Let $D$ be a Dedekind scheme with the characteristic of all residue fields not equal to 2. To every tame cover $C\to D$ with only odd ramification we associate a second Stiefel-Whitney class in the second cohomology with mod 2 coefficients of a certain tame orbicurve $[D]$ associated to $D$ . This class is then related to the pull-back of the second Stiefel-Whitney class of the push-forward of the line bundle of half of the ramification divisor. This shows (indirectly) that our Stiefel-Whitney class is the pull-back of a sum of cohomology classes considered by Esnault, Kahn and Viehweg in ‘Coverings with odd ramification and Stiefel-Whitney classes’. Perhaps more importantly, in the case of a proper and smooth curve over an algebraically closed field, our Stiefel-Whitney class is shown to be the pull-back of an invariant considered by Serre in ‘Revêtements à ramification impaire et thêta-caractéristiques’, and in this case our arguments give a new proof of the main result of that article.

We study the coinduction functor on the category of FI-modules and its variants. Using the coinduction functor, we give new and simpler proofs of (generalizations of) various results on homological properties of FI-modules. We also prove that any finitely generated projective VI-module over a field of characteristic 0 is injective.

In this paper we study the singularities of holomorphic functions of bicomplex variables introduced by G. B. Price ($An Introduction to Multicomplex Spaces and Functions$, Dekker, New York,1991). In particular, we use computational algebra techniques to show that even in the case of one bicomplex variable, there cannot be compact singularities. The same techniques allow us to prove a duality theorem for such functions.