Are some models better than others? Yes. But can we weight models by the probability that they are true? That is harder than it sounds. In this chapter we cover various methods for weighting the models in a multiverse and assess their strengths and weaknesses using a dataset on how air pollution near schools can affect student learning. Weighting models creates a tension between model selection and model robustness, and authors must be clear about how model weights change the distribution of results. We recommend uniform weights as a transparent default, and if further weighting is desired, either double lasso or influence weighting appears best for inference.

In 62 BCE, a young and politically ambitious Roman aristocrat, Publius Clodius, is said to have disguised himself as a women in order to infiltrate the rites of the Bona Dea, which it was sacrilege for men to observe. His purpose, according to his detractors, was to seduce the wife of Julius Caesar, the Pontifex Maximus, in whose house the ceremony was taking place. A man dressed as a woman, the profanation of religious rites, adultery with the wife of one of the leading men in Rome and the adulterer already notorious for his pernicious and disruptive political dealings – this incident, related or alluded to by numerous Roman authors, summed up the disorder of the final years of the republic. For Roman writers, adultery among the elite was a telling symptom of disease in the body politic.

Neurobiological theories draw on neurobiological evidence from fMRI but also plenty of other neuroscientific methods for theory development: On a fundamental level, neurobiological theories are neurobiological explanations about the nature of the brain-behavior link.

The cross-border movement of natural persons for the supply of services (’mode 4’) is the least utilised mode of service delivery of the WTO General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). Why mode 4 is trailing behind has much to do with states’ reluctance to cede sovereignty over borders, admissions, work authorization and skills recognition. Where states cooperate on mobility, they are increasingly using mode 4 in preferential trade agreements (PTAs). At the same time, bilateral labour migration agreements (BLMAs) are utilised, even if driven by a different ambition. In this chapter, we explore the advances on mode 4 made by PTAs and uncover why some have been more forthcoming in adding mode 4 GATS-plus or GATS-extra advances than others. Second, we develop a typology the features unseen in the other three modes of service supply. Third, several PTAs added mode 4-plus in recreational services, caregiving, and food and beverages, such that PTAs overlap with foreign worker recruitment through BLMAs. Finally, we look beyond mode 4 to other legal pathways for migrant workers and suggest --in light of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration--interpreting BLMAs to be mutually supportive with mode 4 pathways of PTAs.

Functional form assumptions are central ingredients of a model specification. Just as there are many possible control variables, there is also an abundance of estimation commands and strategies one could invoke, including ordinary least squares (OLS), logit, matching, and many more. How much do empirical results depend on the choice of functional form? In this chapter we demonstrate the functional form multiverse with two empirical applications: how job loss affects wellbeing in panel data and the effect of education on voting for Trump. We find in our cases that OLS and logit produce very similar results, but that matching estimators can be surprisingly unstable. We also reconsider an important many-analysts study and find that human researchers produce a much wider range of results than does the multiverse algorithm.

This chapter uses the histories of baseball (Ty Cobb vs. Babe Ruth) and presidential power rankings, and the reception history of Eleanor Roosevelt to unearth a sea change in greatness conversations. During the 1950s, America swapped Ty Cobb for Babe Ruth and Washington for FDR to signal a change in the value of greatness. Whereas Americans had valued greatness as a shorthand for changemaking, the postwar period witnessed a search for nostalgic heroes meant to confirm already-established ideals of this generation, later to be designated the “Greatest Generation.”

Chapter 3 examines the five most widespread decorative roofing elements in 3rd–1st century central Italy, which are referred to collectively as the “standard temple kit.” Each type is shown to derive from earlier models, suggesting a conscious act of archaizing in their use which likely relates to notions of antiquity and deeply rooted religious authority.

Unrighteousness in the Steward of Unrighteousness parable adheres to a business tycoon whose steward is forced to act cannily on his own behalf, a stratagem that in an ideal future world will no longer be necessary. Underlying are deceptive actions involving money that Joseph had his steward take against the brothers, which nonetheless resulted in reconciliation among Israel’s first family.

Introduction

In 1909, the Sino-Japanese poet Su Manshu painted an image of Cai Yan (Lady Wenji), a poetess of the late second century who had spent 12 years in captivity abroad before returning to the Han Empire, and sent it to his friend, the art collector Liu Jiping (also known as Liu San). Liu wrote a series of poems to appreciate Su's gift, including the following verses:

Why would a Chinese literatus at the turn of the twentieth century write a poem mentioning the Indian epic Mahabharata to match a seemingly unrelated painting?

Until well into the twentieth century, the name of the Mahabharata had been mostly unknown in East Asia, except for a few isolated references in Buddhist texts. Against the sheer preponderance of Buddhist thought in the intellectual flows between India and China, it might even have seemed futile to look for an East Asian reception of the Mahabharata. Yet, over the centuries, various elements related to the Mahabharata circulated between South Asia and East Asia and played significant roles within East Asian culture itself.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indian thought continued to play a major role in East Asia amidst intense contact between China, Japan, Europe, and India itself. In close interdependence with the notion of the ‘West’, the category of ‘Asia’ emerged in the Japanese and Chinese imaginary by the turn of the twentieth century, when intellectuals developed a globalized sense of their position in the world. India became a renewed object of study but, at the same time, also a ‘method’ to deal with the challenges posed by modernity. Interest in India and its role within ‘Asia’ was a significant element not only in understanding the geopolitical realities and ‘catching up’ with the ‘West,’ but also in the quest for a ‘world beyond the material and epistemological constraints’ posed by Western modernity. While Buddhism still played a crucial role as the connecting bond between the two macroregions of East Asia and South Asia, some intellectuals came to understand it in a wider framework that also encompassed other traditions such as that of the Mahabharata.