For every smooth complex projective variety W of dimension d and nonnegative Kodaira dimension, we show the existence of a universal constant m depending only on d and two natural invariants of the very general fibres of an Iitaka fibration of W such that the pluricanonical system |mK_W| defines an Iitaka fibration. This is a consequence of a more general result on polarized adjoint divisors. In order to prove these results we develop a generalized theory of pairs, singularities, log canonical thresholds, adjunction, etc.

Varyingcoefficient linear models arise from multivariate nonparametric regression, nonlinear time series modelling and forecasting, functional data analysis, longitudinal data analysis and others. It has been a common practice to assume that the varying coefficients are functions of a given variable, which is often called an <i>index</i>. To enlarge the modelling capacity substantially, this paper explores a class of varyingcoefficient linear models in which the index is unknown and is estimated as a linear combination of regressors and/or other variables. We search for the index such that the derived varyingcoefficient model provides the least squares approximation to the underlying unknown multidimensional regression function. The search is implemented through a newly proposed hybrid backfitting algorithm. The core of the algorithm is the alternating iteration between estimating the index through a onestep scheme

Two measures of sensitivity to initial conditions in nonlinear time series are proposed. The notions give some insight into the relationship between the Fisher information in statistical estimation and initial-value sensitivity in dynamical systems. By using the locally polynomial regression, we develop nonparametric estimates for a conditional density function, its square root and its partial derivatives. The proposed procedures are innovative and of interests in their own right. They are also used to estimate the sensitive measures. The asymptotic normality of the proposed estimators have been proved. We also propose a simple and intuitively appealing method for choosing the bandwidths. Two simulated examples are used as illustrations.

This paper attempts to relate some ideas of Grothendieck in his Esquisse d'un programme and some of the recent results on 2-dimensional topology and geometry. Especially, we shall discuss the Teichmller theory, the mapping class groups, $ SL (2,\bold C) $ representation variety of surface groups, and Thurston's theory of measured laminations.

In this paper, we present a staggered discontinuous Galerkin method for the approximation of the incompressible NavierStokes equations. Our new method combines the advantages of discontinuous Galerkin methods and staggered meshes, and results in many good properties, namely local and global conservations, optimal convergence and superconvergence through the use of a local postprocessing technique. Another key feature is that our method provides a skew-symmetric discretization of the convection term, with the aim of giving a better conservation property compared with existing discretizations. We will present extensive numerical results, including Kovasznay flow, Taylor vortex flow, lid-driven cavity flow, parallel plate flow and channel expansion flow, to show the performance of the method.