Daily Bits

Software

The Innovative Software Behind the Cannabis Industry

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While cannabis has been prized throughout history for its medicinal properties — and was a key ingredient in legal medications in the United States up until the early 1930s — for most of the twentieth century it was classified as an illegal narcotic. Not until the nineties, when scientific evidence for cannabis medicinal value became indisputable, and decades of fruitless attempts to sanction the drug failed, did legislators start to reconsider the blanket ban on cannabis. 

In the years since cannabis was legalized for medical use in states like California (in 1996) and countries like Canada (in 2001), it has become a popular solution for pain management, and a range of products have been developed to help people make cannabis part of their treatment regimens.

[Read more…] about The Innovative Software Behind the Cannabis Industry

Soon, Your Avatar Can Reflect Your Emotion in Real Time

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Avatar

The graphics of today’s video games have improved so much that I can’t help but be mesmerized even when I am a mere observer most of the time. I am thinking about games such as Skyrim, where the level of details is simply astounding. Even with all the advances made, though, there is still some room for improvement.

If you think about it, there video game avatars do not exactly have real facial expressions. While their expressions do change, there is still some way to go in this regard.

This is what Thibaut Weise of EPFL’s Computer Graphics and Geometry Laboratory has been working on. His idea is very simple: to enable avatars to reflect the facial expressions of their real life users in real time. [Read more…] about Soon, Your Avatar Can Reflect Your Emotion in Real Time

You Can Smile, But You Can’t Fool This Facial Recognition Software From MIT

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MIT-phony-smile2
So you think you’re totally in control of your emotions, or at least the visible aspect of it. People can’t tell if you’re hurting deep inside, or maybe bored to death.

That kind of control can sure come in handy a lot, but with the new facial recognition software that some guys from MIT have developed, your poker face (or a phony smile face, rather) might just be totally useless. [Read more…] about You Can Smile, But You Can’t Fool This Facial Recognition Software From MIT

Digital Spell-checkers Killing Words?

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Spell-checker
Language is dynamic. That is one line that I have said one time too many, but no one can really deny its veracity. Whatever language you look at, it changes over time, with words dying and being born all the time.

But did you ever think that software that we take for granted may be contributing to the death of some words? This is what researchers found out after conducting an analysis of digitized text. The text featured languages such as English, Hebrew, and Spanish, and they dated from 1800 to 2008. Thanks to the digitization efforts of Google, the researchers were able to get hold of the materials for analysis. [Read more…] about Digital Spell-checkers Killing Words?