Democracy, India, And South Africa - 875 Words

As the Economist article highlights, â€Å"democracies are going through a difficult time† and currently its forward momentum seems to be at a standstill in the modern-day world (The Economist, n.d.), but the mere fact that democracy has the ability to have â€Å"taken root in the most difficult circumstances possible† (the article noting Germany, India, and South Africa of major importance) should be a testament that the democratic ideal is effective and perhaps more importantly, supported, amongst many citizens universally (The Economist, n.d.). One of the first actions towards reinstating and balancing the effectiveness of current democracy is popular participation. Getting citizens to become fully engaged and passionate about participating in politics is integral to a democracy’s success, one that entails not having to compromise in order to achieve an effective yet limited government. As the textbook highlights, without the participation of the public from t he entirety of society, governments are less likely to respond to the people’s needs and put the people’s interests at the forefront (Mintz, et al., 2013). A more effective government and a stronger display of democracy will be allowed only when the majority of citizens participate in the voting process freely. In the 2011 Canadian election, the Conservative government found itself obtaining a majority of seats in the House of Commons with only 25 percent of the potential electorate; to begin with, only 61 percent of theShow MoreRelatedSummary of Two Articles: Democracy Canadian-style Part I and Coal India Ltd Floats Expression of Interest for Overseas Coal Assets749 Words   |  3 PagesDemocracy Summary In the article Democracy Canadian-style Part I: Abroad (Walberg, 2013) the Canadian democracy takes orders from its US-Euro masters to invade countries in order to set up mechanisms for elections when necessary. It uses its foreign diplomatic services to support the needs of Canadian corporations abroad and facilitate the efforts to produce profits. The author is questioning their motives in respects as to supporting the profit needs of corporations or if they are consideringRead MoreWhat Made Non Violence Work1154 Words   |  5 Pagesabout change. This DBQ will look at two countries where a non-violent movement was successful. Historic Context India and South Africa were two important nations on two different continents. But although they looked strong on the outside, each one suffered from a disease that threatened the health of the whole. For India, the disease was colonization. For South Africa, it was racial segregation. Three Conditions In each of these nations three conditions help explain why non-violenceRead MoreMahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela1504 Words   |  7 Pageswas the preeminent leader of Indian nationalism in British-ruled India. Employing non-violent civil disobedience, Gandhi led India to independence and inspired movements for non-violence, civil rights and freedom across the world. A very important turning point in Gandhi’s life is he arrived in South Africa to work as a legal representative for the Muslim Indian traders based in the city of Pretoria when he was 24. In South Africa he faced the discrimination directed at colored people, prejudiceRead MoreThe Long Term Potential Growth Rate Of South Africa Essay1006 Words   |  5 PagesThe long-term potential growth rate of South Africa under the current policy environment has been estimated at 3.5%.Per capita GDP growth has proved mediocre, though improving, growing by 1.6% a year from 1994 to 2009, and by 2.2% o ver the 2000–09 decade, compared to world growth of 3.1% over the same period. The high levels of unemployment, at over 25%, and inequality are considered by the government and most South Africans to be the most salient economic problems facing the country. These issuesRead MoreCodified Constitutions Are Not An Essential Element Of Democracy1614 Words   |  7 Pagesconsidered that codified constitutions are an essential element of democracy in that by clearly setting out the functions of each branch of government and their relations with each other and their citizens, this prevents an over powerful executive developing and ensures rights of citizens are protected. However, I believe that codified constitutions are not an essential element of democracy as there are examples of robust democracies which have uncodified constitutions and at times codified constitutionsRead MoreCommonwealth Realm1566 Words   |  7 Pageswhich was originally slated to host the summit in 2011, was accused of committing atrocities during the Sri Lankan civil war and the summit was instead held in Perth, Australia; Colombo was given the 2013 summit instead.[3][4] The leaders of Canada, India, and Mauritius boycotted the summit, citing alleged human rights violations by Sri Lanka against its Tamil minority. Protests were also banned during the summit.[5] President Mahinda Rajapaksa summarised the summits events as: Issues covered in theRead MoreThe Second Wave Of Democracy1682 Words   |  7 PagesThe third wave of democracy started in Portugal in 1974 and spread to Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. This included spreading democracy to many nations that were previously thought to be inhospitable to democracy. This led many scholars to re-evaluate the leading theories on democratization in an attempt to correlate and understand this newest wave of democracy. Many of the countries that didn’t fit in this established wealthy, mostly â€Å"Western† mold, could be classified and explained byRead MoreEssay on Imperialism1578 Words   |  7 Pa gesprevailed to this day. Imperialism caused a breakdown of the previous cultures and lifestyles that the natives had followed. The European imperialism caused many of the now prevalent ethnic rivalries that can be found in northern India, parts of Asia, and parts of Africa. quot;Africa and much of the developing world have been struggling for nearly half a century to come to terms with grinding ethnic and tribal rivalries that remain, in a way, one of the most enduring legacies of their colonial past.quot;Read MoreExpansion Of United Nations Security Council1344 Words   |  6 Pagesthe call for a more effective Council. Thus far, three fundamental plans have been proposed, the G4 (Brazil, India, Germany and Japan) plan, UFC (United for Consensus) plan and the Ezulwini Consensus. The G4 plans visualize a council with 25 members in total. This number would be inclusive of 6 new permanent members in the form of India, Germany, Japan, Brazil and two countries from Africa. It would also include 3 elected seats. The second plan which is UFC also advocates for 25 council membersRead MoreThe Great Divide : How And Why The Apartheid Differ From Colonial Rule1438 Words   |  6 PagesAfrican mining, agricultural and rubber economies. But nothing that Africa had previously suffered was quite like the apartheid, which South Africa was exposed to from 1948-1994. The apartheid was a systematic of racial segregation in South Africa enforced by the all-white National Party with the goal to â€Å"separate South Africa’s white minority from its non-white majority, non-whites from each other, and to divi de black South Africans to decrease their political power†. In essence, under apartheid

Historical Figure - Julius Caesar - Free Essay Example

Sample details Pages: 3 Words: 952 Downloads: 7 Date added: 2019/03/26 Category History Essay Level High school Topics: Julius Caesar Essay Did you like this example? Julius Caesar is a historical figure known for his political ambition, as well as the spotlight thrust upon him thanks to Williams Shakespeares play, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar was born on July 13, 100 B.C. There is not much documentation on the childhood of Julius Caesar. He was born into privilege in a family that claims lineage from the son of Venus, the goddess. His father was a praetor and his mother was from an affluent family as well. However, even with their political connections, they were not politically influential (wikipedia.org). Caesars father died unexpectedly and he found himself as the man of the house. At this time, his uncle was involved in a war between his uncle and Sulla. It was during this time that Caesar was nominated to be a high priest and he was married to Cornelia. When his uncle was defeated, however, Caesar lost all of his titles, as well as his inheritance. He was supposed to divorce his wife but he refused and went into hiding. His mothers family had connections to Sulla and they lifted all threats against him and he was able to move back into the public light. However, he did not feel safe to be so close to Sulla, his uncles enemy, so he moved away from Rome and started his military career. He went back to Rome only after the death of Sulla, when he truly felt safe. Don’t waste time! Our writers will create an original "Historical Figure Julius Caesar" essay for you Create order Caesar finally gets a taste of politics when he is elected to the military tribune. During this time, his Aunt Julia passed away, as well as his wife, Cornelia. This would set the stage for Caesars ultimate goal. After her funeral, Caesar went to serve in Spain and it is here that he encounters a statue of Alexander the Great. Caesar pondered his life and realized that he really has not accomplished much in his life. When he returned to Rome, he married Pompeia. He soon divorced her after her involvement in a religious scandal. He decided to run for the title of Pontifex Maximus. Using his political savvy, it was an easy win for him. Later on, he ran for the position on consul and he won. Caesar was indebted to a man named Crassus, who did not get along with Pompey. Caesar wanted the men to get along because combined, the men had enough money and influence to control public business. This is how the first triumvirate was formed it was an informal group. Eventually this triumvirate fell apart as Caesar and Pompey were engaged in a civil war against each other. Caesars authority and political influence are sealed here. He is appointed dictator and he conquers many tribes and nations. Caesar experienced a time of greatness. Everything seemed good. Everyone was celebrating the many victories Caesar had accumulated. During his dictatorship, Caesar had many contributions. He set out to make Rome a true Republic. One on his greatest and most influential changes had to do with changing the calendar. The calendar was once based on the movement of the moon. Caesar opted to follow the Egyptian example and based the calendar on the movement of the sun, including adding room for a leap year. Caesar had amassed some enemies during his climb to the top. Instead of punishing them, however, he forgave them. He actually formally pardoned them. This allowed them to still hold political offices and to remain close to Caesar. This action made his ultimate demise that much more of a true backstabbing: these men were supposed to be his friends. Some of these very men were part of the conspiracy to assassinate him. Caesar was set to appear before the Senate that day, on the Ides of March, which according to Shakespeare, he probably would have been better off staying at home. There were around sixty men involved in the assassination. Some were involved with the actual stabbing, others were responsible for making sure Caesar made it to his meeting with the Senate, while others were responsible for keeping other people away from Caesar so they would not interfere. Caesar was approached by Tillius Cimber with a paper asking for the reinstatement of his exiled brother. It was during this time that Caesar was attacked. He was stabbed twenty three times. Even though he was stabbed so many times, only one wound actually killed him: the dagger struck in the chest. Caesar was left to lay on the steps for three hours until somebody finally came to collect his body. The assassination of Julius Caesar was supposed to be a major political move by the members of the Senate. However, they were blinded by their political agenda. Caesar may not have been very popular among the Senate or among Romes richest because of the reforms that he passed that were not beneficial to them. They failed to recognize how popular Caesar was with the lower and middle class of Rome. Caesars reforms were beneficial to them and they were now angry because Caesar, who fought for them, was taken away by the Senate and as they saw it, the upper class. This ignited several civil wars and signaled the end of the Roman Republic. Julius Caesars life reads like a Hollywood tabloid. It is full of fame, fortune, drama, scandal, and then backstabbing. He started his life with no real political savvy, even though his family was upper class. He then found himself on the wrong side of the law and had no money and was in debt. A chance meeting with a statue of Alexander the Great put him on the path to greatness, where, surrounded by friends, he meets his gruesome end.

The Effect Of Mozart s Piano Sonata K448 On Patients Who...

The Mozart Effect is a phenomenon that occurs when individuals listen to the two piano sonata. The stated results are individuals that are able to remember information easier. There are two studies that were conducted in associated with the Mozart Effect. The first study was dedicated to spatial skill performance and its neural pathway relation to music. The other study was dedicated to challenging the first study due to the argument that any type of music that is appreciated can cause the same memory effect. The second study was based on an experiment with unborn mice that heard Mozart’s piano sonata K448. The other part of the study was related to the effects of Mozart’s piano sonata K448 on patients who were suffering from epilepsy. The overall conclusion is that Mozart’s piano sonata K448 has positive effects on both animals and humans. Keywords: Mozart Effect, spatial skill performance, memory, music, neurons, neural pathways, brain, rats, and epilepsy The Mozart Effect Research and conducting experiments is the most effective way possible to gain an answer. The type of research is based on the situation, the hypothesis, and the resources the individual or group has on hand. The purpose of this research paper is to examine the Mozart Effect from two different journals and answer questions based on the research materials. The first article for examination is Music and spatial task performance. Music and Spatial Task Performance The Mozart Effect is

The Education System Has Underlying Issues That Affect All...

The education system has underlying issues that affect all departments in schools. Special Education has been challenged with creating new ways to educate students with quite individualized skill sets and abilities. Students with Down syndrome (DS) and autism are two types of students that need intense one on one learning with their educator as well as group involvement at an early age. The teachers and parents of these special education students should be well informed of the daily struggles each student faces, and how they can help these students improve from preschool through college. In the movement towards reaching student’s fullest potential, special education teachers and parents are encouraged to find the key to successful†¦show more content†¦Students with autism have difficulties expressing these feelings because of the limited exposure to forms of communication at a young age. Also, the unwillingness to change is a sad reality that students with autism hand le throughout the years of growing up. No matter how much they would want to accept their disorder, there is always hope for an easier life. The struggles of autism vary between the severity of each case, but the movement towards each student’s fullest potential has to start at a young age. Like autism and Asperger’s, Down syndrome is also a developmental disorder that delays certain advances in growth, and is present within the body from conception. One in every seven hundred babies are born with Down syndrome (What is Down Syndrome?). There are three types of DS: Trisomy 21 (nondisjunction), Translocation, and Mosaicism. Trisomy 21 is developed when there are three twenty-first chromosomes instead of the regular two. This is the most common type of DS which consists of ninety-five percent of all diagnosed children. Translocation is the second most diagnosed with four percent of all cases. This disability is created when there are thirty-six chromosomes, but a complete or partial twenty-first chromosome, most commonly attaching to the fourteenth chromosome, and forms the Down syndrome trait. Mosaicism is a less noticeable type of Down syndrome which is developed when there is a combination of cells, some containingShow MoreRelatedNurse Leaders : The Backbone Of Healthcare Industries1299 Words   |  6 Pagesbackbone of healthcare industries. Their knowledge, skills, and commitment to their patients make them a true aspect of nursing. For many years, the role of nurses became more complex due to the changes of the healthcare needs of the population. It has evolved from providing care at bedside to becoming a part of an interdisciplinary team. Nurses are guided by nurse leaders who provide motivation and inspiration for the nurses to become successful in their practice. Nurse leaders are passionate aboutRead MorePotential Difficulties With Diverse Clients: Case Study1642 Words   |  7 Pagesrecommendations (e.g., Hays ADDRESSING framework), theoretical considerations, and possible techniques that research has found to be effective. Be specific. Pamela Hays addressing framework is particular helpful and effective. The framework allows for a systemic yet simplistic method in which to learn more about a particular culture. The framework begins with addressing any cultural related issues from their inception. Questions such as, Which of this ADDRESSING factors might be easier for me to talk aboutRead MoreEssay about Educational Achievement and Development1338 Words   |  6 Pagesacademic journey. Education as a form of secondary socialisation teaches students, the basic norms and values of society and assists in developing their individual identity. In many cases there are contributing issues that not only hinder, but can dramatically affect a child’s educational achievement and development; but also impacts negatively on their childhood experience. These contributing factors consist of a person’s class, their gender and/or their race and ethnicity; which no child has the abilityRead MoreA New Course By Magdale na Kay Essay1342 Words   |  6 Pagesglobe utilizes. Through a wide array of variations, countries across the world have developed their own meaning of what higher education is. However, the underlying tone of it all is the same, furthering one’s knowledge. With a vast number of schools from a broad range of locations trying to pull the population in, colleges compete with different tactics ranging from education relevance to evaluation. Consequently, problems have arisen from these approaches, addressed along the lines in an article calledRead MoreAcademic Literacies : Learning And Communicating Practices1628 Words   |  7 Pagespractices (OUA SP2) Assignment Title: First Essay: Participation on Higher Education Tutor’s Name: Kythera Watson-Bonnice Date of Submission: 26/07/2015 I declare that (the first four boxes must be completed for the assignment to be accepted): ââ€" ¡ This assignment does not contain any material that has previously been submitted for assessment at this or any other university. ââ€" ¡ This is an original piece of work and no part has been completed by any other student than signed below. ââ€" ¡ I have read andRead MorePublic Education System For Education1688 Words   |  7 PagesIt is every child’s right to have access to a public education system that will provide quality education for success in life. Yet far today far too many children, especially those from poor and minority families, are limited to at risk by school systems with a lower quality of education while students in a low poverty community receive a higher quality of education. It is frustrating that even when socio-economic statuses are rapidly merging and changing that an educational achievement gap stillRead MoreHr Functions of St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital1558 Words   |  7 Pagescures for children with cancer and other catastrophic diseases through research and treatment. St. Jude was the first institution to develop a cure for sickle cell disease with a bone marrow transplant and has one of the largest pediatric sickle cell programs in the country. St. Jude has developed protocols that have helped push overall survival rates for childhood cancers from less than 20 percent when the hospital opened in 1962 to 80 percent today. St. Jude researchers and doctors are treatingRead MoreA Society Of Victims : Understanding And Preventing The Effects Of Domestic Violence Essay1348 Words   |  6 PagesVictims: Understanding and Preventing the Effects of Domestic Violence Domestic Violence has been an ongoing issue since the beginning of time and for centuries, considered a private family matter. While it may have been noticed, it was rarely addressed and intervention was rarely offered to, or accepted by the victim. With the uprising of feminist movements, domestic violence is now recognized as a serious social issue, with the implications of abuse reaching far past the four walls of the private homeRead MoreThe Constitutional Rights Of The United States909 Words   |  4 Pagesconstitutional rights. Prison is not a fun place to be even for the most harden criminals, and a correctional system is not an arena for solving the underlying causes of crime. Some states are facing severe budget cuts due to economic struggles and drops in tax revenues; therefore, not all prison facilities in the United States could offer rehabilitation, education, mental health services, and sanitary cells for convicted offenders. Clear et al. (2013) states, â€Å"Women correctional facilities are

A Short Essay About Cancer Free Essays

Short Essay on Cancer Cancer is defined as the unwanted growth of cells in any part of the body. There are various reasons that lead to development of cancerous growths in the body. There can be various reasons that lead to cancerous growths in the body. We will write a custom essay sample on A Short Essay About Cancer or any similar topic only for you Order Now Genetic predisposition and environmental factors together play an important role. Genetic constitution of the body is something that cannot be dealt with. But controlling the external environmental factors is in one’s hands. Active or passive smoking is one of the biggest causes that results in development of various cancers in the body. In a health study it has been evidently shown that about 30% of the deaths due to lung cancers were those of who either smoke actively or are exposed to passive smoking. This data is proof enough to describe the serious complications of smoking. Besides, it is not just the lung tissue that is affected by smoking. Carcinoma of oral cavity, pharynx, larynx, kidney, pancreas and other systemic organs of he body are evident. More than 6000 substances are released during smoking. Out of which 70 chemicals are known to act as carcinogens. These chemicals settle down in the lining of air ways and adversely affect the basic unit of respiration- the alveoli. Tobacco which is the main ingredient of smoking also leads to carcinoma of the oral cavity. The internal mucosa is severely damaged and continuous exposure leads to irreparable damage. A smoker is four times at a higher risk of developing mouth cancer as compared to non- smoker. The commonly affected areas are beneath the tongue and lips in the oral cavity. The vital organs of the body like liver, kidney, pancreas, colon and rectum also develop the risk of development of carcinomatous growth. Women who smoke also suffer a chance of developing breast cancer besides the above stated types. Higher incidences of cervical cancer have been noticed in women who smoke. According to researchers, 1 out 5 heavy smokers will die of lung cancer. The ratio for moderate smokers declines to 1 in 10 persons. Another alarming case is that among all the lung cancer patients only 0. 5% persons are non-smokers. The rest of the cases had a history of smoking. Lung cancer is one of the commonest types of cancer that lead to death in maximum number of patients throughout the world. In the advanced stage of disease other distant organs of the body are also affected and result in severe complications. Eventually the whole physiological system of the body collapses. Besides cancer smoking leads to various other grave medical diseases. Affecting the functioning of heart, viz. Coronary thrombosis; affecting the eye sight and predisposition to cataracts and macular degeneration and eventually vision loss; and brain in cases like cerebral thrombosis; smoking poses a threat to the whole physiological system of the body. Quitting smoking dramatically improvises the medical health of the individual. Though, the risk of developing cancer is higher than those persons who have never smoked. But by following an active life and eating healthy food and above all abstaining from smoking, one can substantially lower down his/ her chances of developing cancer. How to cite A Short Essay About Cancer, Essay examples

Freak Economics Essay Example For Students

Freak Economics Essay FREAKONOMICS A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner CONTENTS AN EXPLANATORY NOTE In which the origins of this book are clarified. INTRODUCTION: The Hidden Side of Everything In which the book’s central idea is set forth: namely, if morality represents how people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work. Why the conventional wisdom is so often wrong†¦How â€Å"experts†Ã¢â‚¬â€from criminologists to real-estate agents to political scientists—bend the facts†¦Why knowing what to measure, and how to measure it, is the key to understanding modern life†¦What is â€Å"freakonomics,† anyway? 1. What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common? In which we explore the beauty of incentives, as well as their dark side—cheating. Who cheats? Just about everyone†¦How cheaters cheat, and how to catch them†¦Stories from an Israeli day-care center†¦The sudden disappearance of seven million American children†¦Cheating schoolteachers in Chicago†¦Why cheating to lose is worse than cheating to win†¦Could sumo wrestling, the national sport of Japan, be corrupt? †¦What the Bagel Man saw: mankind may be more honest than we think. 2. How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents? In which it is argued that nothing is more powerful than information, especially when its power is abused. Going undercover in the Ku Klux Klan†¦Why experts of every kind are in the perfect position to exploit you†¦The antidote to information abuse: the Internet†¦Why a new car is suddenly worth so much less the moment it leaves the lot†¦Breaking the real-estate agent code: what â€Å"well maintained† really means†¦Is Trent Lott more racist than the average Weakest Link contestant? †¦What do online daters lie about? 3. Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms? In which the conventional wisdom is often found to be a web of fabrication, self-interest, and convenience. Why experts routinely make up statistics; the invention of chronic halitosis†¦How to ask a good question†¦Sudhir Venkatesh’s long, strange trip into the crack den†¦Life is a tournament†¦Why prostitutes earn more than architects†¦What a drug dealer, a highschool quarterback, and an editorial assistant have in common†¦How the invention of crack cocaine mirrored the invention of nylon stockings†¦Was crack the worst thing to hit black Americans since Jim Crow? 4. Where Have All the Criminals Gone? In which the facts of crime are sorted out from the fictions. What Nicolae Ceau? scu learned—the hard way—about abortion†¦Why the 1960s were a great time to be a criminal†¦Think the roaring 1990s economy put a crimp on crime? Think again†¦Why capital punishment doesn’t deter criminals†¦Do police actually lower crime rates? †¦Prisons, prisons everywhere†¦Seeing through the New York City police â€Å"mir acle†Ã¢â‚¬ ¦What is a gun, really? †¦Why early crack dealers were like Microsoft millionaires and later crack dealers were like Pets. com†¦The superpredator versus the senior citizen†¦Jane Roe, crime stopper: how the legalization of abortion changed everything. 5. What Makes a Perfect Parent? In which we ask, from a variety of angles, a pressing question: do parents really matter? The conversion of parenting from an art to a science†¦Why parenting experts like to scare parents to death†¦Which is more dangerous: a gun or a swimming pool? †¦The economics of fear†¦Obsessive parents and the nature-nurture quagmire†¦Why a good school isn’t as good as you might think†¦The black-white test gap and â€Å"acting white†Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Eight things that make a child do better in school and eight that don’t. 6. Perfect Parenting, Part II; or: Would a Roshanda by Any Other Name Smell as Sweet? In which we weigh the importance of a parent’s first official act—naming the baby. A boy named Winner and his brother, Loser†¦The blackest names and the whitest names†¦The segregation of culture: why Seinfeld never made the top fifty among black viewers†¦If you have a really bad name, should you just change it? †¦High-end names and low-end names (and how one becomes the other)†¦Britney Spears: a symptom, not a cause†¦Is Aviva the next Madison? †¦What your parents were telling the world when they gave you your name. EPILOGUE: Two Paths to Harvard In which the dependability of data meets the randomness of life. Notes Acknowledgments Index About the Author Credits Copyright About the Publisher AN EXPLANATORY NOTE The most brilliant young economist in America—the one so deemed, at least, by a jury of his elders—brakes to a stop at a traffic light on Chicago’s south side. It is a sunny day in mid-June. He drives an aging green Chevy Cavalier with a dusty dashboard and a window that doesn’t quite shut, producing a dull roar at highway speeds. But the car is quiet for now, as are the noontime streets: gas stations, boundless concrete, brick buildings with plywood windows. An elderly homeless man approaches. It says he is homeless right on his sign, which also asks for money. He wears a torn jacket, too heavy for the warm day, and a grimy red baseball cap. The economist doesn’t lock his doors or inch the car forward. Nor does he go scrounging for spare change. He just watches, as if through one-way glass. After a while, the homeless man moves along. â€Å"He had nice headphones,† says the economist, still watching in the rearview mirror. â€Å"Well, nicer than the ones I have. Otherwise, it doesn’t look like he has many assets. † Steven Levitt tends to see things differently than the average person. Differently, too, than the average economist. This is either a wonderful trait or a troubling one, depending on how you feel about economists. —The New York Times Magazine, August 3, 2003 In the summer of 2003, The New York Times Magazine sent Stephen J. Dubner, an author and journalist, to write a profile of Steven D. Levitt, a heralded young economist at the University of Chicago. Dubner, who was researching a book about the psychology of money, had lately been interviewing many economists and found that they often spoke English as if it were a fourth or fifth language. Levitt, who had just won the John Bates Clark Medal (awarded every two years to the best American economist under forty), had lately been interviewed by many journalists and found that their thinking wasn’t very†¦robust, as an economist might say. But Levitt decided that Dubner wasn’t a complete idiot. And Dubner found that Levitt wasn’t a human slide rule. The writer was dazzled by the inventiveness of the economist’s work and his knack for explaining it. Despite Levitt’s elite credentials (Harvard undergrad, a PhD from MIT, a stack of awards), he approached economics in a notably unorthodox way. He seemed to look at things not so much as an academic but as a very smart and curious explorer—a documentary filmmaker, perhaps, or a forensic investigator or a bookie whose markets ranged from sports to crime to pop culture. He professed little interest in the sort of monetary issues that come to mind when most people think about economics; he practically blustered with self-effacement. â€Å"I just don’t know very much about the field of economics,† he told Dubner at one point, swiping the hair from his eyes. I’m not good at math, I don’t know a lot of econometrics, and I also don’t know how to do theory. If you ask me about whether the stock market’s going to go up or down, if you ask me whether the economy’s going to grow or shrink, if you ask me whether deflation’s good or bad, if you ask me about taxes—I mean, it would be total fakery if I said I knew anything about any of those things. † What interest ed Levitt were the stuff and riddles of everyday life. His investigations were a feast for anyone wanting to know how the world really works. His singular attitude was evoked in Dubner’s resulting article: As Levitt sees it, economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions. His particular gift is the ability to ask such questions. For instance: If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their mothers? Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What really caused crime rates to plunge during the past decade? Do real-estate agents have their clients’ best interests at heart? Why do black parents give their children names that may hurt their career prospects? Do schoolteachers cheat to meet high-stakes testing standards? Is sumo wrestling corrupt? And how does a homeless man in tattered clothing afford $50 headphones? Many people—including a fair number of his peers—might not recognize Levitt’s work as economics at all. But he has merely distilled the so-called dismal science to its most primal aim: explaining how people get what they want. Unlike most academics, he is unafraid of using personal observations and curiosities; he is also unafraid of anecdote and storytelling (but he is afraid of calculus). He is an intuitionist. He sifts through a pile of data to find a story that no one else has found. He figures a way to measure an effect that veteran economists had declared unmeasurable. His abiding interests—though he says he has never trafficked in them himself—are cheating, corruption, and crime. Levitt’s blazing curiosity also proved attractive to thousands of New York Times readers. He was beset by questions and queries, riddles and requests—from General Motors and the New York Yankees and U. S. senators but also from prisoners and parents and a man who for twenty years had kept precise data on his sales of bagels. A former Tour de France champion called Levitt to ask his help in proving that the current Tour is rife with doping; the Central Intelligence Agency wanted to know how Levitt might use data to catch money launderers and terrorists. What they were all responding to was the force of Levitt’s underlying belief: that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and—if the right questions are asked—is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking. In New York City, the publishers were telling Levitt he should write a book. â€Å"Write a book? he said. â€Å"I don’t want to write a book. † He already had a million more riddles to solve than time to solve them. Nor did he think himself much of a writer. So he said that no, he wasn’t interested—â€Å"unless,† he proposed, â€Å"maybe Dubner and I could do it together. † Collaboration isn’t for everyone. But the two of them—henceforth known as the two of us—decided to talk things over to see if such a book might work. We decided it could. We hope you agree. Levitt had an interview for the Society of Fellows, the venerable intellectual clubhouse at Harvard that pays young scholars to do their own work, for three years, with no commitments. Levitt felt he didn’t stand a chance. For starters, he didn’t consider himself an intellectual. He would be interviewed over dinner by the senior fellows, a collection of world-renowned philosophers, scientists, and historians. He worried he wouldn’t have enough conversation to last even the first course. Disquietingly, one of the senior fellows said to Levitt, â€Å"I’m having a hard time seeing the unifying theme of your work. Could you explain it? † Levitt was stymied. He had no idea what his unifying theme was, or if he even had one. Amartya Sen, the future Nobel-winning economist, jumped in and neatly summarized what he saw as Levitt’s theme. Yes, Levitt said eagerly, that’s my theme. Another fellow then offered another theme. You’re right, said Levitt, my theme. And so it went, like dogs tugging at a bone, until the philosopher Robert Nozick interrupted. â€Å"How old are you, Steve? † he asked. â€Å"Twenty-six. † Nozick turned to the other fellows: â€Å"He’s twenty-six years old. Why does he need to have a unifying theme? Maybe he’s going to be one of those people who’s so talented he doesn’t need one. He’ll take a question and he’ll just answer it, and it’ll be fine. † —THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, AUGUST 3, 2003 INTRODUCTION: The Hidden Side of Everything Anyone living in the United States in the early 1990s and paying even a whisper of attention to the nightly news or a daily paper could be forgiven for having been scared out of his skin. The culprit was crime. It had been rising relentlessly—a graph plotting the crime rate in any American city over recent decades looked like a ski slope in profile—and it seemed now to herald the end of the world as we knew it. Death by gunfire, intentional and otherwise, had become commonplace. So too had carjacking and crack dealing, robbery and rape. Violent crime was a gruesome, constant companion. And things were about to get even worse. Much worse. All the experts were saying so. The cause was the so-called superpredator. For a time, he was everywhere. Glowering from the cover of newsweeklies. Swaggering his way through foot-thick government reports. He was a scrawny, big-city teenager with a cheap gun in his hand and nothing in his heart but ruthlessness. There were thousands out there just like him, we were told, a generation of killers about to hurl the country into deepest chaos. In 1995 the criminologist James Alan Fox wrote a report for the U. S. attorney general that grimly detailed the coming spike in murders by teenagers. Fox proposed optimistic and pessimistic scenarios. In the optimistic scenario, he believed, the rate of teen homicides would rise another 15 percent over the next decade; in the pessimistic scenario, it would more than double. â€Å"The next crime wave will get so bad,† he said, â€Å"that it will make 1995 look like the good old days. † Other criminologists, political scientists, and similarly learned forecasters laid out the same horrible future, as did President Clinton. â€Å"We know we’ve got about six years to turn this juvenile crime thing around,† Clinton said, â€Å"or our country is going to be living with chaos. And my successors will not be giving speeches about the wonderful opportunities of the global economy; they’ll be trying to keep body and soul together for people on the streets of these cities. † The smart money was plainly on the criminals. And then, instead of going up and up and up, crime began to fall. And fall and fall and fall some more. The crime drop was startling in several respects. It was ubiquitous, with every category of crime falling in every part of the country. It was persistent, with incremental decreases year after year. And it was entirely unanticipated—especially by the very experts who had been predicting the opposite. The magnitude of the reversal was astounding. The teenage murder rate, instead of rising 100 percent or even 15 percent as James Alan Fox had warned, fell more than 50 percent within five years. By 2000 the overall murder rate in the United States had dropped to its lowest level in thirty-five years. So had the rate of just about every other sort of crime, from assault to car theft. Even though the experts had failed to anticipate the crime drop—which was in fact well under way even as they made their horrifying predictions—they now hurried to explain it. Most of their theories sounded perfectly logical. It was the roaring 1990s economy, they said, that helped turn back crime. It was the proliferation of gun control laws, they said. It was the sort of innovative policing strategies put into place in New York City, where murders would fall from 2,245 in 1990 to 596 in 2003. These theories were not only logical; they were also encouraging, for they attributed the crime drop to specific and recent human initiatives. If it was gun control and clever police strategies and better-paying jobs that quelled crime—well then, the power to stop criminals had been within our reach all along. As it would be the next time, God forbid, that crime got so bad. These theories made their way, seemingly without question, from the experts’ mouths to journalists’ ears to the public’s mind. In short course, they became conventional wisdom. There was only one problem: they weren’t true. There was another factor, meanwhile, that had greatly contributed to the massive crime drop of the 1990s. It had taken shape more than twenty years earlier and concerned a young woman in Dallas named Norma McCorvey. Like the proverbial butterfly that flaps its wings on one continent and eventually causes a hurricane on another, Norma McCorvey dramatically altered the course of events without intending to. All she had wanted was an abortion. She was a poor, uneducated, unskilled, alcoholic, drug-using twenty-one-year-old woman who had already given up two children for adoption and now, in 1970, found herself pregnant again. But in Texas, as in all but a few states at that time, abortion was illegal. McCorvey’s cause came to be adopted by people far more powerful than she. They made her the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit seeking to legalize abortion. The defendant was Henry Wade, the Dallas County district attorney. The case ultimately made it to the U. S. Supreme Court, by which time McCorvey’s name had been disguised as Jane Roe. On January 22, 1973, the court ruled in favor of Ms. Roe, allowing legalized abortion throughout the country. By this time, of course, it was far too late for Ms. McCorvey/Roe to have her abortion. She had given birth and put the child up for adoption. (Years later she would renounce her allegiance to legalized abortion and become a pro-life activist. So how did Roe v. Wade help trigger, a generation later, the greatest crime drop in recorded history? As far as crime is concerned, it turns out that not all children are born equal. Not even close. Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal. And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade—poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get—were often models of adversity. They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. But because of Roe v. Wade, these children weren’t being born. This powerful cause would have a drastic, distant effect: years later, just as these unborn children would have entered their criminal primes, the rate of crime began to plummet. It wasn’t gun control or a strong economy or new police strategies that finally blunted the American crime wave. It was, among other factors, the reality that the pool of potential criminals had dramatically shrunk. Now, as the crime-drop experts (the former crime doomsayers) spun their theories to the media, how many times did they cite legalized abortion as a cause? Zero. It is the quintessential blend of commerce and camaraderie: you hire a real-estate agent to sell your home. She sizes up its charms, snaps some pictures, sets the price, writes a seductive ad, shows the house aggressively, negotiates the offers, and sees the deal through to its end. Sure, it’s a lot of work, but she’s getting a nice cut. On the sale of a $300,000 house, a typical 6 percent agent fee yields $18,000. Eighteen thousand dollars, you say to yourself: that’s a lot of money. But you also tell yourself that you never could have sold the house for $300,000 on your own. The agent knew how to—what’s that phrase she used? — â€Å"maximize the house’s value. † She got you top dollar, right? Right? A real-estate agent is a different breed of expert than a criminolo-gist, but she is every bit the expert. That is, she knows her field far better than the layman on whose behalf she is acting. She is better informed about the house’s value, the state of the housing market, even the buyer’s frame of mind. You depend on her for this information. That, in fact, is why you hired an expert. As the world has grown more specialized, countless such experts have made themselves similarly indispensable. Doctors, lawyers, contractors, stockbrokers, auto mechanics, mortgage brokers, financial planners: they all enjoy a gigantic informational advantage. And they use that advantage to help you, the person who hired them, get exactly what you want for the best price. Right? It would be lovely to think so. But experts are human, and humans respond to incentives. How any given expert treats you, therefore, will depend on how that expert’s incentives are set up. Sometimes his incentives may work in your favor. For instance: a study of California auto mechanics found they often passed up a small repair bill by letting failing cars pass emissions inspections—the reason being that lenient mechanics are rewarded with repeat business. But in a different case, an expert’s incentives may work against you. In a medical study, it turned out that obstetricians in areas with declining birth rates are much more likely to perform cesarean-section deliveries than obstetricians in growing areas—suggesting that, when business is tough, doctors try to ring up more expensive procedures. The 20s And Sinclair Lewis EssayConsidering this fact, it might be worthwhile to take a familiar question—why is there so much crime in modern society? —and stand it on its head: why isn’t there a lot more crime? After all, every one of us regularly passes up opportunities to maim, steal, and defraud. The chance of going to jail—thereby losing your job, your house, and your freedom, all of which are essentially economic penalties—is certainly a strong incentive. But when it comes to crime, people also respond to moral incentives (they don’t want to do something they consider wrong) and social incentives (they don’t want to be seen by others as doing something wrong). For certain types of misbehavior, social incentives are terribly powerful. In an echo of Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter, many American cities now fight prostitution with a â€Å"shaming† offensive, posting pictures of convicted johns (and prostitutes) on websites or on local-access television. Which is a more horrifying deterrent: a $500 fine for soliciting a prostitute or the thought of your friends and family ogling you on www. HookersAndJohns. com. So through a complicated, haphazard, and constantly readjusted web of economic, social, and moral incentives, modern society does its best to militate against crime. Some people would argue that we don’t do a very good job. But taking the long view, that is clearly not true. Consider the historical trend in homicide (not including wars), which is both the most reliably measured crime and the best barometer of a society’s overall crime rate. These statistics, compiled by the criminologist Manuel Eisner, track the historical homicide levels in five European regions. HOMICIDES (per 100,000 People) NETHERLANDS ENGLAND AND BELGIUM 13th 23. 0 and 14th c. 15th c. n. a. 16th c. 7. 0 17th c. 5. 0 18th c. 1. 5 19th c. 1. 7 1900– 0. 8 1949 47. GERMANY AND SCANDINAVIA SWITZERLAND n. a. 37. 0 ITALY 56. 0 45. 0 25. 0 7. 5 5. 5 1. 6 1. 5 46. 0 21. 0 18. 0 1. 9 1. 1 0. 7 16. 0 11. 0 7. 0 7. 5 2. 8 1. 7 73. 0 47. 0 32. 0 10. 5 12. 6 3. 2 1950– 0. 9 1994 0. 9 0. 9 1. 0 1. 5 The steep decline of these numbers over the centuries suggests that, for one of the gravest human concerns—getting murdered—the incentives that we coll ectively cook up are working better and better. So what was wrong with the incentive at the Israeli day-care centers? You have probably already guessed that the $3 fine was simply too small. For that price, a parent with one child could afford to be late every day and only pay an extra $60 each month—just one-sixth of the base fee. As babysitting goes, that’s pretty cheap. What if the fine had been set at $100 instead of $3? That would have likely put an end to the late pickups, though it would have also engendered plenty of ill will. (Any incentive is inherently a trade-off; the trick is to balance the extremes. ) But there was another problem with the day-care center fine. It substituted an economic incentive (the $3 penalty) for a moral incentive (the guilt that parents were supposed to feel when they came late). For just a few dollars each day, parents could buy off their guilt. Furthermore, the small size of the fine sent a signal to the parents that late pickups weren’t such a big problem. If the day-care center suffers only $3 worth of pain for each late pickup, why bother to cut short the tennis game? Indeed, when the economists eliminated the $3 fine in the seventeenth week of their study, the number of late-arriving parents didn’t change. Now they could arrive late, pay no fine, and feel no guilt. Such is the strange and powerful nature of incentives. A slight tweak can produce drastic and often unforeseen results. Thomas Jefferson noted this while reflecting on the tiny incentive that led to the Boston Tea Party and, in turn, the American Revolution: â€Å"So inscrutable is the arrangement of causes and consequences in this world that a two-penny duty on tea, unjustly imposed in a sequestered part of it, changes the condition of all its inhabitants. † In the 1970s, researchers conducted a study that, like the Israeli day-care study, pitted a moral incentive against an economic incentive. In this case, they wanted to learn about the motivation behind blood donations. Their discovery: when people are given a small stipend for donating blood rather than simply being praised for their altruism, they tend to donate less blood. The stipend turned a noble act of charity into a painful way to make a few dollars, and it wasn’t worth it. What if the blood donors had been offered an incentive of $50, or $500, or $5,000? Surely the number of donors would have changed dramatically. But something else would have changed dramatically as well, for every incentive has its dark side. If a pint of blood were suddenly worth $5,000, you can be sure that plenty of people would take note. They might literally steal blood at knifepoint. They might pass off pig blood as their own. They might circumvent donation limits by using fake IDs. Whatever the incentive, whatever the situation, dishonest people will try to gain an advantage by whatever means necessary. Or, as W. C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for. Who cheats? Well, just about anyone, if the stakes are right. You might say to yourself, I don’t cheat, regardless of the stakes. And then you might remember the time you cheated on, say, a board game. Last week. Or the golf ball you nudged out of its bad lie. Or the time you really wanted a bagel in the office break room but couldn’t come up with the dollar you were supposed to drop in the coffee can. And then took the bagel anyway. And told yourself you’d pay double the next time. And didn’t. For every clever person who goes to the trouble of creating an incentive 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 pillpopping 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? Imagine now that instead of running a day-care center in Haifa, you are running the Chicago Public Schools, a system that educates 400,000 students each year. The most volatile current debate among American school administrators, teachers, parents, and students concerns â€Å"high-stakes† testing. The stakes are considered high because instead of simply testing students to measure their progress, schools are increasingly held accountable for the results. The federal government mandated high-stakes testing as part of the No Child Left Behind law, signed by President Bush in 2002. But even before that law, most states gave annual standardized tests to students in elementary and secondary school. Twenty states rewarded individual schools for good test scores or dramatic improvement; thirty-two states sanctioned the schools that didn’t do well. The Chicago Public School system embraced high-stakes testing in 1996. Under the new policy, a school with low reading scores would be placed on probation and face the threat of being shut down, its staff to be dismissed or reassigned. The CPS also did away with what is known as social promotion. In the past, only a dramatically inept or difficult student was held back a grade. Now, in order to be promoted, every student in third, sixth, and eighth grade had to manage a minimum score on the standardized, multiplechoice exam known as the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Advocates of high-stakes testing argue that it raises the standards of learning and gives students more incentive to study. Also, if the test prevents poor students from advancing without merit, they won’t clog up the higher grades and slow down good students. Opponents, meanwhile, worry that certain students will be unfairly penalized if they don’t happen to test well, and that teachers may concentrate on the test topics at the exclusion of more important lessons. Schoolchildren, of course, have had incentive to cheat for as long as there have been tests. But high-stakes testing has so radically changed the incentives for teachers that they too now have added reason to cheat. With high-stakes testing, a teacher whose students test poorly can be censured or passed over for a raise or promotion. If the entire school does poorly, federal funding can be withheld; if the school is put on probation, the teacher stands to be fired. High-stakes testing also presents teachers with some positive incentives. If her students do well enough, she might find herself praised, promoted, and even richer: the state of California at one point introduced bonuses of $25,000 for teachers who produced big test-score gains. And if a teacher were to survey this newly incentivized landscape and consider somehow inflating her students’ scores, she just might be persuaded by one final incentive: teacher cheating is rarely looked for, hardly ever detected, and just about never punished. How might a teacher go about cheating? There are any number of possibilities, from the brazen to the sophisticated. A fifth-grade student in Oakland recently came home from school and gaily told her mother that her super-nice teacher had written the answers to the state exam right there on the chalkboard. Such instances are certainly rare, for placing your fate in the hands of thirty prepubescent witnesses doesn’t seem like a risk that even the worst teacher would take. (The Oakland teacher was duly fired. ) There are more subtle ways to inflate students’ scores. A teacher can simply give students extra time to complete the test. If she obtains a copy of the exam early—that is, illegitimately—she can prepare them for specific questions. More broadly, she can â€Å"teach to the test,† basing her lesson plans on questions from past years’ exams, which isn’t considered cheating but certainly violates the spirit of the test. Since these tests all have multiple-choice answers, with no penalty for wrong guesses, a teacher might instruct her students to randomly fill in every blank as the clock is winding down, perhaps inserting a long string of Bs or an alternating pattern of Bs and Cs. She might even fill in the blanks for them after they’ve left the room. But if a teacher really wanted to cheat—and make it worth her while—she might collect her students’ answer sheets and, in the hour or so before turning them in to be read by an electronic scanner, erase the wrong answers and fill in correct ones. And you always thought that no. 2 pencil was for the children to change their answers. ) If this kind of teacher cheating is truly going on, how might it be detected? To catch a cheater, it helps to think like one. If you were willing to erase your students’ wrong answers and fill in correct ones, you probably wouldn’t want to change too many wrong answers. That would c learly be a tip-off. You probably wouldn’t even want to change answers on every student’s test—another tip-off. Nor, in all likelihood, would you have enough time, because the answer sheets are turned in soon after the test is over. So what you might do is select a string of eight or ten consecutive questions and fill in the correct answers for, say, one-half or two-thirds of your students. You could easily memorize a short pattern of correct answers, and it would be a lot faster to erase and change that pattern than to go through each student’s answer sheet individually. You might even think to focus your activity toward the end of the test, where the questions tend to be harder than the earlier questions. In that way, you’d be most likely to substitute correct answers for wrong ones. If economics is a science primarily concerned with incentives, it is also—fortunately—a science with statistical tools to measure how people respond to those incentives. All you need are some data. In this case, the Chicago Public School system obliged. It made available a database of the test answers for every CPS student from third grade through seventh grade from 1993 to 2000. This amounts to roughly 30,000 students per grade per year, more than 700,000 sets of test answers, and nearly 100 million individual answers. The data, organized by classroom, included each student’s question-by-question answer strings for reading and math tests. The actual paper answer sheets were not included; they were habitually shredded soon after a test. ) The data also included some information about each teacher and demographic information for every student, as well as his or her past and future test scores—which would prove a key element in detecting the teacher cheating . Now it was time to construct an algorithm that could tease some conclusions from this mass of data. What might a cheating teacher’s classroom look like? The first thing to search for would be unusual answer patterns in a given classroom: blocks of identical answers, for instance, especially among the harder questions. If ten very bright students (as indicated by past and future test scores) gave correct answers to the exam’s first five questions (typically the easiest ones), such an identical block shouldn’t be considered suspicious. But if ten poor students gave correct answers to the last five questions on the exam (the hardest ones), that’s worth looking into. Another red flag would be a strange pattern within any one student’s exam—such as getting the hard questions right while missing the easy ones—especially when measured against the thousands of students in other classrooms who scored similarly on the same test. Furthermore, the algorithm would seek out a classroom full of students who performed far better than their past scores would have predicted and who then went on to score significantly lower the following year. A dramatic one-year spike in test scores might initially be attributed to a good teacher; but with a dramatic fall to follow, there’s a strong likelihood that the spike was brought about by artificial means. Consider now the answer strings from the students in two sixth-grade Chicago classrooms who took the identical math test. Each horizontal row represents one student’s answers. The letter a, b, c, or d indicates a correct answer; a number indicates a wrong answer, with 1 corresponding to a, 2 corresponding to b, and so on. A zero represents an answer that was left blank. One of these classrooms almost certainly had a cheating teacher and the other did not. Try to tell the difference—although be forewarned that it’s not easy with the naked eye. Classroom A 112a4a342cb214d0001acd24a3a12dadbcb4a0000000 d4a2341cacbddad3142a2344a2ac23421c00adb4b3cb 1b2a34d4ac42d23b141acd24a3a12dadbcb4a2134141 dbaab3dcacb1dadbc42ac2cc31012dadbcb4adb40000 d12443d43232d32323c213c22d2c23234c332db4b300 db2abad1acbdda212b1acd24a3a12dadbcb400000000 d4aab2124cbddadbcb1a42cca3412dadbcb423134bc1 1b33b4d4a2b1dadbc3ca22c000000000000000000000 d43a3a24acb1d32b412acd24a3a12dadbcb422143bc0 313a3ad1ac3d2a23431223c000012dadbcb400000000 db2a33dcacbd32d313c21142323cc300000000000000 d43ab4d1ac3dd43421240d24a3a12dadbcb400000000 b223a24acb11a3b24cacd12a241cdadbcb4adb4b300 db4abadcacb1dad3141ac212a3a1c3a144ba2db41b43 1142340c2cbddadb4b1acd24a3a12dadbcb43d133bc4 214ab4dc4cbdd31b1b2213c4ad412dadbcb4adb00000 423b4d4a23d24131413234123a243a2413a21441343 3b3ab4d14c3d2ad4cbcac1c003a12dadbcb4adb40000 dba2ba21ac3d2ad3c4c4cd40a3a12dadbcb400000000 d122ba2cacbd1a13211a2d02a2412d0dbcb4adb4b3c0 144a3adc4cbddadbcbc2c2cc43a12dadbcb4211ab343 d43aba3cacbddadbcbca42c2a3212dadbcb42344b3c b Classroom B db3a431422bd131b4413cd422a1acda332342d3ab4c4 d1aa1a11acb2d3dbc1ca22c23242c3a142b3adb243c1 d42a12d2a4b1d32b21ca2312a3411d00000000000000 3b2a34344c32d21b1123cdc000000000000000000000 34aabad12cbdd3d4c1ca112cad2ccd00000000000000 d33a3431a2b2d2d44b2acd2cad2c2223b40000000000 23aa32d2a1bd2431141342c13d212d233c34a3b3b000 d32234d4a1bdd23b242a22c2a1a1cda2b1baa33a0000 d3aab23c4cbddadb23c322c2a222223232b443b24bc 3d13a14313c31d42b14c421c42332cd2242b3433a3343 d13a3ad122b1da2b11242dc1a3a12100000000000000 d12a3ad1a13d23d3cb2a21ccada24d2131b440000000 314a133c4cbd142141ca424cad34c122413223ba4b40 d42a3adcacbddadbc42ac2c2ada2cda341baa3b24321 db1134dc2cb2dadb24c412c1ada2c3a341ba20000000 d1341431acbddad3c4c213412da22d3d1132a1344b1b 1ba41a21a1b2dadb24ca22c1ada2cd32413200000000 dbaa33d2a2bddadbcbca11c2a2accda1b2ba20000000 If you guessed that classroom A was the cheating classroom, congratulations. Here again are the answer strings from classroom A, now reordered by a computer that has been as ked to apply the cheating algorithm and seek out suspicious patterns. Classroom A (With cheating algorithm applied) 1. 112a4a342cb214d0001acd24a3a12dadbcb4a0000000 2. b2a34d4ac42d23b141acd24a3a12dadbcb4a2134141 3. db2abad1acbdda212b1acd24a3a12dadbcb400000000 4. d43a3a24acb1d32b412acd24a3a12dadbcb422143bc0 5. d43ab4d1ac3dd43421240d24a3a12dadbcb400000000 6. 1142340c2cbddadb4b1acd24a3a12dadbcb43d133bc4 7. dba2ba21ac3d2ad3c4c4cd40a3a12dadbcb400000000 8. 144a3adc4cbddadbcbc2c2cc43a12dadbcb4211ab343 9. 3b3ab4d14c3d2ad4cbcac1c003a12dadbcb4adb40000 10. d43aba3cacbddadbcbca42c2a3212dadbcb42344b3cb 11. 214ab4dc4cbdd31b1b2213c4ad412dadbcb4adb00000 12. 313a3ad1ac3d2a23431223c000012dadbcb400000000 13. d4aab2124cbddadbcb1a42cca3412dadbcb423134bc1 14. dbaab3dcacb1dadbc42ac2cc31012dadbcb4adb40000 15. db223a24acb11a3b24cacd12a241cdadbcb4adb4b300 16. 122ba2cacbd1a13211a2d02a2412d0dbcb4adb4b3c0 17. 1423b4d4a23d24131413234123a243a2413a21441343 18. db4abadcacb1dad3141ac212a3a1c3a144ba2db41b43 19. db2a33 dcacbd32d313c21142323cc300000000000000 20. 1b33b4d4a2b1dadbc3ca22c000000000000000000000 21. d12443d43232d32323c213c22d2c23234c332db4b300 22. d4a2341cacbddad3142a2344a2ac23421c00adb4b3cb Take a look at the answers in bold. Did fifteen out of twenty-two students somehow manage to reel off the same six consecutive correct answers (the d-a-d-b-c-b string) all by themselves? There are at least four reasons this is unlikely. One: those questions, coming near the end of the test, were harder than the earlier questions. Two: these were mainly subpar students to begin with, few of whom got six consecutive right answers elsewhere on the test, making it all the more unlikely they would get right the same six hard questions. Three: up to this point in the test, the fifteen students’ answers were virtually uncorrelated. Four: three of the students (numbers 1, 9, and 12) left at least one answer blank before the suspicious string and then ended the test with another string of blanks. This suggests that a long, unbroken string of blank answers was broken not by the student but by the teacher. There is another oddity about the suspicious answer string. On nine of the fifteen tests, the six correct answers are preceded by another identical string, 3-a-1-2, which includes three of four incorrect answers. And on all fifteen tests, the six correct answers are ollowed by the same incorrect answer, a 4. Why on earth would a cheating teacher go to the trouble of erasing a student’s test sheet and the n fill in the wrong answer? Perhaps she is merely being strategic. In case she is caught and hauled into the principal’s office, she could point to the wrong answers as proof that she didn’t cheat. Or perhaps— and this is a less charitable but just as likely answer—she doesn’t know the right answers herself. (With standardized tests, the teacher is typically not given an answer key. ) If this is the case, then we have a pretty good clue as to why her students are in need of inflated grades in the first place: they have a bad teacher. Another indication of teacher cheating in classroom A is the class’s overall performance. As sixth graders who were taking the test in the eighth month of the academic year, these students needed to achieve an average score of 6. 8 to be considered up to national standards. (Fifth graders taking the test in the eighth month of the year needed to score 5. 8, seventh graders 7. 8, and so on. ) The students in classroom A averaged 5. 8 on their sixth-grade tests, which is a full grade level below where they should be. So plainly these are poor students. A year earlier, however, these students did even worse, averaging just 4. 1 on their fifth-grade tests. Instead of improving by one full point between fifth and sixth grade, as would be expected, they improved by 1. 7 points, nearly two grades’ worth. But this miraculous improvement was short-lived. When these sixth-grade students reached seventh grade, they averaged 5. 5—more than two grade levels below standard and even worse than they did in sixth grade. Consider the erratic year-to-year scores of three particular students from classroom A: 5TH GRADE SCORE Student 3 Student 6 3. 0 3. 6 6TH GRADE SCORE 6. 5 6. 3 7. 1 7TH GRADE SCORE 5. 1 4. 9 5. 6 Student 14 3. 8 The three-year scores from classroom B, meanwhile, are also poor but at least indicate an honest effort: 4. 2, 5. 1, and 6. 0. So an entire roomful of children in classroom A suddenly got very smart one year and very dim the next, or more likely, their sixth-grade teacher worked some magic with a no. 2 pencil. There are two noteworthy points to be made about the children in classroom A, tangential to the cheating itself. The first is that they are obviously in terrible academic shape, which makes them the very children whom high-stakes testing is promoted as helping the most. The second point is that these students would be in for a terrible shock once they reached the seventh grade. All they knew was that they had been successfully promoted due to their test scores. (No child left behind, indeed. They weren’t the

Antigone The True Tragic Hero In Sophocles Antigone Essay Example For Students

Antigone: The True Tragic Hero In Sophocles Antigone Essay Antigone: The True Tragic Hero in Sophocles Antigone In Sophocles Antigone, the question of who the tragic hero really is, has been a subject of debate for a great number years. Creon does possess some of the qualities that constitute a tragic hero but unfortunately does not completely fit into the role. Antigone, however, possesses all the aspects of a tragic hero. These are, having a high social position, not being overly good or bad, being persistent in their actions, arousing pity in the audience, a revelatory manifestation, and having a single flaw that brings about their own demise and the demise of others around them. Antigone possesses all of these traits therefore qualifying as the tragic hero. The first qualifying aspect is that Antigone is of a high social standing in Thebes. Creon himself refers to her as a princess though she is technically no longer one. Because of her high standing she is capable of great suffering, in that she has a lot of fame and regard to lose. Those who say Creon is the tragic hero say that Antigone is no longer in a high position in the society, therefore does not qualify on that account. If the character had needed to be in a high political position this would be true, but they need only have a great deal to lose in their downfall. Although she may no longer hold political power Antigone is still a powerful figure in Thebes, since she was to be married to Creons son Haemon and the whole city seemed to know how tragic her life had become. Antigone and Creon would qualify as the tragic hero if the only requirement was not being overly good or bad. Creon shows his negative side when he refuses to bury Polyneices and when he speaks to the sentry. His positive side is shown in his obvious affection for Antigone and Ismene. Antigones ungodly side is shown by her incestuous behavior with her brother Polyneices. Her positive side is shown by the way the she insists on respecting his right to be buried in the religious tradition of Greece so that his soul may live on in the afterlife. Another aspect of a tragic hero is an unwavering course of action, most likely caused by their flaw, that brings about their demise and the demise of those around them. Antigones flaw is her rash and headstrong behavior. This is the source of the conflict in the play. Had Antigone asked Creon for permission to bury Polyneices in observance of the Greek role in religious life he would have probably allowed it. Instead, she rashly decided to take matters into her own hands, most likely because of her anger in losing the true love of her life. This aspect also emerges later in the play, when Antigone decides to kill herself in the tomb rather than give Creon the satisfaction of the deed. Had she not been so recklessly hasty she would have been spared  her life by Creon, who was on his way to free Antigone and have Polyneices given a proper burial. Creon does not have a persistent nature, and therefore could not be the Aristotelian tragic hero. His ineptness as a ruler is prevalent in the way he wavers on the topic of Polyneices burial. In the beginning he seems very stubborn, which some say is one of the fatal flaws that qualify him as a tragic hero, but later changes his mind. The true tragic hero would stick to their fatal flaw, like Antigone did, until their complete demise. As far as the issue of arising pity in the audience and in other characters, it is clear that Antigone clearly wins over Creon in the arena of intensity of emotion. All of Thebes sympathizes with Antigone, especially after she has been sentenced to death. Haemon himself tells his father And I have heard them, muttering and whisperingThey say no woman has ever, so unreasonably, died so shameful a death for a generous actScene 3. 61-4. It is obvious that she had the pity of the entire city except for Creon. Creon, however, is not sympathized with at all except for the chorus, which always agrees with the last point of view presented. Some readers may be inclined to side with him, but the entire city is opposed to him during the play disqualifying him as the tragic hero. 'To Kill a Mockingbird' By Harper Lee EssayCreon does not have a persistent nature, and therefore could not be the Aristotelian tragic hero. His ineptness as a ruler is prevalent in the way he wavers on the topic of Polyneices burial. In the beginning he seems very stubborn, which some say is one of the fatal flaws that qualify him as a tragic hero, but later changes his mind. The true tragic hero would stick to their fatal flaw, like Antigone did, until their complete demise. As far as the issue of arising pity in the audience and in other characters, it is clear that Antigone clearly wins over Creon in the arena of intensity of emotion. All of Thebes sympathizes with Antigone, especially after she has been sentenced to death. Haemon himself tells his father And I have heard them, muttering and whisperingThey say no woman has ever, so unreasonably, died so shameful a death for a generous actScene 3. 61-4. It is obvious that she had the pity of the entire city except for Creon. Creon, however, is not sympathized with at all except for the chorus, which always agrees with the last point of view presented. Some readers may be inclined to side with him, but the entire city is opposed to him during the play disqualifying him as the tragic hero. Another issue that has been brought up in the debate is the necessary presence of an epiphany, or revelatory manifestation of to the tragic hero. Creon is supposed to have received his when Tiresias delivers his prophecy, proclaiming that the Gods have decided he was wrong in what he did. But the true epiphany in this play would have been right before Antigone hung herself, when she realized what has become of her life due to her own fatal flaw. Antigones choice to bury Polyneices is what the play revolves around. Her impetuous personality and incestuous love drives her to disregard the will of the struggling King Creon and bury her brother. The consequences of her actions cause the demise of not only herself, but Creons son and her groom to be Haemon, who kills himself once he hears of her death. In closing, upon a close analyses of the play Antigone, the tragic hero would have to be Antigone herself, since she has all the aspects that a tragic hero must have. Having a high social position, not being overly good or bad, being persistent in their actions, arousing pity in the audience, a revelatory manifestation, and having a single flaw that brings about their own demise and the demise of others around them. Creon does not have perseverance, arousal of pity from characters and audience, and a single flaw which brings about the demise of himself and everyone around him. Although Creon closely resembles what a tragic hero must be, it is clear that Antigone is the tragic hero in Sophocles Antigone.