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Black-browed albatross pairs communicate with voice and body language. Here is a common posture between the mated pairs--wrapping their necks around the mate. Their white plumage is glowingly beautiful, too! Saunders Island, Falkland Islands, Black-browed Albatrosses nesting.
The Longest Wings in the World
Southern Royal Albatrosses have the longest wingspans of any bird in the world--over 13 feet. Not the feathers, and the huge chest. They are magnificent flyers, with a heart rate lower when they fly in a glide than resting on land!
Southern Royal Albatrosses--A Royal Couple
On Campbell Island--subantarctic islands of New Zealand. This pair is at their nest, and look especially dignified and stately. I love them so much!
Albatross Love
I don't care what anyone says, albatrosses must feel love for each other. They are so tender together, so intimate, so good at the gestures of affection. And a divorce rate--of zero!
Do You Like This?
The male courts the female by grooming her chin and beak.
Its mate just returned to their nest, and the incubating bird calls and stands up in the nest to reveal their egg and, presumably, that it's healthy. They touch beaks, and "talk" back and forth. Note that these albatrosses have lips--pink lips! Saunders Island, Falkland Islands, Black-browed Albatrosses.
Just returned to the nest, one Black-browed Albatross looks as proud as can be of mate and egg, while the mate gently attends to the precious egg.
Can you hear this mated pair of albatrosses? They're clacking their beaks, excited to see one another after the one standing has been out at sea for a long time.
Beak to beak is an albatross kiss!
Black-browed Albatross--"Beak Dancing." Among the most common behaviors was this one--one albatrosses opens its beak wide, screaming "waaaaaa" like a wounded lamb, and the other passes its beak back and forth. Somehow, they find that aching scream erotic! Saunders Island, Falkland Islands, Black-browed Albatrosses nesting.
Black-browed albatrosses--their beaks seem to burn pink, and their white feathers seem to glow from within. A mated pair!
Black-browed Albatrosses--"A Beaky Kiss"! One albatross gives its mate a kiss on the beak. When it happened, I knew it was a goodbye kiss. Sure enough, the one walked to the orange rock, spread its long wings, and left. So tender with each other. Saunders Island, Falkland Islands, breeding Black-browed albatrosses.
These Black-browed albatrosses are so beautiful and sweet-natured. After exchanging duties at the nest, and spending an hour with each other courting and preening, the albatross who had been on the nest--the big mound they make up to sit on--spreads its wings to fly away. I knew she was leaving, and there's a poignancy to the moment that I love. I also love the lines of this photo. Saunders Island, Falkland Islands, Black-browed Albatrosses at the nest.
The image of tenderness--two black-browed albatrosses preen each other. They focus on areas that they could not reach by themselves!
A Black-browed Albatross, supreme in flight, soars on long wings in early morning light, Falkland Islands. In flight, they have such fierce expressions in their eyes, belying their tenderness at the nest. Albatrosses must have the most beautiful wings in the world!
Black-browed Albatross, soaring in soft light.
Black-browed Albatross on nest, with a rainbow ending at its nest. A symbol of hope--for the species, which is endangered and declining, and for all of us!
Two Birds, One Heart--Grey-headed albatrosses here court with their beaks, and together they form the shape of a heart. This photo is now also available as a greeting card.
Two grey-headed albatrosses court with their exquisite beaks at their nest in the tussac on South Georgia Island.
Magnificent wings on this yellow-beaked albatross! Pyramid Rock, off Chatham Islands, New Zealand, in the background.
Buller's Albatrosses
Flight Formation
The Only Nesting Place
Chatham Island Albatross--note the all yellow beak with gray head! Their entire nesting range is this rock--Pyramid Rock, Chatham Islands, New Zealand!


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What is it with modern American liberals and taxes? Apparently they don't just see taxes as a necessary evil, they actually like 'em; they think, as Gail Collins puts it in the New York Times, that in a better world "little kids would dream of growing up to be really big taxpayers." But you really see liberals' taxophilia coming out when you read the reviews of the new movie Robin Hood, starring Russell Crowe. If liberals don't love taxes, they sure do hate tax protesters.
Carlo Rotella, director of American Studies at Boston College, writes in the Boston Globe that this Robin Hood is "A big angry baby [who] fights back against taxes" and that the movie is "hamstrung by a shrill political agenda — endless fake-populist harping on the evils of taxation." You wonder what Professor Rotella teaches his students about America, a country whose fundamental ideology has been described as "antistatism, laissez-faire, individualism, populism, and egalitarianism."
At the Village Voice, Karina Longworth dismisses the movie as "a rousing love letter to the Tea Party movement" in which "Instead of robbing from the rich to give to the poor, this Robin Hood preaches about 'liberty' and the rights of the individual as he wanders a countryside populated chiefly by Englishpersons bled dry by government greed." Gotta love those scare quotes around "liberty." Uptown at the New York Times, A. O. Scott is sadly disappointed that "this Robin is no socialist bandit practicing freelance wealth redistribution, but rather a manly libertarian rebel striking out against high taxes and a big government scheme to trample the ancient liberties of property owners and provincial nobles. Don't tread on him!" The movie, she laments, is "one big medieval tea party."
Moving on down the East Coast establishment, again with the Tea Party hatin' in Michael O'Sullivan's Washington Post review:
Ridley Scott's "Robin Hood" is less about a band of merry men than a whole country of really angry ones. At times, it feels like a political attack ad paid for by the tea party movement, circa 1199. Set in an England that has been bankrupted by years of war in the Middle East – in this case, the Crusades – it's the story of a people who are being taxed to death by a corrupt government, under an upstart ruler who's running the country into the ground.
Man, these liberals really don't like Tea Parties, complaints about lost liberty, and Hollywood movies that don't toe the ideological line. As Cathy Young notes at Reason:
Whatever one may think of Scott's newest incarnation of the Robin Hood legend, it is more than a little troubling to see alleged liberals speak of liberty and individual rights in a tone of sarcastic dismissal. This is especially ironic since the Robin Hood of myth and folklore probably has much more in common with the "libertarian rebel" played by Russell Crowe than with the medieval socialist of the "rob from the rich, give to the poor" cliché. At heart, the noble-outlaw legend that has captured the human imagination for centuries is about freedom, not wealth redistribution….The Sheriff of Nottingham is Robin's chief opponent; at the time, it was the sheriffs' role as tax collectors in particular that made them objects of loathing by peasants and commoners. [In other books and movies] Robin Hood is also frequently shown helping men who face barbaric punishments for hunting in the royal forests, a pursuit permitted to nobles and strictly forbidden to the lower classes in medieval England; in other words, he is opposing privilege bestowed by political power, not earned wealth.
The reviewers are indeed tapping into a real theme of this Robin Hood, which is a prequel to the usual Robin Hood story; it imagines Robin's life before he went into the forest. Marian tells the sheriff, "You have stripped our wealth to pay for foreign adventures." (A version of the script can be found on Google Books and at Amazon, where Marian is called Marion.) Robin tells the king the people want a charter to guarantee that every man be "safe from eviction without cause or prison without charge" and free "to work, eat, and live merry as he may on the sweat of his own brow." The evil King John's man Godfrey promises to "have merchants and landowners fill your coffers or their coffins….Loyalty means paying your share in the defense of the realm." And Robin Hood tells the king, in the spirit of Braveheart's William Wallace, "What we ask for is liberty, by law."
Dangerous sentiments indeed. You can see what horrifies the liberal reviewers. If this sort of talk catches on, we might become a country based on antistatism, laissez-faire, individualism, populism, and egalitarianism and governed by a Constitution.

subset: commoncrawl


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Once you put the games in your cart and checkout and it's on your download list, you can redownload it whenever you want as long as you have plus, even when the game is no longer free. I don't see any reason not to get the full year as you'll need it for ps4 eventually anyways, but I don't think there's any disadvantage to just getting the 90 day one first. I'm loving the service thus far as they actually give games I want to play, sometimes too many games, I haven't finished little big planet 2 or the psn tomb raider game yet. If you only have a 40 gig hard drive, it's going to be a problem as some of the full price games are like 7 gigs.
Awesome, that is even better than I expected. Thanks for the help Kof, you confirmed a lot of things for me. I actually ended up getting Plus today and so far, so good. I might look into doing that John. Space has always been an issue for me and that would solve a lot of my problems. Thanks for the heads up.


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California Firearms Licensee Check System
Welcome to the California Firearms Licensee Check System (CFLC)
Quick Link - GO TO CFLC
About CFLC
California Penal Code Section 27555 prohibits all Federal Firearms Licensees (FFLs), other than Type 03 or 06 FFLs, from shipping firearms to an FFL in California unless, prior to delivery, the FFL intending to deliver, sell or transfer the firearms obtains a verification approval number from the California Department of Justice (CADOJ) Bureau of Firearms. This includes transfers that occur at gun shows.
The verification approval number, which the Bureau of Firearms provides in a Firearms Shipment Approval letter, confirms that the intended recipient of the firearm shipment is properly licensed and listed in the state's database of persons/entities authorized to receive firearm shipments. If the intended CA FFL recipient is not listed in the state's database, the transaction will result in a Do Not Ship letter, and it is a crime for the intended recipient to receive the firearms (Penal Code Section 28465).
As a courtesy to impacted FFLs, the Bureau of Firearms has established an Internet application that is available to FFLs nationwide 24 hours a day 7 days a week (24/7) to obtain Firearms Shipment Approval letters. All Internet transactions will be handled on a secure server, and the information provided will be used solely for the purposes associated with the administration of the CFLC program. For FFLs that do not have Internet access, the Bureau has established a telephone service that allows nationwide FFL shippers to enroll and obtain Firearms Shipment Approval letters via telephone (916) 227-2665 or facsimile (916) 227-1032 prior to shipping firearms to a California FFL. However, the telephone service availability will be limited to Monday through Friday 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.
For additional information regarding this new program, please refer to our CFLC Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs).
Enrolling in CFLC
You must have a valid FFL number to enroll in CFLC. Enrollment is a one-time process. There are several ways you can enroll. You can use the Internet, or mail/fax an enrollment application to the Bureau of Firearms.
To enroll using the CFLC Internet application, use the link in the "Not yet enrolled in CFLC?" section on the CFLC home page. After completing the CFLC enrollment process, you will be able to log in to CFLC to obtain a Firearms Shipment Approval letter. Also an enrollment acknowledgement email message containing your CFLC Logon ID and Password will be sent to the email address entered on the enrollment screen.
To enroll by mail or fax, complete the California Firearms Licensee Check Enrollment Application, pdf and return it to the Bureau of Firearms. Once your application is processed, you will receive an enrollment confirmation letter that includes a telephone/fax number you can use to request Firearms Shipment Approval letters via fax or mail.
Obtaining a Firearms Shipment Verification Approval Letter
To obtain a Firearms Shipment Approval letter 24 hours a day from the CFLC Internet application, Logon to CFLC. You will need the CFLC Logon ID and Password you received during the Internet or mail/fax enrollment process. You will also need the five digit Centralized List (CL) number of the CA FFL to whom you intend to ship firearms.
You can also request a Firearms Shipment Approval letter by calling the telephone number listed on your enrollment verification letter or faxing/mailing a CFLC Firearms Shipment Approval Letter Request Form (BOF 08-300) to the Bureau of Firearms. However, you must have enrolled in CFLC prior to submitting a Firearms Shipment Approval Letter Request Form.
Firearms Shipment Approval letter requests received via phone, fax, or mail will be processed Monday through Friday between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. After processing your request, the Bureau of Firearms will fax you a Firearms Shipment Approval letter containing the verification approval number.
California FFL Holders
California FFL holders (other than Type 03 or 06) must enroll in the California Firearms Licensee Check (CFLC) Program to ship firearms to another California FFL. They must also be listed on the State of California Centralized List as either a dealer, manufacturer, or exempt. Once enrolled in CFLC, California FFLs will be able to obtain Firearms Shipment Approval letters to ship firearms to other FFL holders within the state.
A CA FFL must provide an FFL shipper with his or her five digit Centralized List number so that the shipper can obtain a Firearms Shipment Approval letter from the Bureau of Firearms.
Enrolling in the Centralized List for California Exempted FFL Holders (CLEFFL)
To enroll in the Centralized List for Exempted FFLs (CLEFFL), you must submit a completed Application and 26500 PC Exemption Declaration for the Centralized List of Exempted Federal Firearms Licensees form (BOF10-07), pdf , a copy of your valid FFL, a valid Certificate of Eligibility, and the appropriate fee to the California Department of Justice (CADOJ). The Bureau of Firearms will send you a "Centralized List of Exempt Firearms Licensees Notice" to confirm your status.


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Golden Union Fish Bar
Time Out says
A gem of a chippie that's knowingly retro in look and feel but admirably forward-thinking when it comes to the beer-battered, sustainable fish it serves.
Cast an eye over the menu and it's evident that Golden Union can talk the talk – fish delivered daily from sustainable waters, grade-A potatoes, a combo of two frying oils changed at least four times a week, and freshly made beer batter. The point is, it can walk the walk too. Fish is chunky, flaky and perfectly cooked in a light, crispy, complementary casing; chips are crisp, firm and fluffy; pies and fish cakes are own-made and look it – there seems to be no weak point. Decide to eat-in and the top-of-the-range large cod and chips will set you back £12.95. Side dishes are priced at the expensive end of the scale. The decor is retro with a knowing wink: tiled walls, plastic-topped wooden tables and chairs, and plastic tomatoes filled with ketchup. The music is up to date and not too intrusive, combining well with the busy atmosphere – and the vibe is maintained by young staff who seem genuinely proud of what they're serving. Chances are you'll be planning your return visit before you've even paid the bill.
38 Poland Street
|Tube: Oxford Circus tube
|Do you own this business?
Users say (37)
Average User Rating
4.6 / 5
Rating Breakdown
- 5 star:26
- 4 star:9
- 3 star:0
- 2 star:1
- 1 star:1
The Best Fish and Chips in London. Great Food, great service and in the heart of Soho.
First class!!!
Great taste, great service, very clean, looks great and what we all look for great value for money what else can you ask for?
Best chippy in central London with the nicest staff. I grew up by the seaside so I'm very judgmental about such things. It's the batter that matters ;-)
This is a good place with positive vibe, the best fish and chips I ever had in my life 😊
Fantastic quality fish and chips, excellent service from staff who are always cheerful and welcoming. Have been coming here for over 8 years now, could not recommend the place more!
Super fresh fish, crispy golden batter, fluffy chips, generous portions, old school atmosphere - surely the best fish and chips in London, as an expat Londoner, it's a must-visit every time I get back home.
Best fish and chips in London! Great staff too. Would highly recommend this place.
Fantastic venue in the heart of London. Great food,menu, staff, atmosphere .. 5 Plus
Not only is the food amazing and cooked to perfection there is always a warm and friendly vibe as soon as you enter the Golden Union. It is my number one stop every time I visit London!!
The best Fish, Mushy Peas and service in LDN!
The best chippy in London.
Best described as Cheap and Cheerful! The day I popped in they ran out of Large cod and only had small ones left... I can't imagine how big a large portion must be, since my "small" cod was a big portion. Even the tartar sauce is a massive serving.
Very simple place, it has a canteen vibe, though the staff is always friendly. The fish is best I have had in central london.
I have no idea how the people work here. It's always busy and they'll be serving up to 5 people at once. I go here once a week, and they've never messed up my order. Really friendly staff, good fish but London prices. You can eat in if you like, or grab a takeaway box and go sit in Soho Square!
This was FANTASTIC. The place was clean, retro, and just out of the way of a busy street. My server was wonderful--attentive and friendly. My food came quickly and was delicious. My fish was flaky and seemed to melt in my mouth. (AND they had ginger beer, my favorite drink, so it gives them a few extra personal points). Definitely recommend this place. The next time I'm back in London I will come again, for sure.
After reading the good reviews I decided to give it a try and I wasn't disappointed! The fish was made fresh to order and the batter was nice and crispy without being greasy. The chips were the right combination of crisp and floury. The portions were huge, good value for money. All very yummy, I will definitely go back.
Went there after seeing the reviews and it was even better than promised. Cod was fresh with crispy and light batter, chips brilliant and the atmosphere was casual and just right. Not too smart, spot on. Service was as good as it gets. Well done to everyone involved in running this small place just off Oxford street.
Genuinely British F&C parlor, with loads of attitude and excellent food, topped with friendly service. Large portions, too, at correct prices. Excellent Haddock and Mushy Peas, good fried prawns.
Somewhere between 3 and 4 stars. I had takeaway, but the cod & chips was still good compared to the stuff I've had recently. It was odd, the more I ate of it, the more I liked. Crispy chips, freshly cooked, and decent batter.
I'm happy to have found this place. Very nice battered cod, chips that are not the tastiest in the world, but lovely and crisp on the outside, and soft in the middle. Good sized portions. Very cheap. Waiters clearly a bit over-loaded but polite. Fun 70's style decor, complete with ketchup held in large plastic tomatoes. Clearly this isn't exactly a posh restaurant, but it's fish and chips done properly - definitely recommended.
First rate; could not find better. So nice to have great TRADITIONAL English food in London without rip off prices and at a top quality with fantastic staff.
Thanks to the Golden Union for their impeccable personal service, delicious fish and wonderful chips. We brought our American colleagues here for a 'Taste of Britain'. They loved it, we loved it. Great atmosphere, really friendly staff and a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Thanks, we will be back again!
Totally amazing! Being a Friday and feeling a little on the fragile side, I took a walk around the corner from work and got myself a large cod and chips..... Being from the southern hemisphere I am a bit of a fish and chip snob but all I can say is this is the best F&C's I have had in years!!! Will be making this a regular thing for sure
Brilliant. saw someone walking with a takeaway and hunted it down found it tucked away. Opted for sit down service which was quick. Everything cooked freshly, chips were amazing and batter on fish was delicious cannoit fault it, agree that reviewer must have been on an off day will be back
I took a takeaway. I recieved Fish that you needed a hammer and chisel to cope with the batter only to discover grease soaked slimy fish underneath ,chips that had both the taste and the appearance of refries dry,hard edged and multicoloured all in all completely unedible,the seagull dined well on my misfortune.At just under £10 for mine and my wifes portions.
If you like soggy batter and savagely overpriced fish and chips then this is the place for you. Disappointing as I was rather hungry had to leave half the fish as it was undercooked. Service from the young gentleman who severed me was good hence the extra star.
Lovely atmosphere, great service, friendly staff, and the food, wow. just incredible. Great choice in the menu, homemade pies, even the tartare sauce is superb. A great restaurant!
My family and friends eat often at the Golden Union and have enjoyed the food and experience every single time.I am a vegetarian and so is my husband, so it is good to know a chippy offers a menu that caters for our needs and cooked separately from the other dishes. The staff are wonderful and I know so many people who go back time and time again. You must try this eatery... A+++++++++
Timeout's reviewer must have gone on a bad day. When we went, the fish, cooked to order, was fresh, flaky and delicious. The chips were perfect, as were the mushy peas. The place was clean and stylish, the music good, the staff friendly and efficient. Even the loos were nice. It was the best, and most unpretentious chippy I've been to in london.
I like everything about this place, but especially the food. think the reviewer must have gone on a bad day. We had haddock, chips, peas. Haddock fabulous - really meaty and succulent; chips faultless, chunky, crisp and steaming, excellent peas; the service was quikc and friendly; the restaurant clean and attractive. Plus, their prices are more than reasonable. I hope it stays the same.
lovely place: everything delicious, though the batter was a smidgen greasy. I'd give it solid 9 out of 10, and I'm fussy.
Brilliant. At last a traditional dining room in London that remains as simple and efficient at what it should do. Great service, tasty and freshly cooked fish and chips. Recommended.
Since our local fish & chip shop burnt down, The Golden Union Fish Bar has become our new local chippy. For us we have only ever been served with good quality flaky fish, the fish is battered to order and not left to sweat in the counter top ovens. It's clean and very friendly. I would highly recommend eating there.
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City Room
Putnam, 2003 - Biography & Autobiography - 664 pages
When Arthur Gelb joinedThe New York Timesin 1944, manual typewriters, green eyeshades, spittoons, floors littered with cigarette butts, and two bookies were what he found in the city room. Gelb was twenty, his position the lowliest-night copy boy.
When he retired forty-five years later, he was managing editor. On his way to the top, he exposed crooked cops and politicians; mentored a generation of our most talented journalists; was the first to praise such yet undiscovered talents as Woody Allen and Barbra Streisand; and brought Joe Papp public recognition. As metropolitan editor, Gelb reshaped the way the paper covered New York, and while assistant managing editor, he launched the paper's daily special sections.
From D-Day to the liberation of the concentration camps; from the agony of Vietnam to the resignation of a President; from the fall of Joe McCarthy to the rise of the Woodstock Nation, Gelb's time at the Times reveals his intimate take on the great events of the past fifty years.
The raffish early days are long gone, the hum of computers has replaced the clatter of typewriter keys, but the same ambition, passion, grandstanding, and courage Gelb found at twenty still fill the city room.
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LibraryThing ReviewUser Review - NewsieQ - LibraryThing
The author began working at the The New York Times in 1944 at age 20. He retired 45 years later as a top editor. Published in 2003, City Room tells the story of those 45 years, emphasizing the ... Read full review
CITY ROOMUser Review - Kirkus
A loving, extremely guarded memoir of the author's 45 years with the New York Times, from durance vile to managing editor.A son of the Bronx, Gelb appeared in the Times' "raffish, freewheeling" city ... Read full review
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Abe Rosenthal Abe's Adolph Ochs arrived Arthur Arthur Hays Sulzberger asked assigned Barbara beat became began believed Bernie Bigart Broadway Bronx Brooks bullpen bureau Burnham Burros byline called Catledge city editor city room city's column cops copy copyboy coverage critic cultural daily Daniel deadline desk Dick drama edition father felt Frank Adams friends Gage gave Gay Talese Greenwich Village Harlem Herald Tribune Homer Bigart interview invited Jewish knew later Lindsay lived looked magazine managing editor Max Frankel mayor metropolitan editor Mike Berger movie neighborhood never newspaper night O'Neill once paper Papp play police president publisher Pulitzer Pulitzer Prize Punch reporters rewrite Sardi's Scotty seemed Serpico staff story Street Sulzberger Sunday talk theater thought Times's Timeswee tion told took Turner Catledge wanted Washington week writing wrote York Yorker


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Engineering Blueprint Placemats
Food built to spec
- Blueprints provide list of ingredients and instructions
- Side, front, and top view diagrams help guide you
- Enjoy your creation and protect your table
On television and in movies, there are always characters who lose their memory as part of the story line. They cannot remember their name or who their loved ones are, but no one ever seems to talk about whether or not they remember their favorite foods or how to make them. Food amnesia must be rough, but we wouldn't mind having to go around tasting all the foods in the world again to see if we liked them. Except maybe durian.
Just in case you ever need a roadmap on how to build some of your favorites, these Engineering Blueprint Placemat Sets fit the bill. Each of these placemats is designed to look like a blueprint on the ins and outs of constructing four classic comfort foods: peanut butter and jelly, s'mores, ants on a log, and a banana split. Ingredient lists, instructions, and diagrams will help guide you to the completion of your perfect snack.
Product Specifications
- Engineering Blueprint Placemats
- Provides detailed, engineering-like diagrams on how to assemble peanut butter and jelly, s'mores, ants on a log, and banana splits
- Fun gift for a family with children
- Or for your favorite engineers / architects / designers who love sweets
- Heavy-duty placemats
- Dimensions: 11 x 17" with rounded corners; 0.31" thick


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In many respects, September's a pretty manic time of year - students and all that - but not, it seems, in terms of records. The standout release this month was by far and away TV On The Radio's Dear Science; the only album to score above 8, in fact.
That's not to say there isn't any good stuff out, though: there most certainly is. The Acorn, Hauschka and Volcano!'s are all underrated LPs worthy of your attention and pennies, plus the big releases from Metronomy, Mogwai and Friendly Fires don't disappoint. Maybe we're just getting more miserly with the marks?
TV On The Radio
Dear Science
Says Rob Webb: "TV On The Radio's rapid ascent to somewhere very near mass popularity - a surprise given the often oblique nature of their cultured, soulful art-rock - means that Dear Science has become probably the most hotly anticipated LP of the year. That's all the more troublesome considering the slow-burning nature of what TV On The Radio do (or did). But whether Dear Science stands the test of time like classic records must is impossible to predict right now - at this moment in time, it's sounding like one of the albums of the year, and its makers' latest, greatest masterpiece."
Read the full DiS review HERE
Friendly Fires
Friendly Fires
Says Reef Younis: "Thankfully Friendly Fires haven't been too tarnished by the endless glow stick paradigms associated with the now dreaded nu-rave tag, and their laboriously recorded, self-titled debut only serves to confirm the burgeoning distance from a world of garish neon and questionable colour combinations. Assured, short and ultimately sweet, [this] is a glib reminder that you don't need an M6 underpass, New York penthouse or guestlist to have an all night disco party, and remind us there's no shame in getting your groove on."
Read the full DiS review HERE
Nights Out
(Because Music)
Says James Skinner: "The second album from Joseph Mount's Metronomy project (and first that sees the band billed a trio) sees electronic disco leanings meld with a welcome sense of warmth and songcraft. The joy and longevity emanating throughout is at once jubilant and effortless: a luminescent pop-not-quite-masterpiece as much an indication one waits a little further down the road, Nights Out is eminently worthy of your time and investment."
Read the full DiS review HERE
Says Jane Oriel: "Paperwork is a worthy listen because it contains all the elements that had us take notice of volcano! the first time around. As such, moving forward was always going to be a challenge as where could they go from here? Less jaw dropping than its predecessor but still an excellent piece of work by any standard."
Read the full DiS review HERE
The Hawk Is Howling
(Wall Of Sound)
Says Luke Slater: "The Hawk Is Howling may not induce the apprehensive anxiety of Happy Songs For Happy People or even match the apocalyptic ambience of Rock Action, but when taken in isolation it holds its own as Mogwai's first solely instrumental album (there's not even a subtle and softly spoken Scots accent being passed through a vocoder). Perhaps Mogwai have made a rod for their own back-catalogue but, after over a decade of output, The Hawk Is Howling proves they still remain worthy of their place on the post-rock pedestal."
Read the full DiS review HERE
**Chad VanGaalen
Soft Airplane**
(Sub Pop; read the full DiS review HERE)
**David Holmes
The Holy Pictures**
(Read the full DiS review HERE)
**Ben Folds
Way To Normal**
(Epic; read the full DiS review HERE)
(FatCat; read the full DiS review HERE)
_Broken Hymns, Limbs, & Skin _**
(City Slang; read the full DiS review HERE)
The Acorn
Glory Hope Mountain
(Bella Union)
Says Daniel Ross: "Vocalist Rolf Klausener is just so_ clued-up, using simple but brilliantly effective touches here. It seems so easy. When he sings, in a Carl Wilson-esque broad shimmer, of climbing constellations moving in semitones, his vocal line takes a gentle upward curve – as an audience we're vaguely conscious of it happening, but it forces you irrevocably to listen to what he says next. _Glory Hope Mountain is an excellent achievement, and heralds Klausener as a major talent in the idiom of narrative song, primed to rival Daniel Bejar, Colin Meloy, Spencer Krug and others. The next LP should be excellent."
Read the full DiS review HERE
DiScuss: Was September a good month for records? Probably not as strong as last month, but TV On The Radio put out one of the albums of the year, didn't they? Yes? Good.


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Olivia Wilde is acing the endorsement game and the new Bo.Bô spring/summer 2013 campaign is one of the most recent examples. The actress has teamed up with the Brazilian label to show off some of the hottest new ensembles the label has skillfully prepared ahead of time. The new campaign was shot by Mark Liddel in the Old Westbury Gardens in Long Island, New York. Olivia looks effortlessly sophisticated and manages to bring its charm and elegance into each and every photoshoot. From the label's perspective the upcoming warm seasons wi... Read More


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Washington DC and Online -- Fig Leaf Software recently launched a new Fast Track to ColdFusion 11 training class. The new FTCF 11 class is a 3-day course that provides experienced Web developers with the knowledge and hands-on practice they need to start building and maintaining dynamic and interactive Web applications using the ColdFusion application server.
This course was authored by Fig Leaf Software, based on decades of practical ColdFusion consulting experience. Adobe ColdFusion is available as a private or public class. For private classes, please contact Steve Drucker at 415-8483 or email firstname.lastname@example.com.
This course was authored by Fig Leaf Software, based on decades of practical ColdFusion consulting experience. Adobe ColdFusion is available as a private or public class. For private classes, please contact Steve Drucker at 415-8483 or email firstname.lastname@example.com.
ColdFusion 11 Course Prerequisites
To gain the most from the class, you should already have:
- A familiarity with Web terminology
- An understanding of Web server characteristics
- Experience with the HTML tag set and syntax
- Familiarity with the SQL command set, including SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE
Course Objectives
- Create a connection to a database using the ColdFusion Administrator
- Use ColdFusion Builder to efficiently develop and troubleshoot code
- Capture information in HTML forms
- Read and write information to/from a database.
- Represent complex structures using abstract data types – lists, arrays, and structures
- Separate your application into a three-tiered architecture of User Interface components, Business Logic, and SQL for easier maintainability and flexibility
- Dynamically send electronic mail
- Secure your application using a password-based framework
- Implement a RESTful API to support modern javascript-based web apps
- Implement a simple ColdFusion application using best practices.
Course Outline
Unit 1: Introducing the Course
- Meeting the Prerequisites
- Understanding the Course Format
- Reviewing the Course Outline
Unit 2: Introducing ColdFusion [click here to download this chapter]
- Reviewing ColdFusion's Features and Capabilities
- Introducing the ColdFusion Administrator
- Working with ColdFusion Builder
- Debugging and Troubleshooting your Apps
Unit 3: Getting Started with CFML
- Working with Variables
- Commenting Code
- Using Functions
- Creating Functions
- Using Control Logic
- Including Common Code
Unit 4: Using the Application Framework
- Using Application.cfc to Define an Application
- Implementing ColdFusion Components
- Implementing Roles-Based Security
Unit 5: Querying Databases
- Using <cfquery> to retrieve data
- Implementing Search Forms
- Inserting New Records
- Supporting File Uploads
- Updating Existing Records
- Deleting Data
- Invoking Stored Procedures
Unit 6: Dynamically Generating Office Documents
- Generating PDFs
- Generating Excel Files
- Sending Email
Unit 7: Designing and Implementing RESTful APIs
- Exposing CFC Methods for Remote Access
- Implementing a RESTful API


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Edward Kundahl, President of BusinessCreator and ForLawFirmsOnly, Makes Public the Debut of an Unique Lead Creation Program
Flat Fee-Based Business Lead Generation Service Developed For Attorneys
Edward Kundahl, president and founder of BusinessCreator Inc. and ForLawFirmsOnly, a targeted lead generation and local search engine online marketing company, is proud to publish the availability of a brand new lead creation program devised expressly for legal professionals.
Edward Kundahl states, "Our new Rapid Results Leads Program is crafted to deliver high quality leads repeatedly, month after month, for a fixed monthly price. Your phone will start to ring almost as soon as we get your campaign started. After many years of experience generating leads for attorneys, we have been able to develop a program that is more cost-effective than the existing choices available in the market for internet leads. Our new program attributes include: a fixed monthly fee (no pay-per-click or pay-per-call costs); no setup fees; exclusive leads - each lead is only sent to one law firm; we serve only one law practice-type in your marketing area; direct-call from our lead generation platform; online access and daily reporting, and no long-term contracts - you may cancel your program at any time after the initial three-month campaign. In addition, there is no ceiling to the amount of leads and no maximum to the get more info amount of available professional services or coverage areas."
Kundahl continued, "The ForLawFirmsOnly Marketing brand new program is produced around our expert skills and takes an integrated strategy to business lead generation specifically designed for lawyer or attorneys. It takes advantage of programmatic ad management, the most efficient method to manage PPC programs for maximum call volume. The process is managed by our new team leader, a former Google AdWords employee responsible for training AdWords Agencies throughout the U.S. for over a decade. The campaigns are optimized for phone calls, mobile and voice search. We also utilize the power of Facebook ad display to generate quality leads. Our skilled illustration artists work with our web marketing staff to create high-converting display ads and landing pages. We also take advantage of display ad retargeting. Our system has access to approximately 99 percent of all web sites that supply ads on Ad Exchange Networks and our platform ties into over 70 different publisher networks. We use a unique tracking number for each client project. There are daily reports and easy access to the call-tracking portal.
" Our unique Rapid Results Leads Program is designed to produce quality leads consistently, month after month, for a fixed monthly fee. Your phone will start to ring almost as soon as we get your campaign started."
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Website: https://www.forlawfirmsonly.com
Email: email@example.com


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I have just managed to see 'The Lion and the Rose', as I was away at the CA conference this week (and I noticed that I saw the major event revealed in at least two places online without me looking for anything Game of Thrones-related - luckily I'm a book reader so I knew what was going to happen in this episode anyway, but to avoid spoilers you really do have to avoid the internet sometimes don't you?!). I had originally been down to review this episode for Doux Reviews but had to rearrange due to the conference - just my luck! Anyway, all of this preamble is here to provide a nice big chunk of text as a spoiler-free safety net for anyone behind on Game of Thrones and the books its based on, and any TV fans who haven't read the books - spoilers lie ahead so stop reading now if you haven't read all of the books and seen up to season four, episode two.
Just to reiterate (and provide plenty of space before the spoilers come) - I will be spoiling all the books up to A Dance With Dragons and presumably upcoming episodes of the TV show. You have been warned.
There are plenty of excellent reviews of this episode out there so I won't go into great detail on the episode in general other than to say I was impressed with how tense the whole wedding sequence was despite the fact I knew exactly what was going to happen. I also loved all the little conversations going on through the wedding, with Jaime's 'oh crap' face when he sees Brienne and Cersei talking to each other being a particular highlight (and Cersei has a point about Brienne's ability to change sides). My least favourite aspects of the episode were Tyrion and Shae, whose story has been my least favourite aspect of the show for a while now and if the show follows the books, will actually be my least favourite thing about the entire series, so that's nothing new.
The reason I'm blogging it, however, is not to make up for missing out on reviewing it (oddly enough I quite enjoyed reviewing the premiere, even though it was much less exciting). What caught my eye Classics-wise was what looked to me like a couple of nice directorial references to I, Claudius.
As I mentioned when I looked at season one, blurbs on the Song of Ice and Fire books often compare the series to Suetonius' Twelve Caesars. I often have a sneaking suspicion that what they're really reminded of isn't so much Suetonius himself (though most of the lurid bits and pieces do come from his gossipy biographies) but Robert Graves' I, Claudius and especially the TV series based on it, which draw on Suetonius, Tacitus, a bit of Cassius Dio and, in the TV version, one spectacularly gory bit of pure invention. Martin certainly references it in the one tiny bit of background we have on the late Joanna Lannister - that Tywin ruled the kingdoms, but Joanna ruled Tywin ('Augustus ruled the world, but Livia ruled Augustus'). Whether that comparison is significant or not remains to be seen.
It's hardly surprising, then, that we see echoes of I, Claudius reverberating through an episode focused on the murder-by-poison of a king at a feast. According to the Roman mindset, poison was a woman's weapon. It is also a method of murder that in the days before forensic pathologists could look conveniently like a natural death - or, from the point of view of a gossipy historian or inventive author of historical fiction, allows for the re-casting of a natural death as a murder (Exhibit A: Augustus' natural death re-figured as Livia poisoning him with figs). It's hardly surprising that it features prominently in I, Claudius, a story which takes Tacitus' snide implications about Livia and really runs with them.
This episode of Game of Thrones, too, focuses heavily on women as the prime suspects in a royal poisoning. There are, of course, male suspects as well - Dontos, who ushers Sansa away; Loras, who storms off in a huff shortly before it all goes pear-shaped, and obviously Tyrion, the possibility of whose guilt the series has so far left open (the book tells this section from his point of view, so we know it wasn't him - though to be fair I've read detective stories in the past that have cleverly concealed the fact he narrator did it until the end). Frankly, I wouldn't even put it past Tywin, who has another grandson and is fed up of Joffrey, who's clearly a liability. Prime suspects, though, are Sansa, for obvious reasons, Margaery, whose acting skills are crumbling in the face of Joffrey's insanity (the character's acting skills that is - Natalie Dormer is excellent as ever) and Margaery's caring grandmother, Olenna Tyrell (we can probably discount Cersei, and Brienne would just have chopped his head off).
It's in the moments focused on Margaery that the I, Claudius references creep in. Desperate to distract Joffrey from tormenting people, she cries out 'Look! The pie!' with a level of excitement comparable to Augustus' daughter Julia spying cake (though in Julia's case she genuinely just wanted the cake) but the clue that it might be I, Claudius the director or writer is thinking of comes when she and Joffrey start eating the pie. She picks a piece off her own plate and feeds it to him from her fork - which is exactly the way the emperor Claudius is killed by his wife/niece Agrippinilla in I, Claudius (historically Agrippina the Younger). Agrippina supposedly poisoned a mushroom of her own and carefully fed it to her husband in order to get around his food tasters (I bet Jaime's wishing he'd thought of that right now, instead of fussing about where everyone was going to stand).
Now of course, book readers know that the deed was done by the process of Dontos, ordered by Littlefinger, giving Sansa poison to wear (here a necklace, in the book a hairnet) which Olenna then takes and sneaks into Joffrey's cup, making Littlefinger, Dontos, Sansa and Olenna all culpable, though Sansa doesn't appear to have known anything about it. It looks like the show is following the book in that, as it's while Olenna fiddles with Sansa's necklace (nabbing the poison) that she talks about how awful it is to kill a man at a wedding, sympathising with her over Robb's demise - there's no dramatic irony like really heavy-handed and unsubtle dramatic irony.
However, one of the big issues that's as yet unresolved in the books is whether Margaery knew about it. Olenna does it for Margaery - politically, she probably should have waited until Margaery and Joffrey had a child, preferably a son, before offing him, but she couldn't bear to let Margaery suffer being married to the little creep. But did Margaery know? Is she acting when she looks shocked and horrifed, or was she kept in the dark? We'll have to wait until Martin writes some more books and/or the series fills us in, but that visual reference is an interesting one - it certainly suggests to me that Margaery is in on it and as much a part of the poison plan as Olenna - it will be interesting to see how she reacts over the next few episodes.
More Game of Thrones thoughts


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The U.S. men's national soccer team has come in from the wilderness. But its reputation in the eyes of the wider American sporting public lags far behind its actual standing in the world game.
People at all levels of U.S. soccer have worked tirelessly to bridge the gap between perception and reality. This makes the failure of the U.S. U-23 national team to qualify for the 2012 Olympic Games all the more disappointing.
The Americans finished third in group A of the CONCACAF Olympic Qualifying Tournament. Monday's 3-3 draw against El Salvador saw the U-23s concede the tying goal in the last minute of the game. It crushed the Olympic hopes of what some called a potential "golden generation" of players.
Not only did it revive not-so-dormant stereotypes about male soccer players in this country. It also raised new questions about the players, coaches and direction of the whole U.S. soccer program.
NESN.com soccer editor Marcus Kwesi O'Mard is joined by Chuck Murphy from the Denver Post to break down the nightmare in Nashville, Tenn. Murphy's recent article on the subject rang alarm bells in some circles. Is the sky falling down on U.S. soccer?
Listen to the podcast or download it in the player below.
Have a question for Marcus Kwesi O'Mard? Send it to him via Twitter at @NESNsoccer, NESN Soccer's Facebook page or send it here. He will pick a few questions to answer every week for his mailbag.


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The St. Louis Rams and New England Patriots are apparently going to replay the 2002 Superbowl, but this time, the game will be in the courtroom. Accoring to an article in the Birmingham News, former Rams player, Willie Gary, and others have filed a $100 million lawsuit against the Patriots, the team owner, Robert Kraft, and the Patriots head coach, Bill Belichick. The lawsuit stems from the alleged videotaping of Rams practices before the 2002 Superbowl which the Patriots won 20-17.
This is a dangerous road to go down: taking games from the field to the courtroom. This is also going to be an extremely difficult case to prove. Even if the allegations of videotaping are true, who is to say the Patriots would not have won the game anyway. This also raises the specter of cheating in our professional sports.
With these issues in the National Football League (NFL), the controversy over steroids in Major League Baseball (MLB) and the scandal involving the referee in the National basketball Association (NBA), pro sports in the United States are taking a major hit. Notwithstanding these "hits", the public continues to watch and attend games. As a result, advertisers continue to pay the networks for commercial time, the networks continue to pay billions of dollars to the pro leagues for the rights to televise the games, and the owners continue to pay millions to the players.
Because of all the money involved, there are huge incentives to cheat. Obviously, you make more money when you perform and win. So, we are seeing allegations of cheating at all levels: players, officials, coaches, and maybe even owners. Where will it end? Who knows?


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- Methodology article
- Open Access
iXora: exact haplotype inferencing and trait association
© Utro et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2013
- Received: 7 October 2012
- Accepted: 14 May 2013
- Published: 6 June 2013
We address the task of extracting accurate haplotypes from genotype data of individuals of large F1 populations for mapping studies. While methods for inferring parental haplotype assignments on large F1 populations exist in theory, these approaches do not work in practice at high levels of accuracy.
We have designed iXora (Identifying crossovers and recombining alleles), a robust method for extracting reliable haplotypes of a mapping population, as well as parental haplotypes, that runs in linear time. Each allele in the progeny is assigned not just to a parent, but more precisely to a haplotype inherited from the parent. iXora shows an improvement of at least 15% in accuracy over similar systems in literature. Furthermore, iXora provides an easy-to-use, comprehensive environment for association studies and hypothesis checking in populations of related individuals.
iXora provides detailed resolution in parental inheritance, along with the capability of handling very large populations, which allows for accurate haplotype extraction and trait association. iXora is available for non-commercial use from http://researcher.ibm.com/project/3430.
- Haplotype
- Phasing
- Phenotype Association
- Trait Association
- Randomization
We address the task of extracting accurate haplotypes from genotype data of individuals of large F1 populations for mapping studies. Haplotypes are useful for inferring the underlying causal genetic basis of the traits in mapping populations as one can more efficiently evaluate the parental inheritance of the haplotype implicated in the determination of the trait [1, 2]. iXora is specifically suited to plant (or animal) breeding, in which mapping populations of individuals of inbred (or non-inbred) parents are utilized. iXora uses a novel approach by effectively utilizing the large data size and exploiting the fortuitous combinatorial structure in the problem. The algorithm is outlined in the next section with a running example and the mathematical details are presented in Methods.
Given genotypes of n progeny on m loci, the general problem of constructing haplotypes from genotypes is NP-complete, under various models such as parsimony, maximum likelihood, phylogeny (see [3] for a detailed exposition). Both statistical and combinatorial frameworks have been used in the literature to solve the problem of haplotype extraction from genotype data. For instance, BEAGLE [4, 5], fastPHASE [6], HAPI [7], HAPI-UR [8], MACH [9], and SHAPEIT [10, 11] use a Hidden Markov Model; whereas Gusfield [12] proposes a combinatorial approach that is based on the parsimony principle. Merlin [13] uses pedigree data under a parsimony model to construct the haplotypes of F1 progeny based on their genotypes and the genotypes of the parents. A review of phasing methods, particularly applicable on human data, is presented in [14]. Based on the models of the input population, the existing methods can be categorized into the following scenarios: unrelated individuals, unrelated trios (two parents per one progeny), and related trios (two parents per several progeny, our F1 population of interest). These categories are discussed in more detail in Methods.
Definition and size of the classes
Accuracy %
PA (ua)
Imp. (ua)
Unrelated individuals (no parent information)
fastPHASE [6]
Up to 30-100 markers
52.89 (0.00)
52.49 (0.00)
50.91 (0.00)
Unrelated trios
99.90 (0.00)
98.61 (0.00)
99.90 (0.00)
98.28 (0.00)
99.69 (0.00)
94.75 (0.00)
99.67 (0.00)
94.88 (0.00)
Related trios
90.75 (9.17)
0.00 (100.0)
< 15 progeny/parent
Merlin [13]
< 15 progeny/parent
< 50 progeny/parent
iXora provides a user-friendly, easy-to-use comprehensive environment for mapping studies. The analysis framework and user interface are described in Additional file 1: Figures A1 and A2. Its usage is described in the section "Using iXora" in Additional file 1, with a running example, where we also demonstrate that genomic regions can be associated with a phenotype at a much higher resolution with haplotypes than with genotypes. The iXora framework has been successfully applied to real data analysis [15], in which pod color phenotype was localized, with high resolution, to a single locus in the T. cacao genome.
Results and discussion
In this section we outline the main results: the iXora phasing algorithm and its comparison with related methods in literature.
Outline of the core algorithm
Phase I (Preprocessing)
Phase II (Detecting crossovers)
Phase III (Staging output)
The parent haplotypes are encoded in V a , V b respectively and the progeny haplotypes in R a and R b . The solution shows no recombinations in the progeny, but has two errors between the phased sequences and the observed genotypes, shown in red. We omit the evaluation of the results (precision measures) here, and direct the reader to Methods.
Comparison with related methods
Here we describe the results from a simulation study on a F1 population with 200 individuals and 300–600 markers. The parameters of the simulation were chosen to reflect real data and the details are described in the section "Using iXora" in Additional file 1.
We compare iXora with the existing phasing methods BEAGLE [5], fastPHASE [6], FMPH [12], HAPI [7], HAPI-UR [8], MACH [9], Merlin [13], and SHAPEIT2 [11]. Each existing method solves a slightly different phasing problem, such as not providing a parental haplotype assignment for the progeny, or not processing the entire population in one run, as discussed in Methods. Hence we used evaluation criteria that enable a meaningful comparison of this wide-spectrum of methods, when applied on simulated data. The evaluation criteria are described in Methods, and the results are summarized in Table 1.
Accuracy of Parent Assignments (PA)
This accuracy is measured on a marker-by-marker basis. We post-process the output of the systems that do not directly provide parental assignment. The best parental assignment is seen with BEAGLE and HAPI-UR, followed by iXora. In the two former cases, there are no unassigned markers. HAPI and SHAPEIT2 show moderate accuracy while Merlin, fastPHASE, and MACH perform poorly. Note that Merlin's performance deteriorates with the increase in number of markers, while HAPI and iXora display similar levels of accuracy.
Handling missing data/imputation
All the methods, except HAPI, show some capability of handling missing data. Merlin has about a third of the missing data unresolved, while iXora has less than 10% unresolved. The rest of the methods resolve all the missing data. BEAGLE, HAPI-UR and iXora display levels of accuracy in the imputed data larger than 90% while the rest perform poorly. Note that these values only account for missing data in the progeny. We found that missing data in the parents were debilitating for all the trio based methods, except Merlin and iXora. These two methods were the only ones that produced some results when all the marker data of both parents were missing. Since Merlin can handle only a small number of individuals per parent, about 15% of the parent haplotypes remained unresolved. We observed that iXora is the only method robust enough to be unaffected by completely missing parent genotypes. We attribute this resilience to its ability to handle large families of individuals without splitting into smaller sets.
Accuracy of Parent Haplotype Assignments (PHA)
Note that PHA is the most important computation since this crucially contributes to the improvement in accuracy and resolution in genomic region assignment to traits (see "Using iXora" in Additional file 1 for an example). In Table 1 the corresponding column, labeled PHA, is shown in bold and is the focus of the comparison study.
The PHA accuracy is measured on a marker-by-marker basis. Only HAPI, Merlin, and iXora provide an assignment of the parental haplotypes. Note that although SHAPEIT2 utilizes trios, it did not give us any means to extract parent haplotype information from the output. Both HAPI and Merlin perform poorly, with accuracy under 85% and 70% respectively. In contrast, iXora yields an accuracy of over 95%.
Although, HAPI and Merlin give means of identifying the parent haplotypes, they suffer a severe scaling problem, and are unable to handle more than about ten progeny per family. Thus it is not obvious how these systems can be coaxed to exploiting the availability of large progeny to improve the accuracy of the parental haplotype assignments.
From the comparison with related methods, we conclude that while methods to the problem of inferencing parental haplotype assignments on large F1 populations exist in theory, these approaches do not work in practice at high levels of accuracy (say > 90%). Moreover, iXora is the only algorithm that is robust enough to accurately extract the parental haplotypes in the absence of any parental genotype information. In practice, when the genotypes of the parents were known, we used this capability of iXora to match the estimated parent genotypes against the true genotypes to confirm the integrity of the phasing results. iXora additionally outputs several intrinsic measures of preciseness (the triplet ), and all the equally-likely phasing solutions with annotations (q/Q/*), see Methods. These added capabilities make iXora and its output particularly attractive, over existing methods, for trait association and inferencing studies.
In this section we describe the mathematical details of the iXora haplotype inference algorithm, the measures used to quantify the precision of the output, and the different downstream processing of the output. We conclude the section with the description of the measures used to compare the results from different phasing algorithms.
iXora algorithm: haplotype inferencing
The outline of the three phases in the iXora algorithm is shown in Figure 1. In this section what follows is a more precise mathematical description of the steps which is presented as a sequence of key observations: thus this describes as well as provides the rationale for each of the steps. Note that Figure 1, annotated by equation and observation numbers, is a road map for the exposition in this section to help the reader understand the description.
Let be an n × m matrix that encodes n (> 1) progeny with m (> 1) markers. Each row i represents a progeny and each column j represents a marker. The order of the markers is also captured in the matrix, i.e., if and only if marker j is located between markers j′ and j′′ on the chromosome. The j th marker of the i th progeny, denoted or simply 〈i j〉, also referred to as the position 〈i j〉, is a pair of alleles: each individual allele can be accessed as and . Thus if or simply written as AC, A and C. The two observed alleles at marker j (across all individuals) will be denoted as Z and Z′. A marker j is polymorphic if Z ≠ Z′. We make the assumption that all the markers in are polymorphic. When or the j th marker at individual i, or position 〈i j〉, is said to be homozygous. Similarly, when , position 〈i j〉 is said to be heterozygous.
We next introduce a definition and notation for conjugacy. Let conjugate of z be written as , where z is a matrix or a discrete value as defined below. Note that the conjugate of conjugate of z is z, i.e., always holds. For parents p = a,b, if p = a, then and vice-versa. Similarly, if k = 0, then and vice-versa. Thus (and ). Also, and for the parents p = a,b.
Solvability of a given genotype matrix
Assume that there is no more than one crossover, in an individual, between two adjacent positions. If d t is the true number of such crossovers, then 0≤d t ≤ 2(m - 1)n. Let the estimate of d t be d c ≥ 0. Consider a scenario where each position in is heterozygous. Then there exist an exponentially large number (2 m n ) of distinct and equally-likely haplotype configurations of the progeny, each with no crossovers. While informative markers in general are chosen for their heterozygosity in data sets, it is observed that the same marker is also homozygous in many a progeny. Thus, in practice, due to Mendelian inheritance [16] it is very unlikely to have a run of markers that are heterozygous in all the progeny. It is this random sprinkling of homozygous positions in , that makes d c estimation possible. We conducted simulations to study the relationship between d c and the extent of homozygosity in in realistic data scenarios.
Let e denote the mean number of crossovers in a progeny. We used simulations with values 2 ≤ e ≤ 15. We observed that for this wide range of crossover profiles, the required fraction of homozygous sites in to get a good estimate of d t (i.e., within 5% of the true value) was bound. The empirical observation is summarized below.
Observation 1. When at least 28% of each subsample of randomly chosen positions inis homozygous, the estimated d c is within 5% of the exact value d t , i.e., d c ≥ 0.95 d t .
In practice, we have encountered values of n in the range of 50 to 400 and m in the range of 30 to 600. We observe that consistently, at least 50% positions are homozygous and the solutions, obtained using methods of the following sections, displayed e ≈ 2. With decrease in cost and in increase in accessibility of sequencing and genotyping technologies, m could be orders of magnitude larger in the coming years. Note that e is not expected to increase with m. Thus the lower bound estimation scales well with m, since the observation above is independent of m and the algorithm discussed in the later sections is linear in m.
Phase I: Preprocessing
Since all the individuals have the same two parents, let the two parents be a and b. Let V a (0) encode haplotype 0 of parent a and V a (1) encode haplotype 1 of parent a. Similarly, V b (0) and V b (1). The two distinct allele values of parent p at marker j are represented by and .
Also, V a and V b is initialized as and , for each j and p = a,b.
If marker j is homozygous in both parents, then position 〈i,j〉 is heterozygous, for all progeny i. If marker j is not homozygous in both parents, then possible progeny values are Z j Z j , , and . When both parents are homozygous, it may not be apparent what the allelic values of the individual parents are, but as is seen in the running example of the Overview section, this does not affect the solution. Such loci are marked as "-" in the parents, i.e., "-" for p = a,b. Also the column j of the matrices are updated as , for each i. If exactly one parent (either a or b) is homozygous, then only Z j Z j , but not , can be observed in some progeny, while the rest are . In Step 2, we identify all such markers.
Note that while it is easy to estimate if a marker is homozygous in both parents or heterozygous in both, it is not obvious to estimate the heterozygous parent when exactly one of the parents is so. In Step 3 we identify markers which are homozygous in exactly one parent (i.e., either a or b). The execution of this process is illustrated in the Overview section through the running example and is described in detail here.
In our implementation we use α1 = 0.3 and α2 = 0.15, which we have observed to yield accurate phasing results on real data, confirmed by the precision measures discussed later. When the polarization condition is violated, it is considered to be an error in data . In practice, we observed that in all such cases this was due to experimental errors at one of the markers. Hence, we make the following assumption. For parent p and for the pair of non-homozygous markers j and j′, must be polarized. In practice, when this condition is violated, we flag the marker for closer scrutiny in the experiments. A consequence of this assumption is the following.
Observation 2. Let J a (resp J b ) be the set of markers with heterozygous parent a (resp b ). Ifis not polarized, then j ∈ J p and.
This observation states that it is possible to computationally obtain two non-overlapping sets of markers, where one set represents the markers that are homozygous in only parent a and the other set represents the markers that are homozygous in only parent b. Thus, when the parent genotypes are not available, this observation is utilized in Step 3 to resolve the markers that are homozygous in exactly in one parent.
Note that the above is equivalent to: For a marker j that is homozygous only in parent a: is set to H for all i and if was X, then it is updated to 1. Similarly, for a marker j that is homozygous only in parent b: is set to H for all i and if was X, then it is updated to 1.
Rationale. Note parent a is homozygous at j (but parent b is not). The reason for switching X to 1 in column j of M b is that no matter what the value of is, or will be eventually updated to, 1 encodes for the allele Z'.
When marker j is homozygous only in parent b, a similar update as above is performed. Note that in the implementation, as a marker j is resolved (Step 3), the marker is immediately updated in V p and M p (Step 4).
Phase II: Detecting crossovers
Without loss of generality, for each non-homozygous j in M p , let j n x t be the adjacent non-homozygous marker in M p . Substituting j′ with j n x t in the definitions from the last section, let tmax and tmin be redefined. Then in Step 5, V p is phased as follows: For parent p, if , then the values of and are interchanged. Further, column j in M p is updated by replacing an existing entry of 0 with 1 and an entry of 1 with 0, to reflect the updated .
Let . Then the minimal number of crossovers (or recombinations) between j and j n x t in haplotypes inherited from parent p is . Thus:
Note that d c could be larger than the sum on the left, since some further crossovers may be introduced in the next phase. Since only adjacent markers need to be considered for detecting crossovers, the following holds.
Observation 4. Given, the haplotype matrices M a ,M b and the parent haplotypes V a ,V b can be constructed intime.
Missing values There are often missing values in the data, sometimes as high as 20%. When the value is missing at position 〈i j〉, we make the assignment , for p = a,b. However, if after the computation of V, marker j is homozygous at parent p, then and is appropriately updated. It can be verified that this treatment does not introduce any extra (spurious) crossovers.
- (1)
V a =V b and if then , for all i and j, or,
- (2)
V a ≠ V b and if then , for all i and j.
Thus M b is defined completely by M a and thus the task is to estimate only M a .
Monotonic state transitions Next, the matrices M p are transformed as follows. A position 〈i j〉 is a heterozygous trio, if the two parents at j are heterozygous and so is .
Note that a marker j can never be both leftmost and rightmost since the number of markers is at least two, hence both Lt(·) and Rt(·) are well defined. Let M i j = x. Then the transition S x →Sy is applied to assign the value y to M i j (written as M i j ←y) as follows.
o If Lt(M i j ) = Rt(M i j ) = k, then M i j ← e k .
o If Lt(M i j ) ≠ Rt(M i j ) with Lt(M i j ) = k1 and Rt(M i j ) = k2, then
o , (note that k1 ≠ k2)
o If Lt(M i j ) = Rt(M i j ) = k, then M i j ← e k .
o M i j ← k.
o If is numeric, then
To estimate the running time of the algorithm, we classify the transitions as intra-transitions and inter-transitions, depending on whether M or is used respectively. Thus is the only inter-transition. The above transitions are applied to the elements of M a and M b till no more transition is applicable. This final form of matrix is written as F(M a ) or simply F a (similarly, F(M b ) or simply F b ).
Each element of F p is in the final state, i.e., for each position 〈i j〉, , p = a,b. A numeric value of -1 indicates that no information regarding the haplotypes can be deduced. It can be verified that these state transitions induce the following properties on F and V.
- (1)
If is not numeric but is, then must hold.
- (2)
If and are both not numeric, then 〈i j〉, must be a heterozygous trio. The converse however is not true.
- (3)
If -1, for some j, then -1, for all j.
- (1)
Given M a and M b , F a and F b are unique.
- (2)
F a and F b can be constructed from M a and M b in time.
To show that F a and F b are unique, the iterations can be viewed as of two types: one where only inter-transitions and the other where only intra-transitions are applicable. In the very first iteration, due to the possible start states, no inter-transition can be applied. Thus using uniquely applicable intra-transitions, each and each is transformed. When no intra-transition can be applied, the uniquely applicable inter-transitions are applied. Thus the iterations alternate between intra- and inter-transitions. Hence the final forms F a and F b are unique. Next, since each entry can go through no more than three transitions, it is possible to obtain F a and F b from M a and M b in time using suitable list data structures.
Phase III: Staging output
An optimization problem (e.g., minimizing an appropriate error function) whose solution is associated with an output configuration, such as alignment of multiple sequences or a phylogeny topology or landscape of crossovers in chromosomes, has the added burden of proving stability in the solution. In other words, how distinct in configuration are the next closest solutions? This is usually very difficult to answer, and most methods are inadequate in addressing this. However, due to the very specific nature of our problem, we provide an agglomerate of "best" solutions, so that its stability can be gauged. Our focus is not just on a maximum likely or a most parsimonious solution, but on an "agglomerate" of all (equally-likely) feasible solutions. This is a characteristic not just of the method but, in a sense, that of the data as well.
Suppose there are L > 0 feasible distinct solutions for a given . Is it possible to generate an agglomerate in a single pair of matrices R a and R b that captures all the L solutions ? In the following paragraphs we describe how to construct the agglomerate (R a and R b ) based on the encodings in F a and F b .
- 1.
If for some j, then without loss of generality and , for all j.
- 2.
If then
- 3.
For each j, if is numeric and is not, then .
- 4.For each j, where and are both not numeric, then(3)
This is illustrated in the following example.
Example 1. Letand, for some j. Further letandfor some i. Then by Equation 4,. However if, then.
The non-numeric values in R p encode multiple solutions, possibly with multiple crossovers. Hence we call the contiguous blocks of non-numeric values as dispersion intervals. The details of interpreting these intervals is discussed in the following sections.
Precision measures of iXora output
Note that d c is the number crossovers seen in the result matrices, thus an average number of crossovers for the individuals is d c /n. But these also correspond to an output configuration. Then how precise is the output of iXora for an input genotype matrix ?
The matrices R a and R b enable the elicitation of the parameters for the various haplotype distributions across the markers as well as the precision measures. The agglomerate structure aids in defining a stability measure summarized as the metric (Equation 11). The other inadequacies, such as insufficient information and errors due to imperfect experiments or data-acquisition, are evaluated by the methodology and summarized as and respectively (Equations 12-13). The former is the extent of dispersion in position of each crossover over the agglomerate, and the latter is the observed error in the R matrices. The trio define the haplotype precision in the given genotypes.
Stability measure,
Let r be a run of contiguous values in a row (progeny) of R p . A dispersion interval is a non-numeric run, sandwiched by the chromosome boundary or numeric value. Let R a and R b be runs in the two haplotypes of the progeny and are aligned in the examples discussed below. It is possible that only one of R a or R b is a numeric run. Then it is called a asymmetric. But if both are non-numeric, then by construction (Equation 4) r a = r b and the run is symmetric. A switch is defined to occur between q and Q or between Q and the numeric value that sandwiches the run. The number of switches is written as s w(r). The value ∗ is a wild card and can be treated either as q or Q. The switch detection is succinctly described by the following two examples. In the illustrations the dispersion interval is shown in green sandwiched between numeric values (in black) and each switch is marked as a numbered (red) down-arrow.
The wild card may result in different positions of the same switch corresponding to whether it was interpreted as a q or a Q. These distinct positions of the switch is termed the wild card count of a switch. If a switch position is not affected by any wild card, its count is 1.
The wild card counts of the four switches are 1, 1, 2 and 1 respectively.
The transformed values are shown in bold above. The same process is applied to every dispersion interval to transform the matrices R a and R b . The observations from the transformations above is summarized as:
Observation 7. R is such that for each dispersion interval r, if s w(r) > 0, then (1) r begins and ends with Q and (2) the positions of the first and the last switch sandwich the dispersion interval.
In fact, the following is easily verified:
Observation 8. Let r be a dispersion interval and let s = sw(r). Then (1) the total number of crossovers in the interval, across both the haplotypes, is exactly s and each crossover in each haplotype of the configuration is at a position of the switch.(2) If r is asymmetric, then s is zero. In general, s is even and the number of crossovers in each haplotype of each distinct configuration is odd.
In practice, we observed that in all data sets all the dispersion intervals had no switches. There was exactly one instance where s w(r) was 2. Also, the following is easily verified.
Observation 9. Let s = s w(r) for a dispersion interval r. Then if s ≤ 2, there is no additional crossover introduced by r. If s > 2, the number of additional crossovers is s-2.
Dispersion index,
where c l is the wild card count of each switch l in r. When the location of each crossover is known precisely, this index is 0, while value 1 indicates maximum uncertainty in the location.
Error estimate,
Also, in our experiments these mismatches were extremely low (less than 0.01) and when followed up turned out to be experimental errors. Hence we have followed the convention that such a mismatch be flagged as a potential error. Then an error, if any, is at 〈i j〉 in F that underwent the transitions . Note that the converse is not true. Also, an additional crossover, if any, is at 〈i j〉 in F that underwent the transitions . Again, the converse is not true.
To summarize, the trio () define the haplotype precision in the given genotypes . Across our experiments (30 distinct data sets) with real data [15], the mean precision trio were observed to be (0,0.002165,0.000299).
Downstream processing of iXora output
Since iXora associates the parent haplotypes (not just the inherited alleles) to each marker in a progeny, it is possible to study the distributions of the inherited parent haplotypes independent of or in association with a phenotype. The details of these and other related postprocessing available in the iXora framework are described here.
Haplotype frequency distributions
One of the important consequences of haplotype inferencing is obtaining the haplotype frequency distribution across the chromosomes. A marker j of progeny i has two alleles, one derived either from haplotype 0 or haplotype 1 of parent a and the other either from haplotype 0 or haplotype 1 of parent b. Since R is an agglomerate, it also contains the non-numeric values that encode multiple configurations. Based on the encoding in R we estimate the expected value of the frequency count and its variance. First, we enumerate the feasible solutions encoded by a non-numeric run r.
Let w t(r) be the number of distinct solutions encoded by r.
Observation 10. Let s = sw(r). Let c1,c2,…c s be the wild card counts of the switch positions. Let wt(r) be the number of distinct feasible solutions due to r. Then
(1) If < 2, wt(r) = len(r) + 1.
- (1)
above is easily verified and for (2), Equation 17 is explained through the following example.
There are six distinct configurations for the first case and since the two haplotypes can be switched it gives 2 × 6 distinct configurations. For the second there aredistinct configuration, giving a total of 12+20 distinct solutions due to r.
Expected frequency and variance
In the absence of any other external information, each of the alternative solutions in R is equally likely. Under this assumption, it is easy to verify the following:
The varianceof the count of the haplotype pair is approximated as.
Haplotype-phenotype association analysis
Below, we describe the iXora methodology for associating discrete traits with genomic locations using haplotypes. The same approach can be used for continuous traits, using different statistical tests and randomizations. In general, the phasing output can be used in other types of statistical tests, for example to test for associations between a pair of markers and a phenotype. In the following, let L the number of discrete phenotype values.
Combination of parents We can test the effect of each haplotype pair at a marker with a phenotype as follows. In the case of discrete phenotype with L possible values, iXora constructs for each marker a 4 × L contingency table of haplotype pair & phenotype counts. In the current iXora implementation, we use Fisher's exact test fisher.test in R [17] to test for association between haplotype pairs & phenotype. The test outputs a p-value for each marker, denoting the significance of the association.
Individual parents We can also investigate the contribution to phenotype of each parent individually. The contingency table in this case is a 2 × L table of haplotype & phenotype counts (a separate table for each parent at each marker). Fisher's Exact test is used to test for association between haplotypes & phenotype. The test outputs a p-value for each marker and for each parent, denoting the significance of the association.
Significance thresholds via randomization We include a method for directly estimating the background distribution of p-values in the haplotype-phenotype data by randomizing the phenotype labels. If p-values observed in the randomized data are always larger than in the real data, then the findings on real data may indeed be significant. When working with categorical traits, we take into account the size (number of individuals) of each phenotype category in the permutation test. Let S be the size of the smallest category. For the permutation test, we randomly select S individuals from each category and permute their phenotype values. The permutation test is repeated T times, running the same statistical test on the randomized data as on the real data, for each marker. The smallest p-value observed in the randomized data is generated as output and becomes the threshold for significance in the real results.
iXora output visualization
The agglomerate solution from the phasing algorithm can be directly visualized to detect distortions in the data, with or without using phenotypic information. Approaches for visualizing the phasing solution are demonstrated in the following two paragraphs, while the third paragraph describes visualization of haplotype-phenotype associations. The figures shown here as examples stem from the use case described in detail in the Section "Using iXora" in Additional file 1. Therein is detailed the phasing an trait association process for locating the genomic region and specific haplotype that determines the simulated phenotype (height).
Individual haplotypes The individual haplotypes can be directly visualized, for example as the colored haplotype blocks shown in Additional file 1: Figure A3. The visualization indicates the locations of crossovers in each individual, including uncertainty in the crossover locations. As an alternative visualization, Additional file 1: Figure A4 shows iXora output on the frequencies of individual haplotypes per parent. In this case, the individuals are divided into two groups by phenotype, and clear distortion is observed regarding frequency of haplotypes in each group.
Comparison with related methods
Here we first elaborate on the three distinct categories of population models for phasing, and then give details on the comparison of iXora with related phasing methods in literature. Technical details on the settings for each compared method can be found in Additional file 1.
Unrelated individuals (no parent information) These methods treat the input genotypes as samples from a population of unrelated individuals, and do not assign the progeny to parental haplotypes. While they may be applicable to human population data, they are not suitable for our purposes. fastPHASE can be adapted to our problem setting by treating the input as n + 2 individuals from a population originating from four founder haplotype clusters. We adapt MACH similarly, though it has a much larger default value on the number of haplotypes. FMPH (Integer Programming Formulations To Solve Maximum Parsimony Haplotyping) [12] is closest in spirit to iXora, but is computationally very expensive and suitable only for small data sets (up to ≈50×30), although a hybrid approach is suitable for slightly larger data sets (up to ≈150×100). While the limitation on number of individuals can be tackled by splitting the data (as we do for Merlin, HAPI, SHAPEIT2 below), the limitation on the number of markers is debilitating, so we were unable to run FMPH on our data sets.
Unrelated trios These methods allow the definition of family relationships between parents and progeny in the input, with the limitation that each parent has only one progeny. BEAGLE and HAPI-UR (HAPlotype Inference for UnRelated samples) are two such methods. The methods phase the progeny individually in terms of sequences that were transmitted from each parent. Therefore the progeny are not necessarily assigned to a consistent set of parent haplotypes.
Related trios These methods allow defining several progeny originating from the same two parents, thus the underlying algorithms utilize the full sibling information. However, unlike iXora, none of the existing methods was able to use the entire set of progeny per two parents. In our application this size is in hundreds. HAPI and Merlin produce results only on families of about 10 progeny while SHAPEIT2 can only process sizes up to 50. We therefore randomly divided the progeny into sets of appropriate sizes and phased the sets independently. However, we observed that the phasing results for the parents between sets were often inconsistent, affecting the overall accuracy. HAPI and Merlin produce an assignment of progeny to parental haplotypes while SHAPEIT2 does not.
Comparison measures Here we describe the measures that we used to compare the different methods. Since existing phasing methods generate various types of output, we use two different measures so that all the methods are comparable on at least one measure. Our interest was not simply restricted to phasing the progeny genotypes by assigning each allele to the correct parent (PA), but also assigning them to the correct haplotype of that parent (PHA).
First, the phasing accuracy (PA) of progeny is examined, on a marker-by-marker basis, of only the heterozygous positions. We report the number of correctly assigned and the unassigned (unknown) positions as a percentage. BEAGLE, HAPI, HAPI-UR, Merlin, SHAPEIT2 and iXora can be directly compared on this measure for progeny, because they report the parental origin (maternal, paternal) of each allele. To incorporate fastPHASE and MACH also in this comparison, we post-processed their output as follows: progeny haplotypes are labeled as 'maternal' and 'paternal', using the labeling that minimizes mismatches compared to true maternal and paternal haplotypes. After the post-processing, all methods can be compared on this measure for progeny. The same accuracy evaluation is used to report imputation accuracy, by examining only the phasing for the missing input values.
Second, the accuracy of assigning the correct parental haplotype (PHA) for each progeny allele is examined, again on a marker-by-marker basis. All markers, including homozygous positions are used. For the output of programs where the input had to be split into smaller families, we consider only those subsets of progeny whose parents' phasing are consistent with the majority parents (see Additional file 1 for details). Again, we report the number of correctly assigned and unassigned (unknown) positions, deeming a progeny position to be correct only when both alleles of the genotype are assigned to the correct parental haplotype. Only HAPI, Merlin, and iXora can be directly compared on this measure for the progeny.
All the simulated data sets are available at the iXora website http://researcher.ibm.com/project/3430.
FU is partially funded by MARS, under the joint cacao project with IBM Research. OEC is partially funded by MARS, Incorporated. The authors would like to thank Dr. Seth Findley and Joseph Conrad Stack, and the anonymous reviewers for providing valuable comments on the manuscript.
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This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.


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Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Jets Return Home After Confidence Building Road Trip
Not only did Bryan Little finally bulge the twine or Ondrej Pavelec collect his first shutout, but the Winnipeg Jets were able to have a winning record on the road trip (3-2-2) and collect eight out of a possible 14 points.
Another positive from the Jets two week road trip are the emergence of Mark Flood as he fills in for the indefinitely injured Tobias Enstrom.
It seems that once Ron Hainsey, Derek Meech, and Randy Jones are back and healthy, Flood may become the seventh defensemen, if the Jets decide to continue with seven with Enstrom on the shelf.
Flood has far outshone the other two defensive call ups - Brett Festerling and Paul Postma - collecting three points (two goals, one assist) and registering a plus two rating in the latter four games of the road trip.
In Buffalo, the Charlottetown, PEI native logged 17:00 minutes of ice time and was up to 19:44 in New Jersey two games prior.
Festerling, on the other hand, has been held pointless in four games, with an even rating and has seen his ice time drop since he logged 19:05 on Long Island to around the 10:00 mark of ice time in the previous two games.
The Jets finally saw some production from their "supposed" top line of Blake Wheeler, Bryan Little, and Andrew Ladd - albeit on the final game of the trip.
But nonetheless, Little finally marked himself onto the scoresheets, now it's Wheeler's turn. Once all three are firing into the net, goals may come easier for the team as they have scored 40 goals to the 51 they have allowed.
Despite the minus eleven differential between goals for and goals against, the Jets have massively improved since the start, which saw them outscored in their first three games by a combined score of 13-5, which accounts for eight of the minus eleven against the Jets.
Improvement in net has been huge to on the road trip as Pavelec recorded very solid numbers as the road trip progressed. And some can say that they saw the huge 6-5 overtime loss on Tuesday coming because of Pavelec's seventh consecutive start.
Throughout the road trip, Pavelec managed to have a 3-2-2 record with a 3.22 goals against average and a 0.916 save percentage.
Take away the blowout win in Philadelphia at the start of the trip, Pavelec is 2-2-2 with a 2.40 goals against average and a 0.929 save percentage.
Looking at the numbers, their number one netminder has been coming into his own, especially during the road swing, and has put the inconsistent play of October behind him.
Now if the Jets defense is healthy and playing well in front of him and the offense is firing on all cylinders heading into the latter part of November, the Jets could be a dark horse team in the Southeast Division and Eastern Conference.
Now the Jets look to improve possibly their worst stat - their home record.
So far this season, the Jets have played an NHL low four games at home.
Time to shake the dust and rust off the MTS Centre as the Jets prepare for a Thursday night meeting with the Florida Panthers - game time is 7:30 PM in downtown Winnipeg.
Good news for the team is, they play 17 of their next 23 games at home, including two stretches - one of five games from October 29th (vs. Ottawa) until December 9th (vs. Carolina) and one of six games from December 13th (vs. Minnesota) until December 23rd (vs. Pittsburgh).
The Jets longest homestand of the season won't be around until late February/early March, when they are at home for eight consecutive games, starting on February 17th against the defending Stanley Cup champion Boston Bruins.
With their next few games coming at home, there are a number of very important inter-divisional matchups that could shape the second half of the Jets season.
First up is the Thursday game against Florida, followed by the Tampa Bay Lightning coming to town on November 14th and the Washington Capitals on November 17th.
Two inter-dividional road games follow in Washington (November 23rd) and Carolina (November 25th) followed by two home games against Carolina (December 9th) and Washington (December 15th).
In their next 16 games, the Jets play a Southeast Division opponent seven times.
Photos Courtesy of Yahoo! Sports & Getty Images
Posted by Matt Eichel at 7:57 AM
Labels: Andrew Ladd, Blake Wheeler, Brett Festerling, Bryan Little, Derek Meech, Mark Flood, Ondrej Pavelec, Paul Postma, Randy Jones, Ron Hainsey
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