The dramatic rise and fall of world food prices in 2007–8 was largely a result of speculative activity in global commodity markets, enabled by financial deregulation measures in the United States and elsewhere. Despite the recent fall in agricultural prices in world trade, the food crisis has been exacerbated in many developing countries where food prices remain high and even continue to increase. The financial crisis also directly operates to increase food insecurity by imposing constraints on fiscal policies and food imports in balance‐of‐payments constrained developing countries, causing exchange rate devaluation through capital flight and adversely affecting employment, thereby reducing the ability of vulnerable groups to purchase food.
The most widely used method for detecting genome-wide protein–DNA interactions is chromatin immunoprecipitation on tiling microarrays, commonly known as ChIP-chip. Here, we conducted the first objective analysis of tiling array platforms, amplification procedures, and signal detection algorithms in a simulated ChIP-chip experiment. Mixtures of human genomic DNA and “spike-ins” comprised of nearly 100 human sequences at various concentrations were hybridized to four tiling array platforms by eight independent groups. Blind to the number of spike-ins, their locations, and the range of concentrations, each group made predictions of the spike-in locations. We found that microarray platform choice is not the primary determinant of overall performance. In fact, variation in performance between labs, protocols, and algorithms within the same array platform was greater than the variation in performance between array platforms. However, each array platform had unique performance characteristics that varied with tiling resolution and the number of replicates, which have implications for cost versus detection power. Long oligonucleotide arrays were slightly more sensitive at detecting very low enrichment. On all platforms, simple sequence repeats and genome redundancy tended to result in false positives. LM-PCR and WGA, the most popular sample amplification techniques, reproduced relative enrichment levels with high fidelity. Performance among signal detection algorithms was heavily dependent on array platform. The spike-in DNA samples and the data presented here provide a stable benchmark against which future ChIP platforms, protocol improvements, and analysis methods can be evaluated.
The most destructive effects of Covid-19 in India have not been the result of the disease, but the nature of the government response. The most stringent lockdown in the world destroyed the economy and forced millions into poverty and hunger, but did not control virus transmission. The resurgence of disease as restrictions were lifted and the continued economic distress point to ten major features of state response that ensured these unfortunate outcomes.
En un período relativamente corto, tal vez de sólo una década, las microfinanzas pasaron de "príncipe a mendigo" en el discurso del desarrollo: de ser elogiadas como "la" solución para resolver los problemas del desarrollo y de la reducción de la pobreza pasaron a ser criticadas como progenitoras de la inestabilidad financiera y del incremento de la vulnerabilidad de la población más pobre. La proliferación de instituciones microfinancieras con y sin fines de lucro pronto fue seguida por diversas crisis en muchos de los mismos países en desarrollo que antes eran considerados los sitios más prominentes de su éxito. En este contexto, bien podría argumentarse que es correcto rechazar a las microfinanzas como un medio para reducir la pobreza o para diversificar la economía, pero entonces, ¿de qué manera los hacedores de política tratarían los problemas de exclusión de las instituciones financieras formales que padecen los sectores pobres? Ya que claramente no son una "bala de plata" para solucionar los problemas del desarrollo, las microfinanzas deben ser tratadas como un elemento más de la amplia gama de estrategias financieras orientadas al desarrollo.
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