Writing by hand, not typing, linked to better learning and memory: Study WION
Sometimes You Either Strike or Accept Death How Things Work
An Interview With The Bee Hero Who Humanely Vacuumed Thousands Of Bees Out Of A Tennis Stadium Defector
Superpowers and the State of Play
One Useful Thing – And then there were three, Ethan Mollick: “For over a year, GPT-4 was the dominant AI model, clearly much smarter than any of the other LLM systems available.
That situation has changed in the last month, there are now three GPT-4 class models, all powering their own chatbots: GPT-4 (accessible through ChatGPT Plus or Microsoft’s CoPilot), Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus, and Google’s Gemini Advanced1.
There is a lot of debate over which of these models are best, with dueling tests suggesting one or another dominates, but the answer is not clear cut. All three have different personalities and strengths, depending on whether you are coding or writing.
Gemini is an excellent explainer but doesn’t let you upload files, GPT-4 has features (namely Code Interpreter and GPTs) that greatly extend what it can do, and Claude is the best writer and seems capable of surprising insight.
The models all have different guardrails and biases, though those are always changing as the AI labs fine-tune their models further. But beyond the differences, there are four important similarities to know about…”
The 6th Annual World Air Quality Reportreveals troubling details of the world’s most polluted countries, territories, and regions in 2023. For this year’s report, data from more than 30,000 air quality monitoring stations across 7,812 locations in 134 countries, territories, and regions were analysed by IQAir’s air quality scientists. Key findings from the 2023 World Air Quality Report:
- Seven countries met the WHO annual PM2.5 guideline (annual average of 5 µg/m3 or less): Australia, Estonia, Finland, Grenada, Iceland, Mauritius, and New Zealand.
- The top five most polluted countries in 2023 were:
- Bangladesh (79.9 µg/m3) more than 15 times higher than the WHO PM2.5 annual guideline
- Pakistan (73.7 µg/m3) more than 14 times higher than the WHO PM2.5 annual guideline
- India (54.4 µg/m3) more than 10 times higher than the WHO PM2.5 annual guideline
- Tajikistan (49.0 µg/m3) more than 9 times higher than the WHO PM2.5 annual guideline
- Burkina Faso (46.6 µg/m3) more than 9 times higher than the WHO PM2.5 annual guideline
- A total of 124 (92.5%) out of 134 countries and regions exceeded the WHO annual PM2.5 guideline value of 5 µg/m3.
- Africa remains the most underrepresented continent, with a third of the population still lacking access to air quality data.
- Climate conditions and transboundary haze were major factors in Southeast Asia, where PM2.5 concentrations rose in nearly every country.
- The region of Central & South Asia was home to the top ten most polluted cities in the world.
- Begusarai, India was the most polluted metropolitan area of 2023. India was home to the four most polluted cities in the world.
- The most polluted major U.S. city was Columbus, Ohio. Beloit, Wisconsin was the most polluted city in the U.S.
- Las Vegas, Nevada was the cleanest major city in the U.S.
- For the first time in the history of this report, Canada was the most polluted country in Northern America, with the region’s 13 most polluted cities located within its borders.
- 70% of the real-time air quality data in the region of Latin America & Caribbean comes from low-cost sensors.
- To download the full report, CLICK HERE.
- Learn more about how you can become an air quality contributor, CLICK HERE.
