Research Report on a Study of Non-Modular Masonry Construction

In 1947, the Small Homes Council made a detailed study and comparison of construction methods used in residential building. Included in this study was an analysis of three houses in wich modular brick were used in the exterior cavity-type masonry wall. No comparison has been available between the data so obtained and the time required to construct the same wall using non-modular materials. To obtain such data, the Small Homes Council, under the sponsorship of the Structural Clay Products Institute, this summer built an exact duplicate of one of the houses constructed in the 1947 study, but used a non-modular brick instead of modular. An analysis of the time-study data taken during the construction period indicat es that the masons' time can be reduced approximately 10 per cent through the use of modular materials. Furthermore, an examination of the brick-work indicates that an improvement in workmanship is possible through the use of modular materials. This improvement in workship is obtained through the regularity achieved by the use of modular materials.Structural Clay Products Institut

Gauss-Manin connections for p-adic families of nearly overconvergent modular forms

We interpolate the Gauss-Manin connection in p-adic families of nearly overconvergent modular forms. This gives a family of Maass-Shimura type differential operators from the space of nearly overconvergent modular forms of type r to the space of nearly overconvergent modular forms of type r + 1 with p-adic weight shifted by 2. Our construction is purely geometric, using Andreatta-Iovita-Stevens and Pilloni's geometric construction of eigencurves, and should thus generalize to higher rank groups.Comment: Final version accepted for publication in the Annales de l'Institut Fourier. Minor revisions. 11 page

On isomorphisms between Siegel modular threefolds

The Satake compactification of the moduli space of principally polarized abelian surfaces with a level two structure has a degree 8 endomorphism. The aim of this paper is to show that this result can be extended to other modular threefolds. The main tools are Siegel modular forms and Satake compactifications of arithmetic quotients of the Siegel upper-half space. Indeed, the construction of the degree 8 endomorphism on suitable modular threefolds is done via an isomorphism of graded rings of modular forms. By studying the action of the Fricke involution one gets a further extension of the previous result to other modular threefolds. The possibility of a similar situation in higher dimensions is also discussed.Comment: 13 pages, revised versio