age

Manipur to compensate farmers hit by ethnic violence with ₹38-crore package 

Farmers are afraid to go to the fields because of sporadic firing by armed miscreants from higher grounds 




age

Wheat, rapeseed crops ravaged by rain days before harvesting

A poor harvest could force the Centre to import wheat, palm oil, sunflower oil and soybean oil




age

What's there in Garbage Bin?




age

A Visual Approach to Help Pages

As the functionality and scope of Web sites and applications has grown over the years, so has the prevalence of Help pages. Nearly every feature has an explanatory article outlining how to use it and why. But most Help pages are walls of text making them hard to act on. So a few years ago, we tried something different.

First let's look at the status quo. This Help page from Amazon is both pretty typical and by those standards, pretty good. It's specific to one topic, brief, outlines steps clearly, and includes links to help people accomplish their intended task. Companies iterated to these kinds of Help pages because they mostly work and because they're less work.

Keeping Help text up to date and accurate is less labor-intensive than updating images or videos with the same information. But as the old saying goes, a picture is worth a lot of words and there's a reason many people turn to video tutorials to learn how to do things instead of reading about how to do them.

When building Polar several years ago, we wanted a more approachable and fun way of helping people learn how to use our product. And while you might say "the best Help pages are no Help pages -just make your app easy to use" not all Help pages are smearing over usability issues. Some introduce higher level concepts, others outline capabilities, and some serve as marketing for specific features.

So with those goals in mind, we iterated to a simple formula. Each concept or feature gets a Help page that has a title alongside 1-2 sentences and as many sections consisting of a title, 1-2 sentences, plus a graphic as needed.

This approach meant people primarily relied on images (or their alt tags if visually impaired) to figure out how to get things done. So we iterated a fair amount on the images to find the right balance of detail and abstraction. Make the UI too realistic and it becomes hard to focus on the relevant elements. Realistic UI images also need updating anytime the actual product UI changes. Conversely, make the image too simplistic and it doesn't provide enough detail for people to actually learn how to do things.

Of course, not all Help topics are well suited to an image but the process of trying to create one often triggers ideas on how to simplify the actual UI or concepts within a product. So it's worth the iteration.

But is a visual approach to Help pages able to scale? Assuming it works, can companies invest the time and effort needed to generate all these images and keep them up to date? Perhaps in a time of image generation AI models, it's increasingly possible through automated or supervised pipelines. Time will tell!




age

Ask Luke: Streaming Inline Images

Since launching the Ask Luke feature on this site last year, we've added the ability for the system to respond to questions about product design by citing articles, videos, audio, and PDFs. Now we're introducing the ability to cite the thousands of images I've created over the years and reference them directly in answers.

Significant improvements in AI vision models have given us the ability to quickly and easily describe visual content. I recently outlined how we used this capability to index the content of PDF pages in more depth making individual PDF pages a much better source of content in the Ask Luke corpus.

We applied the same process and pipeline to the thousands of images I've created for articles and presentations over the years. Essentially, each image on my Website gets parsed by a vision model and we add the resulting text-based description to the set of content we can use to answer people's design questions. Here's an example of the kinds of descriptions we're creating. As you can see, the descriptions can get pretty detailed when needed.

If someone asks a question where an image is a key part of the answer, our replies not only return streaming text and citations but inline images as well. In this question asking about Amazon's design changes over the years, multiple images are included directly in the response.

Not only are images displayed where relevant, the answer refers to them and often refers to the contents of the image. In the same Amazon navigation example, the answer refers to the green and white color scheme of the image in addition to its contents.

Now that we've got citations and images steaming inline in Ask Luke responses, perhaps adding inline videos and audio files queued to relevant timestamps might be next? We're already integrating those in the conversational UI so why not... AI is a hell of a drug.

Further Reading

Additional articles about what I've tried and learned by rethinking the design and development of my Website using large-scale AI models.

Acknowledgments

Big thanks to Sidharth Lakshmanan and Sam Breed for the development help.




age

That vintage sparkle

The movers-and-shakers at the Cartier Concours d’Elegance




age

The future of higher education in an age of artificial intelligence [electronic resource] / by Stephen Murgatroyd.

[Cambridge, England] : Ethics International Press Limited, 2024.




age

Rethinking writing instruction in the age of AI [electronic resource]: a universal design for learning approach Randy Laist ; with contributions from Nicole Brewer, Cynthia J. Murphy, and Dana Sheehan

Lynnfield, Massachusetts CAST [2024]




age

Smart university [electronic resource] : student surveillance in the digital age / Lindsay Weinberg.

Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, [2024]




age

Actor Kishore hopes Kannada movie Kantara’s success will encourage directors to explore new content and presentation

Kannada actor Kishore hopes the response to ‘Kantara’ will encourage Kannada filmmakers to explore new content in different ways




age

Watch | Directors’ Take | Venkatesh Maha: I began seeing the real world from the age of 16; it shaped my personality 

Venkatesh Maha, director of ‘Care of Kancharapalem’ and ‘Uma Maheswara Ugra Roopasya’, recalls his formative years and why he stands firm to make the films he believes in




age

Varun Tej, Lavanya Tripathi engaged

Actors Varun Tej and Lavanya Tripathi were engaged at a private ceremony in Hyderabad, attended by their family members including Chiranjeevi, Ram Charan and Allu Arjun




age

Google will now let users manage access to Google Drive files directly from Gmail

The feature will work for Gmail users on the web, on Android, and on iOS



  • Computers & Laptops

age

Sacred groves and ravaged gardens : the fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor.

Athens, Georgia : University Of Georgia Press, 2008.




age

Voyageurs : a novel / Margaret Elphinstone.

Edinburgh : Canongate, 2003.




age

Un barrage contre le Pacifique / Marguerite Duras ; dossier et notes réalisés par Jean-Luc Vincent ; lecture d'image par Isabelle Varloteaux.

[Paris] : Éditions Gallimard, 2005.




age

Good word guide : the fast way to correct English - spelling, punctuation, grammar and usage / edited by Martin H. Manser ; foreword by Martin Cutts, Plain Language Commission ; consultant editors, Jonathon Green and Betty Kirkpatrick ; compilers, Rosalin

London : A & C Black, 2007.




age

Martin Boyce / edited by Renate Wiehager and Christian Ganzenberg ; [translation, Bernhard Geyer, Michael Robinson].

Köln : Snoeck, [2012]




age

L'art médiéval est-il contemporain? = Is medieval art contemporary? / édité par Charlotte Denoël, Larisa Dryansky, Isabelle Marchesin and Erik Verhagen.

Turnhout, Belgium : Brepols, [2023]




age

Doctor Atomic : [opera in two acts] (2007) / composer, John Adams ; libretto, Peter Sellars from original sources ; stage director, Peter Sellars ; a co-production of De Nederlandse Opera and the NPS [DVD].

Waldron, Heathfield, East Sussex, U.K. : Opus Arte, [2008]




age

Deutsches Strafrecht. 1. Band, Allgemeine Grundlagen / von Dr. Robert v. Hippel.

Berlin : Springer, 1925.




age

Travels with Epicurus : meditations from a Greek island on the pleasures of old age / Daniel Klein.

London : Oneworld, 2014.




age

A passage to Africa / George Alagiah.

London : Time Warner Paperbacks, 2002.




age

Lost enlightenment : Central Asia's golden age from the Arab conquest to Tamerlane / S. Frederick Starr.

Princeton ; Oxford : Princeton University Press, 2013.




age

Allies for Armageddon : the rise of Christian Zionism / Victoria Clark.

New Haven, Conn. ; London : Yale University Press, 2007.




age

A tour in Scotland and voyage to the Hebrides, 1772 / by Thomas Pennant ; introduction by Charles W.J. Withers ; edited by Andrew Simmons.

Edinburgh : Birlinn ; Chester Springs, PA : U.S. distributor, Dufour Editions, 1998.




age

Local elites and local coinage : elite self-representation on the provincial coinage of Asia, 31 BC to AD 275 / Robert Bennett.

London : Royal Numismatic Society, 2014.




age

Reinhold Niebuhr revisited : engagements with an American original / edited by Daniel F. Rice.

Grand Rapids, Mich. : W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2009.




age

Marriage and family in the biblical world / edited by Ken M. Campbell.

Downers Grove, Ill. : IVP Academic, [2003]




age

The kingdom, the power, and the glory : American evangelicals in an age of extremism / Tim Alberta.

New York : Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, [2023]




age

Antwerp in the age of Reformation : underground Protestantism in a commercial metropolis, 1550-1577 / Guido Marnef ; translated [from the Dutch] by J.C. Grayson.

Baltimore ; London : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.




age

Sharmadean Reid: Diversity is a Competitive Advantage | WIRED Smarter 2019

Sharmadean Reid is an entrepreneur and the CEO of Beautystack, a professional beauty booking app which aims to make it easier for beauty professionals and clients to find each other. Reid formerly worked as a brand consultant and stylist, and founded WAH Nails, a millennial friendly nail booking service with a focus on social media, as a side project. In this video, Sharmadean explains how diversity can be a competitive advantage for companies of all sizes and across all industries. But she also emphasises how diversity should not be fetishised, breaking down the characteristics of the employees at Beauty Stack to demonstrate how diversity should be a priority at every level. #wiredsmarter #diversity #wiredevents For more information on WIRED Smarter: http://wired.uk/smarter ABOUT WIRED EVENTS WIRED events shine a spotlight on the innovators, inventors and entrepreneurs who are changing our world for the better. Explore this channel for videos showing on-stage talks, behind-the-scenes action, exclusive interviews and performances from our roster of events. Join us as we uncover the most relevant, up-and-coming trends and meet the people building the future. ABOUT WIRED WIRED brings you the future as it happens - the people, the trends, the big ideas that will change our lives. An award-winning printed monthly and online publication. WIRED is an agenda-setting magazine offering brain food on a wide range of topics, from science, technology and business to pop-culture and politics. CONNECT WITH WIRED Events: http://wired.uk/events Subscribe for Events Information: http://wired.uk/signup Web: http://bit.ly/VideoWired Twitter: http://bit.ly/TwitterWired Facebook: http://bit.ly/FacebookWired Instagram: http://bit.ly/InstagramWired Magazine: http://bit.ly/MagazineWired Newsletter: http://bit.ly/NewslettersWired




age

Tradecraft - Former Secret Service Agent Explains How to Protect a President

Former Secret Service Agent Jonathan Wackrow, now managing director at Teneo Risk, explains how the Service protects the President and other VIPs. Wackrow details the many steps required to ensure the safety of protectees, and describes how the Service has changed due to changing technology and lessons learned from historical events. Wackrow served in the Presidential Protection Division in Washington, DC, and managed numerous high-level security operations in the U.S. and abroad.




age

Tradecraft - Former FBI Agent Explains Criminal Profiling

According to Jim Clemente, retired FBI behavioral analyst and criminal profiler, when it comes to the "nature vs. nurture" debate, "Genetics loads the gun, personality and psychology aim it, and your experiences pull the trigger..." As a criminal profiler, it was Jim's job to catch murderers, serial killers and rapists and pick up the slack where forensic evidence failed.




age

Tradecraft - Former Secret Service Agent Explains How to Detect Counterfeit Money

Former Secret Service Agent Jonathan Wackrow explains how the Service keeps counterfeit currency out of circulation. The Secret Service was installed to combat counterfeit money during the Civil War, and the Service still to this day works tirelessly to suppress counterfeits. Wackrow served in the Presidential Protection Division in Washington, DC, and managed numerous high-level security operations in the U.S. and abroad.




age

Tradecraft - Former FBI Agent Explains How to Detect Deception

There are a number of myths about detecting deception. Fidgeting, looking away, touching your mouth, all of these things are commonly thought to be practices that indicate deception. Jim Clemente, former Supervisory Special Agent for the FBI, explains why that isn't always the case and how people like him can decipher what these indicators really mean.




age

How to Forage and Cook Wild Plants

You know those plants and weeds you see every day growing outside your home? They may not look like much, but if prepared properly, they can be transformed into a delicious and nutritious meal. Dr. Bill Schindler, a chef and professor of archeology and anthropology at Washington College, explains how we can forage for greenery from the most unlikely places and prepare a meal that is both good for you and tastes great. @drbillschindler Note: Due to COVID-19 restrictions, this video was self-taped by Bill with remote direction from our Wired video crew.




age

Accent Expert Breaks Down Language Pet Peeves

For all intensive purposes, dialect coach Erik Singer is literally an expert when it comes to language. So, who better to curve our hunger for knowledge than him and his colleague, fellow dialect coach Eliza Simpson. Erik and Eliza break down some of the most common pet peeves we associate with language; some so common we often take them for granite. This episode features a special guest appearance by dialect coach, Eliza Simpson. Vocal cord imagery courtesy of Jan G. Svec Videokymographic images of the three voice registers taken from the study "Svec, J. G. (2004). Research journey: chest-falsetto discontinuity and videokymography. In H. K. Schutte, S. Poppema, & E. te Bos (Eds.), Physiology and Acoustics of Singing (PAS), 3-5 October, 2002, Groningen, the Netherlands (CD-ROM). Groningen, the Netherlands: Groningen Voice Research Lab (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241682145_RESEARCH_JOURNEY_CHEST-FALSETTO_DISCONTINUITY_AND_VIDEOKYMOGRAPHY)", courtesy of Jan G. Svec, Palacky University, Olomouc, Czechia.




age

Former FBI Agent Explains How to Read Facial Expressions

Former FBI agent and body language expert Joe Navarro is back, this time to breaks down the non-verbal ways we communicate using facial expressions. What does it mean when we scrunch up our noses or show tension in the glabella? Joe also goes deep into chirality, and equates this concept with some of the most quizzical of human expressions. Check out Joe's book "The Dictionary of Body Language" https://www.jnforensics.com/




age

Technique Critique - Retired FBI Agent Breaks Down Surveillance Scenes From Film & TV

Retired FBI Special Agent Rhonda Glover Reese takes a look at some scenes featuring surveillance in movies and television and explains how accurate they really are.




age

Former FBI Agent Breaks Down Political Body Language

Former FBI agent and body language expert Joe Navarro breaks down the intentional (and unintentional) non-verbals displayed by politicians. Why do some politicians point with their entire hand? What does it mean when politicians wave to a large crowd? How do Donald Trump and Joe Biden's non-verbals compare to each other? Check out Joe's book "The Dictionary of Body Language" https://www.jnforensics.com/ Books By Joe Navarro: https://www.jnforensics.com/books Joe Navarro Body Language Academy: https://jnbodylanguageacademy.com




age

Former FBI Agent Breaks Down Body Language We Can't Control

Former FBI agent and body language expert Joe Navarro breaks down the unintentional non-verbals that are displayed by human beings around the globe. Joe explains how the limbic system functions and why we act the way we do in certain situations. Check out Joe's book "The Dictionary of Body Language" https://www.jnforensics.com/ Books By Joe Navarro: https://www.jnforensics.com/books Joe Navarro Body Language Academy: https://jnbodylanguageacademy.com




age

Former FBI Agent Breaks Down Interrogation Techniques

Former FBI agent and body language expert Joe Navarro breaks down how he approached interrogating during his time with the FBI. Joe sets the record straight; there is no simple way to tell if a human being is lying. When looking for deceit, Joe focuses on the subject's discomfort. He also does is best to make sure the subject feels comfortable enough to open up...a far cry from the images we see in many police procedurals. Check out Joe's book "The Dictionary of Body Language" https://www.jnforensics.com/ Books By Joe Navarro: https://www.jnforensics.com/books Joe Navarro Body Language Academy: https://jnbodylanguageacademy.com




age

Former FBI Agent Breaks Down Dating Body Language

Former FBI agent and body language expert Joe Navarro breaks down the intentional (and unintentional) non-verbals displayed during dating. What kind of signs do we show during dates that we don't even realize? Can we display our affection for someone without even explaining it verbally? Check out Joe's book "The Dictionary of Body Language" https://www.jnforensics.com/ Books By Joe Navarro: https://www.jnforensics.com/books Joe Navarro Body Language Academy: https://jnbodylanguageacademy.com




age

Using AI as a creative tool with artist and stage designer Es Devlin | WIRED Live

Artist and stage designer Es Devlin has created stage sculptures for Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, the WEEKND and U2 and now at WIRED Live, she discusses her approach to creativity; AI as a creative tool; and the future of live experiences. "The practice has changed beyond recognition."




age

Autocomplete Interview - SpongeBob's Tom Kenny & Bill Fagerbakke Answer the Web's Most Searched Questions

'The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run' stars Tom Kenny and Bill Fagerbakke answer the internet's burning questions about themselves and the characters they play. What does Tom Kenny's voice actually sound like? How did Bill Fagerbakke get the role of Patrick Star? Who does Tom play in 'Rick and Morty'? Is Bill on Cameo? Tom and Bill answer all these questions and much more. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run is out now streaming on Paramount+.




age

Former Air Force Pilot Breaks Down UFO Footage

Andrea Themely, current commercial pilot and former Air Force colonel, dissects some famous UFO footage released by the U.S. government.




age

Tech Support - Former FBI Agent Answers Body Language Questions From Twitter

Former FBI agent and body language expert Joe Navarro answers the internet's burning questions about body language. Why is being stared at so intimidating? How do you have a good poker face? Can body language be admitted as evidence in court? How can you end a conversation politely? Joe answers all these questions and much more! Check out Joe's book "Be Exceptional" https://www.jnforensics.com/ Books By Joe Navarro: https://www.jnforensics.com/books Joe Navarro Body Language Academy: https://jnbodylanguageacademy.com




age

Former FBI Agent Breaks Down Body Language Pet Peeves

Former FBI agent and body language expert Joe Navarro is back to explain why we feel they way we do about certain types of body language. Why do we shake hands, and why does a bad handshake turn us off so much? Why do we feel uncomfortable being stared at? Is there a reason why people "manspread"? Check out Joe's book "Be Exceptional" https://www.amazon.com/Be-Exceptional-Master-Traits-Extraordinary-ebook/dp/B08K93BLQP/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= https://www.jnforensics.com/ Books By Joe Navarro: https://www.jnforensics.com/books Joe Navarro Body Language Academy: https://jnbodylanguageacademy.com




age

Good Form - Spy Satellite Expert Explains How to Analyze Satellite Imagery

- Made in collaboration with the International Spy Museum - Keith Masback, former Director of Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Integration for the US Army, explains how to understand satellite imagery, and provides a few tips and tricks for what people like him are generally looking for. Keith talks about how to tell man-made and natural environments apart from each other and breaks down what typical military routines from other countries looks like.