The Impact of Structural Reforms on Environmental Problems in Agriculture

With the technological advancement in almost every sphere of human life, there has been an increased tendency to focus on the conservation of scarce resources by acquiring higher levels of resource use efficiency in the production process. However, there also remains a visible element of haste in policy planning towards the achievement of these goals, particularly in the developing world. The economic viability of such haste would have been positive had this helped in reducing the social cost of delayed policy actions taken in the preceding period. Conversely, the policy planning efforts continue to be ignorant of long-term consequences of current actions, as well as deficient in integrating various components of the sector or sub-sector of the economy which can not be viewed in isolation. These design defects in policies are largely ignored in post-impact evaluations of programmes, and failures are often incorrectly attributed to implementation, or simply referred to as managerial snags. Nevertheless, these inherent design defects become the primary contributors towards non-sustainability of development programmes. Pakistan’s agriculture, with its declining share in the economy over time, is still the single largest sector accounting for 23 percent in the GDP. Whereas its share has steadily declined in favour of rising manufacturing and services sectors, its rate of growth has remained rather erratic.

The Impact of Structural Reforms on Environmental Problems in Agriculture

With the technological advancement in almost every sphere of human life, there has been an increased tendency to focus on the conservation of scarce resources by acquiring higher levels of resource use efficiency in the production process. However, there also remains a visible element of haste in policy planning towards the achievement of these goals, particularly in the developing world. The economic viability of such haste would have been positive had this helped in reducing the social cost of delayed policy actions taken in the preceding period. Conversely, the policy planning efforts continue to be ignorant of long-term consequences of current actions, as well as deficient in integrating various components of the sector or sub-sector of the economy which can not be viewed in isolation. These design defects in policies are largely ignored in post-impact evaluations of programmes, and failures are often incorrectly attributed to implementation, or simply referred to as managerial snags. Nevertheless, these inherent design defects become the primary contributors towards non-sustainability of development programmes

Research Notes: Children as Scavengers (Rag Pickers) “A Case of Karachi”

In developing countries, the emerging mega cities face a number of interlinked issues, such as, increased flow of trading activities (particularly in the coastal cities), expansion in manufacturing and service sectors (because of a relatively developed infrastructure). As a combined effect of these factors there is a significant increase in population from within and neighboring countries. The situation aggravates even further when the huge influx of population exerts enormous pressure on limited physical and social infrastructure of a city. The obtained situation is thus observed with increased environmental degradation and significant rise in poverty levels. The coastal city of Karachi which is the largest city of Pakistan is now considered as one of the ten biggest mega cities in the world and appears as a classic case of such type of expansion in its size of population. As per the last population census of 1998 in the country, Karachi had a population of 9.8 million (though controversial). In absence of the new population census which was due in 2008, different estimates suggest that the current population size of Karachi city would be around 20 to 25 million. Along with the population growth, an average income level of its inhabitants has also caused upward shifts in consumption expenditures. The simultaneous raise in production of solid waste, as an outcome of improved standards of living and increased business activities, has impaired the city’s institutional capacity to properly dispose off and recycle the solid wastes. In the obtained situation, the remaining part of solid waste is disposed off and recycled by the private sector

A mammalian functional-genetic approach to characterizing cancer therapeutics

Supplementary information is available online at http://www.nature.com/naturechemicalbiology/. Reprints and permissions information is available online at http://npg.nature.com/reprintsandpermissions/.Identifying mechanisms of drug action remains a fundamental impediment to the development and effective use of chemotherapeutics. Here we describe an RNA interference (RNAi)–based strategy to characterize small-molecule function in mammalian cells. By examining the response of cells expressing short hairpin RNAs (shRNAs) to a diverse selection of chemotherapeutics, we could generate a functional shRNA signature that was able to accurately group drugs into established biochemical modes of action. This, in turn, provided a diversely sampled reference set for high-resolution prediction of mechanisms of action for poorly characterized small molecules. We could further reduce the predictive shRNA target set to as few as eight genes and, by using a newly derived probability-based nearest-neighbors approach, could extend the predictive power of this shRNA set to characterize additional drug categories. Thus, a focused shRNA phenotypic signature can provide a highly sensitive and tractable approach for characterizing new anticancer drugs.National Institute of Mental Health (U.S.) (grant RO1 CA128803-03)American Association for Cancer ResearchMassachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of BiologyNational Cancer Institute (U.S.). Integrative Cancer Biology Program (grant 1-U54-CA112967