pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/12/psshootout.jpg" width="807" height="415" style="display:block;float:none;" /There are a lot of $200-$300 point and shoots on the market right now, and there's no way the test display at Best Buy is going to tell you which to buy. How is elbowing other shoppers while analyzing your hasty snapshots on a 3-inch, low-rez screen going to help you make an informed buying decision?/p pInstead, I put six of the most popular point-and-shoots on the market through some major testing. Then I decided on the one that you should buy without the hedging BS./p pstrongMeet our competitors/strongbr emEach of these compact point and shoots features optical image stabilization and is priced around $250:/em/p pa href="http://www.samsung.com/us/consumer/detail/detail.do?group=camerascamcorderstype=digitalcamerassubtype=tlseriesmodel_cd=EC-TL9ZZBBA/US"Samsung TL9 ($280)/abr 10MP, 5X zoom, 2.7-inch LCD/p pa href="http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=ModelInfoActfcategoryid=145modelid=16718#ModelDetailAct"Canon SD790 ($250)/abr 10MP, 3X zoom, 3-inch LCD/p pa href="http://www.nikonusa.com/Find-Your-Nikon/Product/Digital-Camera/26120/COOLPIX-S560.html"Nikon S560 ($250)/abr 10MP, 5X zoom, 2.7-inch LCD/p pa href="http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10551storeId=10151langId=-1productId=8198552921665309170"Sony W170 ($250)/abr 10MP, 5x zoom, 2.7-inch LCD/p pa href="http://www2.panasonic.com/consumer-electronics/shop/Cameras-Camcorders/Digital-Cameras/Lumix-Digital-Cameras/model.DMC-FS20K_11002_7000000000000005702"Panasonic FS20 ($250)/abr 10MP, 4x zoom, 3-inch LCD/p pa href="http://www.kodak.com/eknec/PageQuerier.jhtml?pq-path=13044pq-locale=en_US_requestid=7962"Kodak M1093 ($200)/abr 10MP, 3x zoom, 3-inch LCD/p pstrongStudio Shoot/strongbr The shots inside were captured under diffused sunlight in full auto mode at max (10MP) resolution. I won't say that it wasn't an extreme disappointment that only one camera, the Kodak, was able to shoot with proper white balance in this situation and offer us colors as they really look (you'll have to trust me on this one). The other cameras compensated poorly, possibly metering the diffused light as tungsten light, and producing a fairly cold image because of it.br script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8" galleryPost('camerabattlemodo', 6,''); /scriptbr Other than the color, you can't make out much from the wide shots. But if you blow the images up to their native resolution, there are huge differences. Even in the web-compressed images here, it's obvious that Canon captures the most detail:br img src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/12/canoncookies2compressed.jpg" width="807" height="440" style="display:block;float:none;" //p pIt's basically a tie between Sony and Kodak for second place. Here's what Kodak looks like:br img src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/12/kodakcookie2compressed.jpg" width="807" height="466" style="display:block;float:none;" //p pAnd then there's a pretty hard drop in quality. Panasonic comes in a solid last place here:br img src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/12/panasoniccookie2compressed.jpg" width="807" height="384" style="display:block;float:none;" //p pYou can fix the color by manually choosing a smarter white balance (color temperature), or adjusting the balance in post. But you can't get the texture of those cookies back. Big win for Canon here./p pstrongMotion Photography/strongbr It's no secret that many point-and-shoots are horrible for capturing the spontaneity of a child or pet, in part due to focus lag and often an additional wait before the shot is actually taken. While DSLRs are the best solution, I wanted to see if any point-and-shoots could rise to the challenge of capturing some action./p pSo I put them to the test on a Chicago side street where cars get up to 15-20mph. After repeat testing on each model, once again, we had a clear winner. Trouble is, it's Panasonic, loser of the resolution match! Panasonic features more shooting settings than any of its competitors, so my guess is that they spent a lot of time on optimizing at least this particular preset optimization.br img src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/12/panasonicmotion.jpg" width="807" height="518" style="display:block;float:none;" /br The remainder of the competition was fairly close, and I can't say that even the Panasonic model will capture any incredible sports action photography. But I will say that the Nikon and Samsung seemed to lag more than the others from button press to shot acquisition. They both tended to have the blurriest shots as well. Here's a typical result of the Nikon:br img src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/12/nikonmotion2.jpg" width="807" height="556" style="display:block;float:none;" //p pstrongVideo/strongbr Like high-speed photography, point-and-shoots aren't fundamentally designed for video. But then again, since they all shoot video, people have begun using them more frequently than they ever used their bigger, more specialized camcorders, so a test was necessary./p pAfter playing some billiards, I found Canon's image, though not technically the highest resolution, to be the best. A point as well to its realistic sound capture of ball on ball action.br img src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/12/canonvideo.jpg" width="807" height="476" style="display:block;float:none;" /br Second place goes to Kodak. Even though you can make out a great deal of grain on the table's felt surface, it also captures a relatively sharp, pleasantly contrasty image when you examine each ball.br img src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/12/kodakpicnewsss.jpg" width="807" height="445" style="display:block;float:none;" /br Last place? This title is, once again, reserved for Panasonic. For some reason, the camera interpreted the red table as some sort of blurry pastel. And the sound was a like a fast food drive-through speaker.br img src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/12/panasonicvideo.jpg" width="807" height="454" style="display:block;float:none;" //p pstrongFlash/strongbr We've all been there. It's late. A friend is in town. Your cameraphone can't hope to capture a shot in your drunken stupor, especially as you're hanging out in a smokey bar. I'd loved to have recreated this scene precisely in its brilliance, but instead I opted to take pictures of my cat with the lights low.br img src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/12/sonyflash.jpg" width="807" height="529" style="display:block;float:none;" /br It's an unfair challenge for a small-lensed, small-chipped camera to capture a decent picture in low light, even with flash as a crutch, but the Sony did as well as I could have hoped, illuminating my subject and her background alike, lacking the hotspots of most flash photography./p pThe other cameras were predictably mediocre, but the absolute worst at handling flash had to be the Nikon. Not only did it give my cat a washed-out glow, but it didn't even consider properly exposing that obnoxious pile of boxes behind her. The shame.br img src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/12/nikonflash.jpg" width="807" height="540" style="display:block;float:none;" //p pstrongWeird Features and Gimmicks/strongbr img src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/12/samsung-tl9.jpg" class="center" style="display:block;" /None of these items should probably determine your buying decision, but I wanted to mention a few of the more...interesting features of the cameras. The Samsung TL9 has a set of snazzy analog dials on top that display battery life and remaining memory like a car's dashmdash;plus it plays music and movies. The Panasonic has categorized an Intelligent Auto Mode that gives a lazy but informed user a nice way to tell the camera, "hey, you may need to boost the ISO," without messing with any other controls or gimmicky menus. The Nikon will warn you if a subject's eyes are closed. The Canon has ditched the standard up, down, left, right menu dial for a spinning ring...that's bold, if not always intuitive. And Sony will shoot in 16x9 or stretch images to that ratio for quick HDTV slideshows. Plus, smile/face detectors are everywhere. How did we ever take pictures before boxes enclosed a loved one's face?/p pstrongSo What Should You Buy?/strongbr After all my testing, I'd recommend the Canon SD790. Sure, it didn't win every category, but it won the one that counts mostmdash;detail. It came first in the video category. And it never ever fell flat on its face./p pMaybe this conclusion sounds a little too clinical to you. If so, let me say that there are less tangible elements I appreciate about the Canon SD790: It includes the best built battery charger and it is the only model tested to sync with a computer via mini USB (as opposed to some annoying proprietary cable or dock). On top of those, it always seems quick to capture a shot after I pressed for the shutter, though it's still not nearly as responsive as my prosumer DSLR. The one thing I'd ask for in this camera is a more powerful zoom lens./p pIf you know an extreme technophobe, you might tell them about the Kodak M1093. It offers the simplest shooting experience with one button to choose a photo mode, one button for flash toggling and one button to actually take a picture. Digital cameras don't get simpler than that, and I have to admit, as the cheapest model in this roundup ($200), with the least techie brand name, it performs better than I expectedmdash;though it does have a propensity to bump the ISO, producing some unwanted noise./p pBut as for the Sony W170, while it does feature the widest angle lens with 5x of zoom, it's clunky in the hand and rarely brilliant in quality. As for the Nikon S560, it takes mediocre shots. The Panasonic FS20 is inconsistentmdash;bordering on horrendous much of the timemdash;and features a small screen and a dated interface. Meanwhile, the Samsung TL9 just completely fails to impress me./p pSo go ahead, pick up the Canon. It seems the company's overwhelming market share is well deserved. Or don't. I won't lose sleep or anything. Just don't come crying to me when all your pictures look like crap./p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=c1a975b9131882296246399e780f880dp=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=c1a975b9131882296246399e780f880dp=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=c1a975b9131882296246399e780f880d" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=UD6vGN1K"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=Wtdzgbo9"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=prZIRpc4"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=prZIRpc4" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=z2R519Xk"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=z2R519Xk" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/CrXUNBcOjJ4" height="1" width="1"/

 Avec l'attaquant Klaas-Jan Huntelaar, que le Real Madrid a présenté jeudi à la presse après la conclusion de son...

What about Navy?

The Navy Chief Admiral Suresh Mehta has launched a war against the media. Heavens knows that Indian media sucks and Barkha Dutt is the one of the worst example of hyper-ventilating dumb journalists this country has seen. But, even then, Admira Mehta’s comments–blaming everyone but himself and his force–are a classic example of passing the buck.

Let’s see what Navy has done:

a) There is a media war currently on between the intelligence sources and the Navy–both blaming each-other for the attacks. It seems, though,  that the Intelligence did give some sort of warning which Navy either ignored or was too inept to act on it. Admiral Mehta blames it on systematic failure conveniently ignoring his own culpability.

b) According to a report in DNA, the Navy wanted a written request from the Chief Secretary before sending its Marine Commandos (MarCos) for operations. A request from Mumbai Police was not good enough. So, at the time of national emergency, Navy wanted its paperwork to be perfectly in order. Excellent. Please note: NSG was still on its way and there was no other force with similar expertise, training, and weapons as MarCos.

c) While the operations were currently on, J.S Bedi, Western Naval Chief, appeared on television with all the evidence his MARCOS had uncovered. To reiterate, while the operations were still on. While the entire security establishment deserves a kick on their backside for attempting to claim credit while NSG was still fighting the terrorists (Sukarshan thakur suggests in the Telegraph that media was invited to watch Nariman House operation–was this a fucking beauty show?), the Navy took it to another level by parading its MARCOS before the media. As many have pointed out, special forces should not address the media. Worse, they should not reveal operational details. It was pathetic. It was an attempt to explain why they had not been able to hit any terrorist after engaging them thrice. That makes it even more pathetic. If you have failed, go back and learn. Don’t offer explanations and excuses. Admit that you were not good enough. And again, go back and learn.

d) Here is perhaps the most explosive details,

In the end, the Maharashtra chief secretary had to prepare a letter and fax it to the navy. The marine commandos finally reached the hotels some two hours after the terrorists seized them. But they refused to go inside on the plea that they were not trained for such operations. They stayed outside, firing intermittently at the hotels while the terrorists moved around freely inside, killing at will.[link]

I don’t know how true this. I don’t trust the editorial standards of the Indian media. It also directly contradicts what MARCOS claimed about engaging the terrorists.

But if it is true, I cannot think of any other explanation except cowardice. If an unarmed cop refused to fight terrorists, it would be perfectly understandable. Committing suicide benefits know one. But some of the India’s best trained and best armed troops refused to fight terrorists in a moment of national emergency (once again, if it is true) is an inexcusable and unforgivable act of cowardice and dereliction of duty. I hope the media pursues this story to its logical conclusion and we get all the facts. Because Mumbai attack will not be the last time. And those unwilling to fight for India should be stripped of their uniforms; they don’t deserve to wear one.

Will it be too much to expect Admiral Mehta will go back and look at the state of his own forces. If this shameful conduct does not call for a full and impartial enquiry, then what will?

Posted in Public Policy, Views On News      

br /What it doesbr /br /If for any reason you are unsatisfied with either Yahoo or Google groups and are on the lookout for a viable alternative, chances are a visit to this newly-launched service will sort you out. br brIn principle, GroupALoop is a free service that is open to anybody, and which has some features that intend to give it an edge over its close competitors. One of the most notable features is the ability to create unlimited groups within any given group. It can be claimed that this can actually clutter proceedings if not used sparingly, but it is always better to have the chance to do something different than being constricted to tried and tested formulas. Moreover, widgets are featured as a way of attracting further members and showing your allegiance on the sites you visit frequently. br brOther features that merit mentioning include a “Lurking” option that effectively enables you to keep the group in your group list without appearing as an actual member, and the ability to add keywords to the group’s description itself. br brTo sum it up, this is a viable alternative to related services which is already acquiring an interesting shape. See it in action for yourself at www.groupaloop.com and draw your own conclusions. brbr /br /In their own wordsbr /br /“GroupALoop mirrors the same kind of fluid group interaction that takes place in real life.”br /br /Why it might be a killerbr /br /It is an endeavor that injects some life into a established formula.br /br /Some questionsbr /br /What features are going to be added in the foreseeable future? br /br /Link: a href='http://www.groupaloop.com'http://www.groupaloop.com/abr /Our Review: a href='http://www.killerstartups.com/Comm/groupaloop-com-an-alternative-to-online-groups'http://www.killerstartups.com/Comm/groupaloop-com-an-alternative-to-online-groups/abr /br / nbsp;div class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?a=UIPaZADD"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?a=w9YskXv5"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?a=ZoHTkIF3"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?i=ZoHTkIF3" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?a=28eHoGzs"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?i=28eHoGzs" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?a=ftP5WcT0"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?d=43" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?a=Io9LV0Ew"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?i=Io9LV0Ew" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/killerstartups/BkQV/~4/3J3O8kEMMs8" height="1" width="1"/

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, Caroline du Nord, December 4 /PRNewswire/ -- TapRoot Systems, Inc., un des principaux développeurs de solutions logicielles pour le marché du smartphone (ou téléphone intelligent), a annoncé la conclusion d'un ...

[Agrégation 2009] Éric Francalanza (dir.), Voltaire, patriarche militant, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, coll. "CNED", Série "XVIIIe siècle français", 2008, 224 p. ISBN : 978-2-13-057101-8 Prix : 14,00 € Présentation de l'éditeur : Dans les années 1760, Voltaire publie ses grandes oeuvres militantes, se construisant ainsi une image de patriarche des philosophes. Ce dictionnaire prend place dans cette représentation de soi et des Lumières à laquelle se livre Voltaire. Les différentes éditions de l'oeuvre imposent, par la virulence des articles et leur fond de critique religieuse et politique, cette figure patriarcale. Plus qu'un anti-dictionnaire ou qu'un pamphlet anti-religieux, l'abrégé de la raison qu'est le Dictionnaire philosophique portatif est avant tout le bréviaire d'une pensée alerte, incisive et sensible. Tout Voltaire, jusqu'à son émotivité la plus naïve, se retrouve dans cette oeuvre. Table des matières : Première partie : Le Dictionnaire philosophique portatif ou l'abc voltairien, élaboration, critique et poétique par Éric FrancalanzaIntroduction : Un patriarche militant - Des enjeux fondamentaux pour la compréhension de l'oeuvre 1 -- Texte et contexte. Le militantisme, de la conception à la réception 2 -- Une critique entre érudition et manipulation. D'honnêtes réflexions alphabétiques 3 -- Genre et forme de l'oeuvre. Le dictionnaire de Voltaire Conclusion Seconde partie : Exercices1 -- Dissertation par Olivier Ferret 2 -- Leçon : auteur, autorité dans le Dictionnaire philosophique par Olivier Ferret 3 -- Étude littéraire : idole, idolâtre, idolâtrie par Olivier Ferret 4 -- Étude grammaticale et commentaire stylistique : abbé par Stéphanie Genand 5 -- Explication de texte : Foi I par Florence Lotterie 6 -- Interrogation orale de grammaire : les discours rapportés par Stéphanie [...]

a href="http://statestats.appspot.com"StateStats/a: Explore the popularity of search queries in U.S. states br / StateStats shows you how popular a particular Google search is in each state. It also shows correlation with other state rankings such as obesity, income, or unemployment. Here are some examples to get you started, and remember that correlation does not imply causation and all that.br / br / a href="http://statestats.appspot.com/?q=metafilter"MetaFilter/a/a href="http://statestats.appspot.com/?q=bacon"Bacon/abr / a href="http://statestats.appspot.com/?q=porn"Porn/a/a href="http://statestats.appspot.com/?q=church"Church/abr / a href="http://statestats.appspot.com/?q=christmas"Christmas/a/a href="http://statestats.appspot.com/?q=hanukkah"Hanukkah/abr / a href="http://statestats.appspot.com/?q=tequila"Tequila/a/a href="http://statestats.appspot.com/?q=vodka"Vodka/a/a href="http://statestats.appspot.com/?q=rum"Rum/a/a href="http://statestats.appspot.com/?q=whiskey"Whiskey/a/a href="http://statestats.appspot.com/?q=wine"Wine/abr / a href="http://statestats.appspot.com/?q=ghosts"Ghosts/a/a href="http://statestats.appspot.com/?q=ufo"UFOs/a/a href="http://statestats.appspot.com/?q=bigfoot"Bigfoot/a/a href="http://statestats.appspot.com/?q=Elvis"Elvis/a

Ne manquez pas la conclusion de la série High School Girls, à suivre dans le tome 9, disponible chez Soleil Manga. L’éditeur présente la série :  "Ça y est, l’heure d’entrer au lycée est arrivée pour Eriko et ses copines. Afin de devenir des jeunes filles bien élevées, elles ont rejoint un établissement exclusivement féminin..."

Les prochains Macbook et les prochains iPhone pourraient disposer d'un système de refroidissement liquide, telles est la conclusion que l'on pourrait tirer d'un brevet déposé par Apple le 22 mai 2007 et [...]

Salut.

Avant d'installer Fedora 10 sur ma machine de bureau, j'en ai profité pour comparer les performances de Fedora 9 à celles de Fedora 8 pour la version 32 bits uniquement.

Pour rappel, ma machine est équipée d'un Quad Core Intel Q6600 à 2,4 GHz avec 4 Go de RAM.

Je me suis limité au benchmark UnixBench qui fournit un indice global, ce qui me simplifiera la comparaison. La version UnixBench utilisée est la version 4.1.0.

Mon protocole de tests est le suivant :

• Installation de Fedora 9 version 32 bits : noyau Fedora 2.6.26.6-79.fc9.i686
• La machine est placée en niveau 3 (init 3).
• 10 séries de tests avec UnixBench compilé sous Fedora 9 et exécuté sous Fedora 9.
• 10 séries de tests avec UnixBench compilé sous Fedora 8 et exécuté sous Fedora 8.

Voici les résultats obtenus :


Fedora 9 version 32 bits : Série 1 : 713.5
Série 2 : 711.1
Série 3 :
Série 4 : 713.5
Série 5 : 707.6
Série 6 : 717.2
Série 7 : 707.4
Série 8 : 712.2
Série 9 : 714.0
Série 10 : 713.5

Moyenne : 712.2


Fedora 8 version 32 bits : Voici pour rappel les résultats obtenus avec Fedora 8 :

Série 1 : 771.3
Série 2 : 753.4
Série 3 : 782.7
Série 4 : 738.7
Série 5 : 754.5
Série 6 : 737.4
Série 7 : 755.2
Série 8 : 736.0
Série 9 : 752.3
Série 10 : 742.7

Moyenne : 752.4



Résultats : Pour Fedora 9, on obtient un indice moyen de 712.2 pour UnixBench.

Pour Fedora 8, j'avais obtenu un indice moyen de 752.4 pour UnixBench.

On a donc une perte moyenne de près de 5 % de Fedora 9 32 bits par rapport à Fedora 8 32 bits.

Conclusion :
Au moment de ces tests, le noyau Fedora 9 (basé sur le noyau vanilla 2.6.26) semble modestement un peu moins performant que le noyau Fedora 8 (basé sur le noyau vanilla 2.6.23).

Cela semble normal, non significatif et dans la marge d'erreur de toute mesure statistique.

Je vous proposerai les résultats de Fedora 10 vs Fedora 9 pour voir l'évolution entre le noyau 2.6.26 et 2.6.27...

++

Billet original de Eddy33.Votez pour cet article sur le Planet Libre.

La formation de Robert Sagna, le Rassemblement pour le socialisme et la Démocratie ( Rsd/Takku Defaraat Sénégal) n'acceptera pas un report éventuel des élections locales. Il l'a fait savoir lors de sa réunion hebdomadaire et dont les conclusions sont

http://www.mobiletechreview.com/pho...sson-Xperia.htm

"Well folks, it's finally here: the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1a. That's the US version with 3G HSDPA on the US AT&T bands. The Xperia is sold in the US at SonyStyle stores in silver and at Best Buy stores in black (Fry's, J&R and other retailers also offer the silver version). Don't confuse the Xperia X1a with the overseas version Xperia X1i (no "a" for America) that lacks all of AT&T's 3G bands."

Read on, US and Canada readers, if you're trying to decide whether to pick one up from a Sony store. I'll leave the details of the conclusion to the article, but in short, the author really likes this device. If anyone has picked up the Americas version and wants to comment on how well it works here, chime in the thread!

Well not there might be a problem with my iPhone. My problem is, I always try to back-up my iPhone through iTunes but it tends to fail 100% of the time lol. It just stops half-way and then it tells me (and I am using Windows XP) "Apple MobileBackup.exe Stopped Responding" and thats that lol. I already tried to Un-Install, Re-Install and nothing. It comes to my conclusion that its my iPhone but I bet it another problem cause my iPhone responds good

Publication Date: 2008 Dec 1 PMID: 19046436br/Authors: Su, S. Y. - White, J. - Balding, D. J. - Coin, L. J.br/Journal: BMC Bioinformaticsbr/br/ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: The power of haplotype-based methods for association studies, identification of regions under selection, and ancestral inference, is well-established for diploid organisms. For polyploids, however, the difficulty of determining phase has limited such approaches. Polyploidy is common in plants and is also observed in animals. Partial polyploidy is sometimes observed in humans (e.g. trisomy 21; Down's syndrome), and it arises more frequently in some human tissues. Local changes in ploidy, known as copy number variations (CNV), arise throughout the genome. Here we present a method, implemented in the software polyHap, for the inference of haplotype phase and missing observations from polyploid genotypes. RESULTS: PolyHap allows each individual to have a different ploidy, but ploidy cannot vary over the genomic region analysed. It employs a hidden Markov model (HMM) and a sampling algorithm to infer haplotypes jointly in multiple individuals and to obtain a measure of uncertainty in its inferences. In the simulation study, we combine real haplotype data to create artificial diploid, triploid, and tetraploid genotypes, and use these to demonstrate that polyHap performs well, in terms of both switch error rate in recovering phase and imputation error rate for missing genotypes. To our knowledge, there is no comparable software for phasing a large, densely genotyped region of chromosome from triploids and tetraploids, while for diploids we found polyHap to be more accurate than fastPhase. We also compare the results of polyHap to SATlotyper on an experimentally haplotyped tetraploid dataset of 12 SNPs, and show polyHap is more accurate. With the availability of large SNP data in polyploids and CNV regions, CONCLUSIONS: We believe that polyHap, our proposed method for inferring haplotypic phase from genotype data, will be useful in enabling researchers analysing such data to exploit the power of haplotype-based analyses.br/br/post to: a href = http://www.citeulike.org/posturl?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Fcmd%3DRetrieve%26db%3DPubMed%26dopt%3DAbstract%26list_uids%3D19046436title=Entrez+PubmedCiteULike/a

Publication Date: 2008 Dec 1 PMID: 19046434br/Authors: Blangiardo, M. - Richardson, S.br/Journal: BMC Bioinformaticsbr/br/ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: In gene expression studies a key role is played by the so called ;;pre-processing'', a series of steps designed to extract the signal and account for the sources of variability due to the technology used rather than to biological differences between the RNA samples. At the moment there is no commonly agreed gold standard pre-processing method and each researcher has the responsibility to choose one method, incurring the risk of false positive and false negative features arising from the particular method chosen. RESULTS: We propose a Bayesian calibration model that makes use of the information provided by several pre-processing methods and we show that this model gives a better assessment of the ;true' unknown differential expression between two conditions. We demonstrate how to estimate the posterior distribution of the differential expression values of interest from the combined information. CONCLUSIONS: On simulated data and on the spike-in Latin Square dataset from Affymetrix the Bayesian calibration model proves to have more power than each pre-processing method. Its biological interest is demonstrated through an experimental example on publicly available data.br/br/post to: a href = http://www.citeulike.org/posturl?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Fcmd%3DRetrieve%26db%3DPubMed%26dopt%3DAbstract%26list_uids%3D19046434title=Entrez+PubmedCiteULike/a

!-- pageType= magazinesmall slug= ff_blodget section= techbiz subsection= people headline= Financial Industry Scapegoat Reinvents Himself as Financial Reporter authorName= Daniel Roth creditType= photo credit= Mike McGregor caption= Henry Blodgetis back, and his straight-talking analysis of the Web world is earning him new fans. -- pstrongHenry Blodget/strong has never gotten used to the chorus of hate that follows his every move. He's merely learned to live with it. When he started his personal blog in 2005, the comments a href="http://www.internetoutsider.com/2005/10/welcomeand_than.html"dripped with disgust/a. "You are a boldface liar," a reader wrote. "Give me one reason why I should believe what you are writing," said another. And that was just in response to Blodget's innocuous first entry. /ppDuring his years as a star Wall Street analyst, his pronouncements were welcomed and celebrated; now he couldn't say hello without getting savaged. Just last August, TechCrunch mentioned that Blodget would be one of more than two dozen tech celebrities a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/15/4-new-experts-henry-blodget-josh-kopelman-tim-o%E2%80%99reilly-robert-scoble-join-techcrunch50/"judging a contest/a for startups. Blodget knew what was coming, even if his hosts didn't. "Blodget is scum.... He is no longer the arrogant prick we saw in the '90s, but he's still scum," someone wrote. "A lot of people lost money listening to this dirtbag." "Blodget is a Web 1.0, bubble-creating has-been." "He is unethical." "He's as crooked as they come."/p pI meet a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/henry_blodget.html"Blodget/a at the offices of his new business, a year-old site called a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/"Silicon Alley Insider/a, shortly after the TechCrunch beat-down. Alley Insider is one of many tech business blogs that feed news, earnings info, and rumors to investors and corporate insiders. But Alley Insider has one thing that others don't. Blodget. He's smart, he's skeptical, and he's got the kind of self-assured voice that sells well in the blogosphere. As the market sinks, his opinions are even more in demand, though he's still hated by a large portion of his prospective audience./p pThe site shares two floors of a Manhattan office building with programmers and business staff for some of Alley Insider's sister companies, all of which were started by former DoubleClick CEO a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/kevin_ryan"Kevin Ryan/a. Blodget works in a double-wide cubicle near a window, separated by a low wall from the site's two other editors. They spend their days crawling Twitter and RSS feeds, calling sources, and pumping out about a dozen daily takes on the business world, most with Digg-friendly headlines (no easy accomplishment with bone-dry business stories). "Is Facebook Distracting Us From Porn? No" is a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/9/is-facebook-distracting-us-from-porn-no"typical/a, or "a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/googles_ginormous_food_budget_7530_per_googler"Google's Ginormous Food Budget/a: $7,530 Per Googler, $72 Million a Year." Blodget tells his team to think of the site as talk radio: He wants readers to feel compelled to check in several times a day to get the Alley Insider view on everything going on in their world./p pFor privacy, we duck into a small conference room, and Blodget, tall and skinny, sinks into a ridiculously deep leather chair. His floppy dirty-blond hair gives him a youthful, almost carefree air, but the deep circles that ring his eyes tell a different story. He's managing a 24-hour news startup. It's midday and he's been posting since 5 am. And then there's the burden that comes with being Henry Blodget, digital punching bag./p p"There are obviously a lot of folks who say, 'Now wait a minute, isn't that the guy who....'" He lets the thought trail off. He's legally barred from talking about the incidents that led to his vilification. "To them, I'm emthat/em Henry Blodget. There's not much more I can say. I still can't address specific points. So it's like, 'OK, here's my face. Throw the fruit. When you want to stop throwing the fruit, if you want to listen, great. If you don't, fine.'"/p pIt's been almost a decade since the impulse to greet him with rotten mangos first struck. Back in 1998, as a 32-year-old analyst with investment bank CIBC, he a href="http://www.thestreet.com/markets/analystrankings/977502.html"declared/a that the stock price of Amazon.com would nearly double to $400. Three weeks later it did, and Blodget was a hero. Soon he packed up his spreadsheets mdash; he's never more comfortable than when he is lining up numbers in rows and columns and teasing out their secrets mdash; and moved to Merrill Lynch./p pInvestors followed the new oracle's every utterance, and bankers wanted Blodget to bless the stocks of companies they were hoping to do business with. The lines on his graphs always seemed to point one way mdash; steeply up and to the right. He wasn't just predicting profits, he was selling a revolution: The old metrics didn't apply. Blodget may have counseled people to own only a small percentage of Internet stocks mdash; 10 percent at the most mdash; but nobody listened./p !-- pagebreak -- div id="embed" style="width:370px;" div id="pic" style="width:350px;" img style="width:350px;" src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_blodget3_f.jpg" alt=""/ div id="caption" Launched in 2007, Silicon Alley Insider is gaining on some of its established rivals. br/ emSource: Compete/em /div /div /div pThen came the crash. Five trillion dollars in wealth vaporized in 24 months, leaving behind unquantifiable amounts of rage among the masses of day traders who had believed briefly that they, too, were market savants. When the bubble burst, so did Blodget's aura./p pStill, it wasn't the crash alone that crushed him. It took Eliot Spitzer to turn Henry Blodget into emthat/em Henry Blodget. Spitzer, then New York's crusading attorney general, investigated Merrill in 2001 for conflicts of interest. He discovered a clutch of emails from the young analyst showing that while talking up certain stocks to clients, he was trashing them internally. Companies like 24/7 Media, Excite@Home, and InfoSpace mdash; firms Merrill was publicly cheering mdash; in private were deemed by Blodget to be "shit," "crap," and "junk" (respectively). According to Spitzer's findings, Blodget would have pulled in $12 million in 2001 mdash; quadruple his earnings in 1999 mdash; if he hadn't accepted a buyout that year. In 2003, Merrill's boy genius agreed to pay a $4 million fine and accepted a lifetime ban from working in the securities industry./p pPublic disgrace usually drives a person into hiding, or at least into a different career. Jerry Levin, the brains behind the disastrous AOL-Time Warner merger, today runs a href="http://moonviewsanctuary.com/staff"Moonview Sanctuary/a, his wife's spa; Spitzer, forced to resign as governor last summer, is currently discovering the a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2008/06/10/spitzers-next-act-distressed-real-estate/"joys of real estate management/a; Health South CEO Richard Scrushy, while on trial for accounting fraud, a href="http://www.richardmscrushy.com/biography.aspx"became a televangelist/a. Not Blodget./p pOne former colleague says Blodget spent the months when he was being investigated trying to grasp why he was singled out for something that was commonplace in the industry. He figured the controversy would blow over once the public realized his conduct was not unusual. "He was incredulous that the investigation got traction; he said it was silly," a friend says. But there was too much anger in the wake of the bubble, and Blodget's embarrassing emails made him an easy scapegoat. Later, when he was inclined to argue his case, the settlement terms prevented it./p pSo Blodget did what came naturally. He began writing about the companies he used to cover, a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2104656/"first for Slate/a, then on his own blog, a href="http://www.internetoutsider.com/"Internet Outsider/a. Was this journalism mdash; or was it therapy? Rather than hide, he started saying in public what he had once said only in private, using the same brutally frank voice that got him in trouble with Spitzer. He marketed his notoriety to a new Web readership hungry for smart, independent analysis./p pWhen Ryan, an Internet Outsider reader, approached him about starting an industry news site, Blodget jumped at the prospect of a bigger stage. Before working on Wall Street, he'd been a freelance writer; now he could combine the two vocations, borrowing freely from both journalism and equity research./p pThrough Alley Insider, Blodget is trying to erase, post by post, Spitzer's portrait of him as a duplicitous, money-grubbing shill for big business. Blodget has always believed that the Internet changed everything, so naturally he believes it has the power to change the world's perception of him. The venue offers all Henry, all the time (and even when his other writers are posting, it's clear they're channeling him). The result is a unique blend of x-ray analysis and tech evangelism./p pAs we talk, Blodget gets up from his chair, antsy to return to his laptop. I ask him if he understands what he's up against. If the hate has lasted this long, why expect it ever to fade away? "If all I knew about me was what I read during that period," he says, "I'd probably have the same reaction."/p pstrongOn a late summer morning/strong, Blodget waits in the lobby of the Nasdaq building in midtown Manhattan. He's all banker today: blue suit, red tie, black cap-toed Oxfords, his shirt so deeply pressed there are creases down the sleeves. It's 10 am and, ready for his second breakfast, he pries open the plastic case of a turkey and Swiss sandwich and starts wolfing it down. In a few minutes he is supposed to conduct a video interview for Yahoo's Tech Ticker finance site. As soon as Blodget started appearing as a regular host in February, the Furies a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/650/Jerry-Yang-Strikes-Back;-Here%27s-Microsoft%27s-Next-Move?tickers=yhoo,msft"reemerged/a. "Did you not find any other decent, credible guy than Henry Blodget?" one of the first comments read. "Why spoil this new feature with such a scum and spoil the Yahoo reputation?"/p pAs producers prepare to tape the show, Blodget wipes his crumbs off the table. He explains the guiding vision behind Alley Insider. "We don't want to do things we don't care about," he says. "It's nice to say theoretically we're the judge of what's important and what's not, but come on, give readers credit. They'll tell you immediately what they want, and that drives coverage. People are fanatically interested in Apple, Google, Microsoft. It wasn't a tough call to know what to write about."/p pBlodget's focus on content is matched by his apparent indifference to the look of the site. Alley Insider employs a cookie-cutter template of scrolling headlines and thumbnail photos dragged off the Web. But design limitations notwithstanding, by September the site was getting nearly 500,000 visitors a month, rivaling a href="http://allthingsd.com/"AllThingsDigital.com/a, the citeWall Street Journal/cite blog edited by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. Since the beginning of the year, traffic to the site has more than doubled, and Blodget's words now carry surprising weight. When a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/10/apple-s-steve-jobs-rushed-to-er-after-heart-attack-says-cnn-citizen-journalist"he reported/a early this fall that Steve Jobs may have been rushed to the hospital after a heart attack mdash; citing an anonymous (and, as it turns out, fraudulent) post on a minor user-generated news site run by CNN called iReport mdash; Apple's a href="http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/03/technology/apple/"stock dropped/a nearly 10 percent. Critics blamed Alley Insider./p p"I read citeThe New York Times/cite, citeThe Economist/cite, and Alley Insider," says a href="http://www.firebrandpartners.com/principals/index.html"Scott Galloway/a, head of investment equity firm Firebrand Partners, who is best known for his successful public fight to get on the board of citeThe New York Times/cite. "Henry takes a no-mercy, no-malice approach to Web business and media." Valleywag recently called him "the disgraced stock analyst everyone now listens to."/p !-- pagebreak -- div class="wide_img" img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_blodget2_f.jpg" alt="" div class="wide_caption" div class="wide_caption_txt" The team at Silicon Alley Insider (left to right): senior editor Dan Frommer, COO Julie Hansen, cofounder Kevin Ryan, and editor in chief Blodget. br/ emPhoto: Mike McGregor/em /div /div /div br/ br/ pFor all the success today, it took Blodget amp; Co. some time to figure out a winning formula. When Ryan, a New Yorker, launched the site in 2007, he wanted to cover the local startup and media scene. Blodget signed on as CEO and editor in chief, bought a minority stake, and hired citeForbes/cite journalists a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/peter_kafka"Peter Kafka/a and a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/dan_frommer"Dan Frommer/a to help him develop content (Kafka was later hired away by AllThingsD). The first few weeks, the site read like a tourist's guide to spotting B-list Internet companies in the big city, with each firm's location prominently announced: "NoHo-based Meetup has quietly launched a Facebook application"; "Flatiron-based YellowJacket Software has raised $1.25 million." Blodget branched out, taking on the bigger names himself mdash; Apple, Dow Jones, NBC, JP Morgan. It quickly became clear to him that New York's tech industry was too small an arena to contain the ambition of the site. And nearly half the readers were in California anyway./p pAlley Insider soon dropped its Silicon Alley focus but stuck with the moniker. And Blodget began to draw more heavily on his research experience. He created financial models of the companies he was talking about and posted the spreadsheets as Google docs so anyone could download and toy with them. He analyzed the potential revenue YouTube could bring to Google, mapping out his assumptions about viewership and ads watched, and offering a clear bottom-line conclusion. Readers weighed in with their critiques, which Blodget used to sharpen the model. He figured he wouldn't just write about Wall Street, he would also usurp part of Wall Street's business by providing high-quality research, the kind brokerage customers used to prize./p pBut visitors to the site wanted more than analytics. They also craved the edgier Henry of the Spitzer emails. Blodget obliged. In one post, a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/1/ben_stein_is_an_idiot"Blodget declares/a citeNew York Times/cite economics columnist Ben Stein to be either "an idiot" or possibly just "delusional." He suggests that the anonymous sources cited by archrival TechCrunch in its reporting on Microsoft's attempt to purchase Yahoo "a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/yahoo_stock_fades_as_techcrunch_microsoft_takeover_sources_sober_up"must have been drunk/a." And in November 2007, when E-Trade lost $9 billion in value as its risky mortgage bets turned to dust, Blodget offered only one piece of advice to the company's shareholders: "a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/11/etrade_etfc_total_cost_of_screwup_9_billion"Cry/a."/p p"On Wall Street, I'd consistently submit a report that would say, 'This is going to be roadkill,' and it would come back rewritten as 'We see some weakness,'" Blodget says. "Now I can say, 'It's going to be roadkill.' That's very satisfying."/p pBut even as he delights in railing against corporate giants, he's still disciplined enough to run the underlying numbers mdash; Blodget loves the drama, but he loves the spreadsheets just as much. One post about craigslist should have been something only an accountant could love: a complex set of assumptions and analyses to determine what the company might be worth. Yet Blodget wrote the whole exercise as if it were a mystery plot, parceling out details and stringing the reader along until the very end./p pWhen Yahoo announced this summer that it had hired Bain amp; Co., a consulting firm usually brought in when a company is about to start swinging the ax, Blodget a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/9/yahoo-fat-farm-how-many-people-does-yahoo-need-to-fire-to-get-fit-"sharpened his own pencil/a. "We're mad as hell ... especially now that Yahoo's wasting millions on Bain." He offered his own, free advice (spreadsheet attached) cataloging how many people Yahoo should fire in each division mdash; 1,804 from its "positively obese" sales and marketing arm alone mdash; in order to goose operating margins to a "more respectable" 20 percent from its current 7 percent. "He pushed us early on to ask, 'What does this mean for profits? How does any news affect a company's numbers?'" Frommer says. "It's great if it makes a company look bad or look good, but is this really going to affect the numbers?"/p pBlodget is also trying things that no mainstream-journalism-trained blogger like Swisher or GigaOm's a href="http://gigaom.com/"Om Malik/a would ever dare. He makes serious-sounding offers to buy companies that he wants to demonstrate are significantly undervalued. It's pure showmanship, but with Blodget's background in finance and his ties to folks up and down Wall Street, no one knows just how far he will take the joke./p pHis first target was CNET. With the a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/12/announcing_our_friendly_takeover_offer_for_cnet"slightest of winks/a, he wrote a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/1/cnet_update_on_our_offer_and_restructuring_plan_part_1"post after post/a explaining how he'd a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/jana_here_s_our_plan_for_cnet"purchase the company/a. At first he proposed a sort of reverse merger, with CNET buying Alley Insider for $50 million in stock, at which point Blodget's team would take over every aspect of the company. Then he detailed the operational changes he would make./p !-- pagebreak -- pRyan got nervous about Blodget's new direction. Blodget's deal with the government forbade him from giving individual research advice, but it didn't say anything about jumping into the private-equity space. Still, there might be legal issues. "Look, why don't we run this by a lawyer just to make sure, because we're getting into securities stuff here," he said to Blodget. When the lawyer asked them "Is this a real offer?" there was a brief silence. For the first time the two really thought about it./p p"You know, yes," Ryan replied. "If they said yes, we would accept $50 million at that time to buy them. So it is a real offer. But we're actually asking them to buy us." The lawyer signed off on the convoluted reasoning./p pAfter Blodget's taunting posts went up, investment firm JANA Partners announced a hostile takeover attempt of CNET. It failed, but by spring 2008 CBS a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/cbs_buying_cnet_for_1_8_billion"stepped in to buy/a the company for $1.8 billion./p pFor one CNET executive, memories of Blodget's unwanted attentions still rankle. "The way you make a big name for yourself on the Web today is to make, for lack of a better word, ridiculous statements," says Zander Lurie, former senior VP of strategy and development at CNET and now CFO of CBS Interactive. Lurie found himself reassuring employees who sent him Blodget's postings and wondered whether their company was at risk. "Everyone knew there was nothing in the offering: He didn't have the capital, the expertise, or any specific insight into our business," Lurie says. "He makes the ridiculous statement and it gets sent all around, and then he claims credit when there's an event the following year, which obviously he had nothing to do with. Less than zero to do with. We all have reputations. And his track record is well known."/p pBlodget has been a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/10/how-the-new-york-times-nyt-can-save-itself"waging another/a half-serious acquisition fight, this time for the New York Times Company. All he wants is the Web site mdash; the print side is dead, he says. He thinks the paper needs to cut about 80 percent of its costs, at which point it would be the perfect size to be the digital paper of record for a long time to come. "It's a serious offer from our perspective, but it hasn't been taken seriously," Blodget says./p pstrongIn the wake of Wall Street's latest meltdown/strong, Blodget finds himself in even greater demand. He's doing regular TV appearances and is posting again on Slate. When NPR wanted someone to talk about the Wall Street culture of greed, they a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94667073"brought in Blodget/a. The reporter introduced him by pointing out that Merrill is now gone, "and Henry Blodget is gone, too; he's banned from Wall Street after being charged with fraud."/p p"Thanks," Blodget said, stuttering for a second, "especially for that horrific introduction." They both laughed. But by the end, the host was treating Blod