A look at the various limits and bans on wheat and rice stocks and exports in the recent past, and their impact

The multi-state cooperative has so far earned Rs. 22 crore profit from April during the current financial year

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

The Board is expected to help develop and grow the spice’s market in India, which controls over 62% share of the turmeric world trade

Ministry directs all wheat stocking entities to register on government’s wheat stock limit portal and update the stock position every Friday

Economic think tank GTRI (Global Trade Research Initiative) in its report said that India needs to cut its reliance on imported vegetable oils to promote better health outcomes and also reduce the import bill

The Cooperation Minister said that before the sowing operation, tur farmers can register on the portal to sell their produce to NAFED and NCCF

Govt prepared to extend necessary support to the company in expanding its oil palm and dairy businesses 

“The government under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is addressing systematic inequalities, which have plagued the society,” Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said.

What are the measures the government is taking to bring down the increasing price of rice?

‘We intend to bring a revolutionary change in the agriculture sector with a special focus on promoting animal husbandry,’ Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu tells the hill State’s milk producers

Traders are allowed to export this quantity till March 31

In value terms, imports in the year jumped 93% to $3.75 billion

Outbound shipments now feasible if global buyers pay at least $770 a tonne for Indian onions

Limited availability of chickpeas in the world market could force India to import of yellow peas, which are available in abundance, say officials

The country is among those most vulnerable to water management risks, and has the poorest access to basic services, including water, among G-20 economies, the rating major flagged

Government allocates ₹1.52 lakh crore for agriculture and allied sectors in the Union Budget 2024-25; Finance Minister announces that the Centre will work with States to promote digital public infrastructure for agriculture

The government initiated the sale of onions at a subsidised rate through mobile vans and outlets of NCCF and NAFED.

The Centre added that shipments by rail rake to Lucknow and Varanasi will be scheduled in next few days

What is an internationalist to make of Donald J Trump’s vow to blow up the North American Free Trade Agreement? Mark Engler asks.

A gesture of love and solidarity from estates and communities in East London to Grenfell and their local community.

How Senegal is trying to involve the diaspora to curb emigration. By Sofia Christensen

KidZania is an unashamed shrine to the sterile, dystopian human-made landscapes, comedian Steve Parry writes.

The author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist talks to Graeme Green about extremism, the refugee crisis and feeling at home in the past.

Over the years, I've given more than 300 presentations on design. Most of these have been accompanied by a slide deck to illustrate my points and guide the narrative. But making the content in these decks work well with the Ask Luke conversational interface on this site has been challenging. So now I'm trying a new approach with AI vision models.

To avoid application specific formats (Keynote, PowerPoint), I've long been making my presentation slides available for download as PDF documents. These files usually consist of 100+ pages and often don't include a lot of text, leaning instead on visuals and charts to communicate information. To illustrate, here's of few of these slides from my Mind the Gap talk.

In an earlier article on how we built the Ask Luke conversational interface, I outlined the issues with extracting useful information from these documents. I wanted the content in these PDFs to be available when answering people's design questions in addition to the blog articles, videos and audio interviews that we were already using.

But even when we got text extraction from PDFs working well, running the process on any given PDF document would create many content embeddings of poor quality (like the one below). These content chunks would then end up influencing the answers we generated in less than helpful ways.

To prevent these from clogging up our limited context (how much content we can work with to create an answer) with useless results, we set up processes to remove low quality content chunks. While that improved things, the content in these presentations was no longer accessible to people asking questions on Ask Luke.

So we tried a different approach. Instead of extracting text from each page of a PDF presentation, we ran it through an AI vision model to create a detailed description of the content on the page. In the example below, the previous text extraction method (on the left) gets the content from the slide. The new vision model approach (on the right) though, does a much better job creating useful content for answering questions.

Here's another example illustrating the difference between the PDF text extraction method used before and the vision AI model currently in use. This time instead of a chart, we're generating a useful description of a diagram.

This change is now rolled out across all the PDFs the Ask Luke conversational interface can reference to answer design questions. Gone are useless content chunks and there's a lot more useful content immediately available.

Thanks to Yangguang Li for the dev help on this change.

The Ask Luke feature on this site uses the thousands of articles, hundreds of PDFs, dozens of videos, and more I've created over the years to answer people's questions about digital product design. Since it launched a year ago, we've been iterating on the core of the Ask Luke system: retrieving relevant content to improve answers.

The most important job of any product interface is making its value clear and accessible to people. Most apps resort to some form of onboarding to accomplish this, but it's exponentially more impactful to experience value than to be told it exists. Likewise it's much more effective to learn through using an interface than through a tutorial explaining it.

These two factors make the seemingly simple job of "getting people to product value" quite difficult. Compounding the issue is that fact that interface solutions that accomplish this often feel simple and obvious -but only after they're uncovered. So iterating to an interface that intuitively conveys value and purpose is usually an iterative process.

That's a long-winded introduction, but it's important context for the changes we made to Ask Luke. The purpose and value of this feature is to pull the most relevant bits of my writings, videos, audio, and files together to answer people's questions about digital product design. So we made a bunch of changes to make that even more front and center -to make how Ask Luke works more obvious.

Now as answers to people's questions stream in, we add citations to the relevant articles, videos, PDF, etc. being used to answer a question in real-time. We also add these citations to the list of sources on the right dynamically instead of all at once before a question is answered.

Before people were able to select any given source and view it in the Ask Luke conversational UI. With these updates, they are also taken to the relevant part of a source: to the relevant point in a video; to the relevant page in a PDF. Since this is easier to see than read about, here's a quick video demonstrating these changes and hopefully making the value and purpose of Ask Luke a bit more obvious.

• Integrated Audio Experiences & Memory: enabling specific content experiences within a conversational UI
• Expanding Conversational User Interfaces: extending chat user interfaces to better support AI capabilities
• Integrated Video Experiences: adding video-specific experiences within conversational UI
• Integrated PDF Experiences: unique considerations when adding PDF experiences
• Dynamic Preview Cards: created on the fly to improve sharing answers
• Text Generation Differences: testing the impact of AI new models
• PDF Parsing with Vision Models: using AI vision models to extract content form PDFs

Acknowledgments

Big thanks to Sidharth Lakshmanan and Sam Breed for the engineering lift on these changes.

Exhibition: 28 Mar 2018 - 29 Mar 2018, London, United Kingdom. Organized by The IET.

Breakthrough could lead to new type of energy source

Elizabeth Tasker details the good, the bad and the confusing of working as a physicist in Japan

Elizabeth Tasker details the good, the bad and the confusing of working as a physicist in Japan

New device could boost telecommunications and be adapted for photonics

Exhibition: 20 Apr 2018 - 21 Apr 2018, NEC, Birmingham, United Kingdom.

Diplomacy is like a woman. You never know what diplomats think or feel. The recent Ford controversy also makes us wonder whether Italy gave up its humour for tough diplomacy

In the elections to the Rajya Sabha from Tamil Nadu, the Congress had an opportunity to rip open the State politics. But as in 1996, it blinked giving little hope to those looking for a non-Dravidian party rule in the State!

The Government may have tightened gold import norms, making it difficult for investors to invest in the yellow metal. But if you are one who is willing to take risks, then there is a door that is wide open to help you take advantage of the current situation.

Here are the latest looks to steal from the fashion week...

Flavour Bastard in London is here to shake up prudes and open up flavour pairings hitherto unseen with Indian food

This year around, the Watch Oscars threw up some surprises by independent watchmakers

The luxury car connoisseur had a good time this year and was spoilt for choice. A look at the cars that top our list

The millennial is lapping up the drink once seen as old fashioned

Montblanc Summit 2 comes with a range of features — and oozes style

If you love great design and architecture, Finland’s capital is right up your alley

Araku Coffee co-founder and CEO Manoj Kumar on the journey of the award-winning brand

The newest entrant to the Porsche Cayenne set is an SUV with the lightness of a sports car

If you are looking for excitement and luxury, head for the Sands Resort