Short Takes – 2-6-24

Artillery: Hiding HIMARS From the Russians. StrategyPage.com article. Pull quote: “Ukraine demonstrated that launching longer-range missiles from HIMARS was much more useful in a near peer war than previously thought. The main reason American leaders gave for not providing Ukraine with longer range missiles was the risk of the war escalating. Russia has already done that, and the Ukrainians make the case that the longer-range missiles will help speed the end of the war.”

Meeting for Software Developers on the Common Formats for Patient Safety Data Collection. Federal Register AHRQ meeting notice. Summary: “AHRQ coordinates the development of sets of standardized definitions and formats (Common Formats) that make it possible to collect, aggregate, and analyze uniformly structured information about health care quality and patient safety for local, regional, and national learning. The Common Formats include technical specifications to facilitate the collection of electronically comparable data by Patient Safety Organizations (PSOs) and other entities. Additional information about the Common Formats can be obtained through AHRQ's PSO website at https://pso.ahrq.gov/​common-formats and the PSO Privacy Protection Center's website at https://www.psoppc.org/​psoppc_​web/​publicpages/​commonFormatsOverview.” Meeting date: March 7^th, 2024.

I’m not a chatbot – I promise! Nature.com article. Pull quote: “Scientific societies can start by having conversations during their meetings and conferences with the goal of more explicit, community-generated standards about when and how AI can be used in the manuscript-writing process, and how that help should be acknowledged. Such standards could help editors to develop better processes for handling accusations of AI-generated text, ideally in a way that is less demoralizing for authors.”

Proposed contractor cyber reporting rule sets a ‘significantly problematic’ bar, industry groups say. GovExec.com article. Discussing FAR regulations proposed in October. Pull quote: ““There’s really no bar or threshold for when that (CISA/FBI) access would be allowed, or scope for what the access would entail, both of which are really big concerns,” Grant Schneider, an ADI senior advisor, said in a phone interview, adding that the agencies should instead consider taming the proposal to require contractors to open up only certain systems to federal investigators if they choose to not be forthcoming in cyber incident disclosures.”

We Need Cybersecurity in Space to Protect Satellites. ScientificAmerican.com commentary. Pull quote: “The vulnerability of satellite systems to cyberattacks is no longer theoretical. These incidents, along with others monitored by organizations such as the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) and the CyberPeace Institute, highlight the growing threat posed by cyberadversaries targeting satellite infrastructure.”

Green steel from toxic red mud. NewsWise.com article. Pull quote: “The remaining metal oxides are no longer corrosive and solidify on cooling to form a glass-like material that can be used as a filling material in the construction industry, for example. Other research groups have produced iron from red mud using a similar approach with coke, but this produces highly contaminated iron and large quantities of CO2. Using green hydrogen as a reducing agent avoids these greenhouse gas emissions. "If green hydrogen would be used to produce iron from the four billion tonnes of red mud that have been generated in global aluminium production to date, the steel industry could save almost 1.5 billion tonnes of CO2," says Isnaldi Souza Filho, Research Group Leader at the Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung.”

One person can supervise ‘swarm’ of 100 unmanned autonomous vehicles, OSU research shows. NewsWise.com article. Pull quote: ““The commanders weren’t physically driving each individual vehicle, because if you're deploying that many vehicles, they can't – a single human can’t do that,” Adams said. “The idea is that the swarm commander can select a play to be executed and can make minor adjustments to it, like a quarterback would in the NFL. The objective data from the trained swarm commanders demonstrated that a single human can deploy these systems in built environments, which has very broad implications beyond this project.””