Extra, Extra: Be Nice, Be Thinking, and Be Graphing

By David Topping

Every weekday’s end, Extra, Extra collects just about everything you ought to care about or ought not miss.

• An important weekend reminder from Wendel Clark, courtesy of the City of Toronto: “Be nice. Clear your ice.”
• Your weekend thing-to-read: “The Next Big Idea,” from University of Toronto Magazine—ten U of T–born ideas for everything from giving native people “more legal, political and cultural autonomy,” to ID that only gives whoever you’re providing it to the one bit of information they need.
• Torontoist is about as challenging of a read as the Toronto Sun, we have learned now that Google displays the “reading level” of individual sites. This is all Mike Strobel’s fault.
• Also new in Google’s world: their Google Books Ngram Viewer, with which you can now search the contents of Google Books and see those terms graphed over time. Toronto sure picked up in the 1990s, and it looks like Chicago’s about to eat our dust. Others found more troubling trends.
• And there are at least two things that are funny about this photo.

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