President Donald Trump is widely expected to sign his latest executive order Wednesday seriously restricting immigration and refugees from seven countries in the Middle East and Africa, five of which the U.S. bombed under the previous administration. Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump accused President Barack Obama of supporting liberal immigration and refugee policies that the Republican billionaire-turned-politician said threatened national security. Trump directed his anti-immigration rhetoric toward Mexico and the Middle East, particularly singling Muslims as targets for tough, new visa policies. While he at one time suggested implementing a ban on all Muslims, Trump has since said he would focus on several countries whose population he felt presented the greatest risk. The list of countries was confirmed by congressional aides and immigration experts who the new administration had briefed on the upcoming order, according to Reuters.

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Billionaires in the world's tech capital Silicon Valley are reportedly preparing for the apocalypse by buying underground bunkers, guns, ammo and motorcycles. Fearful that artificial intelligence will displace so many jobs that there will be a revolt against those responsible for the technology, the are entrepreneurs readying themselves for doomsday like scenarios. Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of the professional social network, LinkedIn, told The New Yorker that he believes more than 50 per cent of billionaires in the Californian tech hub are preparing for the worst. "I own a couple of motorcycles. I have a bunch of guns and ammo. I figure that, with that, I can hole up in my house for some amount of time," he said.

Not many computers can thank GIFs for their existence. In 2013, Dave Rauchwerk worked on a San Francisco art installation that allowed people to record and project a GIF of themselves onto a building. It was popular and led to Rauchwerk joining with two friends to start a hardware company called Next Thing Co. Their aim? To create a camera that can capture GIFs for $100. After a long stay in China with the HAX Accelerator, Next Thing Co. launched OTTO, a $250 "hackable GIF camera" in 2014.

Banks around the world are being confronted with a record number of regulations, and those falling short of institutional obligations are paying a high price for their errors. In response, major financial institutions are grasping big data solutions in a bid to comply with often dense regulations and reduce regulatory breaches. "Considering many banks have grown organically, often via merger and acquisition, their data is not always consistent and well organised," according to James Arnett, a partner at business and technology consulting firm Capco. Mr Arnett believes that new tools can be created through the application of data analytics, which will transform banks compliance programmes from manual, non-scalable projects into lower-cost and automated processes. "There is a real opportunity for banking clients to embrace data analytics to answer the underlying theme of regulation strategically rather than to treat each regulation as a'tick-the-box' exercise," he says.

Steve Mirsky: Welcome to Scientific American's, Science Talk, posted on November 10, 2015. A short episode today for which I'll turn it over now to Scientific American's associate tech editor, Larry Greenemeier. Larry Greenemeier: Computers have always been good at doing things that are really complicated for us humans. On the other hand, computers have a really hard time recognizing a particular voice or face in a crowd; something most kids learn to do before they're even out of diapers. But things are changing fast. Over the next decade or so, machines will more easily mimic inherently human abilities.

We study the statistical limits of both detecting and estimating a rank-one deformation of a symmetric random Gaussian tensor. We establish upper and lower bounds on the critical signal-to-noise ratio, under a variety of priors for the planted vector: (i) a uniformly sampled unit vector, (ii) i.i.d. $\pm 1$ entries, and (iii) a sparse vector where a constant fraction $\rho$ of entries are i.i.d. $\pm 1$ and the rest are zero. For each of these cases, our upper and lower bounds match up to a $1+o(1)$ factor as the order $d$ of the tensor becomes large. For sparse signals (iii), our bounds are also asymptotically tight in the sparse limit $\rho \to 0$ for any fixed $d$ (including the $d=2$ case of sparse PCA). Our upper bounds for (i) demonstrate a phenomenon reminiscent of the work of Baik, Ben Arous and P\'ech\'e: an `eigenvalue' of a perturbed tensor emerges from the bulk at a strictly lower signal-to-noise ratio than when the perturbation itself exceeds the bulk; we quantify the size of this effect. We also provide some general results for larger classes of priors. In particular, the large $d$ asymptotics of the threshold location differs between problems with discrete priors versus continuous priors. Finally, for priors (i) and (ii) we carry out the replica prediction from statistical physics, which is conjectured to give the exact information-theoretic threshold for any fixed $d$. Of independent interest, we introduce a new improvement to the second moment method for contiguity, on which our lower bounds are based. Our technique conditions away from rare `bad' events that depend on interactions between the signal and noise. This enables us to close $\sqrt{2}$-factor gaps present in several previous works.

Welcome to the second in a new series of brief reports. Every Monday, we might look back at last week; look ahead to this week; share a few thoughts (our own or others); or discuss anything that catches our eye. Anything goes, so here goes. Last week I was in Hong Kong, but that region has probably been discussed enough for the moment. As part of that trip there was the 2017 StartmeupHK Festival, which produced a few interesting points from a presentation and a panel discussion.

Corporate venture capital (CVC) is an investment by a corporate (fund) into external startups in order to make a financial return or to gain a competitive advantage. CVC is a polarizing subject and opinions are divided. Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures believes that it's evil and corporates should not invest in startups but simply buy them. While Marc Andreessen from Andreessen Horowitz on the other hand is co-investing with corporations such as General Electric. Whatever the opinions are, fact is that CVC is on the rise, also in the old continent.

The number of people defrauded in the UK by online dating scams reached a record high in 2016, the Victoria Derbyshire programme has learned. According to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau, there were 3,889 victims of so-called romance fraud last year, who handed over a record £39m. Action Fraud, the UK's cyber-crime reporting centre, says it receives more than 350 reports of such scams a month. One woman who lost more than £300,000 says she felt emotionally "brutalised". Nancy - not her real name - is 47, and a single mother from North Yorkshire, who runs her own business.