In this Note we prove that, under a weaker condition than the-lemma, the existence of balanced metrics is preserved under small deformations. This weaker condition is satisfied on the twistor space over a compact self-dual four manifold.

This is a continuation of our first paper in [WY16]. There are two purposes of this paper: One is to give a proof of the main result in [WY16] without going through the argument depending on numerical effectiveness. The other one is to provide a proof of our conjecture, mentioned in [TY], where the assumption of negative holomorphic sectional curvature is dropped to quasi-negative. We should note that a solution to our conjecture is also provided by Diverio-Trapani [DT]. Both proofs depend on our argument in [WY16]. But our argument here makes use of the argument given by the second author and Cheng in [CY75].

We prove that a pair (X, D) with X Fano and D a smooth anti-canonical divisor is K-unstable for negative angles, and K-semistable for zero angle.

We use adiabatic limits to study foliated manifolds. The Bott connection naturally shows up as the adiabatic limit of Levi-Civita connections. As an application, we then construct certain natural elliptic operators associated to the foliation and present a direct geometric proof of a vanshing theorem of Connes [Co], which extends the Lichnerowicz vanishing theorem [L] to foliated manifolds with spin leaves, for what we call almost Riemannian foliations. Several new vanishing theorems are also proved by using our method.

We study the rigidity of polyhedral surfaces using variational principles. The action functionals are derived from the cosine laws. The main focus of this paper is on the cosine law for a nontriangular region bounded by three possibly disjoint geodesics. Several of these cosine laws were first discovered and used by Fenchel and Nielsen. By studying the derivative of the cosine laws, we discover a uniform approach to several variational principles on polyhedral surfaces with or without boundary. As a consequence, the work of Penner, Bobenko and Springborn and Thurston on rigidity of polyhedral surfaces and circle patterns are extended to a very general context.