By two well-known results, one of Ax, one of Lubotzky and van den Dries, a profinite group is projective iff it is isomorphic to the absolute Galois group of a pseudo-algebraically closed field. This paper gives an analogous characterization of relatively projective profinite groups as absolute Galois groups of regularly closed fields.

In an earlier paper a construction was given for an infinite-dimensional uniserial module over Q for SL(2,Z) whose composition factors are all isomorphic to the standard (two-dimensional) module. In this note we consider generalizations of this construction to other composition factors and to other rings of algebraic integers.

We study the homology of SLn(F [t, t ]) by examining the action of the group on a suitable simplicial complex. The E–term of the resulting spectral sequence is computed and the differential, d, is calculated in some special cases to yield information about the low-dimensional homology groups of SLn(F [t, t ]). In particular, we show that if F is an infinite field, then H2(SLn(F [t, t ]), Z) = K...