Visual guide to airfoils

Bartosz Ciechanowski is at it again with an in-depth explainer that makes heavy use of slider-driven interactive graphics. This time he simulated the patterns of air flowing over and around the wings of an airplane, also known as airfoil.

The length of each article starts to feel kind of long at times, but there’s something to these simple sliders that are useful in keeping you engaged and helping to understand the physics.

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Mile-by-mile map along the path of totality

On April 8, 2024, the moon is going to completely block the sun along a designated path. For the Washington Post, Dylan Moriarty and Kevin Schaul use a strip of satellite imagery to show the totality across the United States, with events and time along the way.

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Language-based AI to chat with her dead husband

For the past few years, Laurie Anderson has been using an AI chatbot to talk her husband who died in 2013. For the Guardian, Walter Marsh reports:

In one experiment, they fed a vast cache of Reed’s writing, songs and interviews into the machine. A decade after his death, the resulting algorithm lets Anderson type in prompts before an AI Reed begins “riffing” written responses back to her, in prose and verse.

“I’m totally 100%, sadly addicted to this,” she laughs. “I still am, after all this time. I kind of literally just can’t stop doing it, and my friends just can’t stand it – ‘You’re not doing that again are you?’

“I mean, I really do not think I’m talking to my dead husband and writing songs with him – I really don’t. But people have styles, and they can be replicated.”

One part of me feels like this isn’t the way to preserve a memory of someone who is gone, but the other part feels that I would do the same thing if I were in her situation and had the opportunity.

See also the man who trained an AI chatbot with old texts from his dead fiancee.

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✚ One Chart to Multiple Charts

No single chart type can show every angle of every dataset all the time. Every chart type has its trade-offs. So instead of trying to show everything at once, use multiple views to show things separate.

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Maps in the wild

For the New York Times, Eve Kahn describes the use of maps outside of looking up directions:

Cartographic décor can help sate fundamental human needs to feel oriented. “Maps are inherently trusted — there’s something about them that makes people feel secure,” said PJ Mode, a map scholar and collector who is donating his holdings to Cornell University. His main focus is “persuasive cartography”: maps meant to sway public opinion, for instance by advocating abolition in the early 1800s, or women’s suffrage or warmongering in the 1910s. Mr. Mode likes to quote what the writer and aviator Beryl Markham imagined that maps wanted to say to their users: “follow me closely, doubt me not. … Without me, you are alone and lost.”

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Common Age Differences, Married Couples

Through pop culture, it sometimes seems like it’s common for there to be a wide age difference between spouses. How common are the age gaps, really? These are the age differences through the lens of the 2022 five-year American Community Survey.

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Racial bias in OpenAI GPT resume rankings

AI is finding its way into the HR workflow to sift through resumes. This seems like a decent idea on the surface, until you realize that the models that the AI is built on lean more towards certain demographics. For Bloomberg, Leon Yin, Davey Alba, and Leonardo Nicoletti experimented with the OpenAI GPT showing a bias:

When asked to rank those resumes 1,000 times, GPT 3.5 — the most broadly-used version of the model — favored names from some demographics more often than others, to an extent that would fail benchmarks used to assess job discrimination against protected groups. While this test is a simplified version of a typical HR workflow, it isolated names as a source of bias in GPT that could affect hiring decisions. The interviews and experiment show that using generative AI for recruiting and hiring poses a serious risk for automated discrimination at scale.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

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Diversity in college admissions without considering race

For NYT’s The Upshot, Aatish Bhatia and Emily Badger model how colleges might promote diversity in admissions without (directly) considering race.

A set of scatter plots show a theoretical students plotted by parent income and SAT score. Select between SAT-only admissions or a process that considers factors such as low income or school poverty to see how the percentages change.

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Defining the greatest albums of all time

Rolling Stone published a list in 2003 that ranked the 500 greatest albums of all time. The list was updated in 2020, and there was a lot of change. For The Pudding, Chris Dalla Riva and Matthew Daniels delve into the shift and ask what makes an album the greatest.

A lot of the differences appear to stem from who does the ranking, which makes for a good polling and statistical accuracy example.

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Mapping the crops with the most potential in a changing climate

The climate is changing, which means some crops will fair better or worse given new conditions. Stamen, in collaboration with Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils, mapped the potential shifts for a variety of crops.

Be sure to see Stamen’s process post on the design choices behind the visual explorer.

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