Surgery-for-life:Aging, sexual fitness and self-management in Brazil

This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork on plastic surgery to explore tensions in aging norms and ideals for women in Brazil.  I situate my analysis in relation to debates about a “de-chronologized life course.”  Some scholars argue that the life course in late capitalism has become less standardized.  In this account, chronological age diminishes in importance as consumers are defined by life style choices available to all ages and the period of youth extends into middle age and beyond.  In Brazil consumers embrace plastic surgery as a means to “manage” aging, mental well-being, and reproductive and sexual health.  This promise of a flexible and optimized aging trajectory seems to echo the notion of a de-chronologized life course.  I argue, however, that medical discourse and patients’ accounts show ambivalence about aging and conflicts in the ideal of medically-managed sexual fitness for women.  Drawing on analysis of changes in family structure and women’s health regimes, I argue that passage through the life course, rather than becoming more flexible, is in some ways becoming more rigidly defined by biological processes

Beauty and Health: Anthropological Perspectives

This essay, written as a 'teaser' for an up-coming symposium, reflects on how human beauty can be understood from an anthropological and medical anthropological perspective. First, it considers how aesthetic and healing rationales can conflict or merge in a variety of medical technologies and health practices. Second, it discusses beauty in relation to the socioeconomic transformations of modernity and globalization. It suggests the need for a theoretical framework that departs from a strictly constructivist approach and views beauty as a distinct domain of social experience, not reducible to an effect of other inequalities

Anthropology and complicated people

Revealing complexity in the world—but also creating it—is at the heart of anthropology. It shapes our engagement with theory and ethics, writing and visual style, and choice of research subjects. But does it create blind spots? I respond to this question by discussing studies of violence, and my ethnographic material in progress on British ex-soldiers. Owing to the ethical norm of suspending moral judgment of our research participants, we tend to avoid portraying their unlikable traits, internal contradictions, or troubling actions that do not advance our arguments. Ethnography often reveals florid complexity in structures or systems, but it creates simpler depictions of the people who inhabit these forms. Yet, since anthropology has long aimed to holistically capture the truth of social life, it should allow more space in ethnographic narrative for complicated protagonists.</p

Mopping up the Mess: A Call to Adopt the Seventh Circuit’s Standard for Assessing Comparator Evidence in Title VII Discrimination Claims

In McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Green, the U.S. SupremeCourt developed a framework to assist courts in assessingindividual disparate treatment claims based oncircumstantial evidence. Under that test, plaintiffs allegingdiscrimination under Title VII must first show a prima faciecase of discrimination. Since McDonnell Douglas, courts havemodified the test by requiring plaintiffs to demonstrate thatthey were treated less favorably than a similarly situatedcomparator employee who is outside the plaintiff’s protectedclass. Courts disagree, however, on what it means foremployees to be similarly situated. Some courts strictlyinterpret the similarly situated requirement; others cautionagainst an overly mechanical approach and employ a flexiblestandard instead. As a result, a plaintiff could successfullyplead a prima facie case of discrimination in one federalcircuit but fail in another. To resolve this disparity, this Noteproposes that the U.S. Supreme Court adopt the SeventhCircuit’s standard for comparator evidence due to itsconsistency with the Court’s precedent, its cohesion with thepurposes underlying Title VII, and its practical benefits forplaintiffs alleging a prima facie case of employmentdiscrimination

Learning versus Refutation in Noninteractive Local Differential Privacy

We study two basic statistical tasks in non-interactive local differential privacy (LDP): learning and refutation. Learning requires finding a concept that best fits an unknown target function (from labelled samples drawn from a distribution), whereas refutation requires distinguishing between data distributions that are well-correlated with some concept in the class, versus distributions where the labels are random. Our main result is a complete characterization of the sample complexity of agnostic PAC learning for non-interactive LDP protocols. We show that the optimal sample complexity for any concept class is captured by the approximate $\gamma_2$~norm of a natural matrix associated with the class. Combined with previous work [Edmonds, Nikolov and Ullman, 2019] this gives an equivalence between learning and refutation in the agnostic setting

Privatization of Employment Claims: Perhaps a Hybrid Approach Will Free American Society from the Epic Trap the Supreme Court has Sprung Without Forfeiting All Advantages of Arbitration

Mandatory individual arbitration, as a condition of employment, binds many U.S. employees after the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis. In effect, fundamental employment protections—such as relief under current anti-discrimination statutes—are privatized. Now, only a legislative fix will break those bonds. Congress and state legislatures have ventured into the fray, though preemption problems plague the latter, and both seem fixated on either excessively narrow categories (harassment claims in employment) or politically distasteful, broad solutions (no individual arbitration allowed in employment or consumer contracts). This Article acknowledges the quandary that the Epic decision, and the Court’s longstanding obeisance to the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA), have visited upon employees and employers. The Article then considers practices in other industrialized democracies, which often feature specialized employment courts. This Article recommends a hybrid. If the United States can fashion specialized employment tribunals, perhaps without calling them that, and simultaneously offer employees an effective path to opt out of employment arbitration, then employers and those workers who want arbitration can enjoy the fruits of the FAA while other employees can pursue their claims in the fashion contemplated by the drafters of federal and state employment statutes

Toward an open cloud standard

Today's cloud ecosystem features several increasingly divergent management interfaces. Numerous bridging efforts attempt to ameliorate the resulting vendor lock-in for customers. However, as the number of providers continues to grow, the drawback of this approach becomes apparent: the need to maintain adapter implementations. The Open Cloud Computing Interface builds on the fundamentals of modern Web-based services to define a standardized interface for cloud environments while enabling service providers to differentiate their service offerings at the same time