Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister of Britain, was a scholarship student at a fancy private school" - no, she wasn't.

"Number counts...but if there are enough [students from a different background] to form their own group they are likely to remain different and contrast effects may cause the differences to increase" - the relative 'power' of the minority culture is also important.

"What has made the descendents of the Jamaicans so successful is that they have a different stereotype of themselves"...not, to my knowledge, true of Jamaicans in the UK cf Jews.

"It isn't until high school that such groups acquire labels and develop stable membership..." - Occam's razor?

"...the Lese, whose farming lifestyle allows for a greater population density, have a society that is highly differentiated by sex." - so it's not true that men hunt, and women gather: instead, men farm, and women have children.

"What does reduce the salience of the gender categories is total lack of interaction: the absence of the opposite sex." - a paradoxical argument for single sex education, it promotes gender equality and gender fluidity.

"Girls relationships tend to be close and exclusive, though not necessarily lasting." - my wife has a few close friendships from school and college, I have none. It is as much to do with how far and how often we have moved as our gender.

"The most important years for group socialization are the years of middle childhood, from six to twelve." - exactly the least important years from for language development, which has been described as a social art. In my own childhood, these as the golden years, free of infantile illness and adolescent strife. The voice in my head is still eleven years old.

"In some African-American communities it has been so long since anyone nursed a baby that way that members of the younger generation are sometimes unaware that it is possible to feed a baby that way." - today, 64% of African American mothers breastfeed. Anecdotalism becoming racism?

"People rear their children the way their friends and neighbours are doing it, not the way parents did it." - when I became a parent, I found myself unconsciously following my parents' example. Same thing when I became a teacher; I abandoned what I had learnt, and did what I knew.

"So now, as they scratch pictures in the mud, the Yup'ik tell stories in English, and some of the stories they tell are based on characters and plots they saw on television." - these days the media may be a bigger influence than peer group.

"The last aspects of the old culture to disappear are the things that are done only at home. Styles of cooking, for example, may survive for generations. Children do not ordinarily learn to cook in the presence of their peers."

"At home they remain the oldest of the youngest sibling. In school they are likely to remain for years, if they are lucky, at the top of the totem pole or, if they are unlucky, at the bottom". - in their classes maybe, in the school not, a senior outranks a freshman.

"I beleive high or low status in the peer group has permanent effects on the personality. Children who are unpopular with their peers tend to have low self esteem, and I think the feelings of insecurity never go away entirely - they last a a lifetime. You have been judged by a jury of your peers and have been found wanting. You never get over that. At least. I didn't." - this book is too autobiographical.

"Children do first is to figure out what sort of people they are - which social category they belong in. Then they learn to behave like the other members of their social category" - there's one for the Dr. Arnold!

"Use or lose it" is a saying most appropriately applied to the developing brain, not the aging brain.

'Nothing is beyond understanding. A hundred more exhibits, and I promise you: you'll be dreaming in five dimensions.' - a little bit of thinking in five dimensions would suit me

'...the astrophysics of survival...' - the theme of the novel

"Of the three main ways we categorize people, babies know two of them -gender and age - before they are a year old. The third is race, and that takes them a good deal longer" - seems counterintuitive, evidence?

"He has Piggy still talking in a lower-class accent ... after many months on the island. In that amount of time, a real-life boy would have learned to talk like his companions." - I think it depends where Piggy is in terms of his linguistic development. As one of my mother's 'lower class' friends once said of me, "why does he talk like he goes to Eton, when he goes to the same school as my kids.

"Reading for information does not stretch your mind any more than reading for amusement" - both can stretch your mind, edutainment is my favourite youtube genre.

"The success of Kozuch's model could be due to the fact that it was just an extremely good metaphor, most of the time, for some deeper physical process which was actually as different from extradimensional wormholes as a spring was different from an asteroid" - I assume that here we're discussing non-fictional physics too.

"...it is a topical index to the set of books titled GREAT BOOKS OF THE WESTERN WORLD" - and the marketing exercise is suddenly revealed.

"The special quality that a syntopical analysis tries to acheive can, indeed, be summarized in the two words "dialectical objectivity". - ooOooh!

"Syntopical reading, in short, is to a large extent an excercise in translation" - the treatment of translation here is one of the weakest aspects of the book.

"In syntopical reading, it is you and your concerns that are primarily to be served, not the books that you read" - that was a bit raw; no "but of course you couldn't this without being able to read a book analytically...

"We've all chosen to stay on Earth, we've chosen to remain organic...but we're still drifting apart - probably faster than any of you in the polises." - evolution is a much consequence of a changing enviroment as it is of genetic change.

"We have seen how history is a mixture of fiction and science...we have had a great deal of experience with [this kind of mixture]. The situation in social science is quite different. Much social science is a mixture of science, philosophy, and history, often with some fiction thrown in for good measure."

"- a division between a group of less hairy hominids, who got progressively balder as body hair became increasingly unpopular" - most human paleontologists would agree now this is just plain wrong. Yet the research into human hairlessness was ongoing when 'The Nurture Assumption' was being written.

"A village's mortal enemy is the group from which it has usually split" - a bad omen for Brexit