Projected Images of Major Chinese Outbound Destinations

This study aimed to explore the projected images of major outbound destinations based on popular travel magazines in China. Travel articles on Hong Kong, Macau, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and Taiwan from 2006 to 2008 were content analyzed. Japan was reported on most, and the projected images of the six destinations are dominated by leisure and recreation, and culture, history and art. Correspondence analysis was used to examine relationships between destinations and popular image attributes. The results showed that South Korea and Macau had distinct projected images, whereas Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Vietnam shared many similar image attributes. Practical implications for destination marketing organizations are provided

Determinants of takeaway and fast food consumption: a narrative review.

Out-of-home foods (takeaway, take-out and fast foods) have become increasingly popular in recent decades and are thought to be a key driver in increasing levels of overweight and obesity due to their unfavourable nutritional content. Individual food choices and eating behaviours are influenced by many interrelated factors which affect the results of nutrition-related public health interventions. While the majority of research based on out-of-home foods comes from Australia, the UK and USA, the same issues (poor dietary habits and increased prevalence of non-communicable disease) are of equal concern for urban centres in developing economies undergoing 'nutrition transition' at a global scale. The present narrative review documents key facets, which may influence out-of-home food consumption, drawn from biological, societal, environmental, demographic and psychological spheres. Literature searches were performed and references from relevant papers were used to find supplementary studies. Findings suggest that the strongest determinants of out-of-home food availability are density of food outlets and deprivation within the built environment; however, the association between socio-economic status and out-of-home food consumption has been challenged. In addition, the biological and psychological drives combined with a culture where overweight and obesity are becoming the norm makes it 'fashionable' to consume out-of-home food. Other factors, including age group, ethnicity and gender demonstrate contrasting effects and a lack of consensus. It is concluded that further consideration of the determinants of out-of-home food consumption within specific populations is crucial to inform the development of targeted interventions to reduce the impact of out-of-home foods on public health

GeneCrunch: Experiences on the SGI POWER CHALLENGEarray with Bioinformatics applications

Analyzing genomic data is a computationally intensive and complicated process in which scientists must typically choose among multiple databases and analysis methods and make expert judgements inspecting multiple results. GeneQuiz, an automated software system for large scale genome analysis developed at the EMBL/EBI, tackles this problem by using an automated, rigorous, rule-based system to select among the results of sequence analysis and database searches, builds informative annotation and aims at predicting the function of new genes. In a demonstration project more than 6000 proteins from the Baker’s yeast, for which the complete genomic sequence was completed in 1996, were analyzed on a Silicon Graphics POWERCHALLENGEarray with 64 processors (R8000 @90 MHz) so that the analysis could be completed in 3 days. The results of the analysis were published on two web servers as they were computed