Savvy Affiliate

The Google Adsense Team has recently issued a clarification on Where it is acceptable to place adsense

 Google did a good job of clearing up some confusion that I, and presumably some other bloggers had.   Basically they said that putting your adsense near navigation and content was fine, so that your users could see the ads and decide whether or not to click on them.

However it is not good to place your ads where users are likely to click on them by accident.  Doing this will result in too many misclicks in your account and your potential banning from Adsense.