Executive Summary The lack of market information represents a significant impediment to market access especially for smallholder poor farmers: it substantially increases transaction costs and reduces market efficiency. For any one crop, the marketing chain consists of multiple middlemen, each taking a margin at every stage of the chain, and price variations in space and time are often large and...

Reluctance of statistical agencies and other data owners to share their possibly confidential or proprietary data with others who own related databases is a serious impediment to conducting mutually beneficial analyses. This paper reviews methods for secure computation that potentially allow agencies to share data without compromising data confidentiality. The methods discussed include secure s...

Background Respiratory motion remains a major impediment in a substantial amount of patients undergoing coronary magnetic resonance angiography (CMRA). Studies in healthy subjects have shown that image-based navigation (iNAV) improves respiratory motion compensation compared to the state-of-the art method. Here, we used iNAV for respiratory motion compensated CMRA in 22 patients with known or s...

An immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment is a cancer hallmark and a major impediment to successful immunotherapy. We engineered hematopoietic progenitors to target expression of an interferon-α (IFNα) transgene specifically to their monocytic progeny, including tumor-infiltrating macrophages. Mice chimeric for these IFNα-expressing macrophages showed activation of innate and adaptive immune ...

This article includes a case study of a pediatric patient who presented for elective correction of a speech impediment via a frenuloplasty. The patient's history and anesthetic course will be discussed prior to the deveopment of the episode of negative pressure pulmonary edema (NPPE). The events surrounding the development and diagnosis of NPPE will be presented, and the treatment modalities wi...

Chemoresistance remains a major impediment in cancer therapy. Although major progress has been made in understanding the mechanisms underlying resistance in cancer, there is still more to learn. Our studies provide evidence that Gli1 drives a novel form of drug resistance involving Phase II drug metabolism enzymes, specifically the UGT1A family.

Article history: Available online 27 March 2007 The standard metaphor of market failure is an impediment to the crafting of environmental policy that can escape policy lock in. Sustainability requires a policy process that can avoid this lock in. Sustainability concerns the creation of dynamic human processes that can respond to—indeed anticipate—unanticipated feedback from biological processes...