Confidentiality is vital to bioweapons control

Animal research is vital to medicine.

What is (and is not) vital to advancing cellulosic ethanol.

Ethanol made biologically from cellulosic biomass, including agricultural and forestry residues, portions of municipal waste, and herbaceous and woody crops, is finally being widely recognized as a unique transportation fuel with powerful economic, environmental and strategic attributes. Although underfunded, it has been advanced to be competitive with corn ethanol; however, government policies...

Beefing up the bioweapons treaty

Alongside support for renewed funding for microbiological research, many scientists are also backing a greater role for international agreements to control potential biological weapons. But such efforts present considerable challenges. One of Britain's leading microbiologists, Hugh Pennington at Aberdeen University, has written of the ease of obtaining agents such as anthrax. " In principle any...

GMC guidance on confidentiality: is it ethical?

The recent GMC guidance on confidentiality [1], especially the supplementary guidance [2], has caused much consternation amongst occupational physicians. The Faculty and Society of Occupational Medicine have issued a joint statement to members [3], and a GMC representative responded on the same day [4]. However, the 6 OCCUPATIONAL MEDICINE

Confidentiality-Preserving Refinement is Compositional - Sometimes

Confidentiality-preserving refinement describes a relation between a specification and an implementation that ensures that all confidentiality properties required in the specification are preserved by the implementation in a probabilistic setting. The present paper investigates the condition under which that notion of refinement is compositional, i.e. the condition under which refining a subsys...