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… Read more: The immigrant physicians holding up U.S. healthcare

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… Read more: America’s vaccination against equity, and its adverse effects

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,… Read more: Mind the strings: Grok 3 and biased AI puppeteers

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… Read more: No border wands, just brutality: what the death of the CBP One app portends

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.… Read more: Deux ex Smartphone: Healthcare Access Isn’t Going to Democratize Itself

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… Read more: Healthcare tech’s turf war hurts patients- here’s how to protect yourself

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… Read more: Down the patient portal: the world of healthcare tech serving you data about you

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… Read more: Out of our minds: externalized cognition and UX design

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… Read more: Leveling up in the DOOM pile that was 2024

Yes, I know it sounds like a children’s story. And in some senses it is, because we’re talking about imagination and empathy. But the unfortunate focus is a universal human experience that drives the pursuit of healthcare, yet its inherently subjective nature makes it challenging (even impossible?) to measure objectively, even with advanced AI. Sora… Read more: Sora and the painbot

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… Read more: I (don’t) feel your pain: A dialog with ChatGPT about what “empathic AI” in healthcare really means

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… Read more: Editorial Cartooning as Visual Storytelling

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… Read more: AI, the labor-saving device

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… Read more: Content design for a nonprofit community makerspace: MakeICT

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… Read more: Letter to the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee regarding CBP One

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… Read more: J.D. Vance’s weird, dumb, little racist jab at CBP One

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… Read more: AI Facial Recognition Technology in CBP One™

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… Read more: CBP One™: The Border in Your Pocket

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… Read more: Decoding the Gurus

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… Read more: AAEC 2019 meeting at CXC in Columbus recap, and some rambling semi-related personal musings (Part II)

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… Read more: AAEC 2019 meeting at CXC in Columbus recap, and some rambling semi-related personal musings (Part I)

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… Read more: iZombie and intuitions about spirit possession

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… Read more: On the death, dearth, and demographics of political cartoons

Hey, did you hear? A student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania was kicked out of class for saying there are only two genders! This is just another example of how universities in America are just bastions of social justice warriors trying to brainwash and browbeat everyone into sharing their views! That student’s First Amendment right… Read more: Student claims in-class tirade against trans woman pastor Constitutionally protected