OUR PICKSMeans-Based Flood Assistance Program | Era of Global Boiling | Can AI Diagnose Brain Trauma?, and more

A Craigslist for Guns, With No Background Checks  (Serge F. Kovaleski and Glenn Thrush, New York Yimes)
Federal law requires background checks only for purchases made through the approximately 80,000 businesses that sell, ship, import or manufacture weapons licensed through the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Unlicensed private sellers, by contrast, can legally sell their wares at gun shows, out of their houses and, increasingly, through online platforms such as Armslist that match buyers with sellers.
The growing digital loophole is causing alarm among gun-control advocates, and some of those whose relatives were targeted with powerful weapons purchased with relative ease online.

A New Attack Impacts Major AI Chatbots—and No One Knows How to Stop It  (Will Knight, Wired)CHATGpt and its artificially intelligent siblings have been tweaked over and over to prevent troublemakers from getting them to spit out undesirable messages such as hate speech, personal information, or step-by-step instructions for building an improvised bomb. But researchers at Carnegie Mellon University last week showed that adding a simple incantation to a prompt—a string text that might look like gobbledygook to you or me but which carries subtle significance to an AI model trained on huge quantities of web data—can defy all of these defenses in several popular chatbots at once.
The work suggests that the propensity for the cleverest AI chatbots to go off the rails isn’t just a quirk that can be papered over with a few simple rules. Instead, it represents a more fundamental weakness that will complicate efforts to deploy the most advanced AI.

GAO Asks Congress to Consider a Means-Based Flood Assistance Program (HSToday)
An alternative to caps on annual premium increases is a means-based assistance program that would provide financial assistance to policyholders based on their ability to pay and be reflected in the federal budget.

It’s Not Just Hot. Climate Anomalies Are Emerging Around the Globe.  (Brady Dennis and Scott Dance, Washington Post)
A glimpse of a more tumultuous future seemed on full display throughout July, a month packed with weather anomalies that exceeded any definition of normal.
It brought deadly and historic rains to parts of India and Vermont, and raging wildfires that delivered dangerous air to parts of the United States and Canada — all the sort of calamities that researchers have long predicted as the planet heats up. Protracted heat waves that enveloped parts of North America and Europe during July would have been “virtually impossible” without the fingerprint of climate change, researchers found.

‘Era of Global Boiling Has Arrived,’ Says UN Chief as July Set to Be Hottest Month on Record  (Ajit Niranjan, Guardian)
The era of global warming has ended and “the era of global boiling has arrived”, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, has said after scientists confirmed July was on track to be the world’s hottest month on record.
“Climate change is here. It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning,” Guterres said. “It is still possible to limit global temperature rise to 1.5C [above pre-industrial levels], and avoid the very worst of climate change. But only with dramatic, immediate climate action.”

White House AI Deal: What Big Tech Pledged—and the Biggest Omissions  (Adam Clark, Barron’s)
The Biden administration said Friday it struck a deal with some of the biggest U.S. technology companies to manage risks posed by artificial intelligence. However, the agreement didn’t directly address how AI systems are trained, a crucial issue as AI companies face lawsuits over alleged copyright violations. The White House said the commitments were being made by seven major AI companies that met with President Joe Biden on Friday

Why The Nation’s Gun Laws Are in Chaos  (Jacob Gershman, Wall Street Journal)
Judges are at odds about how to use centuries-old weapons laws, many obscure, to evaluate modern-day restrictions and firearm offenses. Some courts upholding the federal gun ban on pot users say the law is consistent with the tradition of keeping guns away from the mentally ill or unvirtuous citizens.

Can AI Diagnose Brain Trauma? The Military Wants to Know  (Carten Cordell, Defense One)
A Defense Department-managed public-private partnership seeking technology to diagnose traumatic brain injuries in U.S. servicemembers is looking for insights from industry.
In a sources-sought notice issued Monday, the Medical Technology Enterprise Consortium — a nonprofit biomedical technology consortium operating under an Other Transaction Authority with the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command — called for new tech prototypes that can help detect, diagnose and treat TBI cases. 
The request is intended to inform both MTEC and the Defense Department of available technology and interest ahead of the former’s State of the Technology Meeting, which is slated for early 2024 and will focus on neurotrauma.