This chapter defines time inconsistency as the difference between the actual frequency of amendments and the one calculated on the basis of constitutional rigidity (Chapter 6). It proceeds to demonstrate that time inconsistency is proportional to the length of the constitution in all democracies. The reason is that “length” is correlated with “detail” (that is, the number of words per subject). This chapter provides empirical evidence that the length of constitutions is related to lower per capita income and higher corruption. These findings are consistent with the empirical research in US states that demonstrate that length of constitutions has a negative impact on GDP per capita, a positive one on unemployment, a positive one on Gini coefficients (inequalities), and a negative one on policy innovativeness (Brown 2021).

We consider solutions that can be obtained via dimensional reduction. We first consider the domain wall, both the perturbative nonrelativistic solution and the exact relativistic solution, first directly in four dimensions, and then show how it can be described via dimensional reduction. Then we consider the cosmic string solution, first directly in four dimensions, and then via dimensional reduction, and finally deriving it at weak field. Finally, we consider the BTZ black hole solution in 2+1 dimensions, deriving it directly, and then show how the BTZ solution and AdS space are continuously related.

The History of Mary Prince was the first account of the life of a Black woman to be published in the United Kingdom. Part of the avalanche of print culture that accompanied the transatlantic abolitionist movement, it has in recent years become an increasingly central text within pedagogy and research on Black history and literature, thanks to its vivid testimonies of Prince’s thoughts and feelings about her gendered experience of Caribbean slavery. Embracing and celebrating a growing international scholarly and general interest in African diasporic voices, texts, histories, and literary traditions, this Companion weds contributions from Romanticists, Caribbeanists, and Americanists to showcase the diversity of disciplinary encounters that Prince’s narrative invites, as well as its rich and troubled contexts. The first published collection on a single slave narrative or author, the volume is not only an authoritative, highly focused resource for students but also a model for future research.

In Chapter 6 we present a general approach relying on the diffusion approximation to prove renewal theorems for Markov chains, so we consider Markov chains which may be approximated by a diffusion process. For a transient Markov chain with asymptotically zero drift, the average time spent by the chain in a unit interval is, roughly speaking, the reciprocal of the drift.

We apply a martingale-type technique and show that the asymptotic behaviour of the renewal measure depends heavily on the rate at which the drift vanishes. As in the last two chapters, two main cases are distinguished, either the drift of the chain decreases as 1/x or much more slowly than that. In contrast with the case of an asymptotically positive drift considered in Chapter 10, the case of vanishing drift is quite tricky to analyse since the Markov chain tends to infinity rather slowly.

Thyroid dysfunction and autoimmunity during pregnancy have been consistently associated with poor maternal and fetal outcomes. Treatment for overt hypo- and hyperthyroidism in pregnant women and women attempting pregnancy is therefore universally recommended. In women with subclinical hypothyroidism, levothyroxine treatment is thought to reduce pregnancy loss, preterm delivery and gestational hypertension although several large trials have failed to demonstrate an effect on child cognition and neurodevelopment. Levothyroxine treatment has also been shown to improve the outcome of fertility treatment in women with subclinical hypothyroidism. However there is currently insufficient evidence to recommend levothyroxine treatment in euthyroid women with thyroid auto-immunity attempting pregnancy as several high-quality randomized trials have failed to demonstrate a beneficial effect of levothyroxine treatment on life birth, miscarriage rate or the outcomes of assisted reproductive therapy.