Time Slipping, U.S. Ponders Afghan Role After 2014

WASHINGTON — American and allied military planners are drawing up the broad outlines of a force that would remain in Afghanistan following the handover to Afghan security after 2014, including a small counterterrorism force with an eye toward Al Qaeda, senior officials say.

Under the emerging plan, the American counterterrorism force might number less than 1,000, one military official said. In a parallel effort, NATO forces would advise Afghan forces at major regional military and police headquarters but most likely have a minimal battlefield role, with the exception of some special operations advisers.

Final decisions on the size of the American and NATO presence after 2014 and its precise configuration have not been made by the United States or its allies. But one option calls for about 10,000 American and several thousand non-American NATO troops.

The planning for a post-2014 mission has emerged as an early test for President Obama in his new term as he tries to flesh out the strategy for transferring the responsibility for security to the Afghans. But it is not the only challenge: After the White House decides what sort of military presence to propose to the Afghan government for after 2014, it must turn to the question of how quickly to reduce its troop force before then.

As one of his last acts as senior American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John R. Allen is expected to submit a formal recommendation for how quickly to begin withdrawing the United States’ 66,000 troops. Two American officials who are involved in Afghan issues said that General Allen wants to keep a significant military capability through the fighting season ending in fall 2013, which could translate to a force of more than 60,000 troops until the end of that period.

Afghan forces are to assume the lead role for the war next year, and a military officer said that such a troop level would enable the United States to better support them, maintain the initiative and control critical terrain.

But such an approach may entail a heavier military involvement than the White House, which appears weary of the war, might like.

The White House is expected to ask General Allen to submit a range of options for drawing down forces next year, including some involving substantial reductions in troop levels.

“The White House has not yet asked General Allen for his assessment, nor have we begun considering any specific recommendations for troop numbers in 2013 and 2014,” said George Little, the Pentagon spokesman. “What is true is that in June 2011 the president made clear that our forces would continue to come home at a steady pace as we transition to an Afghan lead for security. That it still the case.”

The issue is already a politically contentious one. Some leading Democratic lawmakers have signaled that they would like to see steady troop reductions next year while Republicans have argued that speedy withdrawals would jeopardize hard-won gains.

There are also questions about General Allen’s future: his e-mails to a woman linked to the F.B.I. inquiry that disclosed David H. Petraeus’s affair are being investigated by the Pentagon inspector general.

But General Allen has resumed his duties in Kabul, and Mr. Obama has said that he thinks highly of his military performance. The Marine general who has been nominated to replace him, Joseph F. Dunford Jr., is not scheduled to take up the post until early February and recently told Congress that he had not been part of the planning process.

The planning for a post-2014 force is the Obama administration’s first order of business on Afghanistan for several reasons. The United States has opened talks with the Afghans on a security agreement that would authorize an American troop presence in Afghanistan after 2014. So American officials need to define what role American and NATO forces might play then.

In addition, NATO’s political arm has authorized the alliance’s military planners to develop a concept for how to carry out the post-2014 mission, which is to be approved by the alliance’s defense ministers early next year.

Reporting was contributed by Matthew Rosenberg and Alissa J. Rubin from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Eric Schmitt and Wesley S. Morgan from Washington.

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Facebook not so fun with a click from boss or mum

LONDON (Reuters) – Posting pictures of yourself plastered at a party and talking trash online with your Facebook friends may be more stress than it’s worth now that your boss and mum want to see it all.

A survey from Edinburgh Business School released on Monday showed Facebook users are anxious that all those self-published sins may be coming home to roost with more than half of employers claiming to have used Facebook to weed out job candidates.

“Facebook used to be like a great party for all your friends where you can dance, drink and flirt,” said Ben Marder, author of the report and fellow in marketing at the Business School.

“But now with your Mum, Dad and boss there, the party becomes an anxious event full of potential social landmines.”

On average, people are Facebook friends with seven different social circles, the report found, with real friends known to the user offline the most common.

More than four-fifths of users add extended family on Facebook, a similar number add siblings. Less than 70 percent are connected to friends of friends while more than 60 percent added their colleagues online, despite the anxiety this may cause.

Facebook has settings to control the information seen by different types of friends, but only one third use them, the report said.

“I’m not worried at all because all the really messy pics – me, drunken or worse – I detag straight away,” said Chris from London, aged 30.

People were more commonly friends with former boyfriends or girlfriends than with current ones, the report also found.

(Reporting By Dasha Afanasieva, editing by Paul Casciato)

Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Bieber booed in native Canada by football fans

TORONTO (AP) — Justin Bieber faced a hostile homecoming during his halftime performance at Canada's football Grey Cup, facing boos and jeers.

The Toronto crowd booed Sunday when the 18-year-old pop star's face popped up on the JumboTron screen. They booed when a host spoke his name. And they booed as he took the stage and throughout his medley of the chart-topper "Boyfriend" and the disco-inflected "Beauty and a Beat."

If Bieber was bothered, it didn't show.

"Thank you so much Canada," Bieber said. "I love you."

Earlier in the week, Bieber was presented with a Diamond Jubilee Medal by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and caused a scene by wearing overalls, unbuttoned on one shoulder, over a white T-shirt, with a backwards baseball cap.

There was sufficient uproar that Harper even weighed in on Twitter.

"In fairness to (Bieber)," Harper tweeted Sunday, "I told him I would be wearing my overalls too."

The Canadian Football League may have been hoping to court Bieber's army of tween followers on Sunday. But recent Grey Cup halftime performers have skewed toward the comparatively heavy likes of Nickelback and Lenny Kravitz.

"J-Biebs doesn't scream football, you know? Neither does Carly Rae Jepsen," said Calgary's Ryan Prisque, 22.

The 27-year-old Jepsen also received a mixed reaction at first Sunday but won the crowd over during an enthusiastic medley of her latest single, "This Kiss," and her infectious hit "Call Me Maybe."

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Agency Investigates Deaths and Injuries Associated With Bed Rails

Thomas Patterson for The New York Times

Gloria Black’s mother died in her bed at a care facility.

In November 2006, when Clara Marshall began suffering from the effects of dementia, her family moved her into the Waterford at Fairway Village, an assisted living home in Vancouver, Wash. The facility offered round-the-clock care for Ms. Marshall, who had wandered away from home several times. Her husband Dan, 80 years old at the time, felt he could no longer care for her alone.

Thomas Patterson for The New York Times

Gloria Black, visiting her mother’s grave in Portland, Ore. She has documented hundreds of deaths associated with bed rails and said families should be informed of their possible risks.

But just five months into her stay, Ms. Marshall, 81, was found dead in her room apparently strangled after getting her neck caught in side rails used to prevent her from rolling out of bed.

After Ms. Marshall’s death, her daughter Gloria Black, who lives in Portland, Ore., began writing to the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Food and Drug Administration. What she discovered was that both agencies had known for more than a decade about deaths from bed rails but had done little to crack down on the companies that make them. Ms. Black conducted her own research and exchanged letters with local and state officials. Finally, a letter she wrote in 2010 to the federal consumer safety commission helped prompt a review of bed rail deaths.

Ms. Black applauds the decision to study the issue. “But I wish it was done years ago,” she said. “Maybe my mother would still be alive.” Now the government is studying a problem it has known about for years.

Data compiled by the consumer agency from death certificates and hospital emergency room visits from 2003 through May 2012 shows that 150 mostly older adults died after they became trapped in bed rails. Over nearly the same time period, 36,000 mostly older adults — about 4,000 a year — were treated in emergency rooms with bed rail injuries. Officials at the F.D.A. and the commission said the data probably understated the problem since bed rails are not always listed as a cause of death by nursing homes and coroners, or as a cause of injury by emergency room doctors.

Experts who have studied the deaths say they are avoidable. While the F.D.A. issued safety warnings about the devices in 1995, it shied away from requiring manufacturers to put safety labels on them because of industry resistance and because the mood in Congress then was for less regulation. Instead only “voluntary guidelines” were adopted in 2006.

More warnings are needed, experts say, but there is a technical question over which regulator is responsible for some bed rails. Are they medical devices under the purview of the F.D.A., or are they consumer products regulated by the commission?

“This is an entirely preventable problem,” said Dr. Steven Miles, a professor at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota, who first alerted federal regulators to deaths involving bed rails in 1995. The government at the time declined to recall any bed rails and opted instead for a safety alert to nursing homes and home health care agencies.

Forcing the industry to improve designs and replace older models could have potentially cost bed rail makers and health care facilities hundreds of million of dollars, said Larry Kessler, a former F.D.A. official who headed its medical device office. “Quite frankly, none of the bed rails in use at that time would have passed the suggested design standards in the guidelines if we had made them mandatory,” he said. No analysis has been done to determine how much it would cost the manufacturers to reduce the hazards.

Bed rails are metal bars used on hospital beds and in home care to assist patients in pulling themselves up or helping them out of bed. They can also prevent people from rolling out of bed. But sometimes patients — particularly those suffering from Alzheimer’s — can get confused and trapped between a bed rail and a mattress, which can lead to serious injury or even death.

While the use of the devices by hospitals and nursing homes has declined as professional caregivers have grown aware of the dangers, experts say dozens of older adults continue to die each year as more rails are used in home care and many health care facilities continue to use older rail models.

Since those first warnings in 1995, about 550 bed rail-related deaths have occurred, a review by The New York Times of F.D.A. data, lawsuits, state nursing home inspection reports and interviews, found. Last year alone, the F.D.A. data shows, 27 people died.

As deaths continued after the F.D.A. warning, a working group put together in 1999 and made up of medical device makers, researchers, patient advocates and F.D.A. officials considered requiring bed rail makers to add warning labels.

But the F.D.A. decided against it after manufacturers resisted, citing legal issues. The agency said added cost to small manufacturers and difficulties of getting regulations through layers of government approval, were factors against tougher standards, according to a meeting log of the group in 2000 and interviews.

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DealBook: New Breed of SAC Capital Hire Is at Center of Insider Trading Case

When Mathew Martoma walked onto the trading floor at SAC Capital Advisors six years ago, he represented a new breed of employee at the giant hedge fund.

Steven A. Cohen, SAC’s billionaire founder, had burnished his reputation as a market wizard by surrounding himself with hard-charging traders — many of them former college jocks and frat boys who thrived in the fund’s competitive, testosterone-fueled environment.

But the brainy and unassuming Mr. Martoma, armed with a Stanford business degree and an expertise in biomedicine, was part of a wave of SAC hires in a crack new research unit. They were just as driven but had more distinguished pedigrees, hailing from top investment banks and elite schools. They were drawn to the firm, in part, by the lavish annual bonuses Mr. Cohen bestowed upon his top performers, sometimes reaching into the tens of millions of dollars.

When Mr. Martoma walks into Federal District Court in Manhattan on Monday morning, he will represent something else: the latest in a growing list of former SAC employees who find themselves accused of breaking the law.

The case against Mr. Martoma, made in a criminal complaint filed by the government last week, represents a watershed moment in its multiyear investigation of insider trading at SAC. For the first time, prosecutors have linked Mr. Cohen to trading activity that the government contends was illegal.

Mr. Martoma has rebuffed efforts by federal authorities to persuade him to plead guilty and cooperate, said a person briefed on the investigation who was not authorized to discuss the case. But if he were to “flip,” Mr. Martoma could help the government with its investigation of Mr. Cohen.

The government has placed Mr. Martoma, 38, at the center of what it calls the most lucrative insider-trading scheme it has ever uncovered. Mr. Martoma is charged with corrupting a doctor who had access to secret drug data, then using that information to gain profits and avert losses totaling $276 million. Mr. Martoma closely collaborated with Mr. Cohen on the questionable trades, prosecutors contend. Mr. Cohen, 56, of Greenwich, Conn., has not been charged, and there is no allegation that he knew the information was confidential. Through a spokesman, Mr. Cohen said that he had at all times acted appropriately.

Charles A. Stillman, a lawyer for Mr. Martoma, who will appear before a federal magistrate judge Monday, said he expected his client to be exonerated.

But with Mr. Martoma’s arrest last week, the clouds over SAC, which is based in Stamford, Conn., and Mr. Cohen have darkened. The government has now implicated five former SAC employees in its sweeping investigation into insider trading; three have admitted their crimes. Three other SAC alumni have also been charged with illegal trading after they left the firm; two have pleaded guilty.

Former employees of Mr. Cohen, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the case against Mr. Martoma highlighted SAC’s high-stress, pressure-packed culture. They described a ruthless place where those who helped Mr. Cohen make money would earn fortunes, while laggards could be fired abruptly, even for a single wrong-way trade.

Though SAC, with about 1,000 employees, manages about $14 billion in assets and has pushed into more esoteric investment strategies, at its core the firm buys and sells stocks. Mr. Cohen and his staff are known for relentlessly digging for information about publicly traded companies to form a “mosaic,” building a complete picture of the company’s prospects that gives the firm an edge over other investors.

SAC hired Mr. Martoma to help Mr. Cohen gain that edge. The son of Indian immigrants, Mr. Martoma was born Ajai Mathew Mariamdani Thomas, but changed his name in 2003, according to legal records. Raised in Merritt Island, Fla., outside Cape Canaveral, Mr. Martoma graduated summa cum laude from Duke University in 1995, where he studied biomedicine, ethics and public policy. After college, Mr. Martoma worked in Washington at the National Human Genome Research Institute.

He spent a year and a half at Harvard Law School, then dropped out to earn a business degree at Stanford University. He blended his passion for medicine and a desire to work on Wall Street by pursuing a career as a stock analyst covering health care companies. After a stint at a smaller hedge fund, Sirios Capital Management in Boston, Mr. Martoma joined SAC.

He became part of a new unit, CR Intrinsic, which was set up as a research engine of SAC. CR Intrinsic (the CR stands for Cumulative Return) was led by Matthew Grossman, an ambitious young analyst who became Mr. Cohen’s right-hand man. Mr. Grossman had worked at Tiger Management, the hedge fund known for its rigorous research and longer-term investment horizon.

With a deep network of contacts in the pharmaceutical and biotech fields, Mr. Martoma made a mark at CR Intrinsic. The volatile health care stocks in which Mr. Martoma specialized had long been favorites of Mr. Cohen’s, offering the potential for big returns through betting on the outcome of events like clinical trials for promising drugs.

To bolster his knowledge, Mr. Martoma tapped into expert-network firms, which employ consultants who match money managers with industry specialists, including public company employees.

For an information-driven hedge fund like SAC, the temptation to exploit the expert-network relationship was immense, two former employees said.

Two of the former SAC employees who have admitted to insider trading said they used expert-network firms to obtain secret information about public companies. And of the roughly 70 insider trading cases that federal prosecutors in Manhattan have brought in the last three years, more than a dozen have involved expert networks.

Mr. Martoma’s case began in 2006, when the expert-network firm Gerson Lehrman Group connected him to Sidney Gilman, a neurology professor at the University of Michigan and a specialist in Alzheimer’s disease. Dr. Gilman, who moonlighted as a consultant for Gerson Lehrman, helped oversee clinical trials for bapineuzumab, or bapi, a new Alzheimer’s drug being jointly developed by Elan and Wyeth.

He also brazenly leaked to Mr. Martoma secret data about the trials throughout 2008, according to the government, violating his duty to the drug companies and breaching his agreement with Gerson Lehrman not to divulge confidential information to money managers. Dr. Gilman earned $108,000 from his work for SAC, the government said.

At first, Dr. Gilman’s positive updates on the Alzheimer’s drug trials emboldened SAC to make big bets on Elan and Wyeth, prosecutors said. Mr. Martoma worked closely with Mr. Cohen on the investments, highlighting the drug companies in his weekly “best ideas” list submitted to Mr. Cohen. SAC accumulated $700 million worth of Elan and Wyeth shares, making it one of the fund’s largest bets.

Prosecutors say that in July 2008 Dr. Gilman received more complete results about bapi showing problems with the drug’s efficacy. He then shared those results with Mr. Martoma, the government contends.

With the public announcement of the data just a week away, Mr. Martoma e-mailed Mr. Cohen on a Sunday, according to the complaint. Within the hour, the two were on the phone and spoke for 20 minutes, prosecutors say.

Over several days, SAC not only sold its entire positions in Elan and Wyeth, but shorted, or bet against, the drug companies’ shares, the government said. On July 29, the companies announced results of the drug trial and their shares sank. SAC avoided about $194 million in losses by selling the stocks and then made $83 million by shorting them, according to court filings. Still, SAC paid Mr. Martoma a $9.4 million bonus in 2008 that was largely attributable to his contributions on the Elan and Wyeth trades, prosecutors said. But the firm fired him in early 2010 after his stock picks flagged. The case against Mr. Martoma stemmed in part from a referral made to federal securities regulators. In 2008, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority observed unusual short-sales in the drug stocks and noted the abnormal activity, regulators said.

Prosecutors recently reached a nonprosecution agreement with Dr. Gilman, meaning they will not charge him. The Justice Department rarely strikes nonprosecution agreements with individuals. The government’s deal with Dr. Gilman, legal experts say, could put pressure on Mr. Martoma to strike a plea deal and cooperate.

Alain Delaquérière contributed reporting.

A version of this article appeared in print on 11/26/2012, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: New Breed of SAC Capital Hire Is at Center of Insider Trading Case.

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New Senate’s First Task Will Likely Be Trying to Fix Itself

Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press

At a news conference after meeting with President Obama about the budget, from left, Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader; Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader; Speaker John A. Boehner; and Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader.

WASHINGTON — Senator Bob Dole had just assumed the mantle of Senate majority leader, after the Republican landslide of 1994, when he confronted a problem.

Piles of Republican legislation from Newt Gingrich’s self-styled “revolutionary” House were stacking up in a narrowly divided, more deliberate Senate, and Democrats were threatening to gum up the works with amendments that would stall the bills.

Mr. Dole turned to the Senate’s Democratic master of floor procedure, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, who taught him a parliamentary trick known to Senate insiders as “filling the tree,” Mr. Dole recalled.

The convoluted procedure allows the majority leader to claim all opportunity for offering changes to a bill, effectively preventing any other senator from proposing an amendment intended to slow down legislation or force a politically embarrassing vote.

“I never knew what ‘filling the tree’ was until I tried it, but it turned out to be pretty good,” Mr. Dole said, ruefully accepting a share of the blame for the parliamentary arms race that has consumed the Senate in recent years. “I don’t think there’s any credit.”

The increased use of the tactic, which had previously been rare, is part of the procedural warfare that has reached a zenith over the past two years in the Senate. Republicans threaten to filibuster and propose politically charged amendments, Democrats fill the amendment tree, and Republicans filibuster in retaliation.

The tactic initially meant to speed bills has instead helped slow them down. The Senate — the legislative body that was designed as the saucer to cool the House’s tempestuous teacup — has become a deep freeze, where even once-routine matters have become hopelessly stuck and a supermajority is needed to pass almost anything.

As a result, the first fight of the next Senate, which convenes in January, is not likely to be over a fiscal crisis, immigration, taxes or any issue that animated the elections of 2012. It will instead probably be over how and whether to change a troubled Senate, members and aides say.

With his majority enhanced and a crop of frustrated young Democrats pushing him hard, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, says he will move on the first day of the 113th Congress to diminish the power of Republicans to obstruct legislation. “We need to change the way we do business in the Senate,” said Senator Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico. “Right now, we have gridlock. We have delay. We have obstruction, and we don’t have any accountability.”

The pressure leaves Mr. Reid with a weighty decision: whether to ram through a change in the rules with a simple majority that would significantly diminish Republicans’ power to slow or stop legislation.

The changes under consideration may sound arcane, but they would have such a profound impact that they are referred to as the “nuclear option.” In effect, they would remake a Senate that was long run on compromise and gentlemen’s agreements into something more like the House, where the majority rules almost absolutely.

Critics of the idea, who exist in both parties, say such a change would do great damage, causing Washington to career from one set of policies to another, depending on which party held power.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said he would aggressively fight any rule change and blamed the Democratic majority for the Senate’s dysfunction. “This notion that the Senate is dysfunctional is not because of the rules,” he said. “It’s because of behavior.”

Supporters of the idea, who also do not fit a neat ideological profile, argue that the collegial Senate of the past no longer exists and that American democracy is often paralyzed as a result. Today’s Senate, they say, has left crucial positions unfilled, like a confirmed head for the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and is preventing action on major issues like job creation proposals.

“There is a tendency to look to the past through rose-colored glasses, to some mythical golden era when everyone got along and cooperated. That’s not true. It’s always been tough, and it’s always been rough,” said George Mitchell, a former Democratic majority leader who would now back some changes. “But I do believe and accept the premise that it’s worse now.”

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Lobbying, a Windfall and a Leader’s Family

The New York Times

Ping An, one of China’s largest financial services companies, is building a 115-story office tower in Shenzhen. The company is a $50 billion powerhouse now worth more than A.I.G., MetLife or Prudential.

SHENZHEN, China — The head of a financially troubled insurer was pushing Chinese officials to relax rules that required breaking up the company in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis.

The survival of Ping An Insurance was at stake, officials were told in the fall of 1999. Direct appeals were made to the vice premier at the time, Wen Jiabao, as well as the then-head of China’s central bank — two powerful officials with oversight of the industry.

“I humbly request that the vice premier lead and coordinate the matter from a higher level,” Ma Mingzhe, chairman of Ping An, implored in a letter to Mr. Wen that was reviewed by The New York Times.

Ping An was not broken up.

The successful outcome of the lobbying effort would prove monumental.

Ping An went on to become one of China’s largest financial services companies, a $50 billion powerhouse now worth more than A.I.G., MetLife or Prudential. And behind the scenes, shares in Ping An that would be worth billions of dollars once the company rebounded were acquired by relatives of Mr. Wen.

The Times reported last month that the relatives of Mr. Wen, who became prime minister in 2003, had grown extraordinarily wealthy during his leadership, acquiring stakes in tourist resorts, banks, jewelers, telecommunications companies and other business ventures.

The greatest source of wealth, by far, The Times investigation has found, came from the shares in Ping An bought about eight months after the insurer was granted a waiver to the requirement that big financial companies be broken up.

Long before most investors could buy Ping An stock, Taihong, a company that would soon be controlled by Mr. Wen’s relatives, acquired a large stake in Ping An from state-owned entities that held shares in the insurer, regulatory and corporate records show. And by all appearances, Taihong got a sweet deal. The shares were bought in December 2002 for one-quarter of the price that another big investor — the British bank HSBC Holdings — paid for its shares just two months earlier, according to interviews and public filings.

By June 2004, the shares held by the Wen relatives had already quadrupled in value, even before the company was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. And by 2007, the initial $65 million investment made by Taihong would be worth $3.7 billion.

Corporate records show that the relatives’ stake of that investment most likely peaked at $2.2 billion in late 2007, the last year in which Taihong’s shareholder records were publicly available. Because the company is no longer listed in Ping An’s public filings, it is unclear if the relatives continue to hold shares.

It is also not known whether Mr. Wen or the central bank chief at the time, Dai Xianglong, personally intervened on behalf of Ping An’s request for a waiver, or if Mr. Wen was even aware of the stakes held by his relatives.

But internal Ping An documents, government filings and interviews with bankers and former senior executives at Ping An indicate that both the vice premier’s office and the central bank were among the regulators involved in the Ping An waiver meetings and who had the authority to sign off on the waiver.

Only two large state-run financial institutions were granted similar waivers, filings show, while three of China’s big state-run insurance companies were forced to break up. Many of the country’s big banks complied with the breakup requirement — enforced after the financial crisis because of concerns about the stability of the financial system — by selling their assets in other institutions.

Ping An issued a statement to The Times saying the company strictly complies with rules and regulations, but does not know the backgrounds of all entities behind shareholders. The company also said “it is the legitimate right of shareholders to buy and sell shares between themselves.”

In Beijing, China’s foreign ministry did not return calls seeking comment for this article. Earlier, a Foreign Ministry spokesman sharply criticized the investigation by The Times into the finances of Mr. Wen’s relatives, saying it “smears China and has ulterior motives.”

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Scientists See Advances in Deep Learning, a Part of Artificial Intelligence

Hao Zhang/The New York Times

A voice recognition program translated a speech given by Richard F. Rashid, Microsoft’s top scientist, into Mandarin Chinese.

Using an artificial intelligence technique inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns, technology companies are reporting startling gains in fields as diverse as computer vision, speech recognition and the identification of promising new molecules for designing drugs.

The advances have led to widespread enthusiasm among researchers who design software to perform human activities like seeing, listening and thinking. They offer the promise of machines that converse with humans and perform tasks like driving cars and working in factories, raising the specter of automated robots that could replace human workers.

The technology, called deep learning, has already been put to use in services like Apple’s Siri virtual personal assistant, which is based on Nuance Communications’ speech recognition service, and in Google’s Street View, which uses machine vision to identify specific addresses.

But what is new in recent months is the growing speed and accuracy of deep-learning programs, often called artificial neural networks or just “neural nets” for their resemblance to the neural connections in the brain.

“There has been a number of stunning new results with deep-learning methods,” said Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University who did pioneering research in handwriting recognition at Bell Laboratories. “The kind of jump we are seeing in the accuracy of these systems is very rare indeed.”

Artificial intelligence researchers are acutely aware of the dangers of being overly optimistic. Their field has long been plagued by outbursts of misplaced enthusiasm followed by equally striking declines.

In the 1960s, some computer scientists believed that a workable artificial intelligence system was just 10 years away. In the 1980s, a wave of commercial start-ups collapsed, leading to what some people called the “A.I. winter.”

But recent achievements have impressed a wide spectrum of computer experts. In October, for example, a team of graduate students studying with the University of Toronto computer scientist Geoffrey E. Hinton won the top prize in a contest sponsored by Merck to design software to help find molecules that might lead to new drugs.

From a data set describing the chemical structure of 15 different molecules, they used deep-learning software to determine which molecule was most likely to be an effective drug agent.

The achievement was particularly impressive because the team decided to enter the contest at the last minute and designed its software with no specific knowledge about how the molecules bind to their targets. The students were also working with a relatively small set of data; neural nets typically perform well only with very large ones.

“This is a really breathtaking result because it is the first time that deep learning won, and more significantly it won on a data set that it wouldn’t have been expected to win at,” said Anthony Goldbloom, chief executive and founder of Kaggle, a company that organizes data science competitions, including the Merck contest.

Advances in pattern recognition hold implications not just for drug development but for an array of applications, including marketing and law enforcement. With greater accuracy, for example, marketers can comb large databases of consumer behavior to get more precise information on buying habits. And improvements in facial recognition are likely to make surveillance technology cheaper and more commonplace.

Artificial neural networks, an idea going back to the 1950s, seek to mimic the way the brain absorbs information and learns from it. In recent decades, Dr. Hinton, 64 (a great-great-grandson of the 19th-century mathematician George Boole, whose work in logic is the foundation for modern digital computers), has pioneered powerful new techniques for helping the artificial networks recognize patterns.

Modern artificial neural networks are composed of an array of software components, divided into inputs, hidden layers and outputs. The arrays can be “trained” by repeated exposures to recognize patterns like images or sounds.

These techniques, aided by the growing speed and power of modern computers, have led to rapid improvements in speech recognition, drug discovery and computer vision.

Deep-learning systems have recently outperformed humans in certain limited recognition tests.

Last year, for example, a program created by scientists at the Swiss A. I. Lab at the University of Lugano won a pattern recognition contest by outperforming both competing software systems and a human expert in identifying images in a database of German traffic signs.

The winning program accurately identified 99.46 percent of the images in a set of 50,000; the top score in a group of 32 human participants was 99.22 percent, and the average for the humans was 98.84 percent.

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'Dallas' star Larry Hagman dies in Texas

J.R. Ewing was a business cheat, faithless husband and bottomless well of corruption. Yet with his sparkling grin, Larry Hagman masterfully created the charmingly loathsome oil baron — and coaxed forth a Texas-size gusher of ratings — on television's long-running and hugely successful nighttime soap, "Dallas."

Although he first gained fame as nice guy Capt. Tony Nelson on the fluffy 1965-70 NBC comedy "I Dream of Jeannie," Hagman earned his greatest stardom with J.R. The CBS serial drama about the Ewing family and those in their orbit aired from April 1978 to May 1991, and broke viewing records with its "Who shot J.R.?" 1980 cliffhanger that left unclear if Hagman's character was dead.

The actor, who returned as J.R. in a new edition of "Dallas" this year, had a long history of health problems and died Friday due to complications from his battle with cancer, his family said.

"Larry was back in his beloved hometown of Dallas, re-enacting the iconic role he loved the most. Larry's family and closest friends had joined him in Dallas for the Thanksgiving holiday," the family said in a statement that was provided to The Associated Press by Warner Bros., producer of the show.

The 81-year-old actor was surrounded by friends and family before he passed peacefully, "just as he'd wished for," the statement said.

Linda Gray, his on-screen wife and later ex-wife in the original series and the sequel, was among those with Hagman in his final moments in a Dallas hospital, said her publicist, Jeffrey Lane.

"He brought joy to everyone he knew. He was creative, generous, funny, loving and talented, and I will miss him enormously. He was an original and lived life to the fullest," the actress said.

Years before "Dallas," Hagman had gained TV fame on "I Dream of Jeannie," in which he played an astronaut whose life is disrupted when he finds a comely genie, portrayed by Barbara Eden, and takes her home to live with him.

Eden recalled late Friday shooting the series' pilot "in the frigid cold" on a Malibu beach.

"From that day, for five more years, Larry was the center of so many fun, wild and sometimes crazy times. And in retrospect, memorable moments that will remain in my heart forever," Eden said.

Hagman also starred in two short-lived sitcoms, "The Good Life" (NBC, 1971-72) and "Here We Go Again" (ABC, 1973). His film work included well-regarded performances in "The Group," ''Harry and Tonto" and "Primary Colors."

But it was Hagman's masterful portrayal of J.R. that brought him the most fame. And the "Who shot J.R.?" story twist fueled international speculation and millions of dollars in betting-parlor wagers. It also helped give the series a place in ratings history.

When the answer was revealed in a November 1980 episode, an average 41 million U.S. viewers tuned in to make "Dallas" one of the most-watched entertainment shows of all time, trailing only the "MASH" finale in 1983 with 50 million viewers.

It was J.R.'s sister-in-law, Kristin (Mary Crosby) who plugged him — he had made her pregnant, then threatened to frame her as a prostitute unless she left town — but others had equal motivation.

Hagman played Ewing as a bottomless well of corruption with a charming grin: a business cheat and a faithless husband who tried to get his alcoholic wife, Sue Ellen (Gray), institutionalized.

"I know what I want on J.R.'s tombstone," Hagman said in 1988. "It should say: 'Here lies upright citizen J.R. Ewing. This is the only deal he ever lost.'"

On Friday night, Victoria Principal, who co-starred in the original series, recalled Hagman as "bigger than life, on-screen and off. He is unforgettable, and irreplaceable, to millions of fans around the world, and in the hearts of each of us, who was lucky enough to know and love him."

Ten episodes of the new edition of "Dallas" aired this past summer and proved a hit for TNT. Filming was in progress on the sixth episode of season two, which is set to begin airing Jan. 28, the network said.

There was no immediate comment from Warner or TNT on how the series would deal with Hagman's loss.

In 2006, he did a guest shot on FX's drama series "Nip/Tuck," playing a macho business mogul. He also got new exposure in recent years with the DVD releases of "I Dream of Jeannie" and "Dallas."

The Fort Worth, Texas, native was the son of singer-actress Mary Martin, who starred in such classics as "South Pacific" and "Peter Pan." Martin was still in her teens when he was born in 1931 during her marriage to attorney Ben Hagman.

As a youngster, Hagman gained a reputation for mischief-making as he was bumped from one private school to another. He made a stab at New York theater in the early 1950s, then served in the Air Force from 1952-56 in England.

While there, he met and married young Swedish designer Maj Axelsson. The couple had two children, Preston and Heidi, and were longtime residents of the Malibu beach colony that is home to many celebrities.

Hagman returned to acting and found work in the theater and in such TV series as "The U.S. Steel Hour," ''The Defenders" and "Sea Hunt." His first continuing role was as lawyer Ed Gibson on the daytime serial "The Edge of Night" (1961-63).

He called his 2001 memoir "Hello Darlin': Tall (and Absolutely True) Tales about My Life."

"I didn't put anything in that I thought was going to hurt someone or compromise them in any way," he told The Associated Press at the time.

Hagman was diagnosed in 1992 with cirrhosis of the liver and acknowledged that he had drank heavily for years. In 1995, a malignant tumor was discovered on his liver and he underwent a transplant.

After his transplant, he became an advocate for organ donation and volunteered at a hospital to help frightened patients.

"I counsel, encourage, meet them when they come in for their operations, and after," he said in 1996. "I try to offer some solace, like 'Don't be afraid, it will be a little uncomfortable for a brief time, but you'll be OK.' "

He also was an anti-smoking activist who took part in "Great American Smoke-Out" campaigns.

Funeral plans were not immediately announced.

"I can honestly say that we've lost not just a great actor, not just a television icon, but an element of pure Americana," Eden said in her statement Friday night. "Goodbye, Larry. There was no one like you before and there will never be anyone like you again."

___

Associated Press writers Erin Gartner in Chicago and Shaya Mohajer in Los Angeles, and AP Television Writer Frazier Moore in New York contributed to this report.

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Scientists See Advances in Deep Learning, a Part of Artificial Intelligence

Hao Zhang/The New York Times

A voice recognition program translated a speech given by Richard F. Rashid, Microsoft’s top scientist, into Mandarin Chinese.

Using an artificial intelligence technique inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns, technology companies are reporting startling gains in fields as diverse as computer vision, speech recognition and the identification of promising new molecules for designing drugs.

The advances have led to widespread enthusiasm among researchers who design software to perform human activities like seeing, listening and thinking. They offer the promise of machines that converse with humans and perform tasks like driving cars and working in factories, raising the specter of automated robots that could replace human workers.

The technology, called deep learning, has already been put to use in services like Apple’s Siri virtual personal assistant, which is based on Nuance Communications’ speech recognition service, and in Google’s Street View, which uses machine vision to identify specific addresses.

But what is new in recent months is the growing speed and accuracy of deep-learning programs, often called artificial neural networks or just “neural nets” for their resemblance to the neural connections in the brain.

“There has been a number of stunning new results with deep-learning methods,” said Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University who did pioneering research in handwriting recognition at Bell Laboratories. “The kind of jump we are seeing in the accuracy of these systems is very rare indeed.”

Artificial intelligence researchers are acutely aware of the dangers of being overly optimistic. Their field has long been plagued by outbursts of misplaced enthusiasm followed by equally striking declines.

In the 1960s, some computer scientists believed that a workable artificial intelligence system was just 10 years away. In the 1980s, a wave of commercial start-ups collapsed, leading to what some people called the “A.I. winter.”

But recent achievements have impressed a wide spectrum of computer experts. In October, for example, a team of graduate students studying with the University of Toronto computer scientist Geoffrey E. Hinton won the top prize in a contest sponsored by Merck to design software to help find molecules that might lead to new drugs.

From a data set describing the chemical structure of 15 different molecules, they used deep-learning software to determine which molecule was most likely to be an effective drug agent.

The achievement was particularly impressive because the team decided to enter the contest at the last minute and designed its software with no specific knowledge about how the molecules bind to their targets. The students were also working with a relatively small set of data; neural nets typically perform well only with very large ones.

“This is a really breathtaking result because it is the first time that deep learning won, and more significantly it won on a data set that it wouldn’t have been expected to win at,” said Anthony Goldbloom, chief executive and founder of Kaggle, a company that organizes data science competitions, including the Merck contest.

Advances in pattern recognition hold implications not just for drug development but for an array of applications, including marketing and law enforcement. With greater accuracy, for example, marketers can comb large databases of consumer behavior to get more precise information on buying habits. And improvements in facial recognition are likely to make surveillance technology cheaper and more commonplace.

Artificial neural networks, an idea going back to the 1950s, seek to mimic the way the brain absorbs information and learns from it. In recent decades, Dr. Hinton, 64 (a great-great-grandson of the 19th-century mathematician George Boole, whose work in logic is the foundation for modern digital computers), has pioneered powerful new techniques for helping the artificial networks recognize patterns.

Modern artificial neural networks are composed of an array of software components, divided into inputs, hidden layers and outputs. The arrays can be “trained” by repeated exposures to recognize patterns like images or sounds.

These techniques, aided by the growing speed and power of modern computers, have led to rapid improvements in speech recognition, drug discovery and computer vision.

Deep-learning systems have recently outperformed humans in certain limited recognition tests.

Last year, for example, a program created by scientists at the Swiss A. I. Lab at the University of Lugano won a pattern recognition contest by outperforming both competing software systems and a human expert in identifying images in a database of German traffic signs.

The winning program accurately identified 99.46 percent of the images in a set of 50,000; the top score in a group of 32 human participants was 99.22 percent, and the average for the humans was 98.84 percent.

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