Microsoft profits from record first-quarter sales

Microsoft profits from record first-quarter sales via bbc.com

Microsoft said it had been an "exceptional" quarter

Microsoft has announced a 51% rise in first-quarter profit, thanks to higher sales of its flagship Windows and Office software.

Net profit for the three months to September came in at $5.4bn (£3.4bn).

Revenues increased by 25% to $16.2bn - a company record for the first quarter.

But Microsoft said that in the same quarter last year it had deferred some revenue from Windows sales. Had it not done so, its net profit would have been only 16% higher in comparison.

"This was an exceptional quarter, combining solid enterprise growth and continued strong consumer demand for Office 2010, Windows 7, and Xbox 360 consoles and games," said Peter Klein, chief financial officer at Microsoft.

Windows sales rose 66% on a year earlier to $4.8bn, while Office and other business software brought in $5.1bn, a 14% increase on last year.

'Firing on all cylinders'

Microsoft shares rose 2.8% in after-hours trading.

Its stock has fallen 14% so far this year as investors worry about its ability to adapt to new ways of computing.

Last week, its chief software architect Ray Ozzie unexpectedly resigned, and warned that the company must think "beyond the PC".

But its latest results were better than analysts had expected.

"Microsoft had a very good quarter," said Toan Tran, an analyst at Morningstar.

"Windows is still doing well, Office is doing well, and servers and tools are doing well. The big three businesses are firing on all cylinders as the PC upgrade cycle continues."

Tea Party a religious movement?

Is the Tea Party becoming a religious movement? via CNN.com

By Jeff Sharlet, Special to CNN

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Jeff Sharlet says anti-tax Tea Party shows signs of evolving into religious movement
• He says GOP star Sen. DeMint is gatekeeper for Tea Party candidates to establishment
• Price of admission, he says, is fealty to DeMint's religious vision of Tea Party
• Sharlet: Putting government in service of religion tends to align it with interests of wealthy

Editor's note: Jeff Sharlet is the author of "C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy," published by Little, Brown, and "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power." He is a contributing editor for Harper's and Rolling Stone and teaches creative nonfiction at Dartmouth College.

(CNN) -- The question of whether the Tea Party will have a real impact on American politics (yes!) has evolved into a new debate: Is the Tea Party really about more than taxes?

Glenn Beck, who invokes the semi-mythical "Black Robe Brigade" -- fighting preachers he claims led the American Revolution -- as a model for a new generation of activists seems to think so.

On public radio, Bryan Fischer, a leader of the fundamentalist American Family Association, sternly instructed a libertarian Tea Party activist that her movement was religiously rooted whether she wanted it to be or not. A recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute backs him up, revealing that 57 percent of self-identified Tea Partiers agree that "America is and always has been a Christian nation."

So is the Tea Party a religious movement, too?

The answer is a little tricky. It didn't begin as one, despite the political God-talk of its heroine, Sarah Palin, but it is becoming one, thanks in large part to one man, Sen. Jim DeMint of Greenville, South Carolina, the GOP's newest and fastest rising star.

DeMint, who has been out front of his party with vigorous support for Tea Party candidates from Alaska to Delaware, has been looked at as a bridge builder between the insurgent right and the establishment right, because he sympathizes with the former even as he's a Washington insider.

But a better metaphor is gatekeeper: DeMint holds the key to the capital for outsider candidates like Alaska's Joe Miller and Delaware's Christine O'Donnell. And the price of admission he's charging is fealty to his religious vision of the Tea Party as a new "Great Awakening."

That is, a Christian crusade akin to the 18th century evangelical movement that set the tone for so many religious surges in American life that many contemporary evangelicals call the United States a "revival nation."

The Republican Party -- at least, the establishment Republican Party -- doesn't have a lock on that energy. In Alaska, Sen. Lisa Murkowski was a reliable conservative, but primary challenger Joe Miller swept past her in September buoyed by anti-abortion voters who thrilled to his pledge to oppose "the culture of death."

In Delaware, Republican Rep. Mike Castle was a sure thing for Joe Biden's old Senate seat -- until he got beat by "fringe" candidate Christine O'Donnell, previously best known for her public campaign against masturbation.

Liberals and centrists wring their hands over Miller and giggle about O'Donnell, hoping that her political hopelessness somehow proves that the movement isn't going. They compile lists of what they take to be her craziest statements, such as her confession that as a young woman she dabbled in witchcraft.

That's a strategic mistake, because they're mocking what is, in fact, a mainstream evangelical view -- that witchcraft and "spiritual war" are real -- and a narrative with powerful resonance in American life. Consider not O'Donnell's words, but her theme: Once I was lost (making bad choices), but now I'm found. Who didn't do something stupid in their youth?

But it's the "found" part that reveals the religiosity of the Tea Party movement, spirituality not at odds with the Tea Party's economics but intertwined with it.

DeMint stumbled through an explanation for the Christian Broadcasting Network: "People are seeing this massive government growing and they're realizing that it's the government that's hurting us. And I think they're turning back to God in effect is our salvation and government is not our salvation and in fact more and more people see government as the problem, and so I think some have been drawn in over the years to a dependency relationship with government, and as the Bible says, you can't have two masters."

DeMint's solution is to put government -- and the economy -- in the service of Jesus, to cultivate a "leadership led by God," as the religious organization that gives DeMint not only a theology but also a roof puts it. DeMint is a longtime resident of the C Street House, the "Prayboy Mansion," as some bloggers have called it, made infamous in 2009 for its role in the sex scandals of Sen. John Ensign, R-Nevada, and Gov. Mark Sanford, R-South Carolina, and maintained by a fundamentalist movement known as the Fellowship, or the Family.

C Street has a singular goal, in the words of one Family leader: to "assist [congressmen] in better understandings of the teachings of Christ, and applying it to their jobs."

It's C Street's understanding of those teachings, though, that mark it as a nexus for the convergence of the Tea Party's populist conservatism and insider influence of fundamentalism's elite (besides DeMint, GOP hard right leaders Sen. Tom Coburn, Ensign, Sen. John Thune, and Sen. Sam Brownback have lived there).

The best way to help the weak, C Street teaches, is to help the strong, who will in turn dispense God's blessings to the rest of us. Call it trickle down religion.

The rhetoric of the Tea Party is populist in style, but its economic vision so neatly aligns with the interests of the wealthy that big business is abandoning the old Republican establishment for the "insurgents" who promise to free the market's "invisible hand" from the safety net of the minimum wage and health care.

And for DeMint and the new disciples he hopes to bring to Washington, that invisible hand ultimately belongs not to the market but to God.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Jeff Sharlet.

Why I write

Being a person who loves both the sciences and writing, I never thought that I will ever write. Sure, playing around with the characters in my head is fun. Imagining them in various situations and conflicts often is a highlight of my day. But to think that I would ever put them on paper? Never!



My love affair with words started as a child. I loved reading then, and especially loved re-enacting situations that I read about. It was a pleasure to be able to act out the scenes I read about. But then, I started wanting more, I wanted to create a new situation for the characters; that's when I started writing.



Things never did go the way I plan then. After all, I was a young child, barely 8. What would I know about writing? Nevertheless, that spark never really died down. As I advanced through the years of primary school, the short compositions we had to do only serve to be a catalyst for my writing outside curriculum time. Soon, I was writing actively once more, revelling in the worlds that I was able to create with words. I never showed anyone those writings though. They were too personal, too amateurish, for me to expose them to the world.



When I graduated from primary school and began my secondary school life, fanfiction came to my attention. Yes, some people told me that it isn't a 'real' form of writing. But what is a 'real' piece of work? Is there even a standard definition for it? Perhaps what I was writing then was not the conventional creative work. I borrowed characters from authors, television shows, cartoons, anything that piqued my interest I used. I placed characters in new situations, tried to rewrite events in books, created new endings for series' which I thought were too short.



This love for writing never died, and when I ran out of ideas, I turned to roleplaying. It started with Twilight, a fandom which I must say I detest, but a friend dragged me in and ever since then, I never left roleplaying. Yes, I did have my ups and downs, who doesn't? I went on hiatus for a while and stopped writing, but I came back after a few days. It was like I could not not write!



Personally, writing is a way for me to hide from the realities of life. Sure, there aren't vampires or fae in reality. But through words, I could imagine myself living amongst them, and escape from the torments of school work and such. There is something about writing that cheers me up whenever I'm down, something that no matter what mood I am in, enables me to return to my former equilibrium quickly.



Yes, perhaps that is a shallow reason for me to write. But as long as the spark lives, I will write. When will I stop? I never know, for each waking day holds new paths for my characters to travel, and that will always keep me writing.

Gene Expression

Gene expression explained

Gene expression is the process of protein formation. Proteins are the molecules that are responsible for enabling us to live. They carry out majority of the processes that are important for life, as they include enzymes, transcription factors and the various cell machinery. Indeed, without proteins, life may not be a possibility. 

Gene expression cannot be carried out without a nucleic acid sequence, also known as DNA in humans. DNA is a double stranded molecule comprising of a sugar-phosphate backbone and nitrogenous bases. On a smaller scale, DNA is made up of complementary nucleotide sequences. There are four different nucleotides: adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). Humans have approximately 3 billion of these base pairs. However, not all of them are coding sequences. Approximately 1.3% of the DNA codes for proteins, the rest, have many varied functions that are still essential to the overall function of the human system. Our main focus here though, is the 1.3%. What exactly goes on in there that enables us to have the various proteins we need for our daily functions?

Gene expression in the human (and other eukaryotes) system comprises of three 'steps': Transcription, RNA Processing, and Translation. Transcription and RNA processing occurs in the nucleus of the cell, before translation occurs.

Transcription

In this process, template DNA (aka DNA that codes for the proteins needed), directs the synthesis of new RNA. This RNA is a complimentary copy of the template DNA, containing everything 'mentioned' by the DNA. It is something like one copying down everything the teacher says, without processing the information and removing the irrelevant parts.

In both eukaryotic and prokaryotic transcription, the process has 3 stages. First, is initiation, where RNA polymerase binds to the promoter region. This initiates the unwinding of the DNA strands, and the polymerase initiates RNA synthesis. Like DNA polymerase, RNA polymerase can only assemble a polynucleotide in the 5' to 3' direction. However, no primer is needed to initiate this chain, unlike DNA polymerase. 

In eukaryotic cells, proteins known as transcription factors bind to promoters that include a TATA box (a nucleotide sequence that contains TATA, 25 nucleotides upstream from the start of transcription). Afterwhich, more transcription factors will bind to the DNA, together with RNA polymerase II, forming the transcription initiation complex.

Subsequently, elongation occurs, the polymerase will move downstream, unwinding the DNA and elongating the RNA transcript in the 5' to 3' direction. As RNA synthesis proceeds downstream, the newly transcribed RNA molecule will detach itself from the DNA template, and the double helix reforms. It is possible for a single gene to be transcribed by multiple molecules of RNA polymerases. This increases the amount of RNA transcribed from it, enabling the cell to make the encoded protein in large amounts. 

The last and final step of transcription is termination. This process differs between prokaryotes and eukaryotes. In prokaryotes, transcription will stop when a terminator sequence is transcribed, causing the polymerase to detach from the DNA and release the transcript, which will be available for immediate use as mRNA. In fact, translation of the mRNA strand sometimes occurs while transcription is still taking place!

In eukaryotes, the pre-mRNA is cleaved when the polymerase transcribes a sequence on the DNA known as the polyadenylation signal, which codes for a polyadenylation signal (AAUAAA) in pre-MRNA. The pre-MRNA is cleaved 10-25 nucleotides from this signal, while the polymerase will continue transcribing until it falls off the DNA by a mechanism that is not fully understood yet. 

 

RNA processing

In eukaryotes, there is one additional step before translation, and that is RNA processing. What happens here is that introns (non-coding sequences) are removed and exons (coding sequences) spliced together. Also, the 5' cap and poly-A tail will be added to the 5' and 3' end of the pre-mRNA respectively. The 5' cap and poly-A tail are not translated into protein, nor the regions known as 5' untranslated region (UTR) and 3' UTR. 

 

Translation

Now comes the complicated part. Translation. After RNA is processed and becomes mRNA, it has to be translated into proteins: something that the cell can use. This process involves a few key members: mRNA, tRNA (transfer RNA), ribosomes and amino acids.

First and foremost, a small ribosomal subunit binds to a molecule of mRNA at the mRNA binding site. Initiator tRNA carrying the amino acid methionine basepairs via hydrogen bonds, to the start codon AUG. This is an important step as it establishes the reading frame for the mRNA. If there is a mistake in the reading frame, wrong proteins will be produced, and this will lead to larger complications.  The large subunit of the ribosome will then attach to the smaller subunit, completing the translation initiation complex. Proteins known as initiation factors are responsible for bringing everything together. Upon the completion of this initiation complex, the initiator tRNA is in the P site, while the A site remains empty for the next tRNA.

Elongation then occurs. First, codon recognition occurs. The anticodon of a tRNA basepairs with the complementary codon on the mRNA in the A site. GTP hydrolysis ensures that accuracy and efficiency of this step is increased. After which, an rRNA molecule of the large subunit catalysis the formation of a peptide bond between the newly arrived amino acid in the A site and the carboxyl end of the growing polypeptide chain in the P site. This step results in the polypeptide being attached to the tRNA in the A site. The ribosome then translocates the tRNA in the A site to the P site. The empty tRNA in the P site is now moved to the E site, where it is released. The mRNA moves through the ribosome, 5' end first, bringing the next codon that is going to be translated into the A site.

The last and final stage is termination. Elongation will continue until a stop codon reaches the A site of the ribosome. UAG, UAA and UGA are all stop codons that signals the stop of translation. A release factor then binds directly to the stop codon, causing the addition of a water molecule instead of an amino acid to the peptide chain. The release factor will then hydrolyse the bond between tRRNA in the P site and the last amino acid of the polypeptide chain, freeing the polypeptide. Everything else then dissociates.

 

Gene regulation

While all this maybe fine and dandy, gene regulation will also occur to ensure that environmental changes will be dealt with successfully by the cell. These are carried out in the form of metabolic control. It occurs on two levels: adjusting the activity of enzymes already in the cell (feedback inhibition), which is a faster response, or regulate the expression of the genes (the operon model).

The operon model is just one of many ways a cell can regulate gene expression. Throughout the various steps of gene expression, gene regulation occurs, in an effort to ensure that the proteins produced in the end will be beneficial to our system.