Novak Djokovic won Australian Open 2013 and beacame No.1 in mens Rank

Novak Djokovic in Australian Open Finals 2013

Novak Djokovic returned to his dominant best to win his third consecutive Australian Open title, denying Andy Murray a second major championship with a 6-7 (2), 7-6 (3), 6-3, 6-2 victory Sunday night at Rod Laver Arena. 

The top-ranked Djokovic is the first man in the Open era to win three straight Australian titles nine others have won back-to-back but were unable to win three in a row. 

“I love this court,” Djokovic said. “It’s definitely my favorite Grand Slam. It’s an incredible feeling winning this trophy once more.” 

Born a week apart in May 1987 and friends since their junior playing days, the two played like they knew each other’s game very well in a rematch of last year’s U.S. Open final won by Murray. There were no service breaks until the eighth game of the third set, when Djokovic finally broke through and then held at love to lead by two sets to one. 

Djokovic earned two more service breaks in the fourth set, including one to take a 4-1 lead when Murray double-faulted on break point. 

The 25-year-old Serb didn’t rip his shirt off this time, as he did to celebrate his epic 5-hour, 53-minute win over Rafael Nadal in last year’s final. He just did a little dance, looked up to the sky and then applauded the crowd after the 3-hour, 40-minute match. 

Murray’s win over Djokovic in the U.S. Open final last year ended a 76-year drought for British men at the majors, but he still is yet to make a breakthrough in Australia after losing a third final here in the last four years. 

Djokovic’s win went against the odds of recent finals at Melbourne Park. In four of the past five years, the player who won his semifinal second has won the tournament. But this year, Djokovic played his semifinal on Thursday an easy three—set, 89—minute minute win over No. 4-seeded David Ferrer. Murray needed five energy sapping sets to beat 17—time major winner Roger Federer on Friday night. 

The win consolidated Djokovic’s position as the No. 1-ranked player in the world, while Federer and Murray will be second and third when the ATP rankings are released Monday. 

Their last two matches in Grand Slams Murray’s five-set win at last year’s U.S. Open and Djokovic’s victory here last year in five in the semifinals had a total of 35 service breaks. 

It was a vastly different, more tactical battle on Sunday, with the first two tight sets decided in tiebreakers. 

Murray, who called for a trainer to retape blisters on his right foot at the end of the second set, was visibly annoyed by noise from the crowd during his service games in the third set, stopping his service motion twice until the crowd quieted down. After dropping the third set, he complained about the noise to chair umpire John Blom. 

Djokovic also appeared frustrated at times, kicking the ball football-style back over the net after he hit a forehand long during a lengthy point, and muttering to himself while sitting down in his chair during changeovers. But both players were guilty of making unforced errors, often ending long rallies with shots into the net or long. 

Murray’s fans came dressed for the occasion, with some wearing “Braveheart“-style wigs, Scottish flags painted on their faces and tartan caps. One group of men wore white T-shirts with black letters that spelled out A-N-D-Y; they serenaded Murray at the start of the first two sets. 

There were a number of Serbian shirts, caps and flags in the stadium, as well as fans calling “Ajde!” or “Come on!” in Serbian to support Djokovic. Retired NBA basketball star Vlade Divac was sitting in Djokovic’s box.

Djokovic looked agitated after failing to convert the break points in the first set, frequently looking up to his box and yelling at the members of his team and himself.

Although Djokovic went into the match with a 10-7 lead in head-to-heads, Murray had beaten Djokovic five out of eight times in tiebreakers, and that improved to six of nine after four unforced errors by Djokovic to end the first set. 

Djokovic pegged back that edge in the second set, when Murray also didn’t help his cause by double-faulting to give Djokovic a 3-2 lead, and the Serbian player didn’t trail again in the tiebreaker. He leveled the match after nearly 2 hours, 15 minutes. 

Andre Agassi was among those in the capacity crowd at Rod Laver Arena the four-time Australian champion’s first trip Down Under in nearly 10 years and he later presented the trophy to Djokovic. 

Victoria Azarenka, who won Saturday’s women’s singles final over Li Na, was in the crowd with her boyfriend rapper Redfoo. Actor Kevin Spacey, who met in the dressing room with both players ahead of the match and later tweeted a photo of himself with them, also was in attendance for the third straight night. 

In the earlier mixed doubles final Sunday, wild-card entrants Jarmila Gajdosova and Matthew Ebden of Australia beat the Czech pair of Lucie Hradecka and Frantisek Cermak 6-3, 7-5.

Gajdosova-Ebden take mixed doubles title in Australian open

Wildcard entrants Jarmila Gajdosova and Matthew Ebden combined to win the Australian Open mixed doubles title with a 6-3, 7-5 win over Czech pair Lucie Hradecka and Frantisek Cermak on Sunday. 

The Australian pair ousted second-seeded Elena Vesnina and Leander Paes in the second round and fifth-seeded Nadia Petrova and Mahesh Bhupathi in the quarterfinals. 

They had two service breaks in each set and dropped twice in the match. 

Jarmila Gajdosova and Matthew Ebdenwin the Australian Open mixed doubles

“As Australians it’s incredible to play here,” Ebden said. “We’ve had an incredible time the last couple of weeks and we’ll see you next year.”

Bryans win Australian Open doubles title

Mike and Bob Bryan won Australian Open 2013

Mike and Bob Bryan have captured their record 13th Grand Slam doubles title, defeating the Dutch team of Robin Haase and Igor Sijsling in the Australian Open final 6-3, 6-4 on Saturday. 

The Americans had been level with the Australian legends John Newcombe and Tony Roche with 12 major titles. 

The Bryans now have six Australian Open titles to go along with four at the U.S. Open, two at Wimbledon and one at the French Open. 

The brothers, top seeds at Melbourne Park, have also finished eight of the last 10 years as the No. 1 ranked doubles team, including last year.

Azarenka secures back-to-back Australian titles

Victoria Azarenka has won back-to-back Australian Open titles

Victoria Azarenka has won back-to-back Australian Open titles, beating Li Na 4-6, 6-4, 6-3 in a dramatic final that contained a break for fireworks and two medical timeouts. 

Li tumbled twice to the court after twisting her left ankle. She had her left ankle taped after falling in the fifth game of the second set. 

On the first point after a 10-minute pause in the third set while fireworks crackled overhead from nearby Australia Day celebrations, Li fell over again and slammed the back of her head into the court. The 2011 French Open champion was treated immediately and had another time out before being allowed to resume the match. 

Azarenka won five of the next six games to claim her second major title and retain the No. 1 ranking.

Stephen Hawking to ‘speak’ faster with a new device

World renowned scientist Stephen Hawking will be able to better communicate his ideas about fundamental physics after the technology that interprets his speech was upgraded with a new device. 

A worsening of the degenerative disease affecting the 71-year-old physicist had recently reduced him to composing sentences at a rate of one word a minute. 

But now a team from computer hardware firm Intel have created a device they believe will give the professor the ability to compose five words a minute - and even increase it to as many as ten, the ‘Daily Mail’ reported. 

The scientist has for the past ten years composed his sentences one letter at a time using a twitch of his cheek to stop a cursor as it moves across an on-screen keyboard. 

After he painstakingly crafts his sentences one word at a time, a computer attached to his wheelchair reads them out in the distinctive metallic voice for which he is known. 

But recently the motor neuron disease from which he suffers has made his cheek twitch more difficult to control, significantly slowing the rate at which one of the world’s sharpest minds is able to communicate with the outside world. 

Intel began working on Professor Hawking’s new device in 2011, after he asked for help from Intel co-founder Gordon Moore - the man behind ‘Moore’s Law’, which says processing power will double every two years.

The new system uses facial recognition technology to recognise not only Hawking’s cheek movements, but also twitches from his mouth and eyebrows to send words to a new speech machine.

Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer, told Scientific American magazine that the upgrade comes after technology finally caught up with the complicated concepts Hawking wanted to express.

“We’ve built a new, character-driven interface in modern terms that includes a better word predictor,” he said. 

“Up to now, [previous] technologies didn’t work well enough to satisfy someone like Stephen, who wants to produce a lot of information,” he added. 

The new technology offers the professor the opportunity to use two different signals to express himself, which means he could even communicate using Morse code which, said Mr. Rattner, ’would be a great improvement’ 

Hawking took to his personal blog to tell how grateful he is for the new technology that allows him to continue to speak. 

“One’s voice is very important. If you have a slurred voice, people are likely to treat you as mentally deficient,” he was quoted by the paper as writing. 

“This [computer] synthesiser is by far the best I have heard, because it varies the intonation, and doesn’t speak like a Dalek. The only trouble is that it gives me an American accent,” he wrote.

Aaron Swartz,co-founder of the social news website Reddit and activist found Dead

Aaron Swartz

A co-founder of the social news website Reddit and activist who fought to make online content free to the public has been found dead, authorities have confirmed, prompting an outpouring of grief from prominent voices on the intersection of free speech and the Web.

Aaron Swartz, 26, hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment weeks before he was to go on trial on accusations that he stole millions of journal articles from an electronic archive in an attempt to make them freely available.

He was pronounced dead on Friday evening at his home in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, said Ellen Borakove, spokeswoman for New York’s chief medical examiner.

Swartz was a prodigy who as a young teenager helped create RSS, a family of Web feed formats used to gather updates from blogs, news headlines, audio and video for users.

He later co-founded Reddit, which ended up being sold to Conde Nast, as well as the political action group Demand Progress, which campaigns against Internet censorship.

In 2011, he was arrested in Boston and charged with stealing millions of articles from a computer archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Prosecutors said he broke into a computer wiring closet on campus and used his laptop for the downloads.

Swartz pleaded not guilty to charges including wire fraud.

His federal trial was to begin next month. If convicted, he faced decades in prison and a fortune in fines.

Some legal experts considered the case unfounded, saying that MIT allows guests access to the articles and Swartz, a fellow at Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics, was a guest.

According to a federal indictment, Swartz stole the documents from JSTOR, a subscription service used by MIT that offers digitized copies of articles from academic journals.

Prosecutors said he intended to distribute the articles on file-sharing websites.

He faced 13 felony charges, including breaching site terms and intending to share downloaded files through peer-to-peer networks, computer fraud, wire fraud, obtaining information from a protected computer, and criminal forfeiture.

JSTOR did not press charges once it reclaimed the articles from Swartz.

Lenovo to release giant 27-inch ‘coffee table PC’

coffee tablet from Lenovo

Dismayed that family members are spread out over the house, each with a separate PC or tablet? Lenovo has something it believes will get them back together a PC the size of a coffee table that works like a gigantic tablet and lets four people use it at once. 

Lenovo Group Ltd., one of the world’s largest PC makers, is calling the IdeaCentre Horizon Table PC the first “interpersonal computer” as opposed to a “personal computer.” 

At first glance, it looks like a regular all-in-one machine in the vein of the iMac- It’s a 27-inch (685.8-millimeter) screen with the innards of a Windows 8 computer built into it, and it can stand up on a table. 

But you can pick it up off the table, unhook the power cord and lay it flat for games of “Monopoly.” It is big enough to fit four people around it, and the screen can respond to ten fingers touching it at the same time. 

As a tablet, it’s a monstrosity. The screen is the size of eight iPads stitched together, and it weighs 15 pounds (6.8 kilograms). It’s almost as homebound as a flat-panel TV. 

The Table PC will include plastic “strikers” for “Air Hockey,” and joysticks that attach to the screen with suction cups for other games, including multiplayer shooter “Raiding Company.” 

In a demonstration at the International CES on Sunday, photos and videos could be rotated with fingers. Spreading five fingers at once on the screen cleared the screen of clutter, while squeezing them together brought the photos and videos back. 

Lenovo, a Chinese company that owns IBM Corp.’s former PC business, said the Table PC will go on sale this summer starting at $1,699. 

Microsoft Corp. pioneered the idea of a table PC with the Surface, a PC with a 30-inch (762-millimeter) touch-sensitive screen released in 2008. It was designed for store displays and other commercial applications. The concept is now called PixelSense, as Microsoft started using the “Surface” name for an unrelated tablet computer last year. 

More recently, Sony Corp. released the Tap 20, an all-in-one PC that can also be laid flat. But it’s smaller than the Lenovo model, at 20 inches (508 millimetres) diagonally, and doesn’t have as much table-oriented software as the Table PC.

Janko Tipservic wins Chennai Open 2013

Janko Tipsarevic has the air of a man seeking answers to life’s mysteries. 

Janko Tipsarevic with Chennai Open Trophy

And he does it rather fashionably: the sight-correction glasses, the designer stubble, the tattoos that quote Dostoevsky, the ankle socks.

But for the last five years, he has had a more mundane pursuit, a pursuit that draws him to Chennai, entourage in tow.

On Sunday at the SDAT Tennis Stadium’s centre court, a place he loves playing in, the 28-year-old Tipsarevic had a taste of salvation.

“Only one word comes to mind: Finally,” he said. “I’ve come really, really close, last year (against Raonic) I could smell it, but I’m so happy that I finally won a tournament I really wanted to win. It’s a dream come true.”

It didn’t come easy. Roberto Bautista Agut, the 24-year-old who might have played football for Villarreal had it not been for his mother’s love of tennis, put together a striking first set.

Tipsarevic was forced to respond, much like in the semifinal against Aljaz Bedene; he did it with greater verve and style, to win 3-6, 6-1, 6-3.

The match had echoes of the semifinal — indeed Tipsarevic said it was like déjà vu. Bautista Agut drove a hard, ruthless forehand, often inside-out, to exploit the two-handed backhand’s limited reach; the work on the ball — because it had been sheared across — got it to drift further to Tipsarevic’s left, buying another yard of court space.

Bautista Agut also hit brave, deep backhands — flat so they were penetrative, but bereft of the margin of error topspin affords — to push the second-seeded Serb further behind the baseline and open up the shorter angles cross-court. This was first-rate, dominant tennis from a man in his first ATP Tour final against the world’s ninth-best player.

Tipsarevic had chances in Bautista Agut’s service games. Thrice he was up 0-30, but the Spaniard fell back on the inside-out forehand: then he rushed the net to either flash a cavalier racquet at a swing volley or carve the follow-up to the open court. Once Tipsarevic managed the right play: a backhand down the line that had Bautista Agut scrambling, only the Spaniard slapped a forehand long-line himself, low-percentage but point-ending.

In the first set, Tipsarevic’s ground-strokes had risen perfectly into Bautista Agut’s wheelhouse; in sets two and three, he consciously stepped into the court and sought to be the first player in the rally to either change direction or seek depth. This was gutsy, even desperate, play, and Tipsarevic had the skill to pull it off.

The two-hander down the line worked much better than it had on Saturday, allowing him to move Bautista Agut.

Tipsarevic’s coach Dirk Hordorff smoked a nervous cigarette in a stairway, while his employer took charge of the match. Having to play three three-setters back to back was affecting Bautista Agut, who looked physically spent the longer the match went on. He had his knee strapped and later said he had experienced abdominal pain; courage didn’t desert him, much to the vocal appreciation of the crowd, but victory was beyond him.

Tipsarevic broke Bautista Agut twice each in sets two and three, including the final game in which the Spaniard was docked a first serve for taking more than 25 seconds between points.

The end came quickly.

Tipsarevic celebrated his fourth ATP title with a crowd that has come to accept him as a favoured son. He said they would see a lot more of him.

Bautista Agut was cheered no less. A man who masters Tomas Berdych and hangs with Tipsarevic is to be admired. There remained one final question though — would he, with the prize money, add to his stable of horses?

“I don’t have the time for one more horse,” Bautista Agut said, smiling. “But I’d just like to take the opportunity to thank my mother who will be following this from Spain.”

Wawrinka and Paire win Chennai Open Doubles

Stanislas Wawrinka and Benoit Paire won their first ATP doubles title together after defeating the German duo of Andre Begemann and Martin Emmrich 6-2 6-1 in a Aircel Chennai Open 2013 final that lasted just 56 minutes.

The unseeded French-Swiss pairing completely dominated the contest, which was the sixth all-unseeded doubles final in the history of the tournament, on the basis of a strong return of serve which helped it to win 50 per cent of the total return points. The German team played well at the net in the opening set but more errors crept into its game as the match progressed and it could eventually win only three of the 15 games played.

After saving a break point in the third game, Wawrinka and Paire proceeded to break Emmrich’s serve in the following when Paire followed up a rasping forehand with a double-handed backhand down the line to take a 3-1 lead. Three comfortable holds of serve later, Emmrich was the culprit again as he served two double faults to lose the game from a strong position at 40-15 and the set was won 6-2 by the French-Swiss pair. As the German duo took a toilet break before the beginning of the second set, Paire entertained the crowd with a wonderful display of keepie-uppie and gave a similarly pleasing display with the racquet later as Begemann was broken early for a 2-0 lead. The early break of serve seemed to sap the morale of the German pair and an easy hold for Paire put further pressure on Emmrich, who failed to do the same for the third time running.

A 4-0 advantage seemed decisive and, despite a minor aberration in the form of a comfortable service game for Begemann, it eventually proved to be so when Wawrinka’s angled shot from outside the court was unreturned by the former. Consequently, the Swiss and the Frenchman celebrated with a chest-thump as it was the duo’s first title success in four attempts, the previous three ending in a first-round exit.

The results: Final: Stanislas Wawrinka (Sui) & Benoit Paire (Fra) bt Andre Begemann (Ger) & Martin Emmrich (Ger) 6-2, 6-1.  
Semifinals: Wawrinka & Paire bt Raven Klassen (Rsa) & Nicholas Monroe (USA) 6-7(9), 6-4, 10-8.