Given a family of nodal curves, a semistable modification of it is another family made up of curves obtained by inserting chains of rational curves of any given length at certain nodes of certain curves of the original family. We give comparison theorems between torsion-free, rank-1 sheaves in the former family and invertible sheaves in the latter. We apply them to show that there are functorial isomorphisms between the compactifications of relative Jacobians of families of nodal curves constructed through Caporaso’s approach and those constructed through Pandharipande’s approach.

We show that there exist $(d-1)$ -Ahlfors regular compact sets $E \subset\mathbb{R}^{d}$ , $d\geq2$ such that for any $t< d-1$ , we have $$\sup_{T} \frac{\mathcal{H}^{d-1}(E\cap T)}{w(T)^{t}}< \infty $$ where the supremum is over all tubes $T$ with width $w(T) >0$ . This settles a question of T. Orponen. The sets we construct are random Cantor sets, and the method combines geometric and probabilistic estimates on the intersections of these random Cantor sets with affine subspaces.

We show that positive$α$-stable densities are hyperbolically completely monotone if and only if$α$≤1/2. This gives a positive answer to a question raised by L. Bondesson in 1977.

We prove sharp weighted weak type (1,1) estimates for rough singular integral operators on homogeneous groups. Similar results are shown for singular integrals on $\mathbb{R}^{2}$ with the generalized homogeneity.

For two-sided topological Markov chains, we show that the set of points for which the two-sided Birkhoff averages of a continuous function diverge is residual. We also show that the set of points for which the Birkhoff averages have a given set of accumulation points other than a singleton is residual. A nontrivial consequence of our results is that the set of points for which the local entropies of an invariant measure on a locally maximal hyperbolic set does not exist is residual. This strongly contrasts to the Shannon–McMillan–Breiman theorem in the context of ergodic theory, which says that local entropies exist on a full measure set.