joanne

Respect for Life and Conscience. The CDC should eliminate programs and projects that do not respect human life and conscience rights and that undermine — 455 — 2025 Presidential Transition Project family formation. It should ensure that it is not promoting abortion as health care. It should fund studies into the risks and complications of abortion and ensure that it corrects and does not promote misinformation regarding the comparative health and psychological benefits of childbirth versus the health and psychological risks of intentionally taking a human life through abortion. The CDC oversaw and funded the development and testing of the COVID-19 vaccines with aborted fetal cell lines, insensitive to the consciences of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people who objected to taking a vaccine with such a link to abortion. As evidenced by litigation across the country, it is likely that thousands were fired unjustly because of the exercise of their consciences or faith on this question, which could have been avoided with a modicum of concern for this issue from CDC. There is never any justification for ending a child’s life as part of research, and the research benefits from splicing or growing aborted fetal cells and aborted baby body parts can easily be provided by alternative sources. All such research should be prohibited as a matter of law and policy. CDC should update its public messaging about the unsurpassed effectiveness of modern fertility awareness–based methods (FABMs) of family planning and stop publishing communications that conflate such methods with the long-eclipsed “rhythm” or “calendar” methods. CDC should fund studies exploring the evidence-based methods used in cutting-edge fertility awareness.

Data Collection. The CDC’s abortion surveillance and maternity mortality reporting systems are woefully inadequate. CDC abortion data are reported by states on a voluntary basis, and California, Maryland, and New Hampshire do not submit abortion data at all. Accurate and reliable statistical data about abortion, abortion survivors, and abortion-related maternal deaths are essential to timely, reliable public health and policy analysis. Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method. It should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion. In addition, CDC should require monitoring and reporting for complications due to abortion and every instance of children being born alive after an abortion. Moreover, abortion should be clearly defined as only those procedures that intentionally end an unborn child’s life. Miscarriage management or standard ectopic pregnancy treatments should never be conflated with abortion. Comparisons between live births and abortion should be tracked across various demographic indicators to assess whether certain populations are targeted by — 456 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise abortion providers and whether better prenatal physical, mental, and social care improves infant outcomes and decreases abortion rates, especially among those who are most vulnerable. The Ensuring Accurate and Complete Abortion Data Reporting Act of 20239 would amend title XIX of the Social Security Act and Public Health Service Act to improve the CDC’s abortion reporting mechanisms by requiring states, as a

But by far and away, the biggest priority for a Heritage Foundation-captured CDC is going to be using the agency's legal frameworks for access to medical data, and weaponizing them to control women. *Most* of the Project 2025 plan for CDC is a witch hunt against abortion on an unprecedented scale.

The Open-Source Software Saving the Internet From AI Bot Scrapers Anubis, which block AI scrapers from scraping websites to death, has been downloaded almost 200,000 times.

Caught up with the creator of Anubis, an open-source software that's stopping AI bot scrapers from crashing sites across the internet www.404media.co/the-open-sou...

Computer-vision research powers surveillance technology - Nature An analysis of research papers and citing patents indicates the extensive ties between computer-vision research and surveillance.

New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance

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Today's phone calls to my reps: Work with @wyden.senate.gov to reintroduce the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act.

What you can do to get data brokers' filthy hands off your PII: use @yaelwrites.com's BADBOOL: github.com/yaelwrites/B...

Gavin Newsom vetoed a data broker privacy bill that our legislature passed last year that would have allowed Californians to opt out of all data brokers with a single click.

1/ Really recommend reading this from @propublica.org, one of the more detailed looks at how DOGE has attempted to use AI to go after government contracts. And below, I recommend further reading.

Good news! The same company building the domestic intelligence data panopticon is going to check you out at your local grocery!

Clean, simple, important call-out by Rock Yuren Pang at #chi25 on LLM-ification of HCI research transparency & reproducibility matter! programs.sigchi.org/chi/2025/pro...

Do you make custom feeds on Bluesky? We'd love to hear about your experiences as part of a research project at @uofwa.bsky.social @socialfutureslab.bsky.social ! Come chat with us for 45 mins and get $20 gift card. Express your interest here: forms.gle/CtoZTwCovTv8....

An older man is sewing a piece of fabric.

A photo of an Italian garment factory. There are people of different ethnicities surrounded by sewing machines.

When people hear of Italian tailoring, they imagine an old maestro quietly sewing away, even if the actual production is done in a factory (like anywhere else). Italy sold the idea of romantic craftsmanship—which brought higher prices and a garment industry boom. This is regional branding.

Yes, this is all about phones and the vices they supposedly inculcate, and has nothing to do with the fact that K-12 education has been forced to teach to tests for decades and constant messaging that the humanities are useless indulgences.

My way from Pygmalion to AI in Harvard's Colloquy!

"Nina Beguš explores the way
that cultural tropes shape
artificial intelligence and
reveal the creative limits of AI."

gsas.harvard.edu/sites/defaul...

Fwiw one thing university faculty can do is provide simple explainers for their students on how federal funding works and how cuts to higher ed & endowment taxes will concretely damage their education and possibly spike tuition costs

Many students don’t know how university finances work!

Trump Pulled $400 million From Columbia. Other Schools Could Be Next. The administration has circulated a list that includes nine other campuses, accusing them of failure to address antisemitism.

List includes Harvard University, George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, Northwestern University, the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Southern California.

The rising Republican movement to defund public libraries Libraries bolster democracy. Republicans want to get rid of them.

So, not burned. Diaspora, defunded, privatized, and finally destroyed by religious zealots.

That's how learning and knowledge was lost in the Classical World.

www.vox.com/politics/202...

Great job alert: ProPublica is hiring a computational journalist, "someone who will use technology and data to identify and unlock stories that would otherwise be out of reach."

Salary: $120K-$140K
Remote: ✅

Come join us!

Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not) While political reporters are still doing their view-from-nowhere “Democrats say this, Republicans say that” dance, tech and legal journalists have been watching an unfortunately recogn…

Wrote up something about Techdirt's recent coverage, and why (whether we like it or not) we need to be a "democracy blog" now, rather than just a "tech" blog (not that we've ever been just a tech blog).

This story is *the* story and it impacts everything else.

www.techdirt.com/2025/03/04/w...

Trump administration retreats in fight against Russian cyber threats Recent incidents indicate US is no longer characterizing Russia as a cybersecurity threat, marking a radical departure: ‘Putin is on the inside now’

Listen, I'm not going to pretend that I'm even remotely surprised, but I will tell you that this is a slap in the face to every person in the infosec community that has worked to track and thwart Russian APTs for the last several decades.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

18F was dissolved because it saved money. We pushed back against contractors who tried to screw American taxpayers. We showed how cheap and good government software can be. Musk hates that.

writing by Dan Tangherlini via @donmoyn.bsky.social

The biggest reason why I dislike the idea of respectability in dress is because it conflates the *appearance* of virtue with *actual* virtue. Wearing a suit doesn't make you respectful, intelligent, or capable, just as wearing a leather jacket doesn't make you rugged.

Conjuring algorithms: Understanding the tech industry as stage magicians - Peter Nagy, Gina Neff, 2024 In this article, we introduce the term “conjuration of algorithms” to describe how the tech industry uses the language of magic to shape people’s perceptions of...

Sam Altman says GPT-4.5 has "a magic to it i haven't felt before."

I'm reminded of Peter Nagy and Gina Neff's article about "the conjuration of algorithms—a strategically deployed narrative device that uses the principles of magic to manipulate the public perception of technologies."

Now how does one get nominated for this…😁

But seriously, I’m glad to see a philanthropic organization using their power to support science and academic freedom 👏🏾

Thrilled to be at #AAAI2025 for our tutorial, “AI Data Transparency: The Past, Present, and Beyond.”

We’re presenting the state of transparency, tooling, and policy, from the Foundation Model Transparency Index, Factsheets, the the EU AI Act to new frameworks like @MLCommons’ Croissant.

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Hitler said the Third Reich would last 1000 years.

It lasted 12 and he died cowering in a bunker.

Fascism always fails.

Culture is not trivia: sociocultural theory for cultural NLP. By Naitian Zhou and David Bamman from the Berkeley School of Information and Isaac L. Bleaman from Berkeley Linguistics.

There's been a lot of work on "culture" in NLP, but not much agreement on what it is.

A position paper by me, @dbamman.bsky.social, and @ibleaman.bsky.social on cultural NLP: what we want, what we have, and how sociocultural linguistics can clarify things.

Website: naitian.org/culture-not-...

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Hayao Miyazaki's short guide to watercolor painting -- we put this translation together a couple of years ago