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  • Craven Tigers and Screeching Canaries: How the DHS Uses Bad Data to Fuel Deportations
    by Gretchen
    July 11, 2025
    This May, the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology released an updated version of an already alarming evaluation of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s handling of data. The introduction to the new version comments on their prescience: “When we published American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century in 2022, we understood that the surveillance.
  • The immigrant physicians sustaining U.S. healthcare
    by Gretchen
    March 21, 2025
    The intersection of healthcare and immigration policy is found in the halls of hospitals and clinics across America, where increasing numbers of International Medical Graduates (IMGs) are filling in for doctors who won’t return, and state governments are doing their best to usher IMGs into practice where they’re sorely needed. Help (Badly) Wanted: Foreign Doctors.
  • America’s vaccination against equity, and its adverse effects
    by Gretchen
    March 10, 2025
    The language used to justify policy is…fraught. Every new program is a triumph, as is every cut to an existing one. Every new rule is a sea change, and every executive order a roadmap to utopia. These flowery-but-decisive statements come from all politicians, pointing in all directions, and they always have. But in the United.
  • Mind the strings: Grok 3 and biased AI puppeteers
    by Gretchen
    March 4, 2025
    Generative AI isn’t supposed to have opinions. Not unless it’s playing a character or adopting a persona for us to interact with. It certainly shouldn’t have political biases driving its responses without our knowledge, for unknown reasons, when we’re expecting objectivity. So when we learn that a generative AI model has been programmed for bias,.
  • No border wands, just brutality: what the death of the CBP One app portends
    by Gretchen
    February 27, 2025
    It’s infuriating that I have to defend this profoundly unjust yet unfairly maligned, rights-violating, prison gate-keeping, Hollerith-ass, bureaucratic government-enforced insult to human dignity in app form, but here we are. On Inauguration Day, January 20th, one of the first things Trump did was cancel the CBP One app— an app developed by Customs and Border.
  • Deux ex Smartphone: Healthcare Access Isn’t Going to Democratize Itself
    by Gretchen
    February 23, 2025
    One of my first-year classes in college was History of Theater, in which I learned how the Greeks built amphitheaters into hillsides, carving out a semicircle of seating for the audience around the stage to maximize. The scenery for a play completes the circle, just as it does for any show in an amphitheater today..
  • Healthcare tech’s turf war hurts patients- here’s how to protect yourself
    by Gretchen
    February 18, 2025
    Quick recap In my last post (Down the patient portal: the world of healthcare tech serving you data about you) I introduced the back end of patient engagement from the patient’s perspective. While you can’t choose the digital patient engagement tools your provider uses, you can often choose your provider— and different providers may be.
  • Down the patient portal: the world of healthcare tech serving you data about you
    by Gretchen
    February 5, 2025
    The subject of patient engagement tools, especially patient portals, took up permanent residence in my head last January when my mother, a few months away from achieving octogenarian status, experienced a health event that would change both of our lives. When she came home from the hospital, suddenly she was no longer under 24-7 observation.
  • Out of our minds: externalized cognition and UX design
    by Gretchen
    January 10, 2025
    Imagine an app that feels like it thinks along with you, rather than for you. Instead of simple automation, it selectively offloads tasks requiring significant mental effort—the ones that slow you down. That’s a well-known concept in UX called “cognitive offloading,” usually referring to intuitive design of the type that Steve Krug wrote about in.
  • Leveling up in the DOOM pile that was 2024
    by Gretchen
    January 2, 2025
    2024 was…a learning experience. Every day I learned something, whether I wanted to or not. It was a crash course in elder care, and an object lesson in patience, resilience, and creative problem-solving. It was, and is, a DOOM pile (a pile which you Didn’t Organize, Only Moved) of a life. The experience A DOOM.
  • Sora and the painbot
    by Gretchen
    December 21, 2024
    Sora is a video generation model that translates text to video, a product of OpenAI released earlier this month, and a painbot is a concept I hatched a few days ago while talking to ChatGPT about AI empathy and the potential for AI to recognize, record, and react to human pain. My initial thought was.
  • I (don’t) feel your pain: A dialog with ChatGPT about what “empathic AI” in healthcare really means
    by Gretchen
    December 16, 2024
    Quick TOC: First up, I’m letting you in on a somewhat rambling (but edited) conversation that I had with ChatGPT about its own limitations in healthcare, and the limitations of those designing and using it. Then I review the research on where things currently stand with empathy and AI, and why we don’t have AI.
  • Editorial Cartooning as Visual Storytelling
    by Gretchen
    November 26, 2024
    Political cartoons illustrate the cultural zeitgeist– literally– while also offering critical commentary on it. An editorial cartoonist has a vast arsenal of tools at her disposal, allowing her to create visual metaphors, transmit brief but powerful narratives, elicit emotional responses, and present compelling arguments to persuade, inform, and potentially bolster public opinion. An editorial cartoon.
  • AI, the labor-saving device
    by Gretchen
    November 12, 2024
    The discussion about AI, specifically about generative AI (whether it’s labeled as such, or just “AI”), revolves around what it means to be human, and it’s doing my head in. Not because I have trouble grappling with the subject matter– my academic research revolved around intuitions we have about invisible agency, specifically how those intuitions.
  • Content design for a nonprofit community makerspace: MakeICT
    by Gretchen
    October 22, 2024
    What even is a makerspace? If you’re not familiar with makerspaces, here’s a definition: they’re spaces where people make things. Literally, that’s it– you could make pretty much anything at a makerspace, with the primary constraints being your own imagination, and what you can get away with. Makerspaces come in many varieties, from university fabrication.
  • Letter to the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee regarding CBP One
    by Gretchen
    October 16, 2024
    Dear Committee Members, specifically Chairman Green, I would like to know why, in numerous published statements, Chairman Green has claimed that Anna Giaritelli published a “groundbreaking scoop showing that the criminal cartels had hijacked the CBP One app using virtual private networks (VPNs), and were exploiting the app to make even more money by scheduling.
  • J.D. Vance’s weird, dumb, little racist jab at CBP One
    by Gretchen
    October 4, 2024
    Note: All quotes from the debate in this post are pulled from CBS News’s transcript, for which I am incredibly grateful. In the vice presidential debate on Tuesday, J.D. Vance brought up the CBP One app out of nowhere, which has inspired a wave of misinformation spread by people who’d never heard of the app.
  • AI Facial Recognition Technology in CBP One™
    by Gretchen
    May 9, 2024
    My review of the mobile app, CBP One™: The Border in Your Pocket, considered factors in the development of CBP One’s facial recognition engine, the Traveler Verification Service (TVS), that render it unsuitable for CBP One’s current usage in collecting information from migrants at the border. This post takes a closer look at how CBP.
  • CBP One™: The Border in Your Pocket
    by Gretchen
    April 15, 2024
    In August of 2018, in light of the growing number of apps under Customs and Border Protection, the agency’s Office of Field Operations (OFO) announced that it would develop the CBP One mobile application in collaboration with the Office of Information Technology (OIT). The app would prevent the confusion that comes with travelers needing to.
  • Decoding the Gurus
    by Gretchen
    January 3, 2021
    I’m a podcast junkie, and have been for– wow– fifteen years now. I listen to podcasts while traveling, going for walks, cleaning, and performing any other action that could be tedious if not for having interesting voices in my ears. When I think back to a portion of a podcast, I visualize where I was.
  • AAEC 2019 meeting at CXC in Columbus recap, and some rambling semi-related personal musings (Part II)
    by Gretchen
    October 5, 2019
    This post is a continuation of Part I– if you haven’t read that yet, click this link. Though I unfortunately missed Kal’s presentation, I did make it to the two AAEC panels that took place on Saturday afternoon (Day 3). The panel “Cartoonists’ Rights and the Free Speech Situation Facing the World” was moderated by.
  • AAEC 2019 meeting at CXC in Columbus recap, and some rambling semi-related personal musings (Part I)
    by Gretchen
    October 4, 2019
    After devoting myself to editorial cartooning at a rapidly increasing pace since the end of 2016, following the work of several cartoonists to the point of being able to identify a new cartoon’s artist without looking, and recording my reflections on the current state of the whole enterprise from an outsider’s perspective, I decided that.
  • iZombie and intuitions about spirit possession
    by Gretchen
    September 23, 2019
    So I’ve been binge-watching the show iZombie on Netflix recently. It’s a supernatural legal drama type show in which zombies exist, and the protagonist has been turned into one against her will. She’s not your typical mindless shambler, however, and actually is pretty much a normal human, apart from the incessant need to consume human.
  • Best in Show
    by Gretchen
    September 21, 2019
  • On the death, dearth, and demographics of political cartoons
    by Gretchen
    July 17, 2019
    As you may have noticed, I’ve been off the blog for quite some time, as I’ve thrown myself pretty completely into political cartooning (the results of which are posted on the main page of this site). But today I wanted to do some more writing– about political cartoons. Mine and other people’s, but mostly other.
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