Cohen, with Joseph Vandello, Sylvia Puente, and Adrian Rantilla, worked on another study about the American North-South cultural divide: " 'When You Call Me That, Smile!' How Norms for Politeness, Interaction Styles, and Aggression Work Together in Southern Culture," Social Psychology Quarterly 62, no. 3 (1999): 257275.

SEVEN: THE ETHNIC THEORY OF PLANE CRASHES

The National Transportation Safety Board, the federal agency that investigates civil aviation accidents, published an Aircraft Accident Report on the Korean Air 801 crash: NTSB/AAR-00/01.

The footnote about Three Mile Island draws heavily on the analysis of Charles Perrow's classic Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

The seven-errors-per-accident statistic was calculated by the National Transportation Safety Board in a safety study titled "A Review of Flightcrew-Involved Major Accidents of U.S. Air Carriers, 1978 Through 1990" (Safety Study NTSB/SS-94/01, 1994).

The agonizing dialogue and analysis of the Avianca 052 crash can be found in the National Transportation Safety Board Accident Report AAR-91/04.

Ute Fischer and Judith Orasanu's study of mitigation in the cockpit, "Cultural Diversity and Crew Communication," was presented at the fiftieth Astronautical Congress in Amsterdam, October 1999. It was published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Dialogue between the fated Air Florida captain and first officer is quoted in a second study by Fischer and Orasanu, "Error-Challenging Strategies: Their Role in Preventing and Correcting Errors," produced as part of the International Ergonomics Association fourteenth Triennial Congress and Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Forty-second Annual Meeting in San Diego, California, August 2000.

The unconscious impact of nationality on behavior was formally calculated by Geert Hofstede and outlined in Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2001). The study of French and German manufacturing plants that he quotes on page 102 was done by M. Brossard and M. Maurice, "Existe-t-il un modele universel des structures d'organisation?," Sociologie du Travail 16, no. 4 (1974): 482495.

The application of Hofstede's Dimensions to airline pilots was carried out by Robert L. Helmreich and Ashleigh Merritt in "Culture in the Cockpit: Do Hofstede's Dimensions Replicate?," Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 31, no. 3 (May 2000): 283301.

Robert L. Helmreich's cultural analysis of the Avianca crash is called "Anatomy of a System Accident: The Crash of Avianca Flight 052," International Journal of Aviation Psychology 4, no. 3 (1994): 265284.

The linguistic indirectness of Korean speech as compared with American was observed by Ho-min Sohn at the University of Hawaii in his paper "Intercultural Communication in Cognitive Values: Americans and Koreans," published in Language and Linguistics 9 (1993): 93136.

EIGHT: RICE PADDIES AND MATH TESTS

To read more on the history and intricacies of rice cultivation, see Francesca Bray's The Rice Economies: Technology and Development in Asian Societies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

The logic of Asian numerals compared with their Western counterparts is discussed in Stanislas Dehaene in The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Graham Robb, The Discovery of France (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).

The surprisingly secure and leisurely life of the !Kung is detailed in chapter 4 of Man the Hunter, ed. Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, with help from Jill Nash-Mitchell (New York: Aldine, 1968).

The working year of European peasantry was calculated by Antoine Lavoisier and quoted by B. H. Slicher van Bath in The Agrarian History of Western Europe, A.D. 5001850, trans. Olive Ordish (New York: St. Martin's, 1963).

Activities Days Percentage

Ploughing and sowing 12 5.8

Cereal harvest 28 13.6

Haymaking and carting 24 11.7

Threshing 130 63.1

Other work 12 5.8

Total 206 100.0

The fatalism of Russian peasant proverbs is contrasted with the self-reliance of Chinese ones by R. David Arkush in "If Man Works Hard the Land Will Not Be Lazy-Entrepreneurial Values in North Chinese Peasant Proverbs," Modern China 10, no. 4 (October 1984): 461479.

The correlation between students' national average scores in TIMSS and their persistence in answering the student survey attached to the test has been evaluated in "Predictors of National Differences in Mathematics and Science Achievement of Eighth Grade Students: Data from TIMSS for the Six-Nation Educational Research Program," by Erling E. Boe, Henry May, Gema Barkanic, and Robert F. Boruch at the Center for Research and Evaluation in Social Policy, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. It was revised February 28, 2002. The graph showing the results can be seen on page 9.

Results of the TIMSS tests throughout the years can be found on the National Center for Education Statistics Web site, http://nces.ed.gov/timss/.

Priscilla Blinco's study is entitled "Task Persistence in Japanese Elementary Schools" and can be found in Edward Beauchamp, ed., Windows on Japanese Education (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991).

NINE: MARITA'S BARGAIN

An article in the New York Times Magazine by Paul Tough, "What It Takes to Make a Student" (November 26, 2006), examines the impact of the government's No Child Left Behind policy, the reasons for the education gap, and the impact of charter schools such as KIPP.

Kenneth M. Gold, School's In: The History of Summer Education in American Public Schools (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), is an unexpectedly fascinating account of the roots of the American school year.

Karl L. Alexander, Doris R. Entwisle, and Linda S. Olson's study on the impact of summer vacation is called "Schools, Achievement, and Inequality: A Seasonal Perspective," published in Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis 23, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 171191.

Much of the cross-national data comes from Michael J. Barrett's "The Case for More School Days," published in the Atlantic Monthly in November 1990, p. 78.

EPILOGUE: A JAMAICAN STORY

William M. MacMillan details how his fears came to pass in the preface to the second edition of Warning from the West Indies: A Tract for Africa and the Empire (U.K.: Penguin Books, 1938).

The sexual exploits and horrific punishments of Jamaica's white ruling class are detailed by Trevor Burnard in Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

The intermediary color class in the West Indies, not seen in the American South, is described by Donald L. Horowitz in "Color Differentiation in the American Systems of Slavery," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3, no.3 (Winter 1973): 509541.

Population and employment statistics among the different-colored classes in 1950s Jamaica are taken from Leonard Broom's essay "The Social Differentiation of Jamaica," American Sociological Review 19, no. 2 (April 1954): 115125.

Divisions of color within families are explored by Fernando Henriques in "Colour Values in Jamaican Society," British Journal of Sociology 2, no. 2 (June 1951): 115121.