Investigating a murder is how startup Body Labs got its start, according to the opening sentence from Issie Lapowsky at Wired. Computer vision expert, Professor Michael Black from Brown University, was asked by police to help solve a murder. The article explains in detail how Black and the founding team figured out how to estimate or guess the shape of the human body from just a few measurements.

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The Xbox One is coming into this fall in a less than enviable spot. One the one hand, it’s doing just fine as a product: it’s selling well, it’s selling better than the Xbox 360 was, and it’s becoming a more and more important part of Microsoft’s broader plans for Windows 10 across platforms. On the other hand, all success comes in comparison to Sony’s PS4, which has dominated current-gen console sales since day one and looks like it’s going to keep doing so for the forseeable future. But that underdog position has made Microsoft hungry, and the tech giant has been using its considerable resources to invest into exclusive games from both first and third party developers in an attempt to recover from the disastrous reveal that it’s still reeling from. Last week, gamesindustry.biz had an interesting interview with Xbox executive Kudo Tsunoda, who hammered home the point that Xbox One, despite overwhelming similarities to the PS4, is continuing to evolve and add functionality.”

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The productivity application space has always been interesting, as it represents the core of “shadow IT” — solutions adopted by end-users without the blessings or awareness of management or IT. Shadow IT dates back to the early days of the PC, when business users brought in machines, under the radar, with word processing and spreadsheet software. Microsoft rode this wave to dominate the corporate computing scene for decades.

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When you play Until Dawn, it will play you right back

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My friends are playing Exploding Kittens for the first time. Tension heightens as one person draws a card, praying it doesn’t spell out his doom.
The turn passes, and the next player snorts. She has played a card titled, “See the Future – Crawl inside a goat butt and see many wondrous things.”
“Denied!” says the next player, brandishing a card that reads, “The Pope of Nope has spoken,” and the tension breaks completely. The entire table erupts in a spontaneous giggle fit.
Simple rules, funny art and a record-breaking Kickstarter—even before Exploding Kittens was delivered, I figured it had to be good. Testing it out with a group of my eight closest friends, I found this game to be simple to learn, but strong enough to engage everyone until the end.
See also: I Played ‘Magic: The Gathering — Arena of the Planeswalkers’ And All I Got Was Drunk
First Look

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“Every workplace could use a union,” Hamilton Nolan wrote this spring, announcing a group of Gawker Media’s editorial staff wanted to unionize. Shortly after the plan to join the Writers Guild of America East passed a majority vote at Gawker, a wave of unionization swept through digital publishing, with editorial staffers at Salon, The Guardian US, and Vice organizing similar internal movements. “Digital media is growing up and it’s time our digital reporters received the same benefits and protections as their print media colleagues,” Bernard Lunzer, president of the NewsGuild-CWA, which The Guardian will be joining, said at the time of the announcement.

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