Two Portrayals of the Moon-God Men

Includes bibliographical reference

A Syncretistic Statuette

"The name given to the fusion of various divinities in a polytheistic system is syncretism. Although the phenomenon has been overemphasized by many modern scholars who are used to thinking in terms of monotheism and therefore cannot bring themselves to think polytheistically, it remains a salient characteristic of late paganism, and one of the cults which it characterizes particularly is that of Sabazius. It is therefore welcome to have a monument which confirms a specific syncretism in the Sabazius cult."--First paragraph.Includes bibliographical reference

Six Plaques of the Danube-Rider Cult

Includes bibliographical reference

A Spoon for Hecate

Includes bibliographical reference

A Bronze Base from Syria

Includes bibliographical reference

A Group of Steles from Byzantium

Includes bibliographical reference

A Statuette of Attis and his Cult

Includes bibliographical reference

How could everyone have been so wrong? Forecasting the Great Depression with the railroads

Contemporary observers viewed the recession that began in the summer of 1929 as nothing extraordinary. Recent analyses have shown that the subsequent large deflation was econometrically forecastable, implying that a driving force in the depression was the high expected real interest rates faced by business. Using a neglected data set of forecasts by railroad shippers, we find that business was surprised by the magnitude of the great depression. We show that an ARIMA or Holt- Winters model of railroad shipments would have produced much smaller forecast errors than those indicated by the surveys. The depth and duration of the depression was beyond the experience of business, which appears to have believed that recovery would happen quickly as in previous recessions. This failure to anticipate the collapse of the economy suggests roles for both high real rates of interest and a debt deflation in the propagation of the depression

Rare Charm Decays in the Standard Model and Beyond

We perform a comprehensive study of a number of rare charm decays, incorporating the first evaluation of the QCD corrections to the short distance contributions, as well as examining the long range effects. For processes mediated by the $c\to u\ell^+\ell^-$ transitions, we show that sensitivity to short distance physics exists in kinematic regions away from the vector meson resonances that dominate the total rate. In particular, we find that $D\to\pi\ell^+\ell^-$ and $D\to\rho\ell^+\ell^-$ are sensitive to non-universal soft-breaking effects in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model with R-parity conservation. We separately study the sensitivity of these modes to R-parity violating effects and derive new bounds on R-parity violating couplings. We also obtain predictions for these decays within extensions of the Standard Model, including extensions of the Higgs, gauge and fermion sectors, as well as models of dynamical electroweak symmetry breaking.Comment: 45 pages, typos fixed, discussions adde