Jose Luis Borau, Spanish Filmmaker, dies at 83

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Influential Spanish filmmaker Jose Luis Borau died Friday in Madrid, the Spanish Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences said. He was 83.

Borau had reportedly been suffering from throat cancer.

Though Borau, who was born in Zaragoza in 1929, only made a handful of films since his 1960 directorial debut “En el Rio,” his talents were widely respected, and he received a Goya award for Best Director in 2000 for his final film, “Leo.”

Borau was also a screenwriter and producer, and acted in some of his films. According to the Academy, his other pursuits included editing the first published biography of director-producer Samuel Bronston and short-story writing. He also “dabbled in advertising,” the Academy said.

Borau was probably best known for his 1975 drama “Furtivos” (“Poachers”), a film whose success, he later said, made him “a little sad.”

“Nobody is bitter sweet, but I’m a little sad,” the filmmaker once said. “My scale is a bit like what happened to Orson Welles, who made great films after ‘Citizen Kane,’ but just remember that title. “

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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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Oprah Winfrey Seeks a Younger Audience to Bolster a Flagging Empire

Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

Oprah Winfrey spoke last month at a convention held by O, The Oprah Magazine, in Los Angeles.

LOS ANGELES — It’s not easy to find a fresh way to photograph Oprah Winfrey.

That’s why the editors of O, The Oprah Magazine, recently tried to create a shot that recalled the glory days of Ms. Winfrey’s syndicated talk show. They arranged to photograph her for its April 2013 issue as she stepped onstage to speak to 5,000 attendees at the magazine’s annual conference, a New Age slumber party of sorts for women held at the convention center here last month. When Ms. Winfrey confidently strode out dressed in a sea foam green V-neck dress and a pair of perilously tall ruby red stilettos, the audience collectively leapt to its feet and shrieked at the sight of her.

“I love you, Oprah,” some women shouted, while other fans brushed away tears. “I love you back,” she responded in her signature commanding voice. “It’s no small thing to get the dough to come here.”

Ms. Winfrey, who used to receive this kind of applause from fans five days a week, has had fewer such receptions since the talk show she hosted for 25 years ended 18 months ago. The cable network OWN, which she started with Discovery Communications, is emerging from low ratings and management shake-ups. And without a regular presence on daytime network television, she cannot steer traffic to her other products as easily as in the past. Her magazine, in particular, has experienced a decline in advertising revenue and newsstand sales since the talk show finished.

“She’s still Oprah. But she’s still struggling,” said Janice Peck, an associate professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Colorado who wrote the 2008 book “The Age of Oprah.” “I think she’s scared, even though she’s very, very rich and she’s always going to be very, very rich. The possibility of failure, it’s quite scary.”

Ms. Winfrey, 58, has shown some signs of strain. She arrived at the conference with faint shadows under her eyes and announced to her best friend, Gayle King, and the audience simultaneously that she had a breast cancer scare the week before. (It was ultimately a false alarm.) When Ms. King grew visibly upset, one woman chided Ms. Winfrey for not telling her friend ahead of time and ordered her to apologize to Ms. King — all before an audience. Ms. Winfrey also did not hide her dissatisfaction with the criticism she had faced. She told the audience, “the press tried to cut me off at the knees” in its coverage of OWN, and bristled at questions about the challenges her magazine confronted.

“I don’t care what the form is,” Ms. Winfrey said with the conviction of a preacher. “I care about what the message is.”

With signs of progress at OWN, Ms. Winfrey now has more time to devote to other media platforms — her magazine, her radio channel on XM Satellite Radio, her Facebook page, which has 7.8 million subscribers, her Twitter account, which has nearly 15 million followers, and her latest content channel on The Huffington Post.

“It’s all an opportunity to speak to people,” Ms. Winfrey said as she sat for an interview during the conference, a pair of glittery gold stilettos slung in her hand and a couple of handlers in the corner quietly tapping away at smartphones. She pushed aside a bottle of sparkling water, a glass with a silver straw and a delicate orchid placed before her and spoke frankly about her plans.

“Ultimately, you have to make money because you are a business. I let other people worry about that. I worry about the message. I am always, always, always about holding true to the vision and the message, and when you are true to that, then people respond.”

When it comes to the magazine, Ms. Winfrey said her staff prepared her to expect a 25 percent decline in newsstand sales after the talk show ended. (It has been closer to 22 percent.) And while she acknowledged that she enjoyed “holding the magazine in my hand,” she was pragmatic about print’s future and said she would stop publishing a print magazine if it were not profitable.

“Obviously, the show was helping in ways that you know I hadn’t accounted for,” Ms. Winfrey said. “I’m not interested, you know, in bleeding money.”

Ms. Winfrey, who spoke in a conference room over the roars of an expectant crowd in the convention space below, said she knew that her brand’s strength stemmed from how she resonated with a breadth of viewers.

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Solar power plants burden the counties that host them

When it comes to attracting business to California's eastern deserts, Inyo County is none too choosy.

Since the 19th century the sparsely populated county has worked to attract industries shunned by others, including gold, tungsten and salt mining. The message: Your business may be messy, but if you plan to hire our residents, the welcome mat is out.

So the county grew giddy last year as it began to consider hosting a huge, clean industry. BrightSource Energy, developer of the proposed $2.7-billion Hidden Hills solar power plant 230 miles northeast of Los Angeles, promised a bounty of jobs and a windfall in tax receipts. In a county that issued just six building permits in 2011, Inyo officials first estimated that property taxes from the facility would boost the general fund 17%.

But upon closer inspection, the picture didn't seem so rosy.

An economic consultant hired by the county found that property tax revenue would be a fraction of the customary amount because portions of the plant qualifiy for a solar tax exclusion. Fewer than 10 local workers would land permanent positions — and just 5% of the construction jobs would be filled by county residents. And construction workers are likely to spend their money across the nearby state line, in Nevada.

Worse, the project would cost the county $11 million to $12 million during the 30-month construction phase, with much of the money going to upgrade a historic two-lane road to the plant. Once the plant begins operation, the county estimates taxpayers will foot the bill for nearly $2 million a year in additional public safety and other services.

Two of California's other Mojave Desert counties, Riverside and San Bernardino, have made similar discoveries. Like Inyo, they are now pushing back against solar developers, asking them to cover the costs of servicing the new industry.

"Southern California is going to become the home to the state's ability to meet its solar goals," said Gerry Newcombe, public works director for San Bernardino County. "That's great, but where are the benefits to the county?"

Desert counties also are anticipating costly shifts in land use, including the conversion of taxable private property into habitat for endangered species. Solar developers are required to buy land to offset the loss of habitat caused by their projects. Once the property is acquired, it cannot be developed, which reduces its potential for tax revenue.

Two of the largest solar plants in the world are under construction in San Bernardino County. But county officials are not sure if revenue from the projects will offset the cost of additional fire and safety services, which analysts say will amount to millions of dollars a year.

For example, the $2.2-billion Ivanpah solar project at the county's eastern border has agreed to pay $377,000 annually, but that may not be enough to cover the county's new costs related to the plant. The county doesn't know how much solar plants will drain from its budget because the projects are being planned and approved too quickly for adequate analysis, officials say.

"We really support private development and generating jobs," Newcombe said. "On the other hand, I am concerned that it's going too fast. I don't know that we've had a chance to appreciate the long-term impacts."

The county is also worried because most of the land inside its borders is owned by the federal government, and up to 1 million acres of that — nearly 8% of the county — could be set aside for solar development, removing it from public access and recreational opportunities, Newcombe said.

Counties that object to the pace of development, however, have been scolded for standing in the way of progress. Not only is renewable energy a priority of the Obama administration, it is also the darling of California's chief executive.

Gov. Jerry Brown has vowed to "crush" opponents of solar projects. At the launch of a solar farm near Sacramento, the governor pledged: "It's not easy. There are gonna be screw-ups. There are gonna be bankruptcies. There'll be indictments and there'll be deaths. But we're gonna keep going — and nothing's gonna stop me."

Counties have little say because the state controls planning and licensing of large-scale projects. The California Energy Commission issues the permits for utility-scale solar farms, and counties depend on the commission's staff to look out for their interests.

To the extent that California counties are pushing back against industrial solar, the rebellion began in Riverside County more than a year ago.

Some 20 utility-scale solar farms are proposed in the eastern stretch of the county on 118,000 acres of federal land along the Interstate 10 corridor between Desert Center and Blythe.

The Riverside County Board of Supervisors considered charging companies a franchise fee to offset the effects on roads and public services and to compensate for the loss of recreation and tourism access to the 185 square miles of federal land. Local officials saw it as a matter of fairness. Public utilities pay 2% of gross receipts to the county, for example.

"The solar companies are the beneficiaries of huge government loans, tax credits and, most critically for me, property tax exemptions, at the expense of taxpayers," said county Supervisor John Benoit, referring to a variety of taxpayer-supported loans and grants available to large solar projects as part of the Obama administration's renewable energy initiative. "I came to the conclusion that my taxpayers need to get something back."

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Nov. 25

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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“Downton Abbey” Renewed for fourth Season by ITV

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “Downton Abbey” fans have something to be thankful for.

British network ITV has commissioned a fourth season of the hit historical drama, the network said Friday. The new season will consist of eight new episodes to premiere in fall 2013, with an extended episode for Christmas 2013. As with previous seasons, the opening and closing episodes will be feature-length.

“Downton Abbey” Season 4 will begin filming in February at Highclere Castle and Ealing Studios.

Noting that the upcoming season will see the inclusion of some new faces, “Downton Abbey” executive producer Gareth Neame said, “Viewers can look forward to more drama, comedy, love, hatred, jealousy, rivalry, ambition, despair and romance.”

Produced by NBC Universal’s Carnival Film & Television, the Emmy and Golden Glove-winning “Downton Abbey” airs on PBS in the U.S.

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M.I.T. Lab Hatches Ideas, and Companies, by the Dozens

HOW do you take particles in a test tube, or components in a tiny chip, and turn them into a $100 million company?

Dr. Robert Langer, 64, knows how. Since the 1980s, his Langer Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has spun out companies whose products treat cancer, diabetes, heart disease and schizophrenia, among other diseases, and even thicken hair.

The Langer Lab is on the front lines of turning discoveries made in the lab into a range of drugs and drug delivery systems. Without this kind of technology transfer, the thinking goes, scientific discoveries might well sit on the shelf, stifling innovation.

A chemical engineer by training, Dr. Langer has helped start 25 companies and has 811 patents, issued or pending, to his name. That’s not too far behind Thomas Edison, who had 1,093. More than 250 companies have licensed or sublicensed Langer Lab patents.

Polaris Venture Partners, a Boston venture capital firm, has invested $220 million in 18 Langer Lab-inspired businesses. Combined, these businesses have improved the health of many millions of people, says Terry McGuire, co-founder of Polaris.

Along the way, Dr. Langer and his lab, including about 60 postdoctoral and graduate students at a time, have found a way to navigate some slippery territory: the intersection of academic research and the commercial market.

Over the last 30 years, many universities — including M.I.T. — have set up licensing offices that oversee the transfer of scientific discoveries to companies. These offices have become a major pathway for universities seeking to put their research to practical use, not to mention add to their revenue streams.

In the sciences in particular, technology transfer has become a key way to bring drugs and other treatments to market. “The model of biomedical innovation relies on research coming out of universities, often funded by public money,” says Josephine Johnston, director of research at the Hastings Center, a bioethics research organization based in Garrison, N.Y.

Just a few of the products that have emerged from the Langer Lab are a small wafer that delivers a dose of chemotherapy used to treat brain cancer; sugar-sequencing tools that can be used to create new drugs like safer and more effective blood thinners; and a miniaturized chip (a form of nanotechnology) that can test for diseases.

The chemotherapy wafer, called the Gliadel, is licensed by Eisai Inc. The company behind the sugar-sequencing tools, Momenta Pharmaceuticals, raised $28.4 million in an initial public offering in 2004. The miniaturized chip is made by T2Biosystems,  which completed a $23 million round of financing in the summer of 2011.

“It’s inconvenient to have to send things to a lab,” so the company is trying to develop more sophisticated methods, says Dr. Ralph Weissleder, a co-founder, with Dr. Langer and others, of T2Biosystems and a professor at Harvard Medical School.

FOR Dr. Langer, starting a company is not the same as it was, say, for Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook. “Bob is not consumed with any one company,” says H. Kent Bowen, an emeritus professor of business administration at Harvard Business School who wrote a case study on the Langer Lab. “His mission is to create the idea.”

Dr. Bowen observes that there are many other academic laboratories, including highly productive ones, but that the Langer Lab’s combination of people, spun-out companies and publications sets it apart. He says Dr. Langer “walks into the great unknown and then makes these discoveries.”

Dr. Langer is well known for his mentoring abilities. He is “notorious for replying to e-mail in two minutes, whether it’s a lowly graduate school student or the president of the United States,” says Paulina Hill, who worked in his lab from 2009 to 2011 and is now a senior associate at Polaris Venture Partners. (According to Dr. Langer, he has corresponded directly with President Obama about stem cell research and federal funds for the sciences.)

Dr. Langer says he looks at his students “as an extended family,” adding that “I really want them to do well.”

And they have, whether in business or in academia, or a combination of the two. One former student, Ram Sasisekharan, helped found Momenta and now runs his own lab at M.I.T. Ganesh Venkataraman Kaundinya is Momenta’s chief scientific officer and senior vice president for research.

Hongming Chen is vice president of research at Kala Pharmaceuticals. Howard Bernstein is chief scientific officer at Seventh Sense Biosystems, a blood-testing company. Still others have taken jobs in the law or in government.

Dr. Langer says he spends about eight hours a week working on companies that come out of his lab. Of the 25 that he helped start, he serves on the boards of 12 and is an informal adviser to 4. All of his entrepreneurial activity, which includes some equity stakes, has made him a millionaire. But he says he is mainly motivated by a desire to improve people’s health.

Operating from the sixth floor of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research on the M.I.T. campus in Cambridge, Mass., Dr. Langer’s lab has a research budget of more than $10 million for 2012, coming mostly from federal sources.

The research in labs like Dr. Langer’s is eyed closely by pharmaceutical companies. While drug companies employ huge research and development teams, they may not be as freewheeling and nimble, Dr. Langer says. The basis for many long-range discoveries has “come out of academia, including gene therapy, gene sequencing and tissue engineering,” he says.

He has served as a consultant to pharmaceutical companies. Their large size, he says, can end up being an impediment.

“Very often when you are going for real innovation,” he says, “you have to go against prevailing wisdom, and it’s hard to go against prevailing wisdom when there are people who have been there for a long time and you have some vice president who says, ‘No, that doesn’t make sense.’ ”

Pharmaceutical companies are eager to tap into the talent at leading research universities. In 2008, for example, Washington University in St. Louis announced a $25 million pact with Pfizer to collaborate more closely on biomedical research.

But in some situations, the close — critics might say cozy — ties between business and academia have the potential to create conflicts of interest.

There was a controversy earlier this year when it was revealed that the president of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center owned stock in Aveo Oncology, which had announced earlier that the university would be leading clinical trials of one of its cancer drugs.  Last month, the University of Texas announced that he would be allowed to keep his ties with three pharmaceutical companies, including Aveo Oncology; his holdings will be placed in a blind trust.

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Lobbying, a Windfall and a Leader’s Family

Gilles Sabrie for 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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Larry Hagman dead at 81, portrayed notorious TV villain J.R. Ewing

(Reuters) – Larry Hagman, who created one of American television’s most supreme villains in the conniving, amoral oilman J.R. Ewing of “Dallas,” died on Friday, the Dallas Morning News reported. He was 81.

Hagman died at a Dallas hospital of complications from his battle with throat cancer, the newspaper said, quoting a statement from his family. He had suffered from liver cancer and cirrhosis of the liver in the 1990s after decades of drinking.

Hagman’s mother was stage and movie star Mary Martin and he became a star himself in 1965 on “I Dream of Jeannie,” a popular television sitcom in which he played Major Anthony Nelson, an astronaut who discovers a beautiful genie in a bottle.

“Dallas,” which made its premiere on the CBS network in 1978, made Hagman a superstar. The show quickly became one of the network’s top-rated programs, built an international following and inspired a spin-off, imitators and a revival in 2012.

“Dallas” was the night-time soap-opera story of a Texas family, fabulously wealthy from oil and cattle, and its plot brimmed with back-stabbing, double-dealing, family feuds, violence, adultery and other bad behavior.

In the middle of it all stood Hagman’s black-hearted J.R. Ewing – grinning wickedly in a broad cowboy hat and boots, plotting how to cheat his business competitors and cheat on his wife. He was the villain TV viewers loved to despise during the show’s 356-episode run from 1978 to 1991.

“I really can’t remember half of the people I’ve slept with, stabbed in the back or driven to suicide,” Hagman said of his character in Time magazine.

In his autobiography, “Hello Darlin’: Tall (and Absolutely True) Tales About My Life,” Hagman wrote that J.R. originally was not to be the focus of “Dallas” but that changed when he began ad-libbing on the set to make his character more outrageous and compelling.

‘WHO SHOT J.R.?’

To conclude its second season, the “Dallas” producers put together one of U.S. television’s most memorable episodes in which Ewing was shot by an unseen assailant. That gave fans months to fret over whether J.R. would survive and who had pulled the trigger. In the show’s opening the following season, it was revealed that J.R.’s sister-in-law, Kristin, with whom he had been having an affair, was behind the gun.

Hagman said an international publisher offered him $ 250,000 to reveal who had shot J.R. and he considered giving the wrong information and taking the money, but in the end, “I decided not to be so like J.R. in real life.”

The popularity of “Dallas” made Hagman one of the best-paid actors in television and earned him a fortune that even a Ewing would have coveted. He lost some of it, however, in bad oil investments before turning to real estate.

“I have an apartment in New York, a ranch in Santa Fe, a castle in Ojai outside of L.A., a beach house in Malibu and thinking of buying a place in Santa Monica,” Hagman said in a Chicago Tribune interview.

An updated “Dallas” series began in June 2012 on the TNT network with Hagman reprising his J.R. role with original cast members Linda Gray, who played J.R.’s long-suffering wife, Sue Ellen, and Patrick Duffy, who was his brother Bobby. The show was to focus on the sons of J.R. and Bobby.

Hagman had a wide eccentric streak. When he first met actress Lauren Bacall, he licked her arm because he had been told she did not like to be touched and he was known for leading parades on the Malibu beach and showing up at a grocery store in a gorilla suit. Above his Malibu home flew a flag with the credo “Vita Celebratio Est (Life Is a Celebration)” and he lived hard for many years.

In 1967, rock musician David Crosby turned him on to LSD, which Hagman said took away his fear of death, and Jack Nicholson introduced him to marijuana because Nicholson thought he was drinking too much.

Hagman had started drinking as a teenager and said he did not stop until the moment in 1992 when his doctor told him he had cirrhosis of the liver and could die within six months. Hagman wrote that for the past 15 years he had been drinking about four bottles of champagne a day, including while on the “Dallas” set.

LIVER TRANSPLANT

In July 1995, he was diagnosed with liver cancer, which led him to quit smoking, and a month later he underwent a liver transplant.

After giving up his vices, Hagman said he did not lose his zest for life.

“It’s the same old Larry Hagman,” he told a reporter. “He’s just a littler sober-er.”

Hagman was born on September 21, 1931, in Weatherford, Texas, and his father was a lawyer who dealt with the Texas oil barons Hagman would later come to portray. He was still a boy when his parents divorced and he went to Los Angeles with Martin, who would become a Broadway and Hollywood musical star.

Hagman eventually landed in New York to pursue acting, making his stage debut there in “The Taming of the Shrew.” In New York, he married Maj Axelsson in 1954 while they were in a production of “South Pacific. The marriage produced two children, Heidi and Preston.

Hagman served in the Air Force, spending five years in Europe as the director of USO shows, and on his return to New York he took a starring role in the daytime soap “The Edge of Night.” His breakthrough came in 1965 when he landed the “I Dream of Jeannie” role opposite Barbara Eden.

In his later years, Hagman became an advocate for organ transplants and an anti-smoking campaigner. He also was devoted to solar energy, telling the New York Times he had a $ 750,000 solar panel system at his Ojai estate, and made a commercial in which he portrayed a J.R. Ewing who had forsaken oil for solar power. He was a longtime member of the Peace and Freedom Party, a minor leftist organization in California.

Hagman told the Times that after death he wanted his remains to be “spread over a field and have marijuana and wheat planted and harvest it in a couple of years and then have a big marijuana cake, enough for 200 to 300 people. People would eat a little of Larry.”

(Writing by Bill Trott in Washington; Additional reporting by Alex Dobuszinkis in Los Angeles; Editing by Peter Cooney)

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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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