We prove that a generic probability measure-preserving (p.m.p.) action of a countable amenable group G has scaling entropy that cannot be dominated by a given rate of growth. As a corollary, we obtain that there does not exist a topological action of G for which the set of ergodic invariant measures coincides with the set of all ergodic p.m.p. G-systems of entropy zero. We also prove that a generic action of a residually finite amenable group has scaling entropy that cannot be bounded from below by a given sequence. In addition, we show an example of an amenable group that has such a lower bound for every free p.m.p. action.

We show that every countable group with infinite finite conjugacy (FC)-center has the Schmidt property, that is, admits a free, ergodic, measure-preserving action on a standard probability space such that the full group of the associated orbit equivalence relation contains a non-trivial central sequence. As a consequence, every countable, inner amenable group with property (T) has the Schmidt property.

We introduce inner amenability for discrete probability-measure-preserving (p.m.p.) groupoids and investigate its basic properties, examples, and the connection with central sequences in the full group of the groupoid or central sequences in the von Neumann algebra associated with the groupoid. Among other things, we show that every free ergodic p.m.p. compact action of an inner amenable group gives rise to an inner amenable orbit equivalence relation. We also obtain an analogous result for compact extensions of equivalence relations that either are stable or have a nontrivial central sequence in their full group.

This paper concerns the study of the global structure of measure-preserving actions of countable groups on standard probability spaces. Weak containment is a hierarchical notion of complexity of such actions, motivated by an analogous concept in the theory of unitary representations. This concept gives rise to an associated notion of equivalence of actions, called weak equivalence, which is much coarser than the notion of isomorphism (conjugacy). It is well understood now that, in general, isomorphism is a very complex notion, a fact which manifests itself, for example, in the lack of any reasonable structure in the space of actions modulo isomorphism. On the other hand, the space of weak equivalence classes is quite well behaved. Another interesting fact that relates to the study of weak containment is that many important parameters associated with actions, such as the type, cost, and combinatorial parameters, turn out to be invariants of weak equivalence and in fact exhibit desirable monotonicity properties with respect to the pre-order of weak containment, a fact that can be useful in certain applications. There has been quite a lot of activity in this area in the last few years, and our goal in this paper is to provide a survey of this work.

Erdős conjectured that for any set $A\,\subseteq \,\mathbb{N}$ with positive lower asymptotic density, there are infinite sets $B,\,C\,\subseteq \,\mathbb{N}$ such that $B\,+\,C\,\subseteq \,A$. We verify Erdős’ conjecture in the case where $A$ has Banach density exceeding $\frac{1}{2}$. As a consequence, we prove that, for $A\,\subseteq \,\mathbb{N}$ with positive Banach density (a much weaker assumption than positive lower density), we can find infinite $B,\,C\,\subseteq \,\mathbb{N}$ such that $B\,+\,C$ is contained in the union of $A$ and a translate of $A$. Both of the aforementioned results are generalized to arbitrary countable amenable groups. We also provide a positive solution to Erdős’ conjecture for subsets of the natural numbers that are pseudorandom.

We present a simple proof of the fact that every countable group ${\Gamma}$ is weak Rohlin, that is, there is in the Polish space $mathbb{A}_{\Gamma}$ of measure preserving ${\Gamma}$-actions an action $\mathbf{T}$ whose orbit in $\mathbb{A}_{\Gamma}$ under conjugations is dense. In conjunction with earlier results this in turn yields a new characterization of non-Kazhdan groups as those groups which admit such an action $\mathbf{T}$ which is also ergodic.

Suppose $G$ is a countable, Abelian group with an element of infinite order and let $\text{ }\!\!\chi\!\!\text{ }$ be a mixing rank one action of $G$ on a probability space. Suppose further that the Følner sequence $\{{{F}_{n}}\}$ indexing the towers of $\text{ }\!\!\chi\!\!\text{ }$ satisfies a “bounded intersection property”: there is a constant $p$ such that each $\{{{F}_{n}}\}$ can intersect no more than $p$ disjoint translates of $\{{{F}_{n}}\}$. Then $\text{ }\!\!\chi\!\!\text{ }$ is mixing of all orders. When $G\,=\,\mathbf{Z}$, this extends the results of Kalikow and Ryzhikov to a large class of “funny” rank one transformations. We follow Ryzhikov’s joining technique in our proof: the main theorem follows from showing that any pairwise independent joining of $k$ copies of $\text{ }\!\!\chi\!\!\text{ }$ is necessarily product measure. This method generalizes Ryzhikov’s technique.

For a compact group G, we compute the Kazhdan constants κ(G, G) obtained by taking G itself as a generating subset. We get κ(G, G) = if G is finite of order n, and κ(G, G) = if G is infinite.

Let Σ be a countably generated left amenable semigroup and ﹛Tσ|σ ∈ Σ﹜ be a representation of Σ as a semigroup of positive linear operators on a weakly sequentially complete Banach lattice E with a weak unit e. It is assumed Tσ are uniformly bounded. It is shown that a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a weak unit invariant under ﹛Tσ | σ ∈ Σ﹜ is that inf σ∈Σ H(Tσe) > 0 for all nonzero H in the positive dual cone of E.