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We describe a new family of representations of 1() in PU(2,1), where  is a hyperbolic Riemann surface with at least one deleted point. This family is obtained by a bending process associated to an ideal triangulation of . We give an explicit description of this family by describing a coordinates system in the spirit of shear coordinates on the Teichm¨uller space. We identify within this family new examples of discrete, faithful, and type-preserving representations of 1(). In turn, we obtain a 1-parameter family of embeddings of the Teichm¨uller space of  in the PU(2,1)-representation variety of 1(). These results generalise to arbitrary  the results obtained in [42] for the 1-punctured torus.

Motivated by results on the simplicial volume of locally symmetric spaces of finite volume, in this note, we observe that the simplicial volume of the moduli space Mg,n is equal to 0 if g  2; g = 1, n  3; or g = 0, n  6; and the orbifold simplicial volume of Mg,n is positive if g = 1, n = 0, 1; g = 0, n = 4. We also observe that the simplicial volume of the Deligne-Mumford compactification of Mg,n is equal to 0, and the simplicial volumes of the reductive Borel-Serre compactification of arithmetic locally symmetric spaces ..\X and the Baily-Borel compactification of Hermitian arithmetic locally symmetric spaces ..\X are also equal to 0 if the Q-rank of ..\X is at least 3 or if ..\X is irreducible and of Q-rank 2.

Using the degeneration formula for Donaldson-Thomas invariants [L-W,MNOP2], we proved formulae for blowing up a point, simple flops, and extremal transitions.

The authors proved in [5] that in a complete, connected, and simply connected Riemannian manifold, the volume of the intersection of two small geodesic balls depends only on the distance between the centers and the radii if and only if the space is harmonic. In this paper, we show that this proposition remains true, if the condition is restricted to balls of equal radii.