Professional binge yapper

The fact that at the lowest point of knowledge for me as far as things like racial dynamics in this country, my friend and I at seventeen and in the midst of our senior year, were talking about this?

We both recognized the privilege that came with having American/Western names.

Me? Because I'm the descendant of chattel slaves, have a mother aboard the respectability train, and an am junior despite being a girl. So American first name. Last name is likely that of whoever owned my father's ancestors.

My friend? She's a child of immigrants and I didn't know that. Not until she showed her original name. At some point, her parents had changed it. Gave her an more American sounding one.

But yeah, I don't know how many times we need to have this conversation about AI and the biases injected into it routinely.

It started with something "innocuous" and more excusable to many. "Oh, you just can't wash your hands because the soap dispenser doesn't recognize dark skin? That's nothing."

this is something thats been brushed off (of course) by my field and i've butted heads with other researchers in my field about the push to integrate these models with no regard to how unequitable they are. before the stanford debacle was made public, i had already taken great issue with the NER (Named Entity Recognition) models that stanford had been pushing, whether it be internal implements or publications released by the university. i have pushed these models to their limits and have found hundreds of times over that they will never, ever, ever be equitable in any sense of the word. i have developed bias audit suites to stress test these models to ensure that they are compliant with the ethical frameworks that we, as researchers, strive to model.

here's a bit of what i mean. the following screenshot is coming from a manuscript of mine that has yet to be published:

the model that i put forth above met the pictured metrics after i had done the barest minimum for a named entity recognition model using an augmented dataset specifically constructed to increase the representation of names from African, Afro-Caribbean, Black American, East African, and West African naming traditions.

the augmented dataset was constructed through a combination of census mining, public domain biographical text, and synthetic augmentation using attested name lists drawn from demographic and sociological research on naming practices in Black communities in the united states, the caribbean, and the african continent. this is the barest minimum that we should undertake and it only scratches the surface of what is necessary to make our machine learning implementations less catastrophic, and still fails to meet expectations of what a truly equitable model should be. the inclusion of synthetic augmentation is acknowledged as a methodological compromise because, ideally, training data would consist of naturally occurring text in which names from all represented traditions appear as entities in realistic contexts.

i can say that i have sat in rooms where these models were trained for years and no entity, be it an academic entity or a corporate entity, has ever given it a fraction of this much thought. i have destroyed personal, consumer-grade hardware that i have paid for and continue to pay for out of my own pocket in order to continue these audits.

i have raised formal complaints and submitted requests for investigation with publishers and institutions about problematic pursuits that cannot pass bias audits and the peer reviewers of these publications seldom review NER models in this much detail. my Black colleagues have done the same and rarely, if ever, receive responses. i have seen a Black colleague defer their complaints and words to a white scientist, as the exact same words have only been taken seriously when the messenger demographic is the same as the offender. i have seen these labs receive funding, stating specific west african benefit in their grant requests, only for no occupant of the lab to know what the words 'Yoruba, Igbo, Akan, and Wolof' even are when prompted. the funding is never revoked and no one is ever disciplined save for the whistleblowers. NER training corpora excludes all of these groups knowing that there will never be consequences for doing so and that the systemic racism perpetuated will be rewarded every single time by bolstering the careers of the researchers that enable it.

i have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours developing equitable and ethical machine learning implementations for research, entirely unfunded, as you can guess where the grant money is deferred to. i have lost significant career advancement opportunities because, in order to hold these positions, you must relinquish your willingness to be an ally of any person of color. i have spent years watching interns who i believed to have great moral character become perpetrators of racial violence through greed and selfishness. now imagine what happens to the researcher that isn't a white man like myself - for many, there is little to no chance to seize the privilege of being able to develop these implementations. there is no chance to enter these rooms, enter these discussions, reap the benefits of the mobility that this specialized education gives to you, or have any say on what happens to your demographic in the model architecture. those who make it will be pressured into submission and those who fight against it will be suppressed somehow.

it is more important than ever for Black computer scientists to be uplifted and for their research to be funded and made visible - it is these same scientists being identified by these models as "out-of-vocabulary" or non-entities, while dozens of less qualified peers are identified correctly.

This is just a fun little thing I’ve been wanting to do since the dawn of time but could never find a post to reblog that satisfied what I wanted. So I made this, feel free to reblog and use it yourself!

❤️ how tall are you?

🧡 what is your sexuality?

💛 what is your favorite feature on yourself?

💚 where are you from?

🩵 do you have any pets?

💙 do you have any siblings?

💜 describe yourself in five words or less!

🩷 dream job?

🖤 favorite hobbies outside of your blog

🎂 when is your birthday?

🌙 your zodiac (Sun, Moon, Rising)

💉do you have tattoos and/or piercings

🚗 can you drive?

✈️ favorite place you’ve traveled

🎤 have you been to a concert

🎵 favorite artists

🎧 last song you listened too

📺 last show you watched

📝 last thing you wrote

🔐 something no one would guess about you

🧟‍♀️ scariest thing that’s happened to you

🔥 craziest thing that’s ever happened to you

🍓 favorite food

🍅 least favorite food

🍊 favorite season?

🍋 favorite genre to read / watch / write

🍐 if you could make one character real, who would it be

🫐 some place you’d love to visit

🍇 a word your friends would use to describe you

🍒 what is your earliest memory

🍌 what is one talent you wish you had

💌 why did you start this blog?

✏️ when did you start writing fanfic

🖇️ what are your favorite asks to answer

📚 how do you come up with the fics you write

📌 what is the fic you’re know for

🔍 what character do you enjoy writing for the most

🖊️ what character do you not enjoy writing for

💔 is there a fic you wish you didn’t write

❤️‍🔥 what character do you simp for most often

🧚‍♀️ favorite characters of all time

🪐 favorite shows / series of all time

🌝 a show you would recommend to anyone

🌚 a show you’d tell people to stay away from

🌹 favorite kinks to write for

🥀 kinks you would never write for

🌊 a kink you would like to write but you think you’d be judged

❄️ full fics, imagines or head canons

☂️ your favorite fanfic from another writer

A couple of in depth questions!

🍄 what is something that’s happened in your life that you wish you could go back and change?

⭐️ what is one of your biggest accomplishments? Why is it so important to you?

🪻what is the toughest thing you had to go through, but can say you’ve successfully overcome?

🌺 what is the best gift someone has ever given you and why is it so important

There are SIX questions total in reblogs, the end will be marked by large green text. If you don’t see all six, check reblogs and grab the version with the ending note.

Answers amended from the 2025 census based on feedback. If you’re mixed, choose what feels right to you I’m not here to do phrenology or paper bag test you but don’t make it my problem either. When in doubt, ask yourself: would the whites kill you too in the race war?

This census is US-centric because so is tumblr, unfortunately. This poll is also starting with a heavy Black/racialized bias due to my personal followers. The main point of this census is to see how white-dominant the site is currently compared to prior years, as well

For the purpose of this census, Imperial Core will be defined as the following: United States, Canada, Australia, Aotearoa, basically all of Western Europe, Japan, and Israel. If you want to argue about any of these designations, too bad maybe they should stop colonizing.

Note for clarification:

*For those who don’t know, TMA means transmisogyny affected (such as trans women, some non-binary people, etc.) whereas TME means transmisogyny exempt (Cis men, cis women, transmasculine individuals, etc). If you want to ask for clarification for which applies to you for the purposes of this poll, feel free to ask and I’ll try to reply, but if you try to argue or quibble about the terms themselves, I’ll block you.

i think there are several reasons why her 'where will she go now that her partnership track position is not an option anymore' storyline sucked, but the main reasons are about how geriatrics is presented and how samira feels about it, how different the other R4's are depicted in contrast to her and the lack of explanation why, the difference in who samira is shown to be in season one compared to now, and why it's upsetting that they wrote samira to have an undefined ending with very little depth about her own wants and needs, or any chance of her getting to do something she loves.

so when i mean contradiction to what is being shown vs what is being said, i mean that they show samira to be good with the elderly and then tell us that that's where she should be because she's too slow, while also showing us that samira had not considered this, and isn't particularly very excited about the idea. it's not a natural thing that she gravitates towards or some gift that she's discovering and loves. she visibly has to get used to the idea when several people present it to her.

next, in the scene with crus, we find out that getting into any decent spot is apparently not an option anymore, because she has no credentials or clearly is far too late; but in season one, langdon (several months further into his R4 than samira is currently) still had options and got offered something by robby. and so they kind of break their own rules and make it so that samira is just a hopeless case with no chance of anything after her residency i guess. and when she wants to ask abbot for a rec letter, she says that she just wants 'any spot that will take her' and 'kill me now, it'll hurt less' which reaffirms that she's far too late and has no options left except being incredibly lucky.

she has her partnership track position, yes; but after that fell through the show makes her look devastatingly unprepared while also it's also completely contradictory to the samira in season one. the samira who knew every case study and incredibly determined and motivated to keep learning; she is the type of person to have a five year plan, and would make sure to have backups just in case. yes, her research got defunded. but a setback never stopped her in season one. and it's all done with no proper explanation.

not giving her a backup plan and killing all her motivation feels like the writers were just deliberately setting her up for failure with no options to fall back onto. which is cruel and feels misogynistic compared to how the male R4's in this show are treated and depicted.

and i'm not saying characters can't have sad and depressing endings, i'm saying that in order for that to feel satisfying or like it has a good reason, there should be explanations given as to why she's so far behind on her peers. a reason why crus is far more prepared than the determined and motivated samira we saw in season one, or why a person like langdon still had time in season one to find a spot. why is R4 samira so different from R4 crus or R4 langdon? because if it was her being a brown woman and not getting the same opportunities, they should have talked about that. but they didn't, and so it feels unintentional and hurtful to depict her in this way.

and the conclusion is that she just simply doesn't know, and might settle for something she doesn't really want or has considered before, like geriatrics. and even if she does want it, we are told her chances of getting into any spot at this time (the very start of her R4 year) are already abysmal, in contrary to what we saw with langdon in season one. on top of there being no explanation as to why she's so behind on her peers or why she has no backup plan.

I think something that often gets missed here is that Samira committed to the Jersey job. She has a job for the next year. She knows what she's going to do over a year in advance. So the backups aren't actually relevant because it's a timing issue! She presumably had backups, but she turned them after accepting the position near her mom.. The entire starting premise is that her plans have blown up and she could still go to Jersey, but she doesn't want to, because without her mom, there's nothing left for her there. So the core issue is that her own preparation did not matter in the slightest, because it all comes down to her mother's timing putting her in a really difficult position – whatever backups she had, it's too late to accept them. So that puts her in a challenging spot for fellowships – not out of her own skills or preparation, but just due to really unfortunate timing.

All of that makes sense! But where it stops making sense and just starts being just meanspirited and stupid is everything that comes after that: the shift towards talking about how she doesn't have the skills or experience to be competitive in ultrasound, the terrible advice she keeps getting from her atttendings, the lack of consistency when it comes to why she (until season two, the only resident we had any indication of doing research or keeping up with the literature) is the one in a bad position.

Now it is absolutely believable to me that Samira isn't a competitive fellowship candidate, but again, not because of her skills, but because from what we see of her, she has diverse interests! Her research was in racial disparities, and that's important to her, but we keep seeing her pick up information like a sponge throughout season one, and the two studies we actually hear her cite have nothing to do with racial disparities whatsoever! They are about...well, seemingly trauma procedures in fast paced, under resourced environments. Those citations were why I'm convinced what would really make Samira happy is a disaster medicine fellowship. This could have tied into why she had initially not opted for a fellowship! She cares deeply about keeping up with the research and learning and geeks out over new techniques and procedures, but she's fundamentally more of a generalist than a specialist. She wants to be the doctor drilling into a patient's skull in the middle of a crisis. She also wants to be the one carefully finding the right diagnosis. So it makes sense to me that she isn't an obvious candidate for a lot of really competitive fellowships, because other people have resumes that, while not necessarily better over all, are more targeted to the specific subspecialty – like Henderson, who is so focused on ultrasound. But what breaks this is how they explained Samira as knowing Al-Hashimi!

I'm on the record as thinking the Samira-Al-Hashimi relationship was ill-conceived and terribly executed. It could have meant something, but it didn't, and what's worse is, it completely screws with Samira's character, because they decided that she did not one, but two elective VA rotations during her residency (not during med school, which would have made way more sense and actually aligned with how Al-Hashimi described them as having met "a few year ago" in 2x01). If they had bothered actually developing the Samira Al-Hashimi relationship it could have meant something and been indicative of Samira's unfulfilled need for mentorship at PTMC. But they didn't, so her going back for two rotations just doesn't make any sense with the character established as being so driven and interested in broad scope knowledge, and doesn't make sense in terms of someone looking for fellowships.

That could have made sense, too! There is absolutely a version of Samira where she's so focused on one path, one right way of doing things, that she just doesn't prepare for alternatives, so once she decided she was going to get a job, that was all she considered, instead of breadth of knowledge and personal enrichment. But they didn't bother actually telling that story. And it gets even stupider! Because later there's a scene with Mel, after their elderly patients, where we learn Samira did a clerkship at NJMS Senior Care. How does that make any sense? You're telling me she did a clerkship in this field she has explicitly not considered? A) Then why did she do it, senior care doesn't seem to be a core clerkship anywhere. B) She didn't consider it even after the clerkship? So they're making it even more apparent that it means nothing to her. She isn't interested in geriatrics in the slightest, and they're forcing her to settle.

What's even more insane is that Samira shifts towards talking about applying for an elective rotation, not a fellowship – she's going to apply for electives so she can have a better chance at a fellowship, and it'll be "whichever one will take me". Which doesn't make any sense! She's applying for electives she doesn't want so she has a better chance at a fellowship that she doesn't want, and no one is even telling her, hey, slow down, you remember you don't actually have to do this and you can just get a job and decide if you want to apply for a fellowship next year??? It would be easier to get a job in Pittsburgh than to get a fellowship, so it'd be easier to stay!

All of this makes the progression of the story flat out absurd: she has a job she no longer wants. She decides to apply for fellowships. She's late in the game and her research was cancelled (treated as a throwaway line instead of something that would deeply affect her, adding to the intense cruelty of how they treated Samira this season), so the really competitive fellowships are a long shot. Her attendings suggest something she couldn't be less interested in. One of them makes it about her pace (something which there is zero indication is a problem anymore, and is clearly him just being a dick). She has a conversation with a couple patients that make her maybe it could be satisfying. Except then she has another conversation where it's clear that she's unqualified for something that actually interests her, so if she does do it, it'll be her settling. All of this while Langdon was treated as a very competitive fellowship candidate, despite us having zero indication he did any research, and the possibility of him (married! Two children!) doing any serious elective rotations or away rotations seems incredibly low.

this post is like 11 years old

hey