Title: Miraculous cancellations for quantum $SL_2$,
Abstract: In earlier work, Helen Wong and the author discovered certain "miraculous
cancellations" for the quantum trace map connecting the Kauffman bracket skein
algebra of a surface to its quantum Teichmueller space, occurring when the
quantum parameter $q$ is a root of unity. The current paper is devoted to
giving a more representation theoretic interpretation of this phenomenon, in
terms of the quantum group $U_q(sl_2)$ and its dual Hopf algebra $SL_2^q$.