Ansible - IT automation engine for configuration management and cloud provisiong

Automatic provisioning of infrastructure as well as deployment is a cornerstone of DevOps. It brings the benefits of version control, reproducibility, and a central place to consolidate (executable) knowledge about infrastructure setups. Best known provisioning systems are Chef and Puppet. A newcomer to this game is Ansible with goal are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use and with strong focus on security and reliability, featuring a minimum of moving parts

Catalogue of the morphological features in the Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies (S4^4G)

A catalogue of the morphological features for the complete Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies (S$^4$G), including 2352 nearby galaxies, is presented. The measurements are made using 3.6 $\mu$m images, largely tracing the old stellar population; at this wavelength the effects of dust are also minimal. The measured features are the sizes, ellipticities, and orientations of bars, rings, ringlenses, and lenses. Measured in a similar manner are also barlenses (lens-like structures embedded in the bars), which are not lenses in the usual sense, being rather the more face-on counterparts of the boxy/peanut structures in the edge-on view. In addition, pitch angles of spiral arm segments are measured for those galaxies where they can be reliably traced. More than one pitch angle may appear for a single galaxy. All measurements are made in a human-supervised manner so that attention is paid to each galaxy. We used isophotal analysis, unsharp masking, and fitting ellipses to measured structures. We find that the sizes of the inner rings and lenses normalized to barlength correlate with the galaxy mass: the normalized sizes increase toward the less massive galaxies; it has been suggested that this is related to the larger dark matter content in the bar region in these systems. Bars in the low mass galaxies are also less concentrated, likely to be connected to the mass cut-off in the appearance of the nuclear rings and lenses. We also show observational evidence that barlenses indeed form part of the bar, and that a large fraction of the inner lenses in the non-barred galaxies could be former barlenses in which the thin outer bar component has dissolved.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in A&

Exponential instability in the fractional Calder\'on problem

In this note we prove the exponential instability of the fractional Calder\'on problem and thus prove the optimality of the logarithmic stability estimate from \cite{RS17}. In order to infer this result, we follow the strategy introduced by Mandache in \cite{M01} for the standard Calder\'on problem. Here we exploit a close relation between the fractional Calder\'on problem and the classical Poisson operator. Moreover, using the construction of a suitable orthonormal basis, we also prove (almost) optimality of the Runge approximation result for the fractional Laplacian, which was derived in \cite{RS17}. Finally, in one dimension, we show a close relation between the fractional Calder\'on problem and the truncated Hilbert transform.Comment: 17 page

Farm Deaths in North Karelia

This study examined the effect of farm size on the mortality and survival of EasternFinnish farms in the late 1990s. Three different dimensions of farm size (i.e. hectaresoperated, number of milk cows, and hectares of forest) were compared. Data wereextracted from administrative records and covered all 4,527 active farms in NorthKarelia from 1995 to 1998. Results did not support the disappearing middle sizehypothesis presented by Weiss (1999). Farm size distributions were not bimodal.No empirical evidence was found of a process of polarisation into two centres ofattraction. As a whole, the analysis provides some support for the conclusion thatthe size of forest holding as measured by hectares of forest owned by farm does nothave an independent effect on the likelihood of survival. Its contribution dependson the other variables in the model

Matter X waves

We predict that an ultra-cold Bose gas in an optical lattice can give rise to a new form of condensation, namely matter X waves. These are non-spreading 3D wave-packets which reflect the symmetry of the Laplacian with a negative effective mass along the lattice direction, and are allowed to exist in the absence of any trapping potential even in the limit of non-interacting atoms. This result has also strong implications for optical propagation in periodic structuresComment: 5 pages, 2 figure