Short Takes – 1-13-24

The Peregrine lunar lander didn’t land, but it’s still collecting data. TheVerge.com article. Pull quote: “NASA says the plan is to extend Peregrine’s mission for as long as possible in order to continue data collection efforts. “Measurements and operations of the NASA-provided science instruments on board will provide valuable experience, technical knowledge, and scientific data to future CLPS lunar deliveries,” said Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration with NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in a statement included in NASA’s announcement.”

5 things to watch as shutdown deadline looms. TheHill.com article. Pull quote: ““Unfortunately, it has become crystal clear that it will take more than a week to finish the appropriations process. So, today I am taking the first procedural step for the Senate to pass a temporary extension of government funding, so the government does not shut down,” he said.”

Congress readies ‘laddered’ March funding patch as shutdown looms. Politico.com article.  Pull quote: “The new funding patch would keep federal agencies running on two different timeframes, like the current stopgap. Funding for some federal agencies would expire March 1, while funding for others would run through March 8, according to a source familiar with the proposal.” Some movement unless the Republican 13 gum up the works.

DOD Releases First-Ever National Defense Industrial Strategy. Defense.gov press release. Pull quote: “Recognizing that the defense industrial base must provide the required capabilities at the speed and scale necessary for the U.S. military to engage and prevail in a near-peer conflict, the NDIS strategy [link added] calls out challenges, solutions, and risks of failure concisely. The strategy offers a strategic vision and path along four strategic priorities: resilient supply chains, workforce readiness, flexible acquisition, and economic deterrence. This proposed pathway to modernize the defense industrial ecosystem also recognizes that this effort cannot be a Department of Defense-only solution, repeatedly emphasizing cooperation and coordination between the entire U.S. government, private industry, and international allies and partners.” One small, say-nothing paragraph on cybersecurity on page 23 of the strategy document.

Federal Cybersecurity Research and Development Strategic Plan. WhiteHouse.gov report. Pull quote: “Human-centered approaches to cybersecurity require improved training for better understanding the  needs of the people using digital technologies and systems. It is important to understand what aspects of cybersecurity people excel with and what aspects should be handled by digital technologies. There is a need to reduce the burden of cybersecurity requirements on people, organizations, communities, and society, and to improve the usability and the user experience of digital technologies and systems. Research on human-centered computing aspects has indicated that including end users early in the process of design and development creates more usable systems and an improved user experience.24 By better understanding the needs and behaviors of users, systems can be designed to reduce security practice responsibilities that are placed on people.”

Medical AI falters when assessing patients it hasn’t seen. Nature.com article. The old ‘train for the test’ problem. Pull quote: “Such tools — which use artificial intelligence (AI) to spot patterns in large data sets and predict how individuals will respond to a particular treatment — are central to precision medicine, in which health-care professionals try to tailor treatment to each person. In work published on 11 January in Science1, researchers showed that AI models can predict treatment outcomes with high accuracy for people in a sample that they were trained on. But their performance drops to little better than chance when applied to subsets of the initial sample, or to different data sets.”