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The traditional virtual machine building and and deployment process is centered around the virtual machine hard disk image. The packages comprising the VM operating system are carefully selected, hard disk images are built for a variety of different hypervisors, and images have to be distributed and decompressed in order to instantiate a virtual machine. Within the HEP community, the CernVM File System has been established in order to decouple the distribution from the experiment software from the building and distribution of the VM hard disk images.We show how to get rid of such pre-built hard disk images altogether. Due to the high requirements on POSIX compliance imposed by HEP application software, CernVM-FS can also be used to host and boot a Linux operating system. This allows the use of a tiny bootable CD image that comprises only a Linux kernel while the rest of the operating system is provided on demand by CernVM-FS. This approach speeds up the initial instantiation time and reduces virtual machine image sizes by an order of magnitude. Furthermore, security updates can be distributed instantaneously through CernVM-FS. By leveraging the fact that CernVM-FS is a versioning file system, a historic analysis environment can be easily re-spawned by selecting the corresponding CernVM-FS file system snapshot.

Island communities are among the first and most adversely affected by the impacts of global climate change. Islands are vulnerable to climate change because of their isolated geography, large coastal areas, and low economic diversification. This paper presents a model-based evaluation of the macroeconomic impacts of climate change on the Blue Economy of southern European islands. We consider climate change impact chains on tourism, maritime transport, and electricity demand in a downscaled modeling framework for different climatic scenarios to the end of the century. Our findings show important economic losses in all climatic scenarios, yet economic damages under an RCP8.5 scenario more than doubled compared to a RCP2.6 pathway. Magnitudes of impacts vary across islands, depending on the level of economic diversification and geographic remoteness. The effects of climate change on the tourism sector are detrimental to the islandic economies, given the sector's complex value chain and dominant position in value added. Similarly, increasing electricity demand for cooling and water desalination puts additional stress on the economy of the islands.

An interview study was conducted to explore volunteers' experiences of creativity in citizen cyberscience. Participants were recruited from 4 projects: GeoTag-X, Virtual Atom Smasher, Synthetic Biology, and Extreme Citizen Science. Ninety-six interviews were conducted in total: 86 with volunteers (citizen scientists) and 10 with professional scientists. The resulting thematic analysis revealed that volunteers are involved in a range of creative activities, such as discussing ideas, suggesting improvements, gamification, artwork, creative writing, and outreach activities. We conclude that the majority of creative products are community-related. Creativity in citizen cyberscience is a collective process: volunteers create within a project and a community, both for themselves and for others.

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