The myriad of ways prediction has been considered in the scientific literature in the past highlights the need for a clear and inclusive definition. It is essential to be conceptually clear about what predictions are, one simple reason being that this is needed to establish what experimental evidence can be considered relevant and what not. First, prediction must be defined in such a way that what is called prediction is clearly about the future; environmental input which is likely to be upcoming or encountered soon.

This means that phenomena and processes that are retrospective or retrodictive, that is, utilize information to explain the past, should not more or less arbitrarily be called prediction. Second, prediction must be defined in an inclusive way such that phenomena and approaches that are clearly about the future are not more or less arbitrarily excluded from the discussion. In consideration of these requirements, prediction in the present book is defined as the conscious or subconscious use of information from previous experiences for the conscious or subconscious processing of information about future states of the body and environment.

This chapter advocates a simple principle: Good analysis should be easier to publish than bad analysis. Multiverse methods promote transparency over asymmetric information and emphasize robustness, countering the fragility inherent in single-path analysis. In an era when the credibility of scientific results is often challenged, the use of multiverse analysis is crucial for bolstering both the credibility and persuasiveness of research findings.

This chapter focuses on the relationships among gender, party, recruitment, and political ambition. First, we focus on potential candidates’ partisan identity. The pool of female potential candidates – like the population of female elected officials – is dominated by Democrats. Yet we find that neither party affiliation nor partisan fervor affects interest in running for office. Still, political parties – through the recruitment process – play a critical role in the candidate emergence process. Here, our analysis highlights one of the book’s central findings: Women are significantly less likely than men to receive encouragement to run for office from party leaders, elected officials, and political activists. Despite the emergence of #MeToo, heightened public discourse about the need to elect more women, and efforts by women’s organizations to push back against Donald Trump, our results are not markedly different from twenty years earlier. The masculinized ethos that continues to shroud party organizations results in a smaller proportion of women than men recruited to enter the electoral arena.

Chapter 5 asks why new colonies turned so invariably to old-fashioned motifs and to the visual culture of their conquered enemies. This phenomenon is discussed in terms of the heterogenous makeup of colonial populations, which had no single visual culture to import, and is then related to broader issues of collective memory, identity formation, and the invention of tradition.

Syndicates in Bangladesh are felt in many ways. They are felt in the higher prices when the supply of goods is manipulated. They are seen in the shoddy quality of public infrastructure when contractors skim contracts and skip on inputs. They are felt in the hefty sums demanded for jobs in the public sector. They are felt in the violence and conflicts between rival political leaders and their followers when they compete for dominance. But perhaps most pressingly, they also felt in the relationships that people sustain to get by in everyday life. The core argument developed here has been that behind many of the diverse dependencies that people rely upon to get work, seek security, find opportunities and other resources, lie syndicates. Syndicates are the coercive control that a particular group or network exercises over a resource to their advantage. Many syndicates are embodied by individuals sustaining that coercive hold on a resource and mediating access to it. Many intermediaries are thus racketeers.

For some, the syndicates that carve up the lanes of Kawran Bazaar could be seen as somehow peripheral to life in the city, distant from where the real capital or authority lies. These dirty streets feel much like the city's other creases and crevices such as the bastis, transport terminals, parks or footpaths where the lower classes live and work. Similarly, when syndicates come to public light, we could easily get the impression that these are a scattered phenomenon, examples of particularly egregious politicians or officials. In drawing together odd combinations of actors such as the leader of an Awami League affiliate body and opaque lineman, as well as a very wide range of sectors, they seem idiosyncratic. Others might also characterise the politics we find here as that at the ‘margins’ of the state. Yet the story told here is that syndicates should be seen as fundamental to Bangladeshi politics. Though the labourers may be poor, and the streets may be dirty, there is nothing marginal about the politics we find here. This is the lifeblood of the nation's politics in microcosm. This is the core, the unstable bedrock on which politicians build and parties rest. Syndicates are not merely the whims of greedy people in power but serve to sustain the authority of political leaders.

Quantum theory provides another way to formalize uncertainty. Quantum probability theory can be used to model phenomena such as order effects which cannot be straightforwardly modeled within classical probability theory. Key concepts of quantum theory including superposition states, noncommutative operations, and entanglement provide new angles and explanations for some predictive phenomena.

Introduction

Rightly or not, the governments’ engagements with memory policies are often met with a shadow of suspicion. Victims’ associations, intellectuals, and activists from different parts of the world tend to warn their publics of possible abuses of memory and manipulations of the past made by political leaders. Argentina, with a dense history of mobilization around its dictatorial past, is no exception to this rule. During the administrations of Néstor Kirchner (2003–2007) and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007–2015), the discussion about the role played by the state in public remembrance was subject to much contention.

In this chapter, we focus on the way Kirchnerism engaged with the memory of the repression and forced disappearances that took place during the last military dictatorship (1976–1983). Our goal is to analyse Kirchnerist governments’ involvement in public remembrance by considering the main aspects of their narrative together with the political–institutional approach they unfolded towards memory.

In the Argentinian public debate, the discussion concerning Kirchnerist engagements with the past has so far been dominated by a dichotomous approach that swings from considering Kirchnerist uses of the past as illegitimate ‘appropriations’ to considering their engagement as a sort of automatic ‘enshrinement’ of the human rights movement's claims into the national state. We will argue that, instead, we should understand the dominant Kirchnerist memory frame in Argentina as an outcome of an ‘articulation process’ between the government and the human rights movement, formed by an ensemble of heterogeneous organizations that had historically led the struggle for memory and transitional justice in the country. As suggested by Laclau and Mouffe (1985), by ‘articulation’, we do not merely mean an alliance between two preformed entities, but rather a mutual constitution where both the Kirchnerist movement and the human rights organizations (HROs) were transformed in time. As we will argue, this articulation made it possible for memory and human rights to become an object of public policy in an unprecedented way for Argentinian democracy.

Following Laclau (2005a), we adopt a formal approach to populism. According to this perspective, a movement or government is not ‘populist’ because of its ideological contents but due to a specific logic of articulation of contents, whatever these may be.

Introduction

The Mahabharata and the Ramayana have significantly shaped South Asian norms of gender roles. The ideals transmitted through them are still often considered the proper mode of conduct by many actors and social groups, especially those influenced by Sanskritic varna–jati (the Indian caste system) norms. While the most popular female prototype among many actors is Sita from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata offers a number of exemplary characters as well. Not only Draupadi but also characters such as Damayanti and Savitri play an important role in shaping the myth of the ideal woman. The French philosopher Roland Barthes explains in his book Mythologies (1957) that myth is born out of history but disconnects from it and evolves into nature. As the content of the myth seems like an eternal truth, its motive appears invisible. The Mahabharata shaped an understanding of women and their role in society, which was accepted for centuries as the natural rule. The gendered basis of this discourse was rarely explicitly questioned until recent times.

This chapter begins by first tracing the origin of how mythological women became the ideal prototype in the nationalist discourse, which will be followed by a focus on M. K. Gandhi's politics regarding women. Traits which most of the epic female characters share are that they suffer silently and resist through loyalty and devotion – characteristics that modern reformers like Gandhi foregrounded in an attempt to mobilize women for the Indian nationalist cause. While his discourse elevated the status of women to a higher position, it came at a cost, and by fortifying the image of the ideal Indian woman, he put them in a gilded cage. The rest of the chapter will focus on feminist revision of myths, necessary to deconstruct the female prototype born out of the epics, based on the theoretical framework offered by Adrienne Rich's ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’ (1972) and Alicia Ostriker's ‘The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking’ (1982). For this, I will take into account several literary texts. Pratibha Ray's (b. 1943) Odia novel Yajnaseni (1984) and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's (b. 1956) novel The Palace of Illusions (2008) are two important landmarks in this paradigm shift.

DLT and cryptoassets are a digital solution to the perennial issue of how to establish a single source of truth. Because digital data entries can easily be altered or copied, we have relied on trusted third parties to keep a master copy of any digital asset registry – until DLT enabled digital equivalents to physical cash and bearer instruments. Instead of a trusted record keeper, DLT relies on a distributed network of nodes that each hold a copy of the ledger. The data are typically stored in a time-stamped sequence of blocks, i.e., a blockchain. Different types of consensus mechanisms exist to keep each copy of the ledger synchronised and to prevent malicious actors from altering the registered information. This technology is democratising the privilege of running a trusted asset registry, thus facilitating new business models in so-called decentralised finance (DeFi) which emulate conventional financial processes with software replacing middlemen, such as banks, depositories, and exchanges. This has resulted in so-called token offerings and more than 10,000 different cryptoassets worth more than USD 1 trillion in aggregate.

• Clinical symptoms and brain changes seen in substance use disorders have also been observed in particular behaviours, leading to the concept of ‘behavioural addiction’.

• Gambling disorder and gaming disorder are now classified by the World Health Organisation alongside substance use disorders

• In the future other behaviours, such as harmful use of internet pornography, may join gaming and gambling disorders.

• Like substance use disorders, behavioural addictions can lead to harms for the individual including worsening mental health, social function and academic performance.

• Relatives, friends and others can also suffer consequences of behavioural addictions such as financial loss (with gambling disorder) and deteriorating relationships.

• The evidence on how best to treat behavioural addiction are still building, but approaches used for substance use disorders are typically recommended.