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In this paper we discuss the change in contact structures as their supporting open book decompositions have their binding components cabled. To facilitate this and applications we define the notion of a rational open book decomposition that generalizes the standard notion of open book decomposition and allows one to more easily study surgeries on transverse knots. As a corollary to our investigation we are able to show there are Stein fillable contact structures supported by open books whose monodromies cannot be written as a product of positive Dehn twists. We also exhibit several monoids in the mapping class group of a surface that have contact geometric significance.

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We embed polarised orbifolds with cyclic stabiliser groups into weighted projective space via a weighted form of Kodaira embedding. Dividing by the (non-reductive) automorphisms of weighted projective space then formally gives a moduli space of orbifolds. We show how to express this as a reductive quotient and so a GIT problem, thus defining a notion of stability for orbifolds. We then prove an orbifold version of Donaldson’s theorem: the existence of an orbifold K¨ahler metric of constant scalar curvature implies K-semistability. By extending the notion of slope stability to orbifolds, we therefore get an explicit obstruction to the existence of constant scalar curvature orbifold K¨ahler metrics. We describe the manifold applications of this orbifold result, and show how many previously known results (Troyanov, Ghigi-Koll´ar, Rollin-Singer, the AdSCFT Sasaki-Einstein obstructions of Gauntlett-Martelli-Sparks-Yau) fit into this framework.

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