Alice Miller and Children of Trauma
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I’m currently reading several books by Alice Miller, an author and researcher whose focus is on child abuse and mistreatment.
When I was growing up, I’ve always felt that my parents were not like other people’s parents. I wish I had known about and had access to books like those written by Miller, who relate the stories of people like myself. I guess they must have always been available at the library, but I had never thought to look for such books until recent years.
It’s a tremendous relief to have someone explain what I have gone through… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
Albert Kwok-Wai Yeung 「楊國偉」 and Agnes Yuk-Lan Yu 「余玉蘭」 are child abusers
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This post will not mean very much to anyone other than myself.
Albert Kwok-Wai Yeung 「楊國偉」 and Agnes Yuk-Lan Yu 「余玉蘭」 are child abusers. I just wanted to post this fact on the Internet so that it can be recorded for posterity… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
Persia is Iran, Iran is Persia, Iran is not Iraq, and Persia is not Bosnia
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Published by
davinci on
September 13, 2009 in
personal and social issues.
Tags: Bosnia, Chinese, Ehsan Yarshater, English, Fars, Farsi, Iran, Iraq, misidentification, Parsa, Persia, Persian, ايران, عراق, 伊拉克, 伊朗, 波斯, 波斯尼亚.
This post was inspired by the post from two days ago on the flags of the world.
I’ve always considered Reza Shah Pahlavi’s 1935 decree requesting that the country formerly known as Persia be referred to as “Iran” by foreign governments with which it had diplomatic relations to be a mistake. Naturally, once governments began to refer to the country as Iran, their citizens followed suit. This change at once led to a severing in the Western consciousness of Iran from the Persian culture of classical antiquity, and also created a situation in which the name of the country can easily become confounded with that of its neighbour and recurrent rival, Iraq, a name which entered the mainstream vocabulary of Western languages only in 1932 with the founding of the Kingdom of Iraq in that year.
Actually, in Arabic and Persian, the names Iraq and Iran sound quite different, and they are not very similar to each other when written in the Perso-Arabic script… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
Little known facts about Hong Kong’s sovereignty
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Published by
davinci on
September 12, 2009 in
personal and social issues.
Tags: Britain, China, Communist China, Convention of Peking, Hong Kong, independence, Kowloon, New Territories, People's Republic of China, Qing, referendum, Republic of China, sovereignty, Taiwan, Treaty of Nanking, United Kingdom.
This post was inspired by the paragraph about the former flag of Hong Kong in yesterday’s post on the flags of the world.
Hong Kong island was actually ceded in perpetuity by the government of Qing China to the British crown in 1842 in the Treaty of Nanking… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
Names and careers, or nominative determinism
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Two random events inspired me to write this post. The first is that Toby Cubitt gave a talk at IQC recently. (I didn’t attend the talk, but I did receive the announcement.) The second is that I chanced upon the book Quirkology by psychologist Richard Wiseman. (Another influence for this post is the fact that job hunting is clearly still on my mind.)
In high school, a friend and I had noticed that several of the people we had to learn about in class had names which were oddly apropos of the accomplishments for which they were famous, and so we started to compile a list. At the head of the list was Robert Boyle, who studied the inverse relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of an ideal gas at a fixed temperature. Another name on the list was Alexander Graham Bell. (“You rang?”)… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
Job hunting and positive character traits
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Published by
davinci on
August 5, 2009 in
social issues and something new every day.
Tags: Bat-Climb, cover letters, creativity, determination, ingenuity, initiative, job hunting, job search, love of challenge, positive character traits, resumes.
Since I have dropped out of university, I am looking for work, or, to use a common expression, “hunting for a job”.
I find the expression humorous — for me, it conjures up the image of a certain bulbous cartoon huntsman on the trail of a wise-cracking, carrot-munching leporid. But I hope that the outcome is more favourable for me than is usually the case for our animated friend… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
Misconceptions about education and schooling held by traditional Chinese parents
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A large part of the reason I have put my autobiography online is to help students with authoritarian parents cope with their parents’ interference in their education. Previously, a person whose parents disagreed with his or her educational or career choices had the option of trying to hide them from their parents. With the Internet, this has become essentially impossible.
Because most people aren’t going to read my rather long autobiography, I have distilled what I want to say on the misconceptions held by traditional Chinese parents about education and schooling into a few important points which I will discuss below. This way, any student caught in the situation that I was in can print this out and use it to tell their parents that they are on the path to destroying his or her academic career… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
An essay on open notebook science
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I have written an essay advocating the adoption of open notebook science by the computer science community. The essay is self-referential in that it discusses the process of collaboratively writing papers online, and is itself written using MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia. I invite suggestions and comments on the discussion page for the essay.
I have tried to keep the essay as impersonal as possible. The benefits given in the essay of keeping an open notebook apply to any scientist, but I especially have some very personal reasons, if not for advocating the practice, then at least for engaging in it myself… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
Miscellaneous articles about raising gifted children, from Scientific American
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I was searching/browsing through the online archives of Scientific American while writing the previous posts, and came across some articles about raising gifted children that I thought I’d comment on, especially with respect to their relevance to my personal situation.
The article “Gifted Children: How to Bring Out Their Potential” by Christian Fischer begins:
Contrary to what many people believe, highly intelligent children are not necessarily destined for academic success. In fact, so-called gifted students may fail to do well because they are unusually smart. Ensuring that a gifted child reaches his or her potential requires an understanding of what can go wrong and how to satisfy the unusual learning requirements of extremely bright young people.
I remember that the teachers and counsellors at my gifted school warned us and our parents about this… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
Thirteen Abusive Behaviours
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I recently came across this list of “Thirteen Abusive Behaviours”. While the list was about abuse between domestic partners, most of the thirteen abusive behaviours apply to abusive parent-child relationships as well.
I will list them and comment on each one in turn… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]