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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Breaking down the holiday movie formula

NYT’s The Upshot looked at 424 holiday movies released by the Hallmark and Lifetime networks since 2017. Like most forms of entertainment, the movies look identical from a zoomed out view. There’s a protagonist female who feels lost, finds her way and love in the process.

Get in closer and you see the nuances. Sometimes a couple has to save a candy shop instead of a bakery.

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Racing amateurs against Tour de France cyclists

It takes strength and dedication to race in the Tour de France. It’s just that when you see the leading cyclist alone on a steep climb, they kind of look the same as some random person riding up a hill. For NYT’s The Upshot, K.K. Rebecca Lai and Ben Blatt provide a point of comparison.

Data from Strava was used to show how a caterpillar-like group of amateurs rode against a professional. As you might have guessed, the professional climbs much faster. Just a tad.

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Smoke from Canada wildfires over the U.S.

Wildfires in one area means smoke and pollution travels to surrounding areas, even thousands of miles away. For NYT’s The Upshot, Aatish Bhatia, Josh Katz, and Margot Sanger-Katz have the maps and charts that show how smoke traveled from the wildfires in Quebec, Canada.

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Shortening baseball games

Baseball games grew longer over the decades, with the average length well over three hours in recent years. Ben Blatt and Francesca Paris, for NYT’s The Upshot, show how a few rule changes this season keep the ball moving for shorter games.

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Demonstrating how large language models work

You might’ve heard about large language models lately. They’re the “brains” behind recent chatbots that seem to know an awful lot. Aatish Bhatia, for NYT’s The Upshot, walks you through how such a model “learns” to write based on a relatively small body of text.

There’s a little bit of Choose Your Own Adventure mixed in, so you can select the type of text. Bhatia used nanoGPT, an open source library, to model Jane Austen, Shakespeare, and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

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Tom Brady of other jobs

Tom Brady, the quarterback for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, is 45 years old, which makes him the oldest player in the National Football League. Francesca Paris, for NYT’s The Upshot, places Brady’s age under the perspective of other occupations. For example, Lilian Thomas Burwell, who is an artist at 95 years old, is well in the upper percentile for those in her field (and the general population).

See also: the distributions of age and occupation.

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Country-wide housing shortage

Emily Badger and Eve Washington for NYT’s The Upshot show how the housing shortage, which was mostly thought of as a west and east coast problem, has grown into a country-wide problem. The tables that compare metro areas between 2012 and 2019, while the most simple, are the most informative in this piece.

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Increased distance to the nearest clinic

With Roe vs. Wade in place, there were areas in the United States where a woman had to travel farther than others to get to the nearest clinic. With Roe vs. Wade overturned, the geography will change as states enforce bans. For NYT’s The Upshot, Quoctrung Bui, Claire Cain Miller and Margot Sanger-Katz mapped what will likely happen.

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Cumulative 3-pointers for the Splash Brothers

Tonight is game six of the NBA Finals. If the Golden State Warriors beat the Boston Celtics, the Warriors win it all and the season is done. So we almost went an entire playoffs without a cumulative multi-line chart that shows current and notable players. Luckily, NYT’s The Upshot got it done with cumulative three-pointers in career playoff games. That was close.

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