Feel Old Yet? Roddick And Blake Will Play On Senior Circuit

James Blake addresses the crowd during an interview with Mary Joe Fernandez after losing on day three of the 2013 U.S. Open.

Matthew Stockman/Getty Images

James Blake addresses the crowd during an interview with Mary Joe Fernandez after losing on day three of the 2013 U.S. Open.

Matthew Stockman/Getty Images

Neither of them is over 35 years old. One of them played in ATP World Tour events just months ago; the other did so last year. But none of that will keep recently retired tennis players Andy Roddick, 31, and James Blake, 33, from joining a circuit of senior players.

The pair will be playing in the PowerShares Series, a touring set of one-day tournaments featuring tennis legends such as Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, John McEnroe and Ivan Lendl. By joining the tour, Roddick could eventually get a chance to play alongside his former coach, Jimmy Connors.

We will pause here to acknowledge that any of the people listed above would make short work of us on any court, under any conditions. And it can be debated that the PowerShares Series isn't a traditional senior tour, as its minimum age requirement is that players be just 30.

But we also confess to a moment of dubious shock after reading this headline in The Los Angeles Times: "Andy Roddick, James Blake join senior tennis tour."

"I am looking forward to playing on the PowerShares circuit," Roddick says, in a report on the Tennis site. "Having a chance to stay connected with tennis and compete on a limited basis through events like these fits perfectly with my life these days."

A look at the PowerShares site shows that it features a Tennis article identifying it as "the newly-named senior circuit" last year, when it changed its name from the Champions Series. The tour was founded in 2005 by a group that includes former tennis star Jim Courier, who plays in many events.

If you're wondering about the age cutoff for other senior tours, so were we:

In tennis, the ATP Champions Tour requires that players be retired and meet career criteria, such as holding a world No. 1 ranking or being a Grand Slam finalist.

While some sources report the Champions Tour requires that players are at least 35, Roddick is scheduled to play a tour event in early 2014, when he'll still be 31. The Champions Tour is also said to require a player be at least two years past their retirement; details about its policies weren't available for review at the time of this post.

In professional golf, the standard minimum age to join a senior tour is 50.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/10/15/234875595/feel-old-yet-roddick-and-blake-will-play-on-senior-circuit?ft=1&f=1055
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T-Mobile to replace grandfathered plans with new rates

Many loyal T-Mobile customers will have to kiss their grandfathered plans goodbye. That's because the carrier is sunsetting legacy plans and moving subscribers to new ones, Big Magenta has confirmed to Engadget. While the company has yet to get back to us with the finer details of the switch, a ...

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/93OEAkRNmnE/
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Going Home: Is Sony's social experiment fit for PlayStation 4?

Home is a loaded word. When you think of home, you think of familiarity. It should be some place of comfort, somewhere you want to go back to. It shouldn't feel like a glorified billboard. The latter is the case with Sony's heavily tauted but oft-forgotten feature, PlayStation Home, leading to a sour taste in my mouth and very few visitations. However, DLB Network provided visual evidence as early as August that Home may be returning for PlayStation 4. I felt that it was time to go back and see if it has a place on the next-generation console.

The initial reintroduction proved to be rather clumsy. After creating my character, I was forced into a mini-tutorial. 'Mini' is the operative word as, for the most part, players are thrown into the world, and have to resort to in-built help guides if they want to know how to fully interact with it. It's as if the developers didn't have the enthusiasm to add detailed tips in-game.

My displeasure was somewhat tempered by the pleasant surprise of Home's visuals and audio. Your starting apartment and the surroundings are gorgeous, and the audio seems to consistently be of high quality. It's hard to appreciate the beauty of the rest of the world to the same degree as your apartment, though, as it is often too cluttered.

The clutter comes from the array of advertising, with the world of Home disappointingly keen to show you that it isn't a social hub or an MMO. Home seems to be an advertising platform, with areas dedicated to various product; your only place of solitude from this barrage of product placement is your apartment. Really, though, that isn't an escape from commercialism, as in order to spruce up your place you'll need to make microtransactions.

The reasonably active community should be an escape from all that, but design choices make getting used to conversing a clunky exercise, as it isn't made particularly clear how to engage in conversation with specific people. The various hubs aren't massively populated, but the community is rather conversational and I was keen to get involved. Home would be a decent place to hang out with friends, though you'd want a keypad; the tedium of typing using the DualShock is maddening.

The main redeeming feature of Home is the now-sizeable games catalogue. The games are by no means innovative, but are genuinely enjoyable and cover a variety of genres. It makes Home feel like a great starting point for new PlayStation 3 owners, who might only have a couple of purchases to play. Sure, the quality varies, but it's hard to complain when the games are fun and mostly free, bar some such as the arcade cabinets in the GAME hub.

Where the games fall down, and Home in general, is the lack of immersion. It doesn't feel enough like a real-world place, with the quick travel system and no clarity provided as to what this world is. Neither do the games convey the feeling of being in a fantasy world; the suspension of disbelief is somewhat taken away when your character is wearing jeans and a shirt aboard a spaceship.

There is a division in quality between games, with some feeling rather half-hearted. For instance, top-down spaceship shooter Nova Prime has decent voice acting, helping to involve you in the game, whilst action-RPG Marcia thrusts you into the world with little lore and written speech, somewhat reducing its epicness.

Gaming Capacity pointed out one serious issue that undermines Home's attempts to create a virtual home: the loading times. If, as it envisages, Home is brought to us by Gaikai, the cloud-gaming service that can stream games, the feature will become much more inviting. I would gladly dip into a much faster Home to meet friends in order to, say, decide what game we're going to play.

Home just doesn't feel totally cohesive, which makes it easy to understand why the experience is still in beta. The only chance Home has of success is to recognize that sales will come from living up to the name it bears. It's frustrating that Sony hasn't fulfilled the mode's full potential five years after ... (continued on next page)

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Source: http://www.psu.com/a021285/Going-Home--Is-Sonys-social-experiment-fit-for-PlayStation-4
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Secretly-filmed movie plumbs Disney's dark side

Movies

Randee Dawn
TODAY contributor

11 hours ago

Is Disney World the happiest place on Earth? Not to director Randy Moore, whose new horror film "Escape from Tomorrow" shows the dark side behind the hugely-popular theme park's smiles.

Moore filmed his low-budget, black-and-white movie guerrilla-style, with hand-held personal cameras (and no permission from Disney) on the grounds of Disney World. But as he told TODAY's David Gregory, he holds no personal grudge against Mickey Mouse.

"I went there religiously as a kid," he said, adding he'd visit his father in Orlando each summer, and "we had a great time." But when he took his wife (who is not from the U.S.) and children to Disney World, she "had an awful, awful experience." 

After seeing it through her eyes, Moore began to see the "cracks in the veneer," and came up with his story, which focuses on a recently-fired father losing his grip on reality as he tries to keep things normal with his family while on vacation at Disney World.

But obtaining official permission to film on the grounds of Disney World was not likely to be forthcoming, so Moore decided to let his film set arise organically from a regular day at the park. After rehearsals in his hotel room, his small cast and crew would infiltrate the crowds and just film away. "Cameras are pretty ubiquitous at Disney," he said. "We went in there like tourists and shot every day."

Disney declined to comment on the film to NBC News, and has made no moves to sue the filmmakers. That may be a wise decision, said The Hollywood Reporter's Matt Belloni.

"They don't want to let this movie have the benefit of a fight with a big company like Disney," he said.

Stay tuned: The film's website has a counter of how many days they can go without being sued. 

"Escape from Tomorrow" is currently in theaters.

Source: http://www.today.com/entertainment/escape-tomorrow-movie-digs-disney-worlds-dark-side-8C11381620
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Rivers, Novak Lead Chargers To 19-9 Win

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Philip Rivers threw a 22-yard touchdown pass to rookie Keenan Allen and Nick Novak kicked four field goals for the San Diego Chargers, who used long drives to keep Andrew Luck off the field in a 19-9 victory against the Indianapolis Colts on Monday night.

Rivers methodically moved the Chargers (3-3) on three scoring drives of at least 74 yards as he rebounded from a three-interception performance in a dismal loss at Oakland.

The Colts (4-2) blew a chance to take a two-game lead over Tennessee in the AFC South. Colts receivers had several drops, including Darrius Heyward-Bey, who couldn't bring in a likely long touchdown pass down the right sideline in the second quarter.

Novak's fourth field goal, from 50 yards, came with 1:55 left.

There were family ties in this one: Chargers defensive coordinator John Pagano beat older brother Chuck, the Colts' coach.

___

AP NFL website: www.pro32.ap.org

Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=234408505&ft=1&f=
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Why MongoDB is worth $1.2 billion

While you were sleeping, 10Gen -- the company behind the MongoDB document database -- changed its name to MongoDB, Inc., raised $231 million, and became the first billion-dollar open source startup. That's right, an open source NoSQL database startup has a $1.2 billion valuation.

Founded in 2007, MongoDB got to this point in only six years, a feat that took Red Hat (founded 1993) nearly two decades. By contrast, the last open source startup I was involved in raised less than $20 million and sold for less than $400 million. At the time, this was considered pretty good.

[ Also on InfoWorld: Ill-informed haters go after MongoDB. | NoSQL showdown: MongoDB vs. Couchbase. | Stay up on the latest developer news with InfoWorld's Developer World newsletter. ]

To what does MongoDB owe its success? Oracle! That's right, Oracle is the best thing that ever happened to MongoDB. Oracle has the lion's share of the $30 billion database market. In 2011, the last year for which I can find database revenue numbers, RDBMS licensing revenue hit $16.75 billion. According to the analyst firm Gartner, Oracle owns 48.3 percent of the RDBMS market. It's the biggest, fattest gorilla imaginable.

Big red legacy
Oracle has many great advantages, beginning with an entrenched installed base. Many internal IT applications are written in Oracle's stored procedure language PLSQL.

But Oracle is not fundamentally different from the database I learned to love and hate in the mid-'90s on HP/UX PA-RISC boxes. In fact, it hasn't fundamentally changed since the '80s. Legacy is great and terrible at the same time. Oracle requires a lot of hardware and a good amount of support staff to keep running. It also does not affordably scale to the tens or hundreds of terabytes required by some -- or the millions of users required by others.

To scale in that way, Oracle would need underlying software architecture changes. Oracle is trying to address this by bolting other technologies onto its RDBMS, but as I've said before, this is a little like stapling a goose to a Mack truck and calling it an airplane. Moreover, that sort of scaling requires a fundamentally different license model. This is difficult to do without cannibalizing your existing market.

Meanwhile, Oracle has been a great consolidator of the database market. It gobbled up parts of MySQL (including its InnoDB storage engine), then Sun, which had in turn gobbled up MySQL. That was one move at the end of a long line of consolidations, which have been great for Oracle in its battles with familiar competitors like IBM and Microsoft. But that approach is also a great weakness when confronted with a new technology.

Source: http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/why-mongodb-worth-12-billion-228510?source=rss_infoworld_top_stories_
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Study enlists kids to combat antibiotics overuse

By Kathleen Raven

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - European public health campaigns have long fought the myth that antibiotics can shorten a bout of the common cold or flu with messages targeted to adults, and with mixed results.

Now, British researchers are bringing the "Take care, not antibiotics" message straight to kids.

Starting in January, 13-year-olds at the eighth-grade level in England's schools will be teaching peers and younger kids about microbes, proper hygiene and why antibiotic overuse is a bad thing. Researchers hope to implement a nation-wide program in September 2014.

"The idea is that the kids will go back home and tell their parents what they've learned," said lead researcher Donna Lecky of Public Health England in the United Kingdom.

To counter a worrisome increase in antibiotic-resistant diseases, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in 2008 designated November 18 as European Antibiotic Awareness Day.

In 2010, 24 European Union states, plus Norway and Iceland, reported their most recent antibiotics use to the ECDC. Overall, numbers of antibiotic doses decreased or stabilized in 15 countries and increased in 11 since the last survey in 2009.

The same report stated that the most commonly prescribed antibiotics in community health clinics, not including hospitals, were drugs in the penicillin family, another category known as macrolides and tetracyclines.

EU countries participate in antibiotic resistance awareness activities leading up to November 18. Poland has produced an informative web portal targeting the general public and health workers. France has outlined a national plan through 2016.

Many countries make use of e-Bug, an online resource, where Lecky serves as an international liaison. If the peer education project is successful, "we envision making the program freely available on the e-Bug website and to local environmental health departments," Lecky said.

Teens and kids tend to listen to and trust each other, the authors wrote in a short report announcing the peer education initiative, published in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy.

"My first reaction was: the parents need the education, not the kids," said Dr. Sandra Arnold of Le Bonheur Children's Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. "But there are plenty of studies that show how only educating parents does not always make a difference."

Arnold is not involved with the current initiative but has studied the effectiveness of ways to prevent antibiotic overuse as a researcher in pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center.

"I think educating the parents through the children is novel and interesting - and it may actually work," she said.

Earlier this year, Lecky's team recruited a handful of eighth-graders from a local school in Gloucestershire to test-drive peer-to-peer teaching. Researchers collected verbal or written feedback and most of it was positive. When the official campaign launches in January, researchers will work with a budget of $19,300 and will collect more data and results.

During the small preliminary study, students "certainly did learn a lot themselves and really enjoyed teaching their peers and talking about things they had just learned," Lecky told Reuters Health.

Kids were asked to adapt information about microorganisms and antibiotics to their own style and present the information to seventh- and eighth-graders in a one-day ‘science fair' format. They also had to teach younger kids ages 6 to 11 the same information. Some students created an interactive game using models.

"These were things that I, as an adult, would not have thought to do," Lecky said.

Programs similar to e-Bug exist in South Korea, said Sang Hee Lee of Myongji University, but no peer-to-peer teaching initiatives have been started there to his knowledge.

"I agree with their decision," Lee wrote in an email to Reuters Health. "The peer education … will be more effective because children can have more creative inquiry-based activities to promote active learning."

Doctors are stewards of both patient health and the future of public health, which relies heavily on the effectiveness of antibiotics, and it's a tricky area to navigate, Lee remarked.

Arnold recounted an experience from a summer camp where she recently volunteered. A 16-year-old visited her twice with cold symptoms and asked for antibiotics, which Arnold did not prescribe.

"My biggest concern is that we are gradually running out of antibiotics to replace the ones that bacteria are becoming resistant to," Lecky said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/17iePz5 Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, online September 15, 2013.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/study-enlists-kids-combat-antibiotics-overuse-211042748.html
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