Wells Fargo the First; Sanctioning Businesses; Duterte Goes Off the Defensive; Turkey Extension; Babi Yar; Hyper-elastic Bone; Only as Well as Your Tool; Working Bored; and Team AI

Banking

Wells Fargo’s Scandal Is a Harbinger of Doom time v

In the financial sector, scandal is the gift that keeps on giving. Publicly shamed by Senator Elizabeth Warren senate.gov after his bank opened as many as 2 million unauthorized accounts to goose profits, Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf, who had been reluctant to part with any of his own compensation following revelations of the scandal, has finally agreed to give up unvested equity worth about $41 million, and forgo his $2.8 million salary while the bank is being investigated. Warren called the act “a small step in the right direction, but nowhere near real accountability,” and said he should return every dime he’s made during the period where fraud was happening.

Also see California's Sanctions Against Wells Fargo theatlantic and Wells Fargo may not be the end: Clawbacks expected to become a bigger issue usatoday

North Korea

The U.S. Is Probing More Chinese Firms over North Korea Sanction Breaches fortune v

[sanctions policy coordinator at the U.S. State Department] Fried declined to name other Chinese firms under investigation, or firms elsewhere in the world, but added: “We are actively looking at a number of targets … Clearly our actions on Monday indicate that we are willing to sanction Chinese companies who are evading U.S. and U.N. sanctions.”

Philippines

Philippine President Duterte Says He Will Scrap Joint Military Exercises with the U.S. time

He told the Filipino community in Hanoi late Wednesday night that he will maintain the military alliance with the U.S. because of the countries’ 1951 defense treaty wikipedia.org. But added next week’s exercises will proceed only because he did not want to embarrass his defense secretary.

Turkey

Turkey security council to recommend extending state of emergency in.reuters

"To take precautions to protect the rights and freedoms of our citizens, our democracy and the principle of the rule of law, it was decided that an extension of the state of emergency should be proposed," the security council said in a statement.

Israel

75 years ago: 33,771 Jews slaughtered at Babi Yar usatoday v

The mass executions of men, women and children at Babi Yar jewishvirtuallibrary.org took place over a 48-hour period between September 29-30, 1941.

Research

3D-printed 'hyperelastic bone' could be the future of reconstructive surgery theverge

A new synthetic material called hyperelastic bone, or HB, could be "the next breakthrough" in reconstructive surgery, new research shows. The HB can be implanted under the skin as a scaffold for new bone to grow on, or used to replace lost bone matter altogether. Though it hasn’t been tested in humans yet, early experiments on animals appear to have been successful, with "quite astounding" results, according to the researchers.

Flawed Research Tool Leads To Faulty Medical Findings npr.org

The tool in this case is a process — the use of custom-built antibodies. Like the antibodies in your body that help fight off disease, these customized research antibodies are also designed to home in on a specific target, this time to help scientists decipher the invisible workings of a cell.

Unfortunately, these commercial antibodies often don't work as advertised. One common and serious problem is that they latch onto the wrong target — fooling the researchers who are putting them to use.

AI

The Algorithms That Tell Bosses How Employees Are Feeling theatlantic

The field—known as sentiment analysis—got its start in market research. As online reviews started to gather steam in the mid-2000s, companies who wanted to understand how their products—or their competitors’ offerings—were being received began to use algorithms to aggregate reviews, says Bing Liu, a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois, Chicago, who has written extensively about the history of sentiment analysis. The algorithmic approach could reveal broader insights than a focus groups or surveys, the thinking went.

More recently, the corporate world has turned these same tools inward. Large companies like Accenture, Intel, IBM, and Twitter have started using the software to understand how their own employees feel about their jobs, and identify problems that might escape a harried supervisor during annual-review time.

'Partnership on AI' formed by Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft theguardian

Going by the unwieldy name of the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, the alliance isn’t a lobbying organisation (at least, it says it “does not intend” to lobby government bodies). Instead, it says it will “conduct research, recommend best practices, and publish research under an open license in areas such as ethics, fairness and inclusivity; transparency, privacy, and interoperability; collaboration between people and AI systems; and the trustworthiness, reliability and robustness of the technology”.