Surprisingly, they cheat...

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 more 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 the boldfact 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 happend 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 you are running the Chicago Public Schools, a system that educates 400,000 students each year.

The most volatile debate among American school administrators, teachers, parents, and students concerns "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 standardlized, multiple-choice 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 radicially changed the incentives for teachers that they too now have added reason to cheat. With high-stake testings, 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 studnets 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 planing 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 a test. If she obtains a copy of the exam early- that is, illegitimately- she can prepare them for specific questions. More broadly, she can "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 patter 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 the 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 clearly 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 eastily memorize a short pattern of correct answers, and it would be a lot faster to erase and change that pattern than go through each student's answer sheet individually. You might even think to focus your activitiy 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 19993 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 a 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 patters 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

112a4a342cb214d0001acd24a3a12dadbcb4a000000
d4a2341cacbddad3142a2344a2ac23421c00adb4b3cb
1b2a34d4ac42d23b141acd24a3a12dadbcb4a2134141
dbaab3dcacb1dadbc42ac2cc31012dadbcb4adb40000
d12443d43232d32323c213c22d2c23234c332db4b300
db2abad1acbdda212b1acd24a3a12dadbcb400000000
d4aab2124cbddadbcb1a42cca3412dadbcb423134bc1
1b33b4d4a2b1dadbc3ca22c00000000000000000000
d43a3a24acb1d32b412acd24a3a12dadbcb422143bc0
313a3ad1ac3d2a23431223c000012dadbcb40000000
db2a33dcacbd32d313c21142323cc30000000000000
d43ab4d1ac3dd43421240d24a3a12dadbcb40000000
db223a24acb11a3b24cacd12a241cdadbcb4adb4b300
db4abadcacb1dad3141ac212a3a1c3a1144ba2db41b43
1142340c2cbddadb4b1acd24a3a12dadbcb43d133bc4
214ab4dc4cbdd31b1b2213c4ad412dadbcb4adb00000
1423b4d4a23d241314123a243a2413a214413430000
32badc2300adc3211caa321acd24a3a12dadbcb400cda
2211cddadc3400ad34221d224a24a3a12dadbcb2de11
342adbbc3da32110033acd24a3a12dadbcb400adcc12
1acdd2332aabb2321230000dc1212dadbcb4acc2331a
acc223122c00bcba3241a123a3a12dadbcb400a231a3


Classroom B

a1221acd213acdd21a3bbc3aacdd122100231000000
12213aa4abc44000231accbac231ca4bac0000000000
bcb23acd4421ba12cca432a23ab23acca21230000a00
bac312bb0032a211acddba121accaba3200a0000000
acaa3212220ad0cadbb21ab2b1acaa2101000000000
a213321000cad3112ad23bca21100123acad2100000
ad231231a1a3bacadad00acad0a2123acd3a21a00000
adcad00ad213ad3131ad33aca144ad000acad002123a
acad2212bca3b3bab1aca1200ad1ad24123aca13100a
123ac3a2123ac44100acabba12300aca114300012300
accebba212300a44123acaba2130123aca3310ca0000
122100134baac31bb34ac21100acba21aca210000010
12bbac2b31b21b101bacadaad212344acab1001ca000
12cacade123ba00a12aca12341bccada00123c000010
adacaar1200a0daccabba1230daad012aca2200a0a410
acaa0cadadaba12312b2b2cabaac1200acad000000000
acababaa00123aca2312aaccbbbaca001231a24412300
a4121323acaabbacaaa000123aacabcbbcabcadd00000
aca1b1b131aca4412babac00aaca11adaa33123000000
00aca1baba2311200aca1101abaca231230012310001
a1231caca212bbcaca21230001231001bacaca32aca00
123100adcacaddbbaca123000aca00001321bbcacca00

If you guess that classroom A was the cheating classroom, congratulations. Here again are the answer strings from classroom A, no reordered by a computer that has been asked to apply the cheating algorithm and seek our suspicious patterns.

Classroom A (With cheating algorithm applied)

112a4a342cb214d0001ACD24A3A12DADBCB4A000000
d4a2341cacbddad3142a2344a2ac23421c00adb4b3cb
1b2a34d4ac42d23b141ACD24A3A12DADBCB4A2134141
dbaab3dcacb1dadbc42ac2cc31012DADBCB4Adb40000
d12443d43232d32323c213c22d2c23234c332db4b300
db2abad1acbdda212b1ACD24A3A12DADBCB400000000
d4aab2124cbddadbcb1a42cca3412DADBCB423134bc1
1b33b4d4a2b1dadbc3ca22c00000000000000000000
d43a3a24acb1d32b412ACD24A3A12DADBCB422143bc0
313a3ad1ac3d2a23431223c000012DADBCB40000000
db2a33dcacbd32d313c21142323cc30000000000000
d43ab4d1ac3dd43421240d24A3A12DADBCB40000000
db223a24acb11a3b24cACD12A241DADBCB4Adb4b300
db4abadcacb1dad3141ac212a3a1c3a1144ba2db41b43
1142340c2cbddadb4b1ACD24A3A12DADBCB43d133bc4
214ab4dc4cbdd31b1b2213c4aA412DADBCB4Adb00000
1423b4d4a23d241314123a243a2413a214413430000
32badc2300adc3211caa321ACD24A3A12DADBCB400cda
2211cddadc3400ad34221d224A24A3A12DADBCB2de11
342adbbc3da32110033ACD24A3A12DADBCB400adcc12
1acdd2332aabb2321230000dc1212DADBCB4Acc2331a
acc223122c00bcba3241a123A3A12DADBCB400a231a3

Take a look at the capitalized answers. Did sixteen 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 atleast four reasons why 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 (number 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 sixteen 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 sixteen tests, the six correct answers are followed by the same incorrect answer, a 4. Why on earth would a cheating teacher go to the troulbe of erasing a student's test sheet then 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 likely answer- she doesn't know the right answer herself. (With standardlized 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 a teacher cheating in classroom A is the class's overall performance. As sixth graders who are 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 a 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 worst, averaging just 4.1 on the 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 his 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 6th Grade Score 7th Grade Score
Student 3 3.0 6.5 5.1
Student 6 3.6 6.3 4.9
Student 14 3.8 7.1 5.6

The three-year scores from classroom B, meanwhile are also poor but atleast indicate an honest effort: 4.2, 5.1, 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 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 ones who artificially jacked up their scores; they probably expected to do great in the seventh grade- and then they failed miserably. This may be the cruelest twist yet in high-stakes testing. A cheating teacher may tell herself that she is helping her students, but the fact is that she would appear far more concerned with helping herself.

An analysis of the entire Chicago data reveals evidence of teacher cheating in more than two hundred classrooms per year, roubly 5 percent in total. This is a conservative estimate, since the algorithm was able to identify only the most egregious forms of cheating- in which teachers systemmatically changed students' answers- and not the many subtler ways a teacher might cheat. In a recent study among North Carolina schoolteachers, some 35 percent of the respondents said they had witnessed their colleagues cheating in some fashion, whether by giving students extra time, suggesting answers, or manually changing students' answers.

What are the characteristics of a cheating teacher? The Chicago data shows that male and female teachers are about equally prone to cheating. A cheating teacher tends to be younger and less qualified than average. She is also more likely to cheat after her incentives change. Because the Chicago data ran from 1993 to 2000, it bracketed the introduction of high-stakes testing in 1996. Sure enough, there was a pronounced spike in cheating in 1996. Nor was the cheating random. It was the teachers in the lowest-scoring classrooms who were most likely to cheat. It should also be noted that the $25,000 bonus for California teachers was eventually revoked, in part because of suspicions that too much of the money was going to cheaters.

Not every result of the Chicago cheating analysis was so dour. In addition to detecting cheaters, the algorithm could also identify the best teachers in the school system. A good teacher's impact was nearly as distinctive as a cheater's. Instead of getting random answers correct, her students would show real improvement on the easier types of question they had previously missed, an indication of actual learning. And a good teacher's students carried over all their gains into the next grade.

Most academic analyses of this sort tend to languish, unread, on dusty library shelf. But in early 2002, the new CEO of the CPS, Arne Duncan, contacted the study's authors. He didn't want to protest or hush up their findings. Rather, he wanted to amek sure that the teachers identified by the algorithm as cheaters were truly cheating- and then do something about it.

Duncan was an unlikely candidtate to hold such a powerful job. He was only thirty-six when apointed, a onetime academic all-American at Harvard who later played pro baketball in Australia. He had spent just three years with the CPS- and never in a job important enough to have his own secretary- before becoming its CEO. It didn't hurt that Duncan had grown up in Chicago. His father taught psychology at the University of Chicago; his mother ran an afterschool program for forty years, without pay, in a poor neighborhood. When Duncan was a boy, his afterschool playmates were the underpriveleged kids his mother cared for. So when he took over the public schools, his allegiance lay more with the schoolchildren and their families than with the teachers and their union.

The best way to get ride of cheating teachers, Duncan had decided, was to readminister the standardized exam. He only had the resources to retest 120 classrooms, however, so he asked the creators of the cheating algorithm to help choose which classrooms to test.

How could those 120 retests be used most efficiently? It migh have seemed sensible to retest only the classrooms that likely had a cheating teacher. But even if their retest scores were lower, the teachers could argue that the students did worse merely because they were told that the scores wouldn't count in their official record- which, in fact, all retested students would be told. To make the retest results convincing, some non-cheaters were needed as a control group. The best control group? The classrooms shown by the algorithm to have the best teacher, in which big gains were thought to have been legitimately attained. If those classrooms held their gains while the classrooms with suspected cheater lost ground, the cheating teacheters could hardly argue that their students did worse only because the scores wouldn't count.

So a blend was settled upon. More than half of the 120 retested classrooms were those suspected of having a cheating teacher. The remainder were divided between the supposedly excellent teachers (high scores but no suspicious answer patters) and, as a further control, classrooms with mediocre scores and no suspicious answers.

The retest was given a few weeks after the original exam. The children were not told the reason for the retest. Neither were the teachers. But they may have gotten the idea when it was announced that CPS officials, not the teachers, would administer the test. The teachers were asked to stay in the classroom with the students, but they would not be allowed to even touch the answer sheets.

The results were as compelling as the cheating algorithm had predicted. In the classrooms chosen as controls, where no cheating was suspected, scores stayed about the same or even rose. In contrast, the students with the teachers identified as cheaters scored far worse, by an average of more than a full grade level.

As a result, the Chicago Public School system began to fire its cheating teachers. The evidence was only strong enough to get ride of a dozen of them, but the many other cheaters had been duly warned. The final outcome of the Chicago study is further testament to the power of incentives: the following year, cheating by teachers fell more than 30 percent.

Real-Estate Agents... Beneficial?

Consider a transaction that wouldn't seem, on the surface, to create much fear: selling your house. What's so scary about that? Aside from the fact that selling a house is typically the largest financial transaction in your life, and that you probably have scant experience in real estate, and that you may have an enormous emotional attachment to your house, there are at least two pressing fears: that you will sell the house for far less than it is worth and that you will not be able to sell it at all.

In the first case, you fear setting the price too low; in the second, you fear setting the price too high. It is the job of your real-estate agent, of course, to find the golden mean. She is the one with all the information: the inventory of similar houses, the recent sales trends, the tremors of the mortgage market, perhaps even a lead on an interested buy. You feel fortunate to have such a knowledgeable expert as an ally in this most confounding enterprise. 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?- "maximize the house's value." She got you top dollar, right?

Right?

A real-estate agent is a different breed of expert than a criminologist, 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 they want for the best price.

Right?

It would be lovely to think so. But experts are humans, 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.

It is one thing to muse about experts' abusing their position and another to prove it. The best way to do so would be to measure how an expert treats you versus how he performs the same service for himself. Unfortunately a surgeon doesn't operate on himself. Nor is his medical file a matter of public record; neither is an auto mechanic's repair log for his own car.

Real-estate sales, however, ARE a matter of public record. And real-estate agents often do sell their own homes. A recent set of data covering the sale of a nearly 100.000 houses in suburban Chicago shows that more than 3,000 of those houses were owned by the agents themselves.

Before plunging into the data, it helps to ask a question: what is the real-estate agent's incentive when she is selling her own home? Simple: to make the best deal possible. Presumably this is also your incentive when you are selling your home. And so your incentive and the real-estate agent's incentive would seem to be nicely aligned. Her commision, after all, is based on the sale price.

But as incentives go, commissions are tricky. First of all, a 6 percent real-estate commision is typically split between the seller's agent and the buyer's. Each agent then kicks back half of her take to the agency. Which means that only 1.5 percent of the purchase price goes directly into your agent's pocket.

So on the sale of your $300,000 house, her personal take of the $18,000 commission is $4.500. Still not bad, you say. But what if the house was actually worth more than $300,000? What if, with a little more effort and patience and a few more newspaper ads, she could have sold it for $310,000? After the commission, that puts an additional $9,400 in your pocket. But the agent's additional share- her personal 1.5 percent of the extra $10,000- is a mere $150. If you earn $9,400 while she earns only $150, maybe your incentives aren't aligned after all. (Especially when she's the one paying for the ads and doing all the work.) Is the agent willing to put out all that extra time, money, and energy for just $150?

There's one way to find out: measure the difference between the sales data for houses that belong to real-estate agents themselves and the houses the sold on behalf of clients. Using the data from the sales of those 100,000 Chicago homes, and controlling for any number of variables- location, age and quality of the house, aesthetics, and so on- it turns out that a real-estate agent keeps her own home on the market an average of ten days longer and sells it for an extra 3-plus percent, or $10,000 on a $300,000 house. When she sells her own house, an agent hold out for the best offer; when she sells yours, she pushes you to take the first decent offer that comes along. Like a stockbroker churning commisions, she wants to make deals and make them fast. Why not? Her share of a better off- $150- is too puny an incentive to encourage her to do otherwise.

This can be tricky. The agent does not want to come right out and call you a fool. So she merely implies it- perhaps by telling you about the much bigger, nicer, newer house down the bloc that has sat unsold for six months. Here is the agent's main weapon: the conversion of information into fear. Consider this true story, told by John Donahue, a law professor who in 2001 was teaching at Stanford University: "I was just about to buy a house on the Stanford campus," he recalls, "and the seller's agent kept telling me what a good deal I was getting because the market was about to zoom. As soon as I signed the purchase contract, he asked me if I would need an agent to sell my previous Stanford house. I told him that I would probably try to sell without an agent, and he replied, 'John, that might work under normal conditions, but with the market tanking now, you really need the help of a broker.' "

Within five minutes, a zooming market had tanked. Such are the marvels that can be conjured by an agent in search of the next deal.

Consider now another true story of a rea-estate agent's information abuse. The take involves C., a close friend of mine. C. wanted to buy a house that was listed as $469,000. He was prepared to offer $450,000 but he first called the seller's agent and asked her to name the lowest price that she thought the homeowner might accept. The agent promptly scolded C. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself," she said. "That is clearly a violation of real-estate eithcs."

C. apologized. The conversation turned to other, more mundane issues. After ten minutes, as the conversation was ending, the agent told C., "Let me say one last thing. My client is willing to sell his house for a lot less than you might think."

Based on this conversation, C. then offered $425,000 for the house instead of the $450,000 he had planned to offer. In the end, the seller accepted $430,000. Thanks to HIS OWN AGENT'S intervention, the seller lost at least $20,000. The agent, meanwhile, only lost $300- a small price to pay to ensure that she would quickly and easily lock up the sale, which netted her a commission of $6,450.

So a big part of a real-estate agent's job, it would seem, is to persuade the homeowner to sell for less than he would like while at the same time letting potential buyers know that a house can be bought for less than its listing price. To be sure, there are more subtle means of doing so than coming right out and telling the buyer to bid low. The study of real-estate agents above also includes data that reveals how agents convey information through the for-sale ads they write. A phrase like "well maintained," for instance, means that a house is old but not quite falling down. A savvy buyer will know this (or find out for himself once he sees the house), but to the sixty-five-year-old retiree who is selling the house, "well maintained" might sound like a compliment, which is just what the agent intends.

An analysis of the language used in real-estate ads shows that certain worlds are powerfully correlated with the final sale price of a house. This doesn't necessarily mean that labeling a house "well maintained" CAUSES it to sell for less than an equivalent house. It does, however, indicate that when a real-estate agent labels a house "well maintained," she is subtly encouraging a buyer to bid low.

Listed below are ten terms commonly used in real-estate ads. Five of them have a srtong positive correlation to the ultimate sales price, and five have a strong negative correlation. Guess which are which.

Ten Common Real-Estate Ad Terms

Fantastic
Granite
Spacious
State-of-the-Art
!
Corian
Charming
Maple
Great Neighborhood
Gourmet

A "fantastic" house is surely fantastic enough to warrant a high price, isn't it? What about a "charming" and "spacious" house in a "great neighborhood!"? No, no, no, and no. Here's the breakdown:

Five Terms Correlated to a Higher Sales Price

Granite
State-of-the-Art
Corian
Maple
Gourmet

Five Terms Correlated to a Lower Sales Price

Fantastic
Spacious
!
Charming
Great Neighborhood

Three of the five terms correlated with a higher sales price are physical descriptions of the house itself: granite, Corian, and maple. A information goes, such terms are specific and straightforward- and therefore pretty useful. If you like granite, you might like the house; but even if you don't, "granite" creatingly doesn't connote a fixer-upper. Nor does "gourmet" or "state-of-the-art." both of which seem to tell a buyer that a house is, on some level, truly fantastic.

"Fantastic," meanwhile, is a dangerously ambiguous adjective, as is "charming." Both these words seem to be real-estate agent code for a house that doesn't have many specific attributes worth describing. "Spacious" homes, meanwhile, are often decrepit or impractical. "Great neighborhood" signals a buyer that, well, THIS house isn't very nice but others nearby may be. And an exclamation point in a real-estate ad is bad news for sure, a bid to paper over real shortcomings with false enthusiasm.

If you study the words in the ad for a real-estate agent's OWN home, you see that she indeed emphasizes descriptive terms (especially "new," "granite," "maple," and "move-in condition") and avoids empty adjectives (including "wonderful," "immaculate," and the telltale "!"). Then she patiently waits for the best buyer to come along. She might tell this buyer about a house nearby that just sold for $25,000 ABOVE the asking price, or another house that is currently the subject of a bidding war. She is careful to exercise every advantage of the information asymmetry she enjoys.

But like most other professions, the real-estate agent has also seen her advantage eroded by the Internet. After all, anyone selling a home can now get online and gether her own information about sales trends and housing inventory and mortgage rates. The information has been set loose. And recent data show the results. Real-estate agents still get a higher price for their own homes than comparable homes owned by their clients, but since the proliferation of real-estate websites, the gap between the two prices has shrunk by a third... More on the Internet later...

Politics and Money... Hmm...

Of all the truisms about politics, one is held to be truer than the rest: money buys elections. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Bloomberg, Jon Corzine- these are but a few recent, dramatic examples of the truism at work. (Disregard for a moment the contrary examples of Howard Dean, Steve Forbes, Michael Huffington, and especially Thomas Golisano, who over the course of three gubernational elections in New York spent over $93 million of his own money and won 4 percent, 8 percent, and 14 percent, respectively, of the vote.) Most people would agree that money has an undue influence on elections and that far too much money is spent on political campaigns.

Indeed, election data show it is true that the candidate who spends more money in a campaign usually wins. But is money the cause of the victory?

It might seem logical to think so, much as it might have seemed logical that booming 1990s economy helped reduce crime. But just because two things are correlated does not mean that one causes the other. A correlation simply means that a relationship exists between two factors- let's call them X and Y- but it tells you nothing about the direction of that relationship. It's possible that X causes Y; it's also possible that Y causes X; and it may be that X and Y are both being caused by some other factor; Z.

Thank about this correlation: cities with a lot of murders also tend to have a lot of police officers. Consider now the police/murder correlation in a pair of real cities. Denver and Washington, D.C., have about the same population- but Washington has nearly three times as many police as Denver, and it also has eight times the number of murders. Unless you have more information, however, it's hard to say what's causing what. Someone who didn't know better might contemplate these figures and conclude that it is all those extra police in Washington who are causing the extra murders. Such wayward thinking, which has a long history, generally provokes a wayward response. Consider the folktale of the czar who learned that the most disease-ridden province in his empire was also the province with the most doctors. His solution? He promtly ordered all the doctors shot dead.

Now, returning to the issue of campaign spending: in order to figure out the relationship between money and elctions, it helps to consider the incentives at play in campaign finance. Let's say you are the kind of person who might contribute $1,000 to a candidate. Chances are you'll give the money in one of two situations: a close race, in which you think the money will influence the outcome; or a campaign in which one candidate is a sure winner and you would like to bask in reflected glory or receive some future in-kind consideration. The one candidate you won't contribute to is a sure loser. (Just ask any presidential hopeful who bombs in Iowa and New Hampshire.) So front-runners and incumbents raise a lot more money than long shots. And what about spending that money? Incumbents and front-runners obviously have more cash, but they only spend a lot of it when they stand a legitimate chance of losing; otherwise, why dip into a war chest that might be more useful later on, when a more formidable opponent appears?

Now picture two candidates, one intrinsically appealing and the other not so. The appealing candidate raises much more money and wins easily. But was it the money that won him the votes, or was it his appeal that won the votes AND the money?

That's a crucial question but a very hard one to answer. Voter appeal, after all, isn't easy to quantify. How can it be measured?

It can't, really- except in one special case. The key is to measure a candidate against... himself. That is, Candidate A today is likely to be similar to Candidate A two or four years hence. The same could be said for Candidate B. If only Candidate A ran against Candidate B in two consecutive elections but in each case spent different amounts of money. Then, with the candidates' appeal more or less constant, we could measure the money's impact.

As it turns out, the same two candidates run against each other in consecutive elections all the time- indeed, in nearly a thousand U.S. congressional races since 1972. What do the numbers have to say about such cases?

Here's the surprise: the amount of money spent by the candidates hardly matters at all. A winning candidate can cut his spending in half and lose only 1 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, a losing candidate who doubles his spending can expect to shift the vote in his favor by only that same 1 percent. What really matters for a political candidate is NOT how much money you spend; what matters is who you are. Some politicians are inherently attractive to voters and others simply aren't, and no amount of money can do much about it. (Messrs. Dean, Forbes, Huffington, and Golisano already know this, of course.)

And what about the other half of the election truism- that the amount of money spent on campaign finance is obscenely huge? In a typical election period that includes campaigns for the presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, about $1 billion is spent per year- which sounds like a lot of money, unless you care to measure it against something seemingly less important than democratic elections.

It is the same amount, for instance, that Americans spend every year on chewing gum.

Where have all the criminals gone?

This is long, but worth your time, I think. Read it all the way through. I believe you'll be surprised at the end.

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 common place. 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. "The next crime wave will get so bad," he said, "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. "We know we've got about six years to turn this juvenile crime thing around," Clinton said, "or our county 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 attritubted 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 jounalists' 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, she had given birth and put the child up for adoption. (Years later she would renounce her allegiance to legalied abortion and become a pro-life activist. - that's for Michael)

So how did Roe vs. 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. Surprising, huh? 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 vs. Wake- 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 vs. 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.

In the late 1960s, several states began to allow abortion under extreme circumstances: rape, incest, or danger to the mother. By 1970 five states had made abortion legal and broadly available: NY, CA, WA, AL, and HI. During the Roe vs. Wade trial, abortion was legalized throughout the country with the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling by the majority opinion, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, specifically to the would-be mother's predicament:

"The detriment that the State would impose upon the pregnant woman by denying this choice altogether is apparent... Maternity, or additional offspring, may force upon the woman a distressful life and future. Psychological harm may be imminent. Mental and physical health my be taxed by child care. There is also the distress, for all concerned, associated with the unwanted child, and there is the problem of bringing a child into a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it."

The Supreme Court gave choice to what mothers had long known: when a woman does not want to have a child, she usually has good reason. She may be unmarried or in a bad marriage. She may consider herself too poor to raise a child. She may think her life is too unstable or unhappy, or she may think that her drinking or drug use will damage the baby's health. She may believe that she is too young or hasn't yet recieved enough education. She may want a child badly, but in a few years, not now. For any of a hundred reasons, she may feel that she cannont provide a home environment that is conducive to raising a healthy and productive child.

Before Roe vs. Wade, it was predominantly the daughters of middle or upper-class families who could arrange and afford a safe illegal abortion. Now, instead of an illegal procedure that might cost $500, any woman could easily obtain an abortion, often less than $100.

What sort of woman was most likely to take advantage of Roe vs. Wade? Very often she was unmarried or in her teens or poor, and sometimes all three. What sort of future might her child have had? One study has shown that the typical child who went unborn in the earliest of legalized abortion would have been 50 percent more likely thatn average to live in poverty; he would have also been 60 percent more likely to grow up with just one parent. These two factors- childhood poverty and a single-parent household- are among the strongest predictors that a child will have a criminal future. Growing up in a single-parent home roughly doubles a child's propensity to commit crime. So does having a teenage mother. Another study has shown that low maternal education is the single most powerful factor leading to criminality.

In other words, the very factors that drove millions of American women to have an abortion also seemed to predict that their children, had they been born, would have led unhappy and possibly criminal lives.

To be sure, the legalization of abortion in the U.S. had myriad consequences. Infanticide fell dramatically. So did shotgun marriages, as well as the number of babies up for adoption (which has led to the boom in the adoption of forieign babies.) Conceptions rose by nearly 30 percent, but births actually fell by 6 percent, indicating that many women were using abortion as a method of birth control, a crude and drastic sort of insurance policy.

Perhaps the most dramatic effect of legalized abortion, however, 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 vs. 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 is missing, of course, were the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals. And the crime rate continued to fall as an entire genereation 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 casual.

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 casuality to things we can touch or feel, not some distance 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 a battlefield. But we too embrace faulty causes, usually at the urging of an expert proclaiming a truth in which he or she has a vested interest.

How, then can we tell if the abortion-crime link is a case of causuality 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. Those early-legalizing states saw crime begin to fall by 13 percent compared to the other states between 1988 and 1994. Their murder rates fell 23 perccent more than those of the other states between 1994 and 1997.

But what if the early legalizers simply got lucky? What else would we look for to relate abortion and crime?

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 1970s experienced the greatest crime drops in the 1990s, while states with low abortion rates experienced smaller crime drops. In the states with high abortion rates, the entire decline in crime was among the post-Roe cohort as opposed to older criminals. Also, studies of Australia and Canada have since established a similar link between legalized abortion and crime.

To discover that abortion was one of the greatest crime-lowering factors in American history is, needless to say, jarring. It feels less Darwinian than Swiftian; it calls to mind a long ago dart attributed to G. K. Chesterton: when there aren't enough hats to go around, the problem isn't solved by lopping off some heads. The crime drop was, in the language of economists, an "unintended benefit" of legalized abortion. But one need not oppose abortion on moral or religious grounds to feel shaken by the notion of a private sadness being converted into public good.

Indeed, there are plenty of people who consider abortion itself to be a violent crime. One legal scholar called legalized abortion worse than either slavery (since it routinely involves death) or the Holocaust (since the number of post- Roe abortions in the U.S., roughly thirty-seven million as of 2004, outnumber the six million Jews killed in Europe.)

Now, for the sake of argument, let's ask an outrageous question: what is the relative value between a fetus and a newborn? If faced with the Solomonic task of sacrificing the life of one newborn for an indeterminate number of fetuses, what number might you choose? This is nothing but a thought exercise- obviously there is no right answer- but it may help to clarify the impact of abortion on crime.

For a person who is either resolutely pro-life or resolutely pro-choice, this is a simple calculation. The first, believing that life begins at conception, would likely consider the value of a newborn versus the value of a fetus to be 1:1. The second person, believing that a woman's right to an abortion trumps any other factor, would likely argue that no number of fetuses can equal even one newborn.

But let's consider a third person. (If you identify strongly with either person number one or person number two, the following might strike you as offensive, and you may want to skip this paragraph and the next.) The third person does not believe that a fetus is the 1:1 equivalent of a newborn, yet neither does he believe that a fetus has no relative value. Let's say that he is forced, for the sake of argument, to affix a relative value, and he decided that 1 newborn is worth 100 fetuses.

There are roughly 1.5 million abortions in the U.S. every year. For a person who believes that 1 newborn is worth 100 fetuses, those 1.5 million abortions would translate- dividing 1.5 million by 100- into the equivalent of a loss of 15,000 human lives. Fifteen thousand lives: that happens to be about the same number of people who die in homicides in the U.S. every year. And it is far more than the number of homicides eliminated each year due to legalized abortion. So even for someone who considers a fetus to be worth only one-hundreth of a human being, the trade-off between higher abortion and lower crime is, from a few's opinions, terribly inefficient.

What the link between abortion and crime does say is this: when the government gives a woman the opportunity to make her own decision about abortion, she generally does a good job of figuring out if she is in a position to raise the baby well. If she decides she can't, she often chooses the abortion.

***For the record, this is not meant to come off as offensive to anyone. It is simply history, statistics, and a twist on thinking put together to form a potential argument. I am 100 percent pro-life, but enjoy looking at the hidden side of certain issues. This is also an idea for a paper I'm writing for one of my classes.

The Sacred Realm

Yet, another one about art... obviously I'm a little too much into it...

Who made the universe? How did life begin, and what is its purpose? What happens to us after we die? For answers to these and other fundamental questions, people throughout history have turned to a world we cannot see except through faith, the sacred realm of the Spirit. Gods and goddesses, spirits of ancestors, spirits of nature, one God and one alone- each society has formed its own view of the sacred realm and how it interacts with our own. Some forms of faith have disappeared into history, others have remained small and local, while still others such as Christianity and Islam have been major regions that draw believers from all over the world. From earliest times art has played an important role in our relationship to the sacred, helping us to envision it, to honor it, and to communicate with it.

Many works of architecture have been created to provide settings for rituals of worship and prayer, rituals that formalize contact between the earthly and divine realms. One such work is the small marvel known as the Sainte-Chapelle, or holy chapel. Located in Paris, the chapel was commissioned in 1239 by the French king Louis IX to house an important collection of relics that he had just acquired, relics he believed to include pieces of the True Cross, the Crown of Thorns, and other instruments of Christ's Passion. The king's architects created a soaring vertical space whose walls seem to be made of stained glass. It is said that light passing through the glass creates a dazzling effect, transforming the interior into a radiant, otherwordly space in which the glory of heaven seems close at hand.



The Sainte-Chapelle is a relatively intimate space, for it was intended as a private chapel for the king and his court. In contrast, the Great Mosque at Cordoba, Spain, was built to serve the needs of an entire community. Begun during the 8th century, the Great Mosque at Cordoba grew to be the largest place of prayer in western Islam. The interior of the prayer hall is a vast horizontal space measured out by a virtual forest of columns. Daylight enters through doorways placed around the perimeter of the hall. Filtered through the myriad columns and arches, it creates a complex play of shadows that make the extent and shape of the interior hard to grasp. Alternating red and white sections break up the visual continuity of the arch forms. Oil lamps hanging in front of the focal point of worship would have created still more shadows.



In both the Saint-Chapelle and the Great Mosque at Cordoba architects strove to create a place where worshipers might approach the sacred realm. The builders of the Sainte-Chapelle envisioned a radiant vertical space transformed by colored light, while the architects of the Great Mosque at Cordoba envisioned a disorienting horizontal space fractured by columns and shadows.

The sacred realm cannot be seen with human eyes, yet artists through out the ages have been asked to create images of gods, goddesses, angels, demons, and all manner of spirit beings. Religious images may serve to focus the thoughts of the faithful by giving concrete form to abstract ideas. Often, however, their role has been more complex and mysterious. For example, in some cultures images have been understood as a sort of conduit through which sacred power flows; in others they serve as a dwelling place for a diety, who is called upon through ritual to take up residence within.

The last image is also for a religous purpose. This Buddist image was made in Tibet. The painting portrays Ratnasambhava, one of the Five Transcendent Buddhas, seated in a pose of meditation on a stylized lotus throne. His right hand makes the gesture of bestowing vows, his left, the gesture of meditation. Unlike other Buddhas, the Five Transcendent Buddhas are typically portrayed in the bejeweled garb of Indian princes. Arranged around Ratnasambhava are bodhisattvas, also in princely attire. Bodhisattvas are enlightened beings who have deterred their ultimate goal of nirvana (freedom from the cycle of birth, death and rebirth- in order to help others attain that goal). All wear halos signifying their holiness. The buddha, being the most important of the personages shwon, dominates the painting as the largest figure. He faces straight front, in a pose of tranquility, while the others around him stand or sit in relaxed postures. It is a safe assumption to say that this artist independently found a format that satisfied his pictorial needs. (I couldn't find a picture of this on the internet, but you can look it up if you just absolutely have to.)

The three different works I have shown are all from their own separate, particular religion. Whether it be Islam, Christianity, or Buddhism, they are all special in their own way. Each show the beliefs of their cultures and I find it very interesting how different cultures vary so across and through our world. Some people of the Christian faith may find it offensive to see Islamic and Buddist works as something of value, but it's through art that we are able to visualize and appreciate other cultures in the world. I would hate to grow old and not see, learn, or appreciate all the different ways people worship. I despise close-mindedness...

Open Your Eyes...

Our simplest words are often the deepest in meaning: kiss, flight, dream, love, death. Most people spend their entire lives seraching for words like these to define who they truly are internally. Often times people turn to various types of Arts for guidance: visual arts, dance, literature, language, music, poetry, and performing arts are a few examples.

I have recently began my journey through Belmont University as an undeclared major, so I am just starting to get "in the swing of things". I am already two weeks into classes, living in the dorms, meeting new people, and having a wonderful time in Nashville. I knew Nashville was known as a city where many cultures unite, but I never thought I would get an up-close and personal encounter with this issue like I have over the past few weeks. I have grown up around various cultures my whole life, but to be surrounded by numerous cultures in the same place at the same time is a little nerve-racking, quite frankly. I see myself as a fairly open-minded person, yet lately I've been a little annoyed. So... I have lately turned to a new way of "healing" my open-mindedness: Art.

Since I am undecided on my future career path, I have decided to take as many pre-requisite courses (that would truly count) as possible. Of these courses I came up with an art class as just a "wild card". However, this art class isn't just your typical drawing, sculpting, painting class, but a class to teach you how to passionately appreciate art for everything that it is. I have never been one to honestly seek the meaning and feelings that come from art, so going into this I was a tad worried and panicked.

Myself, like most others, find art in the simplest forms: Very likely the walls of your home are decorated with posters, photographs, or even paintings you chose because you find them beautiful or meaningful. Walking around your community or neighborhood you probably pass by buildings that were designed for visual appeal as well as to serve practical ends. If you ever pause for a moment just to look at one of them, to take pleasure, for example, in it's silhouette against the sky, you have made the architect's work live for a moment by appreciating an effect that he or she prepared for you. This aesthetic experience is the branch of philosophy concerned with feelings aroused in us by sensory familiarity- such as sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. This concerns itself with our response to the natural world and to the worlds we make, especially the world of art. The impulse to make and respond to art appears to be deeply ingrained in us like to the ability to learn language, part of what sets us apart as humans. Our aptitude to make images is extremely unique. We do it so naturally and so constantly that we take it for granted. We make them with our hands, and we make them with our minds. Lying out on the grass, for example, you may amuse yourself by finding images in the shifting clouds... now a lion... now an old woman. Are the images really there? We know that a cloud is just a cloud, yet the image is certainly there, because we see it.

One reason for difference in perception is the immense amount of detail available for our attention at any given moment. To navigate efficiently through daily life, we practice selective perception, focusing on the visual information we need for the task at hand and relegating everything else to the background. But other factors are in play as well. Our mood influences what we notice and how we interpret it, as does the whole of our prior experience- the culture we grew up in, relationships we have had, places we have seen, knowledge we have accumulated, seasons that have come and gone, how beauty and sadness were intertwinced, the ceremonies that marked life's passing, the idea of one realm opening onto another, and the fragility of things.

One of my favorite pieces of art is Vincent van Gogh's "The Starry Night". As most of us know, van Gogh was a painfully distorted, tormented, intensely private, introspective, erratic, and impulsive man who had the self-discipline to construct an enormous body of work in a career that lasted only a decade. Not until the age of twenty-seven did he begin to take a serious interest in art, not knowing he had but ten years to live. Ironically enough, most of the work we admire so much was done in the last two and a half years of his life.

In "The Starry Night", Vincent van Gogh labored to express his personal feelings as he stood on the outskirts of a small village in France and looked up at the night sky. Van Gogh had become intrigued by the belief that people journeyed to a star after their death and that there they continued their lives. "Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen," he wrote in a letter, "we take death to reach a star." Seen through the prism of this idea, the night landscape inspired in him a vision of great intensity. Surrounded by halos of radiating light, the stars have an exaggerated, urgent presence, as though each one were a billiant sun. A great wave or whirlpool rolls across the sky- a cloud, perhaps, or some kind of cosmic energy. The landcape, too, seems to roll on in waves like an ocean. A tree in the foreground writhes upward toward the stars as though answering their call. In the distance, a church spire points upward as well. Everything is in turbulent motion. Nature seems alive, communicating in it's own language while the village sleeps.

This type of artwork is what refreshes and awakens our vision to enable us to see the world in new ways. Habit dulls our senses. What we see everyday we no longer marvel at, because it has become familiar. Through art, we can see the world through someone else's eyes and recover the intensity of looking for the first time. By doing this we may find ourselves more attentive to the world around us, which is stranger, more mysterious, more various, and more beautiful than we usually realize. In the end, what we see in the everyday life around us depends on what we bring to it, and if we apprach the task sincerely, there are no wrong answers.