India’s banana export destinations extend beyond the Middle East, with potential opportunities in major global players like the USA, Russia, Japan, Germany, China, the Netherlands, the UK, and France.

The government subsidised the sale of a few commodities to improve domestic supply and arrest the sharp spikes in retail prices of wheat, rice, edible oils, pulses, tomato, and onion

Centre says the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee is a statutory body and the committee had examined relevant scientific data before giving the go-ahead for the environmental release

The Food Minister says the role of FCI is not only to deliver ration, but also to instill confidence in farmers and beneficiaries by bringing in transparency, efficiency and accountability

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

Traders are allowed to export this quantity till March 31

A group of developing and least developed countries want WTO to find a solution to the issue of public stockholding of rice and wheat

Agriculture Ministry releases advance production estimates for 2023-24 and final estimates for the year 2022-23

Centre has permitted 24,400 MT shipments to the country amid ban on exports ‘till further orders’; exporters allege selling price being set too low, triggering windfall profits for selected UAE importers

Centre allows export of 99,500 tonnes of onions from Maharashtra to six countries despite domestic ban

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

The decision assumes importance as it comes before the crucial Lok Sabha polls in key onion belts like Nashik, Ahmednagar and Solapur in Maharashtra

Reserve Bank of India’s annual report highlights MSPs, foodgrain stocks, and challenges faced by agriculture in 2023-24

A release said the award signifies the station’s unwavering commitment to maintain the highest standards in quality seed production and has emerged as a front runner setting an example for excellence in the field of seed production

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

How H&M, Zara and Marks & Spencer are buying viscose from highly polluting factories in Asia. By Natasha Hurley.

Power rests in the hands of a corrupt military and political oligarchy that denies people the right to self-determination, reports Hamza Hamouchene.

Britain’s largest festival about refugees and sanctuary is more relevant than ever, writes Lydia Noon.

Rûwâhîne by Ifriqiyya Electrique; The Underside of Power by Algiers: our music reviews of the month.

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

We talked to homeless in different countries and they revealed housing insecurity's different causes around the world.

As the number of highly capable large language models (LLMs) released continues to quickly increase, I added the ability to test new models when they become available in the Ask Luke conversational interface on this site.

For context there's a number of places in the Ask Luke pipeline that make use of AI models to transform, clean, embed, retrieve, generate content and more. I put together a short video that explains how this pipeline is constructed and why if you're interested.

Specifically for the content generation step, once the right content is found, ranked, and assembled into a set of instructions, I can select which large language model to send these instructions to. Every model gets the same instructions unless they can support a larger context window. In which case they might get more ranked results than a model with a smaller context size.

Despite the consistent instructions, switching LLMs can have a very big impact on answer generation. I'll leave you to guess which of these two answers is powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 and which one comes from Antrhopic's new (this week) Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

Some of you might astutely point out that the instruction set could be altered in specific ways when changing models. Recently, we've found the most advanced LLMs to be more interchangeable than before. But there's still differences in how they generate content as you can clearly see in the example above. Which one is best though... could soon be a matter of personal preference.

Thanks to Yangguang Li and Sam for the dev help on this feature.

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.

When working through the early stages of a product design, it's common that labels for objects and actions emerge organically. No one is overly concerned about making these labels consistent (yet). But if this proliferation of terms doesn't get reined in early, both product design and strategy get harder.

Do we call it a library, a folder, a collection, a workspace, a section, a category, a topic? How about a document, page, file, entry, article, worksheet? And.. what's the difference? While these kinds of decisions might not be front and center when working out designs for a product or feature, they can impact a lot.

For starters, having clear definitions for concepts helps keep teams on the same page. When engineering works on implementing a new object type, they're aligned with what design is thinking, which is what the sales team is pitching potential customers on. Bringing a product to life is hard enough, why complicate things by using different terms for similar things or vice versa?

Inconsistent terms are obviously also a comprehension issue for the people using our products. "Here's it's called a Document, there it's called an Article. Are those the same?" Additionally, undefined terms often lead to miscellaneous bins in our user interfaces. "What's inside Explore?" When the definition of objects and actions isn't clear, what choice do we have but to drop them into vague sounding containers like Discover?

The more a product gets developed (especially by bigger teams) the more things can diverge because people's mental model of what terms mean can vary a lot. So it's really useful to proactively put together a list of the objects and actions that make up an application and draft some simple one-liner definitions for each. These lists almost always kick off useful high-level discussions within teams on what we're building and for who. Being forced to define things requires you to think them through: what is this feature doing and why?

And of course, consistent labels also ease comprehension for users. Once people learn what something means, they'll be able to apply that knowledge elsewhere -instead of having to contend with mystery meat navigation.

Browsing the Web on your smartphone these days can feel like a gauntlet: accept this cookie consent, close this newsletter promo, avoid this app install banner. This morass of attention-seeking actions makes it hard to focus on content. Enter Apple's Distraction Control feature.

There's more than 7 billion active smartphones on the planet. This is the Web they are getting.

I won't get into how the Web became a minefield of pop-ups, banners, overlays, modals, and other forms of annoyance. For that you can take a look at my Mind the Gap presentation which goes into depth on why and what designers can do about it. But it's pretty clear the average mobile Web experience sucks.

And when things suck, people usually decide to do something about it. In this case, with iOS 18, Apple is giving average folks a chance to fight back with Distraction Control. When turned on, this new feature allows anyone to remove distracting elements on Web pages complete with a satisfying animation.

Newsletter pop-up? Boom, gone. Mobile app banner? Boom. Interstitial ad? Boom. Is it perfect? No. Elements might come back after you remove them if the page is reloaded. Accessing the control takes a few taps. But it's a way for people to fight back against Web clutter and we need more.

The most significant user interface change from iOS 17 to iOS 18 are the navigation differences in Apple's Photos app. The ubiquitous tab bar that's became the default navigation model in mobile apps is gone and in its place is one long scrolling page. So how does it work and why?

Most mobile applications have adopted a bottom bar for primary navigation controls. On Android it's called bottom navigation and on iOS, a tab bar, but the purpose is the same: make the top-level sections of an application visible and let people move between them.

And it works. Across multiple studies and experiments, companies found when critical parts of an application are made more visible, usage of them increases. For example, Facebook saw that not only did engagement go up when they moved from a “hamburger” menu to a bottom tab bar in their iOS app, but several other important metrics went up as well. Results like this made use of tab bars grow.

But in iOS 18, Apple removed the tab bar in their Photos app. Whereas the prior version had visible tabs for the top-level sections (Library, For You, Albums, Search), the redesign is just a single scroll view. The features previously found in each tab are now accessed by scrolling up and down vs. switching between tabs. One notable exception is Search which stays anchored at the top of the screen.

In addition to the persistent Search button, there's also a Select action and user profile image that opens a sheet with account settings. As you scroll up into your Photo library a persistent set of View controls appears at the bottom of the screen as well. The Close action scrolls you to the end of your Photo library and reveals a bit of the actions below making the location of features previously found in tabs more clear.

It's certainly a big change and given the effectiveness of tab bars, its also a change that has people questioning why? I have no inside information on Apple's decision-making process here but based on what I've learned about how people use Google Photos, Yahoo! Photos, and Flickr, I can speculate.

1. By far the dominant use of a Photo gallery is scrolling to find an image whether to share, view, or just browse.
2. Very few people organize their photo libraries and those that do, do it rarely.
3. People continue to have poor experiences with searching images, despite lots of improvements, so they default to browsing when trying to find photos.
4. Most automatic curation features like those found in For You just get ignored.

All that together can easily get you to the design answer of "the app should just be a scrolling list of all your Photos". Of course there's trade-offs. The top-level sections, and their features are much less visible, and thereby less obvious. The people who do make use of features like Albums and Memories now need to scroll to them vs. tapping once. But as iOS18 rolls out to everyone in the Fall, we'll see if these trade-offs were worth it.

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.

Breakthrough could lead to new type of energy source

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We have come across few people who are sober when punch drunk.

A walk through the University of Leuven in Belgium throws up insights, brews and delicious food

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Lanham, MD : Rowman and Littlefield, 2024.

Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2023]

Edmonton, Alberta : Brush Education Inc., [2023]

London ; Philadelphia : Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2024.

Singapore : Springer, [2024]

Bloomington, IN : Solution Tree Press, [2023]

Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge , 2025.

Cincinnati : University of Cincinnati Press, 2021.

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

Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge , 2024.

Lynnfield, Massachusetts CAST [2024]

New York, NY : Routledge , 2024.