McIlroy leads by two after Mickelson woe in Shanghai

Shanghai (AFP) - Rory McIlroy found himself leading a golf tournament for the first time since May as he took control of the World Golf Championships HSBC Champions with a superbly crafted seven-under par round of 65 in Shanghai Thursday.

The 24-year-old was helped by world number three Phil Mickelson blowing up in disastrous fashion on the long eighth hole, the 17th of his round, as the American found the Sheshan Golf Club water twice en route to a quadruple-bogey nine.

Moments earlier McIlroy had carded his eighth birdie of the day on the same hole to move to seven under. Mickelson then bogeyed his last hole, the ninth, to drop five shots in two holes and plummet from outright second to tied 28th in the 78-man field with a 71.

On Wednesday McIlroy had said he was capable of winning the tournament with the way the course was set up.

On Thursday he proved it was no idle boast as his swagger and, more importantly, his short game returned to leave a field containing 40 of the world's top 50 in his wake.

The last time McIlroy had even held a share of the lead was after the first round of the Wells Fargo Open at Quail Hollow on May 2.

He leads by two from Spain's Gonzalo Fernandez-Castano, who carried on his fine form from last week when he won the BMW Masters across the city, by carding a five-under round of 67.

Also on 67 was Jamie Donaldson of Wales.

Back on four-under are the English pair Justin Rose and Tommy Fleetwood. They were joined on that mark by two Americans, Bubba Watson and US PGA Tour Rookie of the Year Jordan Spieth.

But it was McIlroy's day. The revival he had threatened, with a second place in the Korea Open a fortnight ago and a solid performance -- tee to green at least -- last week at Lake Malaren, at last materialised.

His confidence buoyed by an exhibition match victory over Tiger Woods on Monday in Hainan, McIlroy got off to the best possible start on his opening hole, the 10th.

Having just seen playing partner and US PGA champion Jason Dufner hole his second shot with a sand wedge for an outrageous eagle two, McIlroy almost matched it with a lob wedge of his own -- leaving a tap-in for the first of seven birdies in his opening 11 holes.

His only blemish of a near flawless card -- McIlroy afterwards modestly gave his own ball striking just seven out of 10 -- came at the 11th when the Northern Irishman was plugged after driving into a fairway bunker.

He was forced to advance the ball just 20 yards but still almost saved par with a seven-iron to 15 feet. However, the putt just slipped by.

He got the shot back straightaway at the 225-yard par three 12th when he rolled in a 20-footer for birdie and never looked back.

Birdies followed at 14, 16 and 18 to get to four-under at the turn, and then McIlroy hit what he described as one of his "shots of the day" on the first.

A rare errant drive found deep rough on the right but he struck a nine-iron imperiously from 160 yards to 12 feet and holed the putt.

Another birdie on the long par-five next hole, where he was just short of the green after a driver and a three-iron, took him to six under, until a final birdie at the eighth gave him daylight on the field.

"It was very good," a smiling McIlroy told AFP straight after his round. "And it was needed."

McIlroy this time last year was world and European number one.

He now lies 62nd in the Race to Dubai standings and must record a good finish this week to guarantee being among the top 60 who qualify for the season-ending DP World Tour Championship in Dubai in two weeks' time. McIlroy is defending champion there.

• Sports & Recreation
• Golf
• Rory McIlroy

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/mickelson-heads-star-cast-asias-major-005447937--golf.html
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Simple plants aren't always easy: Revision of the liverwort Radula buccinifera complex

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

31-Oct-2013

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Contact: Matt Renner
matt.renner@rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au
Pensoft Publishers

The supposedly widespread and variable Australasian liverwort species Radula buccinifera is nothing of the kind. The species was described in 1844, and reported for New Zealand in 1855. It has gone on to be the most commonly collected species in both countries, yet it doesn't even occur in New Zealand, according to results of research led by Dr Matt Renner at Royal Botanic Gardens & Domain Trust.

Molecular and morphological evidence show that what was thought to be one species of leafy liverwort from Australia and New Zealand is in fact eight different species, and five of these are new to science. The study was published in the open access journal PhytoKeys.

The species is an Australian endemic restricted to the wetter parts of the south-east of the country. Records from the tropics are referable to other species, two of which are found only there. Another two species are endemic to Australia, and a third is shared between Australia and New Zealand. The species may have been confused because many appear similar, and are variable so overlap in form.

Better understanding of species diversity has implications for studies of biogeography, in that this 'widespread species' is actually a complex of geographically restricted species. Liverworts also contain many bioactive compounds, which exhibit a range of activity including anti-microbial and anti-retroviral properties, and the greater the recognized species diversity the greater the pool of potentially useful molecules.

"There may be no direct application of this research unless you are identifying liverworts, but direct application is only one kind of benefit, and solid taxonomic studies have many, the least of which is that we learn what is out there in the world around us," comments the lead author Dr Matt Renner.

###

Original Source

Renner MAM, Devos N, Patio J, Brown EA, Orme A, Elgey M, Wilson TC, Gray LJ, von Konrat MJ (2013) Integrative taxonomy resolves the cryptic and pseudo-cryptic Radula buccinifera complex (Porellales, Jungermanniopsida), including two reinstated and five new species. PhytoKeys 27: 1113. doi: 10.3897/phytokeys.27.5523

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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

31-Oct-2013

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Contact: Matt Renner
matt.renner@rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au
Pensoft Publishers

The supposedly widespread and variable Australasian liverwort species Radula buccinifera is nothing of the kind. The species was described in 1844, and reported for New Zealand in 1855. It has gone on to be the most commonly collected species in both countries, yet it doesn't even occur in New Zealand, according to results of research led by Dr Matt Renner at Royal Botanic Gardens & Domain Trust.

Molecular and morphological evidence show that what was thought to be one species of leafy liverwort from Australia and New Zealand is in fact eight different species, and five of these are new to science. The study was published in the open access journal PhytoKeys.

The species is an Australian endemic restricted to the wetter parts of the south-east of the country. Records from the tropics are referable to other species, two of which are found only there. Another two species are endemic to Australia, and a third is shared between Australia and New Zealand. The species may have been confused because many appear similar, and are variable so overlap in form.

Better understanding of species diversity has implications for studies of biogeography, in that this 'widespread species' is actually a complex of geographically restricted species. Liverworts also contain many bioactive compounds, which exhibit a range of activity including anti-microbial and anti-retroviral properties, and the greater the recognized species diversity the greater the pool of potentially useful molecules.

"There may be no direct application of this research unless you are identifying liverworts, but direct application is only one kind of benefit, and solid taxonomic studies have many, the least of which is that we learn what is out there in the world around us," comments the lead author Dr Matt Renner.

###

Original Source

Renner MAM, Devos N, Patio J, Brown EA, Orme A, Elgey M, Wilson TC, Gray LJ, von Konrat MJ (2013) Integrative taxonomy resolves the cryptic and pseudo-cryptic Radula buccinifera complex (Porellales, Jungermanniopsida), including two reinstated and five new species. PhytoKeys 27: 1113. doi: 10.3897/phytokeys.27.5523

---

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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-10/pp-spa103113.php
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SoftLayer CEO: A very Big Blue cloud is coming

One of the funny things about the cloud is that it's often difficult to know what's behind the curtain. Before IBM bought IaaS provider SoftLayer in June, we were hard-pressed to determine precisely what sort of IaaS Big Blue was offering. Yes, they had a virtual server configurator similar to Amazon's, but the self-service stopped there: you'd tally up your config, submit it, and IBM would get back to you.

Then there was that fuss in July about the SEC investigating IBM to discover exactly how Big Blue was calculating the 70 percent increase in cloud revenue it reported for the first half of 2013 (although, to be fair, cloud-washing like this seems commonplace).

[ Stay on top of the cloud with the "Cloud Computing Deep Dive" special report. Download it today! | From Amazon to Windows Azure, see how the elite 8 public clouds compare in InfoWorld's review. | For a quick, smart take on the news you'll be talking about, check out InfoWorld TechBrief -- subscribe today. ]

IBM acquired a big hunk of cloud credibility with the $2 billion it paid for SoftLayer. According to SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby, whom I interviewed last week, SoftLayer has 120,000 physical nodes in 13 data centers. And thanks to IBM, that footprint is poised to get a whole lot bigger. "We're going to have massive expansion in the next 24 months," Crosby says.

The quiet cloud company
Founded in Dallas in 2005, SoftLayer was the largest privately held IaaS provider until it became part of IBM. "We were cloud before cloud was cool," says Crosby, offering both multitenanted and single-tenanted IaaS. And self-service has always been part of the deal, right up until the acquisition. "We were at $500 million in revenue without an outbound salesperson, so it's all self service."

Contrary to the approach of Amazon Web Services, Crosby always believed in giving complete visibility into the hardware infrastructure behind the cloud. "The concept of creating this fungible machine where you don't have to worry about the underlying infrastructure -- it's nonsense," says Crosby. "In SoftLayer, you can drill down to the server, the rack, the network board, the serial numbers ... everything down to the encryption level on the drive" even in multi-tenanted systems.

That may not seem very cloudy to some. But according to Crosby, offering such transparency -- and in single-tenanted systems, granular control over configuration -- delivers special benefit to SoftLayer customers. He provides a detailed example:

We have a customer who is writing a big data solution for retail. They're using SSD drives, and their developers are saying "you should be getting better performance from the drives." The [customer's] devops guys looked into the drives, and their drives actually had two versions of firmware: one for 1GB or less and one for over 1GB. They swapped the firmware on the drives -- they pushed a button and made an API call -- and performance went up 25 percent. In Amazon land, you've got to buy 25 percent more machine.

Crosby said he pushed his engineers from the beginning to build in this extreme level of visibility, which resulted in SoftLayer's Infrastructure Management System (IMS), an API layer that today offers 2,200 documented methods across 180 discrete services. According to Crosby, he allowed his good friend Lanham Napier, CEO of Rackspace, to use IMS as the original framework for OpenStack, which now stands as the open source leader in cloud software platforms.

Source: http://www.infoworld.com/t/cloud-computing/softlayer-ceo-very-big-blue-cloud-coming-229605?source=rss_infoworld_top_stories_
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Jessica Alba and Pierce Brosnan Engage in Lip Lock on Set

Locking lips for a special scene in LA today (October 30), the lovely Jessica Alba and suave and sophisticated Pierce Brosnan continued filming "How to Make Love Like an Englishman."

Each of them looked fantastic during their passionate kiss scene, the "James Bond" stud in jeans and an overcoat, and the "Killer Inside Me" sweetheart dressed in a tan sweater and jeans, her lovely flowing hair down about her shoulders. Both exchanged smiles as they finished off the scene.

"How to Make Love to Make Love Like an Englishman" comes at us from "Extraordinary Measures" director, Tom Vaughan, the movie also stars the multi-talented Salma Hayek.

According to the romantic flick's synopsis, "A drama about a Cambridge poetry professor who begins to re-evaluate his life of Byronic excess."

Source: http://celebrity-gossip.net/how-make-love-englishman/jessica-alba-and-pierce-brosnan-engage-lip-lock-set-952678
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Actress Laverne Cox On The Music That Gets Her Dancing

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Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=241842376&ft=1&f=1039
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Republic Wireless running contest to give away Moto X prize pack

Win a phone, 12 months of free service and various accessories

You can pick up a Moto X on Republic Wireless for the low price of $299 unsubsidized, but getting it for free would be better. The scrappy upstart carrier is currently running a contest on its Facebook page that is giving away what it calls "Moto X Prize Pack," including a device, 12 months of service from the carrier and a nice package of accessories  — you'll pick up a wireless speaker, car charger, Motorola Skip, case and set of earbuds.

In order to enter you'll first need to head to the Republic Wireless Facebook page (linked below), then "like" their page and enter a little bit of identifying information so that you can be contacted if you've won. If you end up referring more friends to enter the contest, you'll also get more entries for yourself to up your chances.

It's not hard to enter and you could win a free Moto X — we don't see much wrong with that equation. You can enter at the source link below.

Source: Republic Wireless

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/7pI-Fca2LzI/story01.htm
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'We made it. No more fear... No more Taliban'

Afghan War ally Janis Shinwari’s well-publicized effort to find refuge in America came to a successful conclusion late Tuesday when the translator and his family walked off a plane in Washington, D.C.

“We are so happy,” Shinwari told Yahoo News on Wednesday. “We made it. No more fear. No more threat. No more Taliban.”

Shinwari, who served as an interpreter for U.S. military forces in Afghanistan for nearly seven years, says he had become a top target of insurgents, who considered him a traitor and made it known that they wanted to behead him.

Threats against his life were “increasing day by day,” said Shinwari, a 35-year-old married father of two young children.

The Shinwaris applied to come to the U.S. more than two years ago under a special immigration visa (SIV) program for people who helped American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the request had been riddled with red tape.

Three months ago, former Army Capt. Matt Zeller, an intelligence officer who says Shinwari saved his life by killing an encroaching insurgent in Afghanistan, began aggressively lobbying his friend’s case. A Change.org petition drew more than 100,000 signatures, and news stories documented the delays Shinwari and other war allies often experience getting their special immigrant visas approved.

In early September, the State Department finally approved the visas for the Shinwari family, but then it put them on hold 14 days later without explanation. Zeller and Shinwari believe the Taliban may have called in a phony tip to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in an effort to sabotage Shinwari’s escape.

“Afghanistan is not safe anymore for any Afghan who is working for the U.S. government, especially those working for the U.S. Army,” Shinwari said Wednesday.

He had to pass two more polygraph exams and wait until the end of the U.S. government shutdown before learning that his family’s visas had been reinstated and they could begin planning their travel.

“We are now all free,” said Shinwari, who had to move his family often in the last few weeks. “We won’t be locked down in the home. I can send my kids to school. They can play outside with other kids.”

The family spent part of Wednesday working on temporary housing through the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Meanwhile, Zeller has started an online fund to help the family get settled.

“They're coming with nothing more than the clothes on their back and whatever they can fit into one suitcase,” he wrote. “Please help me get their new lives started.”

Shinwari, who said he hopes to find work in the U.S. as a government translator, will also use his freedom to encourage improvements to the SIV program. Shinwari and Zeller will meet with members of Congress next week to discuss his work as a battlefield interpreter and the obstacles he faced getting his visa.

“I want them to speed up the process and save the lives of others,” Shinwari said.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., is one of the politicians working to address shortcomings in the SIV program. In a statement, he called Shinwari’s arrival in the U.S. “an amazing day” which “embodies a promise kept.”

“But while he is an example of the SIV program eventually working,” Blumenauer wrote, “there are still thousands of brave translators and their families stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not every applicant is lucky enough to have an effective and perseverant advocate like Matt Zeller.”

Their embrace at the airport in Washington late Tuesday was the first time Shinwari and Zeller had seen one another in five years.

“I thank the Lord for Zeller, he saved my life,” Shinwari said. “He gave me a new life. I won’t forget it.”

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/afghan-war-ally-janis-shinwari-finally-finds-safety-in-america-182755540.html
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