Down 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 More

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

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 […]

Read More

Content design for a nonprofit community makerspace: MakeICT

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 […]

Read More

It should go without saying

Yesterday Ophelia Benson and Richard Dawkins both published, on their respective blogs, a brief joint statement on how atheists should disagree. It’s really unfortunate that such a thing should be necessary, but encouraging that it happened. The statement condemns bullying and harassment generally, and then goes on to cite specific […]

Read More

A simple ethics of expectations

On the news this morning I listened to a report about a new virus discovered in Saudi Arabia. But after talking about how scary and disturbing that is, it was mentioned that it has infected a total of two people and is believed to be only transmissable from non-human animals […]

Read More

International Blasphemy Rights Day

https://www.facebook.com/events/440034722701608/ Blasphemy. Noun: The act or offense of speaking sacrilegiously about God or sacred things; profane talk. In other words, the act or offense of speaking about religion as though you are not religious. Speaking about a religion as if you are not an adherent of it. And all of […]

Read More

Spokesgroups

Radley Balko got quite a lot of hate mail in response to an article he wrote for HuffPo on Occupy Wall Street. One letter hilariously complains I am appalled by your lack of integrity. You quoted someone from the Cato Institute but didn’t reveal that you also worked for them. […]

Read More

Dan Savage as sexual ethicist

As president?  Well, maybe not…but we could do and have done a lot worse for that, too. Lutheran pastor Benjamin Dueholm wrote an interesting and thorough article on this subject for Washington Monthly.  It’s definitely worth a read, though I disagree with some of his analysis.  So does Amanda Marcotte, […]

Read More