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Just one of the cool insights from my friends’ amazing visual story about the Amazon rainforest.

The good news: Brazil has already done more than most countries to protect the rain forest. The bad news: A fifth of its rain forest is already gone. What happens next has the potential to affect us all.

Check out the full story here!

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Rain Forest Was Here

Brazil has already done more than most countries to protect its rain forest. Here's what it looks like. How is this possible?

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Arab Art Redefined

Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi got big on Twitter during the Arab Spring. Now, his revolution is art.

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The Unthinkable

An ancient city plunges into darkness as a war on civilians rages

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A 22-year-old American came to Yemen to document a revolution. Then the country plunged into civil war. This is what she saw.

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What Does Music Look Like?

When Denise Burt started designing classical music album covers, she knew nothing about the music.

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A Girl Can Dream

But in Afghanistan, can dreams become reality? Take a look inside a school in Kabul.

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The Bus Station:

For released Texas prisoners, the first step toward the future is into an old Greyhound station.

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A Photo I Love:

Cmdr. Reid Wiseman is an astronaut, and a photographer and a pro at Twitter. He shares one of his favorite shots from space.

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A Photo I Love

Featuring filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris -- on his grandparents and what's missing from the American photo album.

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A Brother And Sister In Love

At age six, John Fugelsang was looking through old family photos and noticed something ... strange. (Hint: It has to do with being Catholic.)

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(Tiffany Sanders at the Clarence Darrow high-rises, 1993) 

In the first half of the 20th century, Chicago's poor lived in privately owned tenements. Attempting to improve those often terrible conditions, the city built thousands of public housing units in modern high-rise apartment buildings from the 1940s-1960s. But in many places, they built them right on top of former slums.

These new housing projects accentuated the existing racial and class divides. Again attempting to fix what was broken, the city decided to demolish the system in the late '90s.

The "Plan for Transformation" was to move all 16,800+ households in public housing out of the old buildings -- and into better living conditions. In the end, only 56% of the original residents remained in the system. What happened?

Here's the story, with photos by Patricia Evans.

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Demolished: The End Of Chicago's Public Housing 

Buildings were leveled, communities were broken up. The story through Patricia Evans' photos.

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Erin Mystkowski is a multimedia editor at the Chicago Tribune. She really loves vintage crime photos -- and one in particular from 1924. Listen to the story, and then tell us about a photo YOU love. 

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The joy of finding faces in things

I'm Wes Lindamood, an interaction designer on the NPR Visuals team. I'll be joining you here on Look At This from time to time to explore design, technology and (I hope) some interesting stories about how we see the world. Today's rabbit hole: Faces in things.

"Ooh - I think I hear the recycling truck!"— @FacesPics

A funny photo showed up in my Twitter feed a few weeks ago, and it was the most delightful thing I saw all day. While I rationally knew that the “face” on the box was nothing more than cutout cardboard, it got me thinking about the simple joy of making a connection between two disparate things, and discovering a visual pun. It also got me thinking about facial recognition algorithms -- and how computers identify faces. Just like us, computers can distinguish a face from a box, and they also make strange and interesting mistakes when identifying faces.

This reminded me of the work of Seoul-based art collective Shinseungback Kimyonghun. They've been experimenting with facial recognition for a while. I've picked three of my favorite projects from their site that deal with facial recognition:

In Cloud Face, they point their cameras to the sky to do some cloud watching. Turns out we’re not the only ones who see faces in the clouds. As they say on their site, the project was designed “to examine the relation between computer vision and human vision.” And I found that the facial recognition algorithm they used identified several convincing cloud faces.

Thanks to Mozilla developer Heather Arthur, facial recognition also exists for cats. Shinseungback Kimyonghun has taken her script and another facial recognition algorithm -- and purposely misused them to find cats that look like humans and humans that look like cats. The project is called "Cat or Human," and after analyzing a selection of human and cat faces sourced via Flickr, their scripts identified ...

that these humans look like cats ...

and that these cats look like humans:

(Photos via Shinseungback Kimyonghun)

While I don't find the results of their project particularly compelling, I am fascinated by these false positives, and the unique perspective of algorithmic vision. Besides, the project led me to KITTYDAR, a drag-and-drop interface that is powered by the same script in the “Cat or Human” project. I tried it out using an image from BENEDICT CATBATCH, which was also not successful, but I plan to continue trying.

Where’s the cat in this photo? (source: http://benedictcatbatch.tumblr.com/)

The last Shinseungback Kimyonghun project I explored was 'FADTCHA'(FAce Detection Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), which is supposed to determine if a computer or human is looking at an image. Unlike a CAPTCHA, which attempts to weed out computers, FADTCHA “requires a user to find a face in an image, which is visible only to computers.” So, for example, in the photo below, while I see one face, the computer has identified two faces outlined by red squares– proving that it is, in fact, a computer.

(Photo via Shinseungback Kimyonghun)

Looking at these experiments is a good reminder of all the devices we have created (computers, cameras, smartphones) that are now looking at the world in their own special way. It’s both charming and disconcerting that the tools we’ve created to identify faces for us are prone to error. We’ll be investigating what this means– for both computers and humans, and would love to know what you've come across. Seen similar art projects? Send us something weird.

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Do you have a voice? How do you feel about the sound of it? Do you ever try to change it? Or have you been told you should?

Introducing: "Talking While Female!"

In which we interview a few NPR women about their voices, a biologist about what voices have to do with self-image -- and asked animator Kelli Anderson to work her magic on it. 

Look at this and then TALK TO US, while female or male, about what you think!

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You've reached the end of the rainbow! And do we have a treasure for you: 

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