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, […]
Read MoreThe immigrant physicians sustaining U.S. healthcare
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. […]
Read MoreAmerica’s vaccination against equity, and its adverse effects
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 […]
Read MoreMind the strings: Grok 3 and biased AI puppeteers
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 […]
Read MoreNo border wands, just brutality: what the death of the CBP One app portends
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 […]
Read MoreDeux ex Smartphone: Healthcare Access Isn’t Going to Democratize Itself
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 […]
Read MoreHealthcare tech’s turf war hurts patients- here’s how to protect yourself
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— […]
Read MoreDown the patient portal: the world of healthcare tech serving you data about you
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 […]
Read MoreOut of our minds: externalized cognition and UX design
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 […]
Read MoreLeveling up in the DOOM pile that was 2024
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 […]
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