15, 11, 9, 5, 3 and four
ages of little souls who are no more
the stories of their lives can still be told
even though their bodies have grown cold

Oh my, there's the little girl who loved her horse
she and the mare galloped and rumbled through the fields
learning about life and love together — for better or worse
day after day, hour after hour, horse and girl, girl and horse
two best friends shared secrets, learned truths, gave acceptance
The years passed, as little girl pink gave way to gossip about boys
the mare stood steady, ready to gallop and rumble again with her girl
but as sad memories often reveal, horse and girl never rode again
for the little girl, fate and circumstance came calling
and when death knocks on the door, it's time to go
the epitaph on her headstone said so

Of all the death, the tragedy, the sad tales of little ones gone
Of time spent imagining rich and wonderful lives one by one

Ok, so that title is a little misleading. But our country is filled with cheaters. In Chapter 1 of his book, "Freakonomics" Steve Levitt talks a little about cheating.

Here's an excerpt:

For every clever person who goes to the trouble of creating an in- centive scheme, there is an army of people, clever and otherwise, who will inevitably spend even more time trying to beat it. Cheating may or may not be human nature, but it is certainly a prominent feature in just about every human endeavor. Cheating is a primordial economic act: getting more for less. So it isn't just the boldface names-inside-trading CEOs and pill-popping ballplayers and perk-abusing politicians-who cheat. It is the waitress who pockets her tips instead of pooling them. It is the Wal-Mart payroll manager who goes into the computer and shaves his employees' hours to make his own performance look better. It is the third grader who, worried about not making it to the fourth grade, copies test answers from the kid sitting next to him.
Some cheating leaves barely a shadow of evidence. In other cases, the evidence is massive. Consider what happened one spring evening at midnight in 1987: seven million American children suddenly disappeared. The worst kidnapping wave in history? Hardly. It was the night of April 15, and the Internal Revenue Service had just changed a rule. Instead of merely listing each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a Social Security number for each child. Suddenly, seven million children-children who had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year's 1040 forms-vanished, representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United States.
The incentive for those cheating taxpayers was quite clear. The same for the waitress, the payroll manager, and the third grader. But what about that third grader's teacher? Might she have an incentive to cheat? And if so, how would she do it?

Levitt goes on to write that school teachers have powerful incentives to cheat. Do they? Yes some of them do. He uses an example of how to meet standardized goals, some teachers were caught cheating, some of even filleing in or changing tests that kids took.

Even a noble profession such as sumo wrestling has cheaters. Look at the recent steroids scandal in baseball.

Why do you think people cheat? Have you ever cheated? What were the circumstances?

Do you think your name can signal success or failure in life? What do you think your parents were thinking when they gave you your name? In Steven Levitt's book, Freakonomics, he writes a chapter on names and how they can influence a person's life. He writes about two brothers named Winner and Loser. Guess what? Loser was the success story while Winner wasn't. Interesting. Here's an excerpt from Chapter 6:

Then there is the recent case of Temptress, a fifteen-year-old girl whose misdeeds landed her in Albany County Family Court in New York. The judge, W. Dennis Duggan, had long taken note of the strange names borne by some offenders. One teenage boy, Amcher, had been named for the first thing his parents saw upon reaching the hospital: the sign for Albany Medical Center Hospital Emergency Room. But Duggan considered Temptress the most outrageous name he had come across.
"I sent her out of the courtroom so I could talk to her mother about why she named her daughter Temptress," the judge later recalled. "She said she was watching The Cosby Show and liked the young actress. I told her the actress's name was actually Tempestt Bledsoe. She said she found that out later, that they had misspelled the name. I asked her if she knew what 'temptress' meant, and she said she also found that out at some later point. Her daughter was charged with ungovernable behavior, which included bringing men into the home while the mother was at work. I asked the mother if she had ever thought the daughter was living out her name. Most all of this went completely over her head."
Was Temptress actually "living out her name," as Judge Duggan saw it? Or would she have wound up in trouble even if her mother had called her Chastity?
It isn't much of a stretch to assume that Temptress didn't have ideal parents. Not only was her mother willing to name her Temptress in the first place, but she wasn't smart enough to know what that word even meant. Nor is it so surprising, on some level, that a boy named Amcher would end up in family court. People who can't be bothered to come up with a name for their child aren't likely to be the best parents either.
So does the name you give your child affect his life? Or is it your life reflected in his name? In either case, what kind of signal does a child's name send to the world-and most important, does it really matter?

Do you feel your given name set you up for success or failure? And if you have kids, what process did you go through when you named them?

I came across the following quotes in a spam porno e-mail at work. Bonus points for anyone who can tell me who said them (without googling them):

"I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them."

"Ability hits the mark where presumption overshoots and diffidence falls short."

In chapter 4 of his book, Freakonomics, Steven Levitt hypothesizes that the sharp crime decrease in the 90s wasn't because of better policing, or better policing strategies even, but because of the legalization of abortion.

Hmmmm.

If you recall, violent crime was getting out hand in the 80s, people in some areas were afraid to come out of their houses. Forecasters were warning of some dire times. What happened?

Here's an excerpt from his book:

Perhaps the most dramatic effect of legalized abortion, and one that would take years to reveal itself, was its impact on crime.
In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe v. Wade was hitting its late teen years-the years during which young men enter their criminal prime-the rate of crime began to fall. What this cohort was missing, of course, were the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals. And the crime rate continued to fall as an entire generation came of age minus the children whose mothers had not wanted to bring a child into the world. Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime.
This theory is bound to provoke a variety of reactions, ranging from disbelief to revulsion, and a variety of objections, ranging from the quotidian to the moral. The likeliest first objection is the most straightforward one: is the theory true? Perhaps abortion and crime are merely correlated and not causal.
It may be more comforting to believe what the newspapers say, that the drop in crime was due to brilliant policing and clever gun control and a surging economy. We have evolved with a tendency to link causality to things we can touch or feel, not to some distant or difficult phenomenon. We believe especially in near-term causes: a snake bites your friend, he screams with pain, and he dies. The snakebite, you conclude, must have killed him. Most of the time, such a reckoning is correct. But when it comes to cause and effect, there is often a trap in such open-and-shut thinking. We smirk now when we think of ancient cultures that embraced faulty causes-the warriors who believed, for instance, that it was their raping of a virgin that brought them victory on the battlefield. But we too embrace faulty causes, usually at the urging of an expert proclaiming a truth in which he has a vested interest.
How, then, can we tell if the abortion-crime link is a case of causality rather than simply correlation?
One way to test the effect of abortion on crime would be to measure crime data in the five states where abortion was made legal before the Supreme Court extended abortion rights to the rest of the country.
In New York, California, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii, a woman had been able to obtain a legal abortion for at least two years before Roe v. Wade. And indeed, those early-legalizing states saw crime begin to fall earlier than the other forty-five states and the District of Columbia. Between 1988 and 1994, violent crime in the earlylegalizing states fell 13 percent compared to the other states; between 1994 and 1997, their murder rates fell 23 percent more than those of the other states.
But what if those early legalizers simply got lucky? What else might we look for in the data to establish an abortion-crime link? One factor to look for would be a correlation between each state's abortion rate and its crime rate. Sure enough, the states with the highest abortion rates in the 1970s experienced the greatest crime drops in the 1990s, while states with low abortion rates experienced smaller crime drops. (This correlation exists even when controlling for a variety of factors that influence crime: a state's level of incarceration, number of police, and its economic situation.) Since 1985, states with high abortion rates have experienced a roughly 30 percent drop in crime relative to low-abortion states. (New York City had high abortion rates and lay within an early-legalizing state, a pair of facts that further dampen the claim that innovative policing caused the crime drop.) Moreover, there was no link between a given state's abortion rate and its crime rate before the late 1980s-when the first cohort affected by legalized abortion was reaching its criminal prime-which is yet another indication that Roe v. Wade was indeed the event that tipped the crime scale.
There are even more correlations, positive and negative, that shore up the abortion-crime link.

Do you buy his theory?