Beyond business: Disgraced Theranos bloodied family, friends, neighbors; Ars Technica, 11/23/16

Beth Mole, Ars Technica; Beyond business: Disgraced Theranos bloodied family, friends, neighbors:

"If you think your Thanksgiving dinner conversation will be awkward and stressful this year, just be glad you and your family weren’t involved with Theranos.

As the once highly regarded blood-testing company crumbles under technological scandals and regulatory sanctions, the death toll of relationships among neighbors, friends, families, and long-standing partners is mounting. With lawsuits, investigative reports, and new accounts from a whistleblower, the company’s culture and inner-workings—which Theranos worked hard to obfuscate—are finally becoming clear. And what’s emerged are patterns of dishonesty, callousness, and litigiousness—if not outright belligerence.

Test of blood

Perhaps most startling of the recent revelations is the identity and family drama of one Theranos whistleblower: Tyler Shultz, grandson of George Shultz, the former secretary of state, who also happens to be a Theranos advisor. An exposé by The Wall Street Journal lays out how in the course of eight months, Tyler Shultz went from a bright-eyed Theranos employee to disgruntled whistleblower, personally disparaged by Theranos’ then-president and desperately trying to convince his grandfather to wash his hands of the doomed company."

Theranos Whistleblower Shook the Company—and His Family; Wall Street Journal, 11/18/16

John Carreyrou, Wall Street Journal; Theranos Whistleblower Shook the Company—and His Family:

"After working at Theranos Inc. for eight months, Tyler Shultz decided he had seen enough. On April 11, 2014, he emailed company founder Elizabeth Holmes to complain that Theranos had doctored research and ignored failed quality-control checks."

‘Fraud is not a trade secret’: How a 27-year-old blew the whistle on Theranos; MarketWatch, 11/17/16

Barbara Kollmeyer, MarketWatch; ‘Fraud is not a trade secret’: How a 27-year-old blew the whistle on Theranos’ :

[Kip Currier: Ethics instructors of all stripes were served up a whopping good case study with the story of Tyler Schultz (grandson of former Secretary of State George Schultz) exposing the dazzlingly fraudulent actions of health tech powerhouse, Theranos, Inc. and its now-disgraced CEO Elizabeth Holmes. This is one that should and will be studied in MBA programs and ethics courses for years.]

"‘Fraud is not a trade secret. I refuse to allow bullying, intimidation and threat of legal action to take away my First Amendment right to speak out against wrongdoing.’"

By Russian Standards, Melania Trump Would Be a Plagiarism Amateur; New York Times, 7/22/16

Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times; By Russian Standards, Melania Trump Would Be a Plagiarism Amateur:

"A study published in the newspaper Novaya Gazeta found that out of 450 members of Parliament, about 200 claimed advanced degrees and at least 49 had been accused of plagiarism, including the speaker. (He denied it.)

Dissernet started work in 2013 after a political appointee with a limited academic record was tapped to lead a prestigious mathematics school. Academics began pouring over his history dissertation line by line, which inspired Mr. Rostovtsev to write software to automate the process.

The Dissernet group knew that an electronic synopsis of every doctoral thesis was posted online in Russia. Its software selects a thesis and compares it with all others in the system. If there is more than a 50 percent overlap, the computer flags the material and a volunteer compares both full works manually.

The software makes comparisons 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and a band of about 50 volunteers does the rest. The results are published on Dissernet.org."