OUR PICKSU.S. Murder Rate Is Suddenly Falling | Preparing for the Advent of AI Disinformation | Floating Solar Panels on New Jersey Reservoir, and more

The Murder Rate Is Suddenly Falling  (Jeff Asher, The Atlantic)
Official crime statistics show something that has never been seen before and that probably has not happened in decades: strong evidence of a sharp and broad decline in the nation’s murder rate.
The United States may be experiencing one of the largest annual percent changes in murder ever recorded, according to preliminary data. It is still early in the year and the trend could change over the second half of the year, but data from a sufficiently large sample of big cities have typically been a good predictor of the year-end national change in murder, even after only five months.
Explaining the trend is much more difficult than describing it. The cause of the Great Crime Decline of the 1990s, when murder fell 37 percent over six years, is still not fully understood, so any explanations of the current trend must remain in the hypothesis phase for now. The national nature of both the surge in murder in 2020 and the apparent decrease this year suggests that national explanations will be more convincing than local anecdotes. Moreover, the factors that caused murder to begin to spike in the summer of 2020 may not be the same factors (now, theoretically, in reverse) that are contributing to its decline in 2023.

New Jersey Utilities Float Solar Panels on Reservoir, Powering Water Treatment Plant  (Wayne Parry, AP / Phys.org)
New Jersey’s Canoe Brook Water Treatment plant produces 14 millions gallons of drinking water a day.
Each one of those gallons weighs around 8 pounds , so it’s quickly apparent that a large amount of energy is needed to move water from a reservoir to the treatment plant and into the 84,000 homes and businesses that the New Jersey American Water Company serves in the area.
So the water utility partnered with NJR Clean Energy Ventures, the renewable energy subsidiary of the natural gas firm New Jersey Resources, for a solution.
NJR Clean Energy Ventures built a vast array of solar panels, linked them together, and placed them on the surface of the water at Canoe Brook Reservoir.
The companies say the 17-acre solar array, consisting of 16,510 solar panels, is the largest floating solar array in North America—about twice the size of the next-largest facility, an array of floating panels on a body of water in Sayreville, New Jersey owned by that municipality.

Army Seeks Bomb-Carrying Drones Like Ukraine’s  (Sam Skove, Defense One)
The U.S. Army wants to develop bomb-carrying drones similar to the jury-rigged commercial drones widely used in Ukraine, according to a service solicitation to industry. 
The proposal-submission solicitation notes the drones’ utility to infantry, suggesting that lethal drones may one day be a common tool in the average infantry platoon’s kit.  
U.S. Army Special Operations Command already operates a variety of smaller drones, most prominently the Switchblade suicide drone. 

The Need for a Comprehensive Strategy Addressing Cybersecurity and Quantum Technology  (Michael Brown, HSToday)
A true strategy that comprehensively addresses QIS, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and other groundbreaking technologies is missing from our arsenal of capabilities.

Policymakers Must Prepare for the Advent of AI Disinformation  (Tristan Paci, National Interest)
National security policymakers in the United States must recognize the threat AI-related advancements pose to national and international security and prioritize addressing it. Given America’s role as a global leader in the development of AI, U.S. policymakers have a responsibility to coordinate an international response to the coming era of disinformation and work with partners to prevent the further breakdown of our shared reality that this technology threatens.
At the heart of this challenge is generative artificial intelligence. This type of AI helps create hyperrealistic content—including text, images, audio, and video—by learning from large datasets. Interest in generative AI has spiked in recent months largely because of its application in ChatGPT, a sophisticated chatbot developed by OpenAI that has exploded in popularity since its public release in late 2022.

Cybersecurity, Nondefense Research May Face Cuts in Debt Ddeal  (Gopal Ratnam, Roll Call)
Spending on cybersecurity, research and development, and basic science could take a hit from the two-year cap on nondefense discretionary spending included in the debt measure negotiated between Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden.
While the legislation “doesn’t expressly cut cybersecurity spending, the caps will constrain overall funding and make it harder for future investments to be authorized,” Linda Moore, CEO of TechNet, a trade association of tech CEOs, said in an email.
Cybersecurity “requires constant advancements and innovations to remain effective, and the threat from our foreign adversaries to steal our data and disrupt our critical infrastructure remains high,” Moore said.