On Tennis Circuit, a Globe-Trotting Fan Sticks to the Cheap Seats

By COREY KILGANNON

Late on Monday afternoon, the first official day of play in the 2012 United States Open, Katrina Williams, 21, was sitting in the top row of a grandstand court at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens.

The day had a leisurely feel and the grandstand was half empty. A fan was lying down sleeping next to Ms. Williams, who was giggling at the shows of emotion from the two women playing, Andrea Petkovic, a German, and Romina Oprandi, a Swiss-Italian.

Ms. Williams browsed her smartphone for news from the other matches, and sent Twitter messages with any drips of drama from the match, like when Ms. Petkovic smashed her racket on the ground. When a group of Swiss fans wearing red wigs a few rows down cheered Ms. Oprandi, Ms. Williams sent posts mocking their cheers.

In other words, Ms. Williams was in her element, in the thick of the buzz of tennis fandom. Ms. Williams, who is from Melbourne, Australia, came under the grip of a vicious tennis obsession last year, abruptly quit her job as a receptionist and started using her $23,000 in savings to travel the world following the big tennis tournaments on the cheap, staying in hostels and avoiding high-price stadium food and premium tickets.

“It's like seeing your favorite TV characters come to life,” Ms. Williams said of attending the tournaments. She said she had been on the road basically since going to the Brisbane International Tennis Tournament in late December. After that came the Australian Open in January, followed by the other three tournaments that make up tennis's Grand Slam: the French Open in May, Wimbledon in June and the United States Open now, with a half-dozen smaller tournaments and side trips along the way.

At the moment, she is staying at a $40-a-night hostel in Long Island City, sleeping in a bunk bed and sharing a room with nine other people. She takes the No. 7 train to the tournament each day.

Ms. Williams said she had spent about $13,000 so far on her tennis odyssey. The United States Open will cost her about $3,000, she said, even with her denying herself the more costlier stadium and later-round matches.

She figures her money will last her until the Paris Indoors tournament in November. Her parents, big tennis fans themselves, are resigned to her mission, she said, and have promised to at least pay for her flight home when her bank account runs dry.

Ms. Williams attributes much of her over-the-top tennis interest to Novak Djokovic, the second-ranked player in the world, who became her favorite as soon as she saw him play Roger Federer â€" now her least-favorite player - in the semifinals of the 2008 Australian Open.

Watching Mr. Djokovic brazenly stare down an umpire after being called for a violation “changed my life,” she said. The love has led to a trip to Serbia, Mr. Djokovic's homeland, a nd a new favorite clothing brand, Uniqlo, which sponsors Mr. Djokovic.

When Mr. Djokovic faced Rafael Nadal in the French Open final this year, Ms. Williams quickly bought an entire Uniqlo outfit for herself, to bring Mr. Djokovic luck. He lost nonetheless.

As important to Ms. Williams as who wins is who is dating whom and who is wearing what. Ms. Williams has hard-to-miss red hair and often sits close to the court in early-round matches and sure she is on the radar screens of some players she has crossed paths with.

When she runs into players on the tournament grounds or in airports, she said, “I usually run away because I'm very shy and I don't want them to think I'm stalking them.”

Ms. Williams said she was never part of the social scene associated with high-profile tournaments and often goes for days without speaking to anyone, just watching tennis.

Having been to all the big tournaments, Ms. Williams takes note of the differences. The United States Open, she said, has a less boisterous crowd than the Australian Open, is less crowded than the French, and is much more casual than Wimbledon.

She walked past the food court â€" she is a vegan and carries a salad from Whole Foods in her purse into the tennis center each day â€" and went to watch Fernando Verdasco of Spain play Rui Machado of Portugal.

After winning the first two sets, Mr. Verdasco sat courtside and stripped off his soaking shirt and squeezed the sweat out of it until a puddle formed on the court.

She grabbed her phone and posted to Twitter: “Verdasco just wrung out his shirt. A bucket of sweat on the court.''

West 62nd Street, 7:37 P.M.

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Eight West Nile Cases Reported in City, Similar to Level in 2011

By CHRIS PALMER

During a summer in which West Nile virus has jumped to record levels nationwide, eight city residents have contracted the mosquito-borne illness - a similar level to the number infected by this time last year, according to the city's health department.

On Monday, the city added one case of West Nile fever in Brooklyn to its tally, along with a case in Brooklyn in which a blood donor's blood was found to be carrying the virus, according to Anne-Katrin Titze, a parks advocate in Brooklyn who monitors the health department's Web site. The health department would not say when the cases were added.

Of the eight city residents, spread across all five boroughs, in whom West Nile fever or the more serious West Nile neuroinvasive disease were diagnosed, five were male and three were female, the city said; the city would not disclose their ages.

Last year, there were 11 human cases of West Ni le citywide, down from 42 cases in 2010, according to city figures. Since the disease was first detected here in 1999, the number of cases in the city has ranged from a high of 47 in 1999 to a low of 3 in 2009.

At least six state residents outside the city have been infected this year, according to the state's Health Department, and two of them â€" both elderly people from Long Island â€" have died. Last year, there were 33 cases in state residents outside the city, one of them fatal.

West Nile is transmitted to humans by infected mosquitoes; symptoms typically include fevers, headaches or stomach pain, which generally pass after a few days. The virus can be fatal for those with weaker immune systems, particularly the elderly.

Nationwide, more than 1,100 human infections and 41 deaths have been recorded this year. Federal health officials said last week that 2012 was on pace to be the worst outbreak of the disease since its arrival on the continent 13 yea rs ago.

As in past years, New York City has been spraying insecticide across neighborhoods since June. On Tuesday, the city was scheduled to spray the southeastern Bronx and northern Queens near Long Island Sound.

Dolan to Offer Prayer at Democratic Convention

August 28, 2012, 12:29 pm

By SHARON OTTERMAN

Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York has accepted an invitation to deliver the closing prayer at next week's Democratic National Convention, following through on a promise that he made when accepting the same role at the Republican convention.

His appearance in Charlotte, which was announced Tuesday by the Archdiocese of New York, may lead to one of the most intriguing tableaus of this convention season. Cardinal Dolan, an opponent of abortion and gay marriage who is among the Catholic bishops suing the Obama administration over its contraception health care mandates, will bless a gathering of thousands of delegates who passionately disagree with him.

Cardinal Dolan is scheduled to deliver the closing prayer at the Republican convention on Thursday night, after Mitt Romney accepts the nomination. He had said that his appearance should not be seen as partisan and said that he would accept an invitation to pray with the Democrats as well.

“It was made clear to the Democratic Convention organizers, as it was to the Republicans, that the Cardinal was coming solely as a pastor, only to pray, not to endorse any party, platform, or candidate,” Joseph Zwilling, the spokesman for the Archdiocese of New York, wrote in a press release on Tuesday.

In recent years Catholics have emerged as an important swing vote. Long predominantly Democratic, Catholics have increasingly shifted to the Republican party drawn by conservative positions on social issues.

Though a pointed critic of the Obama administration, Cardinal Dolan frequently speaks about the importance of engaging with those one disagrees with. On Monday, he even issued a challenge to the Democratic and Republican nominees for president and vice-president, asking them to sign a pledge to behave “with civility” this election season.

That pledge, written by the Knights of Columbus, asks the candidatesâ€" as well as the media, advocates and other commentatorsâ€" “to employ a more civil tone in public discourse on political and social issues, focusing on policies rather than on individual personalities.”

Cardinal Dolan also raised conservative eyebrows several weeks ago when he announced that he had decided to invite both President Obama and Mr. Romney to the annual Al Smith Dinner, a charity event in New York in October.

He was inundated with stacks of angry mail after issuing that invitation, he said, many from anti-abortion advocates who believed he was offering a stage to someone they believe is complicit in the deaths of unborn children. In 2004 Cardinal Edward M. Egan, then archbishop of New York, declined to invit e the presidential candidates to the dinner because of his concern for the positions held by the Democratic nominee for president, Sen. John Kerry, who is Catholic.

But Cardinal Dolan wrote on his blog in response: “It's better to invite than to ignore, more effective to talk together than to yell from a distance, more productive to open a door than to shut one.”

I.B.M. Mainframe Won\'t Die, But Evolves

is introducing on Tuesday a new line of mainframe computers, adding yet another chapter to a remarkable story of technological longevity and business strategy.

The new model, the zEnterprise EC12, has strengthened the traditional mainframe's skill of reliably and securely handling vast volumes of transactions. That is why the mainframe is still the digital workhorse for banking and telecommunications networks - and why mainframes are selling briskly in the emerging economies of Asia and Africa.

The new models have added capabilities for computing chores that are growing rapidly, like analyzing torrents of data from the Web and corporate databases to predict consumer behavior and business risks. Name a trend in corporate computing - cloud computing, data center consolidation, flash-memory storage, so-called green computing - and I.B.M. executives point to tailored features in its mainframe that deliver the goods.

The death of the mainframe has been predicted many times over the years. But it has prevailed because it has been overhauled time and again. In the early 1990s, the personal computer revolution took off and I.B.M., wedded to its big-iron computers, was in deep trouble. To make the mainframe more competitive, its insides were retooled, using low-cost microprocessors as the computing engine.

Like any threatened species that survives, the mainframe evolved. It has been tweaked to master new programming languages, like Java, and new software operating systems, like Linux.

“The mainframe is the most flexible technology platform in computing,” said Rodney C. Adkins, I.B.M.'s senior vice president for systems and technology.

That flexibility is a byproduct of investment. The new I.B.M. mainframe, according to the company, represents $1 billion in research and development spending over three years.

I.B.M. has also invested beyond its corporate walls. Nearly a decade ago, fearing that its mainframe business would wither if retiring mainframe engineers were not replaced, I.B.M. went out to universities, advocating for mainframe courses and offering support. Today, more than 1,000 schools in 67 countries participate in I.B.M.'s academic initiative for mainframe education.

The sale of mainframe computers accounts for only about 4 percent of I.B.M.'s revenue these days. Yet the mainframe is a vital asset to I.B.M. because of all the business that flows from it. When all the mainframe-related software, services and storage are included, mainframe technology delivers about 25 percent of I.B.M.'s revenue and more than 40 percent of its profits, estimates A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein.

The I.B.M. mainframe story offers a glimpse of why manufacturing can be crucial to an American company - and to the economy as a whole - even though high-end manufacturing does not employ large numbers of factory workers.

Over the last 15 years, I.B.M. has aggressively globalized its operations and work force, and pulled out of manufacturing businesses including personal computers and disk drives.

But I.B.M. held on to its core mainframe business, whose development is supported by thousands of engineers and scientists. Mainframe parts are produced in I.B.M. facilities in the United States, in Endicott, N.Y., and Fishkill, N.Y., and in Germany and elsewhere. The final assembly work is done in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where I.B.M. opened a $30 million mainframe plant in 2010.

A mainframe costs more than $1 million, and higher-performance models with peripheral equipment often cost $10 million or more. Yet even young companies and emerging nations, analysts say, find the expense worth it for some tasks.

Comepay, for instance, is a fast-growing company that says it operates more than 10,000 self-service payment kiosks in Russia, where consumers pay for products and services ranging from Internet service and cellphones to electric bills. Comepay handles millions of transactions a day, and the volume is rising. The Russian company bought an I.B.M. mainframe in 2010.

“Mainframes are extremely reliable,” said Ruslan Stepanenko, chief information officer of Comepay. “It keeps working even when the transaction load is very high.”

Last year, the Senegal Ministry of Finance bought two I.B.M. mainframes to help monitor all the imports, exports and customs duties at the African country's 30 border checkpoints.

Performance, security and reliability were the main reasons for selecting the mainframe, said Momar Fall, a manager and mainframe technical specialist in CFAO Technologies, an I.B.M. partner in Senegal. But another advantage in a developing nation, he said, is that the mainframes are constantly communicating over the Internet with a remote I.B.M. support center.

“So seven days a week, 24 hours a day, I.B.M. is looking after them,” Mr. Fall said.

Longtime mainframe customers say the technology has done a good job keeping up with the times. Last year, Primerica, a financial services company, purchased its 19th mainframe in 30 years.

David Wade, chief information officer, has worked for Primerica, based in Duluth, Ga., since its first mainframe arrived. With more than four million life insurance customers and more than two million investment-account clients, he said the company needs the reliable processing technology of the mainframe. “It works like nothing else,” Mr. Wade said.

Amazon Reshapes Business With Cloud Service

SEATTLE - Within a few years, 's creative destruction of both traditional book publishing and retailing may be footnotes to the company's larger and more secretive goal: giving anyone on the planet access to an almost unimaginable amount of computing power.

Every day, a start-up called the Climate Corporation performs over 10,000 simulations of the next two years' weather for more than one million locations in the United States. It then combines that with data on root structure and soil porosity to write crop insurance for thousands of farmers.

Another start-up, called Cue, scans up to 500 million e-mails, Facebook updates and corporate documents to create a service that can outline the biography of a given person you meet, warn you to be home to receive a package or text a lunch guest that you are running late.

Each of these start-ups carries out computing tasks that a decade ago would have been impossible without a major investment in computers. Both of these companies, however, own little besides a few desktop computers. They and thousands of other companies now rent data storage and computer server time from Amazon, through its Amazon Web Services division, for what they say is a fraction of the cost of owning and running their own computers.

“I have 10 engineers, but without A.W.S. I guarantee I'd need 60,” said Daniel Gross, Cue's 20-year-old co-founder. “It just gets cheaper, and cheaper, and cheaper.” He figures Cue spends something under $100,000 a month with Amazon but would spend “probably $2 million to do it ourselves, without the speed and flexibility.”

He conceded that “I don't even know what the ballpark number for a server is - for me, it would be like knowing what the price of a sword is.”

Cloud computing has been around for years, but it is now powering all kinds of new businesses around the globe, quickly and with less capital.

Instagram, a 12-person photo-sharing company that was sold to Facebook for an estimated $1 billion just 19 months after it opened, skipped the expenses and bother of setting up its own computer servers.

EdX, a global online education program from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, had over 120,000 students taking a single class together on A.W.S. Over 185 United States government agencies run some part of their services on A.W.S. Millions of people in Africa shop for cars online, using cheap smartphones connected to A.W.S. servers located in California and Ireland.

“We are on a shift that is as momentous and as fundamental as the shift to the electrical grid,” said Andrew R. Jassy, the head of A.W.S. “It's happening a lot faster than any of us thought.”

He started A.W.S. in 2006 with about three dozen employees. Amazon won't say how many people now work at A.W.S., but the company's Web site currently lists over 600 job openings.

Amazon's efforts are just the start of a global competition among computing giants. In June, Google fully introduced a service similar to A.W.S. Microsoft is also in the business with its offering, Windows Azure.

If only for competitive reasons, Amazon does not say much about A.W.S. However, it is estimated to bring in about $1 billion to Amazon. Its three giant computer regional centers in the United States, in Virginia, Oregon and California, each consist of multiple buildings with thousands of servers.

There are others in Japan, Ireland, Singapore and Brazil. And the pace of its expansion has quickened. It opened four of those regions in 2011 and is believed to be building a similar number now. Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, is interested in setting up cloud-computing installations for other governments.

According to an executive with knowledge of Amazon's operation who was not authorized to speak publicly, just one of the 10 data centers in Amazon's Eastern United States region has more servers dedicated to cloud computing than does Rackspace, a public cloud company serving 180,000 businesses with more than 80,000 servers.

Eventually, however, Mr. Jassy said, “we believe at the highest level that A.W.S. can be at least as big as our other businesses.” Amazon recorded nearly $50 billion in revenue last year. Mr. Jassy thinks A.W.S. is probably less than 10 percent of its eventual size.

The lower cost of computing, along with overnight deployment of machines, drives the business. Germany's Spiegel TV paid A.W.S. to make digital copies of 20,000 programs. It cost less than Spiegel would have paid for the electricity powering its own servers.

GoodData, based in San Francisco, analyzes data from 6,000 companies on A.W.S. to find things like sales leads. “Before, each company needed at least five people to do this work,” said Roman Stanek, GoodData's chief executive. “That is 30,000 people. I do it with 180. I don't know what all those other people will do now, but this isn't work they can do anymore. It's a winner-takes-all consolidation.”

All that data running through Amazon's cloud also has value. People leave bits of data about themselves that others then analyze. At any given time on A.W.S., there are about one million uses of a powerful database, called Elastic MapReduce, that is used to make predictions. Some suggest a new movie or video game to play, while others log behavior for advertising, credit history or suggestions about whom to date. (Companies have to permit their data to be analyzed, and Amazon says it applies the same security standards it uses on its retail site.)

The efficiency of this hyper-aware environment is already remaking jobs for many and will most likely dislocate more. “You can now test a product against millions of users for just a few thousand dollars, or start a company with just one or two people,” said Graham Spencer, a partner at Google Ventures, which invests in data-heavy start-ups that rely on such cheap computing. “It's a huge change for Silicon Valley.”

That vision is in line with the way Mr. Bezos sees A.W.S., say executives who have worked with him. “Jeff thinks on a planetary level,” said David Risher, a former Amazon senior executive who now heads a charity called Worldreader, which uses A.W.S. to download books to thousands of computers in Africa. “A.W.S. is an opportunity, as a business. But it is also a philosophy of enabling other people to build big systems. That is how Amazon will make a dent in the universe.”

Considering Political Corruption and, Perhaps, a New City Motto

By CLYDE HABERMAN

My colleague Sam Roberts wrote on Monday about a Latin motto woven into the Bronx borough flag. It's from Virgil. “Ne cede malis,” it goes. “Do not yield to evil.”

The Day

Clyde Haberman offers his take on the news.

Considering the number of Bronx politicians sent to prison for criminal possession of sticky fingers, the irony of those words is self-evident. Perhaps a new motto is in order, not just for the Bronx but for the entire city. Other boroughs have hardly been slackers when it comes to producing officials who look more natural in orange jumpsuits than in pinstripes.

One slogan that seems appropriate has the advantage of being both familiar and to the point: “Ostende mihi pecuniam.” You probably know it better in its English form:

“Show me the money.”

What better timing for this idea than the day after yet another office holder, State Senator Shirley L. Huntley of Queens, ended up with hands cuffed behind her back, charged with conspiring to siphon taxpayer dollars from their intended purpose and divert them to the pockets of allies and relatives.

The roster of the indicted and the convicted among New York's political class is appallingly long, and keeps growing. Nearly two dozen officials, most of them Democrats, have been brought up on corruption charges in the last few years. The names of many who fell from grace can be found in a “Day” column that ran not long ago. They run the gamut from A to Z - from A for Alan G. Hevesi, the former state comptroller, to Z for Miguel Martinez, a former city councilman. (Where is it written that the name has to begin with Z?)

Separate from the criminal charges brought against Ms. Huntley on Monday, Assemblywoman Naomi Rivera of the Bronx is reportedly in the sights of ethics officials because of claims that she put her lovers on the public payroll and used a nonprofit organization that she controlled as her personal ATM.

As if old-fashioned greed weren't enough, we have lust to consider as well.

The avatar of this deadly sin is Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez, the Democratic political boss in Brooklyn. On Friday, the Assembly leadership stripped Mr. Lopez of his privileges, based on findings that he had groped, kissed and verbally harassed female staff members. It turns out, though, that the same leadership â€" namely Speaker Sheldon Silver - had earlier doled out in secret more than $100,000 of the public's money to quietly settle allegations of sexual harassment against the 71-year-old assemblyman.

Ah, Albany.

Though Mr. Lopez denies any wrongdoing, many leading Democrats, including the governor, say it's time for him to go.

All of this is enough to make a grown man blush. Not everyone's sensibi lities, however, are quite so delicate. District Council 37, the city's largest union of public employees, is made of sterner stuff.

Last week the council announced its endorsements for legislative primaries that will be held on Sept. 13. Among the candidates it considers stellar are Ms. Huntley and Ms. Rivera. Oh, and also Assemblyman William F. Boyland Jr. of Brooklyn. Besides possessing the worst attendance record in Albany and displaying no interest in introducing bills, Mr. Boyland has twice been indicted on federal charges of bribe-receiving.

He beat one set of charges last November. That was a perplexing turn of events. One jury had previously pronounced the head of a health care organization guilty of bribing the assemblyman. But now a different bunch of jurors couldn't agree that Mr. Boyland had in fact received those payoffs. Call it the immaculate reception. Federal prosecutors aren't through with Mr. Boyland, though. They have brought new corruption charges against him.

So, why are officials of such questionable character deemed worthy of a giant union's approval?

District Council 37 confined itself to passing along a prepared statement from its executive director, Lillian Roberts, to the effect that its endorsement process was “transparent.”

“Candidates are not rated on any single issue but on the entire record of issues related to labor,” Ms. Roberts said.

All in all, it looks as if we're a long way from seeing the end of “Ostende mihi pecuniam” as a guide to New York politics. Mr. Lopez's situation is another matter. If the groping charges are true, his seems more a case of “Da mihi corpus tuum.”

“Give me your body.”