Fighting Dirty ????

എന്തിനും ഏതിന്നും ഗൂഗിള്‍ ആശ്രയിക്കുന്നവര്‍ക്ക് ഒരു മുന്നറിയിപ്പ് ...
ഞാനുള്‍പ്പെടുന്ന ഒരു വലിയ സമൂഹം നാളെ ഗൂഗിള്‍ പറയുന്നത് മാത്രം വങ്ങേണ്ടി വരുന്ന കാലം വിദൂരമല്ല ... open source software എന്ന ബഹുമാനം ഗൂഗിളിനു കൊടുത്തവര്‍ അത് കളഞ്ഞിട്ടു കാലം കുറെയായി .. ഇതാ ഗ്ഗൂഗിലിനു എതിരെ മൈക്രോസോഫ്ട്‌ ....

SCROOGled!

Tail piece:-
(പണ്ട്' ബില്‍ ഗറ്റെസ് മോഷ്ടിച്ച ആപ്പിള്‍ ഇന്ന് തകര്ച്ചുയുടെ വക്കിലാണ് ...ഗൂഗിള്‍ മാത്രമാണ് ഇപ്പോളത്തെ പ്രധാന ശത്രു....അത് കൊണ്ട് ഇരിക്കട്ടെ ഒരു പണി )

CRITICS SAY MICROSOFT IS SPREADING FEAR, UNCERTAINTY, AND DOUBT

As is typical when political campaigns go negative, there was a bit of a backlash. Critics say Microsoft is spreading FUD — fear, uncertainty, and doubt — when it should be focused on building great products that can compete with Google on quality. "What I don’t get is why Microsoft feels the need to run such a negative campaign," tech blogger Frederic Lardinois wrote at TechCrunch.

In other words, why does Microsoft have to be so mean?

ON THE ATTACK

This isn’t the first time Microsoft has swiped at Google, nor is it the first time one monster tech brand has poked at another — take the "I’m a Mac, I’m a PC" ads, or Samsung’s pillorying of Apple. Oracle was recently sanctioned for a botched attempt to smear IBM, and Google was quickly criticized when a Motorola ad bashing Apple’s maps turned out to be using a nonexistent address. But for the most part, tech brands stick to positive ads.

That may be changing. There’s a reason Microsoft’s new attack ads have started to resemble political ads, and we’re likely to see a lot more of them. In July, Microsoft hiredlongtime Democratic political operative Mark Penn, best known for running presidential campaigns for both Bill and Hillary Clinton. Penn, who first started advising Microsoft in 1998, now holds the murky title "corporate vice president for strategic and special projects." His job is to push lagging products, primarily Bing, using his corporate "SWAT team" and the rapid poll-and-response advertising tactics he honed in politics

Fetal Genome Deduced from Parental DNA

Image: Flickr/lunarcaustic

From Nature magazine

Heralding a future in which a child’s genetic blueprint can be safely scanned for traits and defects long before birth, researchers have announced that they have reconstructed the genome of a fetus using a blood sample from its mother and a saliva sample from its father. The work is published in Science Translational Medicine.

The feat is possible because when a woman is pregnant, her blood contains fragments of DNA both from her genome and from that of her unborn child. Generally, around 13% of the DNA in her blood plasma — called ‘cell-free' DNA — comes from the fetus. The first challenge facing those who wish to glean information about the fetus in this way is to figure out how to distinguish fetal from maternal DNA.

Jay Shendure, a geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and his colleagues isolated 5 nanograms of cell-free DNA from a maternal blood sample taken at 18.5 weeks of gestation. They performed 'deep sequencing' on the DNA, which involved sampling fragments roughly 78 times.

The researchers constructed the mother’s genome by sequencing the DNA in her blood cells and then computationally predicted the ratios at which certain blocks of gene variants, or haplotypes should appear as cell-free DNA in her blood. Where the observed ratios diverged from what was predicted, the researchers surmised they were reading some of the genetic material from the fetus.

To work out the paternal contribution, the researchers sequenced the father's genome using DNA from his saliva (blood could also have been used but in this case was not available). Variants of his that didn't turn up in the maternal blood were presumed not to have been inherited by the fetus; those that did were presumed to come from the fetus.

The researchers also developed computational techniques to try to detect de novomutations in the fetus's genome, which arise spontaneously rather than come from a parent.

To test the accuracy of the deduced genome, the researchers sequenced the child’s genome from cells collected from its cord blood after birth. The researchers were able to predict inherited mutations using the parental samples at most but not all variant sites. Where they were able to make predictions, they report 98% accuracy. They also managed to detect 39 of 44 de novo mutations in the fetus, but with false positives. Mindful that fetal screening needs to be done sooner to give parents time to respond, they then tested the technique on a second family with a 8.2 week-old fetus and obtained 95% accuracy.

Difference or defect?
At present, most prenatal diagnosis is done from a sample of either placental tissue or amniotic fluid, both of which must be obtained using invasive methods that can trigger miscarriage. Some tests already sample maternal blood, but they target specific chromosomal disorders such as Down’s syndrome. Wide-ranging, non-invasive screening could reach the clinic within a few years, says Shendure. But he warns that more needs to be done to refine the method and make the results meaningful to patients. “The technical piece is not the only challenge,” he says.

James Evans, a clinical geneticist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, agrees that the idea is not yet ready for the clinic. “We don’t know how to interpret the vast majority of variations we find in the genome,” he says. He also warns that parents have very little time to make life-or-death decisions. “The stakes are high,” he says. “Many are testing to decide about termination.”

“Catching everything in the basket” may also hasten our intolerance for variation, says Françoise Baylis, a bioethicist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. “As technology moves on, so does our willingness to think of difference as a defect,” she says.

PAN explained.......

PAN is a 10 digit alpha numeric number, where the first 5 characters are letters, the next 4 numbers and the last one a letter again. These 10 characters can be divided in five parts as can be seen below. The meaning of each number has been explained further.
1. First three characters are alphabetic series running from AAA to ZZZ
2. Fourth character of PAN represents the status of the PAN holder.
• C — Company
• P — Person
• H — HUF(Hindu Undivided Family)
• F — Firm
• A — Association of Persons (AOP)
• T — AOP (Trust)
• B — Body of Individuals (BOI)
• L — Local Authority
• J — Artificial Juridical Person
• G — Government
3. Fifth character represents first character of the PAN holder’s last name/surname.
4. Next four characters are sequential number running from 0001 to 9999.
5. Last character in the PAN is an alphabetic check digit.
Nowadays, the DOI (Date of Issue) of PAN card is mentioned at the right (vertical) hand side of the photo on the PAN card