Anthropological facial ‘reconstruction’ – recognizing the fallacies, ‘unembracing’ the errors, and realizing method limits

Despite being practiced for over the last 200 years, facial approximation methods remain in their infancy as the soft tissue prediction methods employed have not been tested and justified. Scientific testing is the only way forward and much of it is needed. The lack of systematic scientific tests in the past has enabled many misleading notions to become established. Many of these notions appear to have arisen and been sustained as a result of practitioner biases--this is clearly evident even in the name commonly used to describe the method of building faces from skulls, for "facial reconstruction" implies everything the method is not, e.g., technical/scientific, exact, and credible. Although facial approximation methods are useful for forensic investigation (even if they do not generate identifications through true positive recognitions of the faces), the public should beware of the marketing and political ploys employed within the profession. These ploys give rise to some impressive, but unjustifiable claims--but do not just take my word for it; evaluate the evidence for yourself with disregard to the indoctrination waged by the facial "reconstruction" field in general, including that promoted by what I have had to say here. Use your own reason and intellect and see which conclusions you reach.     

中外妇女生殖健康比较研究

女性生殖健康是妇女的一项基本人权,也是妇女解放程度和妇女地位提高的重要标志.中国妇女许多生殖健康指标已经达到甚至超过发达国家水平,表明尽管中国经济水平和整体医疗保健水平尚未达到中等发达国家水平,但中国妇女尤其是广大农村妇女生殖保健水平得到国家在现有条件下的最好关照.在这一领域,中国妇女已经获得比世界许多国家包括许多中等发达国家更高的解放程度和社会及家庭地位.中国政府在经济文化水平欠发达条件下对人权的争取和维护,在妇女生殖健康问题上得到最充分的诠释.     

From the workplace to the household: migrant labor and accumulation without dispossession

Working class studies on China commonly use the lens of proletarianization to understand class formation among peasant workers who move into cities to work in China’s manufacturing sector. However, in the decade since the 2008 global financial crisis, proletarianization is an increasingly fading possibility for the Chinese peasantry, as urban labor markets remain saturated. Instead of peasants being transformed into proletariats, new patterns of class formation have emerged, where the interconnections between agrarian and urban remain central to peasant-workers living without dispossession. The Marxist feminist centering of practices and social arrangements of social reproduction, i.e. workforce maintenance, provides a welcome point of departure for redrawing some of our class maps in the shadow of the 2008 global economic crisis. This contribution draws on multi-sited ethnographic research among migrant workers toiling in the petty-commodity workplaces of Kunming, and in the adjacent countryside of Yunnan Province, to document the fluid class formation among families living on labor’s frontier. Through examining different experiences of workforce reproduction for families and migrant laborers as they move in and out of the workforce and household self-provisioning for subsistence, alternative imaginations for the possibilities of subsistence autonomy emerge.     

Access to education in six Eastern European countries between 1940 and 1985. Results of a cross-national survey

This paper presents an analysis of patterns of access to education in six Eastern European countries (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Slovakia) between 1940 and 1985. As in other industrial countries, average educational attainment (measured by duration, i.e. years in school) has increased greatly since 1940. But the expansion was most rapid until 1970. In all six countries, women increased their educational attainment more than men. By 1975, the difference between men and women in regard to years of schooling had virtually disappeared in all countries studied. Parents' educational attainment (measured as average years of schooling of father and mother) proves to be a main determinant of their children's attainment. However, the effect of parents' education decreased by about half from 1940 to 1985. Cultural resources (measured by parents' cultural behavior while the respondent was growing up) turns out to be a strong predictor of educational attainment, and equally so for men and women. It accounts for about one-third of the educational reproduction effect. However, the effect of cultural background declined considerably under communism. Finally, parents' political resources (measured as parents membership of the Communist Party) is shown to have a weak but consistent effect on educational attainment in the six countries. Although this effect was relatively strong in the early communist period, it was negligible for the younger cohorts.     

Measuring the accuracy of facial approximations: a comparative study of resemblance rating and face array methods

The success of facial approximation is thought to depend, at least in part, upon the "accuracy" of the constructed face. However, methods of accuracy assessment are varied and this range in methods may be responsible for the disparate results reported in the literature. The aim of this study was to determine if the accuracy results of one facial approximation were comparable across two different assessment methods (resemblance ratings and simultaneous face array tests using unfamiliar assessors) and if resemblance ratings co-varied with recognition responses. True-positive recognition performance from the facial approximation was poor (21%) while resemblance scores using the same facial approximation were moderately high (3 out of 5 on a five-point scale). These results are not, therefore, consistent and indicate that either different variables are being evaluated by the methods, or the same variable is being examined but with different weight/calibration. Further resemblance ratings tests of the facial approximation to three foil faces from the face array revealed that resemblance scores were similar irrespective of which face was compared, and did not closely correspond with the degree of recognition performance. This was especially the case for isolated comparisons of single faces to the facial approximation. Collectively, these results indicate that resemblance ratings are: (i) insensitive measures of a facial approximation's accuracy; and (ii) inconsistent with results of unfamiliar simultaneous face-array recognition results. These data suggest that familiar and unfamiliar recognition tests should be given increased weight in contrast to current resemblance rating tests.     

论代孕母的合法化基础

代孕母自出现以来因其有效的社会功能得到快速发展,同时因其衍生过多的法律伦理问题而在各国遭到不同程度的限制,有的则予以全面禁止.我国也是禁止代孕母的国家之一.禁止代孕是否符合法理精神?立足于代孕母合法化的国际潮流,从法对人的基本权利的限制、无伤害不禁止原则、正义原则及维护人的追求幸福权和家庭权几个方面深入论证了代孕母合法化的法学基础.     

Regulating Assisted Reproduction in Canada,Switzerland, and the USA: Comparing the Judicialization of Policy-Making

This article analyses the extent to which courts shape policies for assisted reproduction. While the USA is considered to be the most litigious country, Canada has observed a growing involvement of the courts from the 1980s onward, and Switzerland is characterized by a modest degree of judicialization. Based on national patterns, we would expect litigation and court impact to vary across these three countries. As the empirical analysis reveals, policy-process-specific variables such as the novelty of regulation, self-regulation by key stakeholders, and the policies in place better explain the variation in the judicialization of policy-making.     

Ma Rainey’s phonograph

This essay engages a series of performance routines by the blues artist Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, as a way of critiquing the epistemological tenets of sound reproduction technology. Between 1923 and 1925 Gertrude “Ma” Rainey carried out an elaborate quasi-burlesque performance routine in which she sang while hidden inside a giant phonograph; this routine precisely references and troubles the legacy of black sounds and bodies and their conflicted forms of capture andembodiment through sonic technologies. I think about how black sounds and bodies have been rendered as documentary objects within sonic and visual performance contexts and how this history is both referenced and complicated in Ma Rainey’s performances. I argue further that Rainey’s performance illustrates how sonic technologies always require, what I term black documentary embodiment, through the sonic and the visual. To this end I illustrate how reducing black art to an evidentiary object was central to the phonograph’s material and epistemological construction. In addition to analyzing Rainey’s performance I briefly engage the contemporaneous visual culture of the blues as a means to trace the legacy of black documentary embodiment within a longer visual-sonic tradition.     

Performance's mode of reproduction I: searching for Danh Võ’s mother

This essay returns to key debates in performance theory regarding the relationship between performance and reproduction, offering a Marxian inflected theory of performance’s mode of reproduction. It suggests that both performance theory and Marxist theory appropriate the mother function in describing performance’s mode of reproduction and the reproduction of capital, while displacing the mother in the process. Through a reading of the work of contemporary artist Danh Võ, the essay explores how performance’s mode of reproduction can affect the reproduction and sustenance of minoritarian life against historical, social, and economic forces of elision, erasure, and annihilation.     

从“家庭”走向“社群”——“都市中产全职妈妈”社会参与的路径与价值探析

两百年来的妇女解放道路一直强调妇女要走出家庭、参与生产,但却并未真正回应现代社会养育责任私人化所带来的双重负担问题。本文通过对四川省成都市一个以全职妈妈为主体的志愿者服务队的成立背景、发展路径、积极影响与限制因素的考察,剖析了现代社会城市女性面临的孕产和育儿困境,以及她们如何借助外部环境和资源优势走出私人家庭内部空间,在社区层面上进行支持与互助。这类群体的社会参与和自我成长也为我们反思"家庭—市场"二元悖论下的女性困境及其突破提供了新的可能与方向。