Escaping the sickening air pollution triggered by the ongoing wildfires in Los Angeles has become a game of which algorithm to trust. After the blazes first ignited last week, residents began noticing that air quality data reported by the US government sometimes contradicted the figures displayed by Apple’s Weather app, the wildfire tracking app Watch Duty, and other tools.
Though they all largely depend on data from the same kind of equipment to measure pollutants in the air, different apps and websites employ different formulas to transform raw readings into digestible estimates of how toxic conditions are currently and how they might change later. And a wider variety of calculations