At least once a week, I read or hear that new research has found that human memories are fallible and that, therefore, survey research and other "traditional" marketing research methods cannot be relied upon. Instead, we should use some new method that is being peddled. The new method may really be old wine in a new bottle. Usually these claims are wrapped in scientific or pseudo-scientific jargon and, on occasion, are made by academics. The problem is that the frailty of human memories is old news and well-known to professional marketing researchers and survey experts.

Hamas has blamed the Israeli national intelligence agency Mossad for the assassination of one of its Tunisian members after conducting an 11-month-long investigation. The Palestinian group said Mohammed al-Zawari, a commander of its armed wing the Qassam Brigades since 2006, was fatally shot outside his home multiple times while in his car near Sfax, 270km southeast of Tunis, on December 15, 2016. Hamas had set up an investigative committee in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. Speaking at a press conference in Beirut on Thursday, Mohammed Nazzal, Hamas politburo member, called the Mossad operation a "terrorist act". "Mossad is officially accused of being behind the assassination, which is not only a terrorist act, but a violation of state sovereignty," he said.

Algorithmia started out as an online marketplace for -- can you guess it? Many of these algorithms that developers offered on the service focused on machine learning (think face detection, sentiment analysis, etc.). Today, with the boom in ML/AI, that's obviously a big draw and Algorithmia is now taking its next step in this direction with the launch of a new service that helps data scientists manage and deploy their machine learning models -- and share them with others inside their companies. This basically means that the company is turning some of the infrastructure and services it built to run these models itself into a new product. "Tensorflow is open-source, but scaling it is not," said Kenny Daniel, co-founder and CTO of Algorithmia, in today's announcement.

The surveillance-equipment market in China was valued at $6.4 billion last year, according to IHS Markit . China is a big buyer of surveillance technology as Beijing steps up its efforts to better monitor its 1.4 billion people. That is providing a boon for equipment makers, who are looking to export their gear abroad. But it has also sparked concern from rights activists about how the authoritarian government is using the souped-up "Big Brother" technology. Seagate Technology PLC, Qualcomm Inc. and United Technologies Corp. were among the foreign companies to show their wares at the 16th China Public Security Expo, where prospective customers included Chinese police, government officials and businesses.

"We are really working on issues that policy makers have never tackled before," Mr. Kratsios, the U.S. deputy chief technology officer, told The Wall Street Journal in his first major interview since his appointment in March. "It's just a question of putting smart people around a table and trying to come up with an innovative approach to regulating" new technologies, he said. To do that, he will need to work closely with the science and tech communities--some of the staunchest critics of Mr. Trump's policies. Leading scientists and tech executives have abandoned White House advisory councils and complained that the president's policies in areas like climate change and immigration threaten to reverse years of economic and social progress. It may help that Mr. Kratsios, 31 years old, hails from the world of technology, having spent seven years as an executive at venture-capital firms founded by Silicon Valley luminary Peter Thiel.

Stuart Russell was born in 1962 in Portsmouth, England. He received his B.A. with first-class honours in physics from Oxford University in 1982, and his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford in 1986. He then joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, where he is a professor of computer science, director of the Center for Intelligent Systems, and holder of the Smith–Zadeh Chair in Engineering. In 1990, he received the Presidential Young Investigator Award of the National Science Foundation, and in 1995 he was cowinner of the Computers and Thought Award. He was a 1996 Miller Professor of the University of California and was appointed to a Chancellor's Professorship in 2000.

A former executive at Google has filed paperwork with the IRS to establish an official religion of technology. The new church of AI will aim "to develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead [to] contribute to the betterment of society," according to IRS documents. The non-profit religious organization would be called "Way of the Future" (WOTF). According to the website (wayofthefuture.church), the movement is "about creating a peaceful and respectful transition of who is in charge of the planet from people to people'machines.'" "Given that technology will'relatively soon' be able to surpass human abilities, we want to help educate people about this exciting future and prepare a smooth transition," the site explains.

The tech industry can't hide from the information war, particularly when its own creations are being weaponized. That was the consensus of a panel at the Techonomy17 conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif., last week. The group assembled to discuss the meaning of authority in a networked, artificially intelligent world. The panelists quickly zoomed in on the manipulation of Facebook, Google, and other sites by Russians during the U.S. presidential election. They, as well as several other speakers at the conference, painted a dark picture of our current online world for at least the immediate future; they concluded that preventing such manipulation is not going to be easy. "I spent my whole life working in civil liberties, and I didn't see this coming," said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Researches have made a breakthrough discovery about the impulsive electron loss that happens in the Earth's upper atmosphere. A paper on the research was published in the Geophysical Review Letters on Wednesday and details the scientific discoveries two spacecraft made about the loss and its cause, according to NASA. The Cubesat FIREBIRD II was one of those craft that recorded the electron microburst when it happened. The craft observed the microbursts from its place orbiting 310 miles above Earth while one of the Van Allen Probes that orbits a bit higher up was able to capture a rising-tone lower band chorus. That chorus of waves had the duration and cadence highly similar to those of the microburst that the FIREBIRD had captured.