iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Northeast Kingdom, Vermont this weekend.

photo of a mountain and lake amidst fall foliage

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

The slouching towards hallucinations of efficiency continues. apnews.com/article/bill...

Gates Foundation warns AI could widen inequality as foundation pledges $1B to expand access

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Overview – FY 2026 Defense Budget comptroller.war.gov/Portals/45/D...

Figure 1.2. DoD Budget FY 2010 – FY 2026

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Once again dusting off this bad boy.

Picture of the book “Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History” by Paul Farmer.

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

Lil pre ICE data center protest beer by the lake to celebrate.

Picture of a computer and beer by Lake Champlain

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

technofinancial capitalism eating itself

A drawing of a snake eating its own tail, an oroboros.

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

🎶Imagine there's no heaven It's easy if you try No hell below us Above us, only sky🎶

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

Sad news. Tracy Kidder did some great work. Like for so many young people, Mountains Beyond Mountains was a gateway to a world of moral and sociological imagination for me.

Tracy Kidder, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose best-selling books expanded the depth, range, and popularity of immersive, narrative nonfiction, has died.

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

Beautiful scenes at UVM today.

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

The scramble for Africa redux/continued. The U.S. is using PEPFAR funding and other health aid as leverage extract control of the mining sector in Zambia. www.lusakatimes.com/2026/01/25/z...

Zambia is nearing the signing of a confidential memorandum of understanding with the United States that would link health sector support to expanded access for American interests in the country’s mineral resources, including copper, gold, and cobalt.

The draft agreement, referred to in official circles as the Zambia US Health Deal, is expected to formalise a long term health financing framework while opening pathways for greater American participation in Zambia’s extractive industries. The arrangement has not yet been confirmed publicly by the government, and key elements remain undisclosed.

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

Paul Giamatti as Edwin Chadwick biopic when?

Edwin Cadwick, c. 1860
Science Museum Group Collection

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

Fascinating rapid response from Pablo Yedlin (@pyedlin.bsky.social), National Deputy in the Argentine National Congress, to our @bmj.com opinion piece. "What is happening today in the United States is a warning." www.bmj.com/content/392/...

Dear Editor:

I read with great interest this article recently published in The BMJ, which analyzes the role of senior officials and influential physicians in the dismantling of public health in the United States under the administration of Donald Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As a former Minister of Health of the Province of Tucumán, a professor of public health, a pediatrician, and a current National Deputy in Argentina, I feel compelled to express my solidarity with the U.S. scientific and health community, while also warning that what is happening there is not foreign to us.

History shows that health policies in the United States do not only have an impact within its borders, but often radiate to other countries, particularly in our region. Argentina is not an exception. In recent months, we have observed with alarm how certain decisions, discourses, and approaches currently applied in the United States are beginning to be replicated—uncritically and dangerously—in our country.

I am particularly concerned about the advance of anti-scientific narratives that downplay evidence, discredit vaccination, cast doubt on essential medicines, and erode public trust in the health system. We know from our own experience that these narratives have serious consequences: sustained declines in vaccination coverage, the reemergence of preventable diseases, increased infant morbidity and mortality, and growing inequality in access to quality care.

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

Trump & RFK Jr.'s coterie of bootlicking doctors are real pieces of shit, we argue in the British Medical Journal, essentially. Link: www.bmj.com/content/392/...

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

Nice shoutout on this research in today's @statnews.com newsletter: Newsletter link: www.statnews.com/2025/12/08/h... Link to the paper: jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

EMTALA violations increase in Texas
Ever since the constitutional right to abortion was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2022, experts have worried about how abortion bans might affect people’s ability to get emergency, lifesaving obstetric care in situations where an abortion is medically necessary. A new study shows there was reason to worry: In Texas, which bans abortion without exceptions for the health of the pregnant person, there was a small but substantial increase between 2018 and 2023 in obstetric-related violations of EMTALA, the federal law that ensures everyone receives emergency medical care regardless of their ability to pay. (The increase came out to about one additional violation per quarter.)

That’s according to a study published Friday in JAMA Health Forum, which analyzed all EMTALA violation filings between 2018 and the first quarter of 2023. The five other states with similarly strict bans had smaller, imprecise increases. The numbers are small, but the study authors emphasize that these are only the confirmed violations – in reality, there could be many more that were never formally recognized. And before the bans, these states had less than one EMTALA violation per year. So the quarterly increase may seem small, study author Liana Woskie said in an email to STAT, but “from a relative perspective it’s large.”

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

🚨New Paper🚨 Obstetric-Related Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act Violations and No Health Exception Bans w/ Liana Woskie and colleagues at Tufts. Link: jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Screen shot from our new paper titled "Obstetric-Related Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act Violations and No Health Exception Bans"

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

🚨Check out our new research on the representational harms embedded in AI image captioning🚨 We investigated how AI models interpret photographs from exploitative human exhibitions from the 19th and 20th centuries where colonized peoples were put on display. Open Access: doi.org/10.1007/s001...

Theorizing the failures of computer vision algorithms requires shifting from detecting and fixing biases towards understanding how algorithms are shaped by social, historical, and political real-world precursors. To better understand the socially embedded and historically rooted representational harms of these algorithms, we analyze how Al image captioning depicts archival images of living ethnological exibitions (so-called 'human zoos), mass stereotype-producing public exhibitions of colonized people common in Europe and the US from the 1870s to the 1930s, which were meant to symbolize the imagined superiority of Western societies and justify their colonial violence. We collected and analyzed more than 3800 captions from 100 archival images using MidJourney—a modern, state-of-the-art generative Al platform. Combining quantification with close reading of the captions, we found evidence of a 'colonial gaze,' an epistemological viewpoint from the perspective of colonizers characterized by significant representational harms representing five main themes: essentialism (41.6% of captions), cultural erasure (54.5%), dehumanization (11.1%), othering (28.4%), and infantilization (26.8%), with striking parallels between Al-generated captions and the original framings of human zoos informed by a broader colonial epistemology. Based on this analysis, we propose to conceptualize the colonial gaze in generative Al as an automated process of object identification and relational interpretation that draws on historical visual tropes and hierarchical logics rooted in colonial epistemologies. Trigger warning: This article contains extremely racialized text and images produced by both
colonizers and the machines.

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

New paper out today in AI & Society w/ Arsenii Alenichev and colleagues. "We can see a savage": a case study of the colonial gaze in generative AI algorithms rdcu.be/ePXNQ

Abstract: "Theorizing the failures of computer vision algorithms requires shifting from detecting and fixing biases towards understanding
how algorithms are shaped by social, historical, and political real-world precursors. To better understand the socially
embedded and historically rooted representational harms of these algorithms, we analyze how AI image captioning depicts
archival images of living ethnological exibitions (so-called 'human zoos'), mass stereotype-producing public exhibitions
of colonized people common in Europe and the US from the 1870s to the 1930s, which were meant to symbolize the
imagined superiority of Western societies and justify their colonial violence. We collected and analyzed more than 3800
captions from 100 archival images using MidJourney––a modern, state-of-the-art generative AI platform. Combining
quantification with close reading of the captions, we found evidence of a ‘colonial gaze,’ an epistemological viewpoint from
the perspective of colonizers characterized by significant representational harms representing five main themes: essentialism
(41.6% of captions), cultural erasure (54.5%), dehumanization (11.1%), othering (28.4%), and infantilization (26.8%), with
striking parallels between AI-generated captions and the original framings of human zoos informed by a broader colonial
epistemology. Based on this analysis, we propose to conceptualize the colonial gaze in generative AI as an automated process
of object identification and relational interpretation that draws on historical visual tropes and hierarchical logics rooted
in colonial epistemologies. Trigger warning: This article contains extremely racialized text and images produced by both
colonizers and the machines."

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of Marshall Ganz's beautiful, important, and above all *useful* book: "People, Power, Change: Organizing for Democratic Renewal" global.oup.com/academic/pro...

Cover of Marshall Ganz's "People Power Change: Organizing for Democratic Renewal"

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

Jeff Tweedy last night. The dude rocks and his band was awesome. Two of his sons!

Photo of Jeff Tweedy with a cool half moon guitar

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

I just ran the PDX half marathon and I can attest that it is not, in fact, burning to the ground. It’s actually been a beautiful weekend in the Rose City!

Picture of me and Sarah and Conor after the Portland half marathon!

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 06/09/2025

Happy Friday from some big pumpkins I’m growing with friends.

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

I’ve been growing big pumpkins this summer and here they are. They’re getting pretty big.

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 13/08/2025

The Guardian is covering the rise of @defendpublichealth.bsky.social. #IHAT is evidence-based policy making and grassroots people powered movement building for justice and rights. MAHA is policy-based evidence making rooted in fascist politics and capital-serving eugenic ideas. #IHATnotMAHA

Screen shot of the article in The Guardian titled, "‘Distracting the public’: group of health professionals call for RFK Jr to be removed".

"Ahead of the second Maha report, grassroots Defend Public Health warns that everything HHS is doing is ‘horrifying’"

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

Few better ways to spend a Monday night.

A picture of Wrigley Field during last night’s game.

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 31/07/2025

Eugenic techno surveillance state, incoming. apnews.com/article/trum...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration announced it is launching a new program that will allow Americans to share personal health data and medical records across health systems and apps run by private tech companies, promising that will make it easier to access health records and monitor wellness.

More than 60 companies, including major tech companies like Google, Amazon and Apple as well as health care giants like UnitedHealth Group and CVS Health, have agreed to share patient data in the system. The initiative will focus on diabetes and weight management, conversational artificial intelligence that helps patients, and digital tools such as QR codes and apps that register patients for check-ins or track medications.

“For decades America’s health care networks have been overdue for a high tech upgrade,” President Donald Trump said during an event with company CEOs at the White House on Wednesday. “The existing systems are often slow, costly and incompatible with one another, but with today’s announcement, we take a major step to bring health care into the digital age.”

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

New commentary piece in Studies of Comparative International Development with social science colleagues who study global health and international development: "Reimagine Aid, Don’t Destroy It" link.springer.com/article/10.1... @josephharrisbu.bsky.social ‪@aliciay.bsky.social + others

"As social scientists with decades of experience working in the field of global health and development, we deplore the recent decision by the Trump Administration to dismantle key US aid programs. This abrupt withdrawal threatens to exacerbate existing humanitarian crises and undercut the potential of future reforms. And while the international aid system is much larger than the contributions of any single country, the contributions of the US government to international development have been incredibly significant in terms of both monetary value and impact. The US has provided the largest single contribution of any country to foreign aid and investments for decades (Herre and Arrigada 2024; OECD 2025). The recent decisions made by the Trump Administration regarding US foreign assistance are an abdication of responsibility that has taken place without careful deliberation, due process, or transparency — and are already costing lives around the world, undermining in a matter of weeks sensitive development partnerships and trust that have taken years to create."

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

What a strange thing to threaten as leverage.

"British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the UK will recognize a Palestinian state in September unless Israel agrees to a cease-fire in Gaza and takes steps toward long-term peace."

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

It’s officially hot Hacking summer, folks.

Photo of three books on a desk: Ian Hacking’s ‘Representing and Intervening’, ‘The Emergence of Probability’, and his edited volume, ‘Scientific Revolutions’.

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

Got to marry my favorite person this weekend. What a gift. 10/10 activity. Would recommend. Love ya, Sarah.

Happy pic of me and Sarah getting hitched.

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Jon Shaffer @jonshaffer.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

🚨 New article in Social Science & Medicine! 🚨 How can clinicians learn to be organizers of people-powered campaigns for structural change? Our new paper looks at 2 years of interviews with participants in a yearlong community organizing training fellowship. doi.org/10.1016/j.so...

Abstract: The climate crisis and its harmful effects on human health are staggering. It is motivating clinicians to transform their scope of practice. Physicians and other clinicians are on the front lines of managing a growing surge of illness and injury directly caused by increasingly extreme temperatures, weather, and ecological transformation.
But the joint institutional constraints of clinician socialization through training and the labor conditions of health care delivery tend to obfuscate and disincentivize the array of possible practical strategies for meaningful, collective intervention in the climate health crisis. How do clinical professionals respond?

This paper empirically and theoretically explores how clinicians can respond to this crisis by examining findings from a study of the first two cohorts of a Climate Health Organizing Fellowship – a year-long training
program for interdisciplinary teams of health workers in which they launch a real-world organizing campaign to challenge and change a concrete climate health problem that they experience in their clinical setting or community.Rooted in the organizing leadership pedagogy of Marshall Ganz, to date this fellowship produced several
campaigns that have successfully changed hospital carbon emission policies, won a municipal electric bus campaign, expanded climate-health medical education curricula in medical schools, and secured new climate health leadership roles within their institutions. In this study we found that this program provided an opportunity for clinical professionals facing the “crisis of expertise” presented by the climate-health crisis to “insource” new leadership capacities and technical skills necessary to organize to win material change in their efforts to combat the climate health challenges they and their communities face. The program also expanded participants’ professional identities and sense that they had jurisdiction in the domain of collective climate health interventions.

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