Just One? Solo Dining, Gender and Temporal Belonging in Public Spaces

In recent years, various lifestyle websites have offered tips on eating out alone as well as lists of the best restaurants for solo dining in major cities of the world. Utilising the theoretical concepts of participation units, territories of the self (Goffman 1972[1971]) and belonging (Author B2011, 2013), this paper explores the challenges that spatio-temporal conventions pose for women solo diners in particular. Through the lens of solo dining, we explore being alone and belonging in shared public spaces, and the gendered nature of aloneness and respectability. The papercontributes to existing theory by examining the influence that time has on a woman solo diner’s ‘single’ participation unit, her ability to lay claim to public space and her relationship with the surrounding social environment. The paper concludes by exploring what the new trend of solo dining can offer and the consequences this has for how sociologists conceptualise sociality inpublic spaces

Simulating complex social behaviour with the genetic action tree kernel

The concept of genetic action trees combines action trees with genetic algorithms. In this paper, we create a multi-agent simulation on the base of this concept and provide the interested reader with a software package to apply genetic action trees in a multi-agent simulation to simulate complex social behaviour. An example model is introduced to conduct a feasibility study with the described method. We find that our library can be used to simulate the behaviour of agents in a complex setting and observe a convergence to a global optimum in spite of the absence of stable states

Who Watches the Watchmen? An Appraisal of Benchmarks for Multiple Sequence Alignment

Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) is a fundamental and ubiquitous technique in bioinformatics used to infer related residues among biological sequences. Thus alignment accuracy is crucial to a vast range of analyses, often in ways difficult to assess in those analyses. To compare the performance of different aligners and help detect systematic errors in alignments, a number of benchmarking strategies have been pursued. Here we present an overview of the main strategies--based on simulation, consistency, protein structure, and phylogeny--and discuss their different advantages and associated risks. We outline a set of desirable characteristics for effective benchmarking, and evaluate each strategy in light of them. We conclude that there is currently no universally applicable means of benchmarking MSA, and that developers and users of alignment tools should base their choice of benchmark depending on the context of application--with a keen awareness of the assumptions underlying each benchmarking strategy.Comment: Revie

Impacts of carbohydrate-restricted diets on micronutrient intakes and status: a systematic review

A systematic review of published evidence on micronutrient intake/status with carbohydrate‐restricted diets (CRD) was conducted in Web of Science, Medline, Embase, Scopus, CENTRAL, and ClinicalTrials.gov up to October 2018. We identified 10 studies: seven randomized controlled trials (RCTs) (“Atkins”‐style, n = 5; “Paleolithic” diets, n = 2), two Atkins‐style noncontrolled trials and one cross‐sectional study. Prescribed carbohydrate varied 4% to 34% of energy intake. Only one noncontrolled trial prescribed multivitamin supplements. Dietary intakes/status were reported over 2 to 104 weeks, with weight losses from 2 to 9 kg. No diagnoses of deficiency were reported. Intakes of thiamine, folate, magnesium, calcium, iron, and iodine all decreased significantly (−10% to −70% from baseline) with any CRD types. Atkins diet trials (n = 6; 4%‐34%E carbohydrate) showed inconsistent changes in vitamin A, E, and β‐carotene intakes, while a single “Paleolithic” diet trial (28%E carbohydrate) reported increases in these micronutrients. One other “Paleolithic” diet (30%E carbohydrate) reported a rise in moderate iodine deficiency from 15% to 73% after 6 months. In conclusion, few studies have assessed the impacts of CRD on micronutrients. Studies with different designs point towards reductions in several vitamins and minerals, with potential risk of micronutrient inadequacies. Trial reporting standards are expected to include analysis of micronutrient intake/status. Micronutrients in foods and/or supplements should be considered when designing, prescribing or following CRDs

Peptic Ulcer Perforation as the First Manifestation of Previously Unknown Primary Hyperparathyroidism

A patient admitted for acute abdomen was incidentally found with elevated serum calcium level. In surgery, under conservative treatment of the hypercalcemia, a perforated duodenal ulcer was found and simple closure was performed. Postoperatively, calcium level continued to rise, parathyroid hormone was elevated and ultrasonographic examination showed a lesion in the right anterior neck, while serum gastrin level was normal, thus documenting the diagnosis of primary hyperparathyroidism. Conservative treatment had no effect on calcium level and the patient was subjected to emergency neck exploration, where a large parathyroid adenoma was removed. After surgery, calcium and PTH levels were normalized and the patient was discharged on the 5th postoperative day. Peptic ulcer and its complications are usual manifestations of primary hyperparathyroidism, with or without increased gastrin level. On the other hand, cases of a perforation of peptic ulcer as the first clinical manifestation of primary hyperparathyroidism are extremely rare

Combining ability of summer-squash lines with different degrees of parthenocarpy and PRSV-W resistance

The aim was to assess heterosis in a set of 16 summer-squash hybrids, and evaluate the combining capacity of the respective parental lines, which differed as to the degree of parthenocarpy and resistance to PRSV-W (Papaya Ringspot Virus-Watermelon strain). The hybrids were obtained using a partial diallel cross design (4 × 4). The lines of parental group I were 1 = ABX-037G-77-03-05-01-01-bulk, 2 = ABX-037G-77-03-05-03-10-bulk, 3 = ABX-037G-77-03-05-01-04-bulk and 4 = ABX-037G-77-03-05-05-01-bulk, and of group II, 1′ = ABX-037G-77-03-05-04-08-bulk, 2′ = ABX-037G-77-03-05-02-11-bulk, 3′ = Clarice and 4′ = Caserta. The 16 hybrids and eight parental lines were evaluated for PRSV-W resistance, parthenocarpic expression and yield in randomized complete-block designs, with three replications. Parthenocarpy and the resistance to PRSV-W were rated by means of a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 = non-parthenocarpic or high resistance to PRSV-W, and 5 = parthenocarpic or high susceptibility to PRSV-W. Both additive and non-additive gene effects were important in the expression of parthenocarpy and resistance to PRSV-W. Whereas estimates of heterosis in parthenocarpy usually tended towards a higher degree, resistance to PRSV-W was towards higher susceptibility. At least one F1 hybrid was identified with a satisfactory degree of parthenocarpy, resistance to PRSV-W and high fruit-yield

RNA secondary structure prediction from multi-aligned sequences

It has been well accepted that the RNA secondary structures of most functional non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) are closely related to their functions and are conserved during evolution. Hence, prediction of conserved secondary structures from evolutionarily related sequences is one important task in RNA bioinformatics; the methods are useful not only to further functional analyses of ncRNAs but also to improve the accuracy of secondary structure predictions and to find novel functional RNAs from the genome. In this review, I focus on common secondary structure prediction from a given aligned RNA sequence, in which one secondary structure whose length is equal to that of the input alignment is predicted. I systematically review and classify existing tools and algorithms for the problem, by utilizing the information employed in the tools and by adopting a unified viewpoint based on maximum expected gain (MEG) estimators. I believe that this classification will allow a deeper understanding of each tool and provide users with useful information for selecting tools for common secondary structure predictions.Comment: A preprint of an invited review manuscript that will be published in a chapter of the book `Methods in Molecular Biology'. Note that this version of the manuscript may differ from the published versio

Improved accuracy of multiple ncRNA alignment by incorporating structural information into a MAFFT-based framework

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Structural alignment of RNAs is becoming important, since the discovery of functional non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs). Recent studies, mainly based on various approximations of the Sankoff algorithm, have resulted in considerable improvement in the accuracy of pairwise structural alignment. In contrast, for the cases with more than two sequences, the practical merit of structural alignment remains unclear as compared to traditional sequence-based methods, although the importance of multiple structural alignment is widely recognized.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We took a different approach from a straightforward extension of the Sankoff algorithm to the multiple alignments from the viewpoints of accuracy and time complexity. As a new option of the MAFFT alignment program, we developed a multiple RNA alignment framework, X-INS-i, which builds a multiple alignment with an iterative method incorporating structural information through two components: (1) pairwise structural alignments by an external pairwise alignment method such as SCARNA or LaRA and (2) a new objective function, Four-way Consistency, derived from the base-pairing probability of every sub-aligned group at every multiple alignment stage.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The BRAliBASE benchmark showed that X-INS-i outperforms other methods currently available in the sum-of-pairs score (SPS) criterion. As a basis for predicting common secondary structure, the accuracy of the present method is comparable to or rather higher than those of the current leading methods such as RNA Sampler. The X-INS-i framework can be used for building a multiple RNA alignment from any combination of algorithms for pairwise RNA alignment and base-pairing probability. The source code is available at the webpage found in the Availability and requirements section.</p

Maximum expected accuracy structural neighbors of an RNA secondary structure

International audienceBACKGROUND: Since RNA molecules regulate genes and control alternative splicing by allostery, it is important to develop algorithms to predict RNA conformational switches. Some tools, such as paRNAss, RNAshapes and RNAbor, can be used to predict potential conformational switches; nevertheless, no existent tool can detect general (i.e., not family specific) entire riboswitches (both aptamer and expression platform) with accuracy. Thus, the development of additional algorithms to detect conformational switches seems important, especially since the difference in free energy between the two metastable secondary structures may be as large as 15-20 kcal/mol. It has recently emerged that RNA secondary structure can be more accurately predicted by computing the maximum expected accuracy (MEA) structure, rather than the minimum free energy (MFE) structure. RESULTS: Given an arbitrary RNA secondary structure S₀ for an RNA nucleotide sequence a = a₁,..., a(n), we say that another secondary structure S of a is a k-neighbor of S₀, if the base pair distance between S₀ and S is k. In this paper, we prove that the Boltzmann probability of all k-neighbors of the minimum free energy structure S₀ can be approximated with accuracy ε and confidence 1 - p, simultaneously for all 0 ≤ k N(ε,p,K)=Φ⁻¹(p/2K)²/4ε², where Φ(z) is the cumulative distribution function (CDF) for the standard normal distribution. We go on to describe the algorithm RNAborMEA, which for an arbitrary initial structure S₀ and for all values 0 ≤ k < K, computes the secondary structure MEA(k), having maximum expected accuracy over all k-neighbors of S₀. Computation time is O(n³ * K²), and memory requirements are O(n² * K). We analyze a sample TPP riboswitch, and apply our algorithm to the class of purine riboswitches. CONCLUSIONS: The approximation of RNAbor by sampling, with rigorous bound on accuracy, together with the computation of maximum expected accuracy k-neighbors by RNAborMEA, provide additional tools toward conformational switch detection. Results from RNAborMEA are quite distinct from other tools, such as RNAbor, RNAshapes and paRNAss, hence may provide orthogonal information when looking for suboptimal structures or conformational switches. Source code for RNAborMEA can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/projects/rnabormea/ or http://bioinformatics.bc.edu/clotelab/RNAborMEA/