chris update

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+Owning a physical book is different than owning a digital book. With a physical book you can highlight its text, dog ear its pages, and give it to a friend (who you know will never return it). Digital books don’t work that way. You don’t own them so much as borrow them for indefinite periods of time. There’s also no scribbling, dog-earring, or lending out. And the pages of digital books remain, after countless reads, just as pristine as the first time you flipped through them.
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+Unless you happen to be reading A Universe Explodes. The book, written by Google employee Tea Uglow, developed by design studio Impossible Labs, and published by Editions At Play, is actually more of a web app. You access it through a browser like you would any other website. Turning its 20 pages requires a tap, not unlike an novel on your Kindle. But A Universe Explodes isn’t a typical ebook. In fact, it’s pretty damn weird.
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+What sets A Universe Explodes apart is how you access it. “We wanted to see if we could make a limited edition digital book,” says Anna Gerber, a co-founder of Editions at Play. This idea stands at odds with how the internet usually works. Most content on the web is open to whoever wants to access it. If it’s not, then it’s usually locked down, accessible by password only. A Universe Explodes sits somewhere between these two. Anyone can read the book, but only a select number can own it.
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+Ownership, as a concept, is surrounded by a set of complex questions. Does physical possession constitute ownership? Or it more of a legal term? Does there have to be an exchange of money? And what happens when you give something away? Computers, the internet, the fast, widespread sharing of information—these have only compounded the confusion. “With digital work, it’s almost impossible to get the sense of who owns it,” Uglow says.
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+ A Universe Explodes is an experiment in what it means to own a digital book. Let us explain how this works, because it gets sort of complicated. Only 100 people own original versions of A Universe Explodes, but each of those copies can be passed onto friends via email. The book, which has 128 words per page, can be handed off from friend to friend up to 100 times. There’s a catch, though: Before an owner can give her version away, she must remove two words and add one to every page, creating a personalized limited edition of the book.
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+That means the version of A Universe Explodes I gift to you will look different from the version I first received. And the version you gift to your friend will read differently than the version they gift to their friend. With every iteration of the book, more words disappear until there’s only one word left on each page. “Frankly, after 20 owners it will be unreadable,” Uglow says.
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+These changes are saved to a public database using blockchain, the technology that’s the backbone of bitcoin. Explained simply, blockchain is an online ledger whose transaction history is available for anyone to view but not manipulate. With something like bitcoin, the transactions are financial in nature—you can see who bought the cryptocurrency, when they bought it, and for how much, without the need of a bank. In the case of A Universe Explodes, it’s more about tracking creativity than the transaction itself. Uglow compares the book’s ledger to a library card—you can see who’s read the book and how they’ve changed it, even if you can’t change the book yourself. From the website, readers can trace the devolution of all 100 original volumes, as each is edited and passed down by its respective owner.
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+It’s an admittedly perplexing project. Why destroy a book’s prose to the point of it being unreadable? It comes down to examining ownership. Making a mark on the book and then passing it on is one way to keep track of who it’s belonged to at any given time. Kim Hansen of Impossible compares it to etching your child’s height on your kitchen wall. “It shows you have been there,” he says. More than anything, A Universe Explodes is a philosophical exploration of what happens when owning relies less on buying an object and more on interacting with an object.|||
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+What does it mean to own a digital book?

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+Juicero, the maker of a high-tech juicing machine, is offering full refunds to customers who are upset to learn that its juice packs can be squeezed by hand.
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+In a lengthy blog post on Medium on Thursday to address the hand-squeezing controversy, Juicero CEO Jeff Dunn promised to take back machines from any customer who “feels that we aren’t making it easier, more enjoyable and delicious to form a healthy habit.”
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+“If you send us your Press, we’ll refund the money you paid for it. Period,” he wrote.
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+When it was launched a year ago, the $US700 Juicero machine touted its ability to create the perfect glass of juice, harnessing the tons of force generated by the machine to squeeze out every last drop of juice from the bags of fresh fruits and vegetables.
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+But on Wednesday, Bloomberg broke the news that the high-end juicer backed by Silicon Valley’s elite venture capitalists wasn’t even needed to squeeze out the juice. It turned out that hand-squeezing the packets yielded nearly the same amount of juice and in a slightly shorter time, according to Bloomberg’s tests.
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+Now, Juicero is on the defensive and is arguing that its juicer (whose price was already cut to $US400) is needed because “the value of Juicero is more than a glass of cold-pressed juice. Much more,” says its CEO Jeff Dunn.
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+To Juicero, the value of the company is its connected juice press that can tell you when the juice is about to expire and saves you the two minutes of packet squeezing.
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+Like the juice packets, Juicero’s refund offer also has an expiration date: Customers need to return the machines in the next 30 days. And don’t expect Juicero to take care of the shipping. Dunn’s blog post noted that “if you send us your Press” the company will issue a refund.
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+Whether a $US400 juicer is worth saving two minutes of hand-squeezing is a question you’ll have to decide, but here’s what it was like to use the Juicero machine when Business Insider first visited last April.|||
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+Juicero, the maker of a high-tech juicing...

stories/14163266.txt

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+Email has been sent. Please check.|||
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+Startup story of Pipecourse

stories/14163332.txt

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+These charts were created by GitHub user Kamranahmedse. They visualize three roadmaps to becoming a web developer. Even though I disagree with some of his suggestions (I recommend you starting building projects almost immediately — and you will with freeCodeCamp’s curriculum), I still think this is worth reading. It will give you a birds-eye view of the modern tools that web developers use.
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+And for DevOps, which he views as an extension of back-end development:
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+Of course, these just the tools. Check out Saul Costa’s exploration of the underlying software development skills, which are far more important than the tools (5 minute read) And here are three other links worth your time: How one camper turned a rejected conference talk into 300,000 views on Medium and YouTube (4 minute read) How the Atom team got their JavaScript-based code editor to start up significantly faster (6 minute read) Dive into Deep Learning with one of these 23 online courses (8 minute read) “Ever Tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” — Samuel Beckett If you Google “once in a blue moon” it will tell you the precise frequency of blue moons in hertz. If you get value out of these emails, please consider supporting our nonprofit.|||
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+These charts were created by GitHub user Kamranahmedse. They visualize three roadmaps to becoming a web developer. Even though I disagree with some of his suggestions (I recommend you starting…

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+Sapien PowerShell Studio 2017 Crack Use Snippets to instantly add predefined and tested script segments to your work. And work faster due to our performance

stories/14163383.txt

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+ElegantJ BI, a leader in Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management solutions, is pleased to announce that its suite of Business Intelligence and Performance Management tools was listed as an Other Modern BI Platform Vendors in the Gartner ‘Other Vendors … Continued|||
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+Business Intelligence India related blog archives and other interesting topics on Business Intelligence & Smarten Advanced Data Discovery.

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+A protein found in young human blood plasma can improve brain function in old mice. The finding, published on 19 April in Nature, is the first time a human protein has been shown to have this effect1. It’s also the latest evidence that infusions of ‘young blood’ can reverse symptoms of ageing, including memory loss, decrease in muscle function and metabolism, and loss of bone structure.
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+For decades, researchers have studied the effects of young blood on ageing in mice through a technique called parabiosis, in which an old mouse is sewn together with a younger one so that they share a circulatory system.
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+Until now, the rejuvenating properties of young blood had only been demonstrated in mouse-to-mouse transfers. Nevertheless, the work has inspired ongoing clinical trials by at least two companies in which elderly people are infused with blood from younger adult donors and then tested for physical improvements.
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+One of the clinical trials is sponsored by a company that neuroscientist Tony Wyss-Coray, at Stanford University in California, is involved with — he's the chair of their scientific advisory board. As part of his work, he and fellow neuroscientist Joseph Castellano, also at Stanford, have started testing plasma collected from the umbilical cords of newborn babies. Their goal is to find out how very young human blood might affect the symptoms of ageing.
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+Infusing this human plasma into the veins of elderly mice, they found, improved the animals’ ability to navigate mazes and to learn to avoid areas of their cages that deliver painful electrical shocks. When the researchers dissected the animals’ brains, they found that cells in the hippocampus — the region associated with learning and memory — expressed genes that caused neurons to form more connections in the brain. This didn't happen in mice treated with blood from older human donors.
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+The researchers then compared a slate of 66 proteins found in umbilical cord plasma to the proteins in plasma from older people, and to proteins identified in the mouse parabiosis experiments. They found several potential candidates, and injected them, one at a time, into the veins of old mice. The team then ran the animals through the memory experiments.
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+Only one of these proteins, TIMP2, improved the animals’ performance. It did not, however, result in regeneration of brain cells that are lost during normal ageing. Injections of human umbilical cord plasma lacking TIMP2 had no effect on memory.
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+The researchers don’t yet know how TIMP2, which is known to be involved in maintaining cell and tissue structure, exerts its effect on memory. And although it is expressed in the brains of young mice, TIMP2 has never before been linked to learning or memory. Wyss-Coray suspects that the protein functions as a 'master regulator' of genes involved in the growth of cells and blood vessels, and that increasing its levels affects many pathways simultaneously.
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+“I think it’s a beautiful paper,” says Michal Schwartz, a neuroimmunologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. And she is intrigued that the researchers could elicit an effect in the mice without injecting plasma into the brain. Schwartz suspects that TIMP2 may be altering the immune system or metabolism in a way that affects the brain indirectly.
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+Lee Rubin, a stem-cell researcher at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, agrees. In 2014, Rubin — who is on the same company's scientific board as Wyss-Coray — and his lab found that young mouse blood contained higher levels of a protein called GDF11, and that injecting GDF11 into the body stimulated blood-vessel growth in the brain2. They have since found that GDF11 never enters the brain, and suspect that TIMP2 could be indirectly affecting the brain by acting on systems throughout the body.
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+Pinning down how TIMP2 influences the brain is the next priority, say Wyss-Coray and Castellano. In particular, Wyss-Coray wants to know whether the protein is specifically affecting ageing or general cell health.
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+“It’s a bit of a black box experiment, because they don’t know what's happening,” says Philip Landfield, a neuroscientist at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. The most promising aspect, he says, is the potential for translating it into a therapy.
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+Infusions of young plasma — pooled from thousands of donors — could be one potential treatment for age-related diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease. Alternatively, elderly patients may one day receive a cocktail of proteins such as GDF-11 and TIMP2, or drugs that mimic their effects. But developing such drugs would take many more years than treating patients with serum, Wyss-Coray says. “At a big picture level, this [new study] is exciting because it reinforces the notion that there are single, ‘good’ factors in young blood.”|||
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+Mice treated with a protein from umbilical cord plasma improved their performance on memory tests.