We’ve started naming our kids like products—and our products like kids. Parents approach baby naming a lot like product branding. Whereas in the past, names were typically chosen with an eye toward personal significance (a baby was named after a grandparent, say), today’s parents increasingly focus on the public image projected by the name.

Now, as companies introduce technologies that function like people—Siri being the most extreme example to date—they suddenly find themselves with the same kinds of naming challenges as today’s parents-to-be. They have to consider the complex web of cultural meanings that each name carries. They have to ask, as parents do, “What kind of person are we creating, and what name represents that?”

It’s no coincidence, then, that brand names and baby names have begun to converge, as in…

Stephanie King of the University of St Andrews, UK, and colleagues monitored 179 pairs of wild bottlenose dolphins off the Florida coast between 1988 and 2004. Of these, 10 were seen copying each other’s signature whistles, which the dolphins make to identify themselves to each other.

The behavior has never been documented before, and was only seen in pairs composed of a mother and her calf or adults who would normally move around and hunt together.

The copied whistles changed frequency in the same way as real signature whistles, but either started from a higher frequency or didn’t last as long, suggesting Dave was not merely imitating Alan.

Naming your new bundle of joy Lucifer has been effectively banned by New Zealand’s names registrar after three parents had the odd request knocked back.

The country’s Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages has been cracking down on mothers and fathers getting too creative with their children’s names, ruling out punctuation marks such as . (Full Stop), * (Asterisk) and / (presumably ”Slash”).

The list of 102 names rejected in the past two years includes Baron, Bishop, Duke, General, Judge, Justice, King, Knight and Mr, all deemed too similar to titles.

Messiah was also turned down, as was 89, and the single letters, C, D, I and T, although Q and J were accepted after being queried.

It’s a new hard line for the agency that made headlines in 2008 when it…

Alexandra will get an A in class but Amber won’t. At least, that’s what their peers expect, according to a small new study of the meanings encoded in people’s names.

“The name you give your kid is sort of a proxy for a whole bunch of things in our culture,” study researcher John Waggoner of Bloomberg University of Pennsylvania told LiveScience. Names have been linked to many life choices, including what kind of work people do and how they donate to charity.

Previous studies have shown that what people name their children varies by their socioeconomic status and education level. Waggoner and his colleagues wondered if people’s names affect what others expect of them.

What’s in a name? Apparently, more than you’d expect. Perhaps it’ll help you land that next job or rise to the top of your company.