The RAppArmor Package: Enforcing Security Policies in R Using Dynamic Sandboxing on Linux

The increasing availability of cloud computing and scientific super computers brings great potential for making R accessible through public or shared resources. This allows us to efficiently run code requiring lots of cycles and memory, or embed R functionality into, e.g., systems and web services. However some important security concerns need to be addressed before this can be put in production. The prime use case in the design of R has always been a single statistician running R on the local machine through the interactive console. Therefore the execution environment of R is entirely unrestricted, which could result in malicious behavior or excessive use of hardware resources in a shared environment. Properly securing an R process turns out to be a complex problem. We describe various approaches and illustrate potential issues using some of our personal experiences in hosting public web services. Finally we introduce the RAppArmor package: a Linux based reference implementation for dynamic sandboxing in R on the level of the operating system

The Poisson center and polynomial, maximal Poisson commutative subalgebras, especially for nilpotent Lie algebras of dimension at most seven

Let g be a finite dimensional Lie algebra over an algebraically closed field k of characteristic zero. We collect some general results on the Poisson center of S(g), including some simple criteria regarding its polynomiality, and also on certain Poisson commutative subalgebras of S(g). These facts are then used to finish our earlier work on this subject, i.e. to give an explicit description for the Poisson center of all indecomposable, nilpotent Lie algebras of dimension at most seven. Among other things, we also provide a polynomial, maximal Poisson commutative subalgebra of S(g), enjoying additional properties. As a by-product we show that a conjecture by Milovanov is valid in this situation. These results easily carry over to the enveloping algebra U(g).Comment: 48 page

Farm growth and exit: consequences of EU dairy policy reform for Dutch dairy farming

The purpose of this paper is to analyse farm growth and exit and its interaction in Dutch dairy farming as consequences of the 2003 CAP reform and 2008 CAP Health Check. Results indicate that the decision to exit dairy farming is largely determined by household characteristics as age and the size of the household. Farm growth is strongly influenced by the availability of labour, capital and land. Simulation results show that the dairy policy reforms reduce farm growth and exit. This is mainly caused by the quota increases

World Bank policies and the obligation of its members to respect, protect and fulfil the right to health

The majority of World Bank donors are States parties to the main inter-national human rights conventions. This article uses the right to health as a lens for examining the obligations of donor States parties with re-spect to their involvement in the World Bank's development activities, which use the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) process as their framework. The article uses the concept of core obligations to examine and assess public expenditure budgeting in the health care sectors of Mozambique, Rwanda, and Uganda, as provided for in the PRSP process. It argues that the current PRSPs make it impossible to fund public health care at a level that satisfies the requirements of core obligations. It concludes by calling on donor countries to comply with their interna-tional human rights obligations

Fiscal space for health expenditure in Mozambique: blocking effectiveness of international funds through budget support

Mexico AIDS Conference 200

Impossible to 'wean' when more aid is needed

Kirigia and Diarra-Nama from the WHO Regional Office for Africa say that funding for health in the WHO Africa Region remains inadequate and that, in some countries, is significantly dependent on donor funding. They propose five strategies for these countries to “wean themselves off” donor funding. While each of the proposed strategies might have some value in itself, they will not succeed in the double objective the authors set: to wean countries from depending upon international health aid and to achieve the US$34 per person annual health expenditure target suggested by the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health1 – an amount that must now be adjusted to US$ 40 due to inflation.