  Several topological and homological operads based on families of projectively
weighted arcs in bounded surfaces are introduced and studied. The spaces
underlying the basic operad are identified with open subsets of a
compactification due to Penner of a space closely related to Riemann's moduli
space. Algebras over these operads are shown to be Batalin-Vilkovisky algebras,
where the entire BV structure is realized simplicially. Furthermore, our basic
operad contains the cacti operad up to homotopy, and it similarly acts on the
loop space of any topological space. New operad structures on the circle are
classified and combined with the basic operad to produce geometrically natural
extensions of the algebraic structure of BV algebras, which are also computed.
