Toward an inductive description of singularities of pairs
  Motivated by Shokurov's ACC Conjecture for log canonical thresholds, we propose an inductive point of view on singularities of pairs, in the case when the ambient variety is smooth. Our main result characterizes the log canonicity of a pair in dimension N+1 by the log canonicity of another pair (not effective, in general) in dimension N. 
Mircea Mustata