F.D.A. to Vote on Restricting Hydrocodone Products Like Vicodin

Trying to stem the scourge of prescription drug abuse in the United States, an advisory panel of experts to the Food and Drug Administration plans to vote Friday on whether to toughen restrictions on hydrocodone products like Vicodin, the most widely used narcotic painkillers in the country.

The recommendation, which the F.D.A. would likely follow, would limit access to the drugs by making them harder to prescribe, a major policy change that advocates said could help ease the growing problem of addiction to painkillers.

The change would have sweeping consequences for doctors, pharmacists and patients. Under the new rules, refills without a new prescription would be forbidden, as would faxed prescriptions and those called in by phone. Only written prescriptions from a doctor would be allowed and pharmacists and distributors would be required to store the drugs in special vaults. The vote comes after similar legislation in Congress failed last year, after intense lobbying by pharmacists and drugstores.

Prescription drugs account for about three-quarters of all drug overdoses in the United States, with the number of deaths more than tripling since 1999, according to federal data. Since 2008, deaths from overdoses have outpaced deaths from car accidents.

The F.D.A. convened the panel, made up of scientists and other experts, after a request by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which contends that the drugs are among the most frequently abused painkillers in the country.

“This is the federal government saying, ‘we need to tighten the reins on this drug,'” said Scott R. Drab, associate professor of pharmacy and therapeutics at the University of Pittsburgh. “Pulling in the rope is a way to rein in abuse, and consequently, addiction.”

At a two-day hearing at F.D.A. headquarters in Silver Spring, Md., many speakers opposed the change, including advocates for nursing home patients, who said older, frail residents needing pain medication would be required to make the arduous trip to a doctor’s office to continue using hydrocodone products. Other experts questioned how effective the change would be. Oxycodone, another highly abused painkiller, has been in the more restrictive category since it came on the market, but the limited access does not seem to have stemmed abuse, they said.

But others including parents who had lost their children to prescription drug abuse, as well as doctors and pharmacists, testified, sometimes emotionally. . Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat of West Virginia, where the scourge has been particularly deadly, made an impassioned plea for tougher restrictions.

“When I go back to West Virginia, I hear how easy it is for anybody to get their hands on hydrocodone drugs,” Mr. Manchin said on Friday. “For underage children, these drugs are easier to get than beer or cigarettes.”

He added that the current, less restrictive status “is fueling the prescription drug epidemic today.”

Dr. James P. Rathmell, chief of the division of pain medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, said hydrocodone products have similar biological effects as oxycodone products, and should unquestionably be in the same category of restrictiveness.

“Knowing what we know today, it was a mistake,” Dr. Rathmell said, referring to hydrocodone products being placed in the looser category when they came to market. “It should be corrected.”

Dr. Timothy Deer, chief doctor at the Center for Pain Relief in Charleston, W.Va., said that he feared for older patients, particularly in rural areas, who would have to drive great distances to get prescriptions renewed. But, he said, hydrocodone products have been by far the most widely prescribed painkiller because the restrictions were so loose. And on balance, particularly in a hard-hit state like his, the public health benefits of a recommendation to toughen restrictions on the drug probably outweigh the harm of additional burdens on legitimate pain patients.

“At the end of the day, the benefits of reducing abuse will outweigh the harm to legitimate pain patients,” he said. “This will likely reduce the amount of drug falling into the wrong hands.”

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DealBook: Compuware Rejects Elliott's $2.3 Billion Bid

11:46 a.m. | Updated

Compuware said on Friday that its board had rejected a $2.3 billion takeover bid by Elliott Management, arguing that the hedge fund’s offer was too low.

Instead, the business software maker said that it was focused on its own corporate turnaround blueprint, including a three-year plan to cut costs and an effort to spin off its Covisint business communication products arm. It also unveiled plans to pay a 50-cent quarterly dividend, beginning next quarter.

Compuware said that Elliott’s offer of $11 a share, made last month, would not deliver enough value to shareholders, compared to the improvements that its self-help plan would yield.

“We believe that selling the company at $11.00 per share does not take into account our progress returning the business to profitable growth and our future prospects,” Bob Paul, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement.

The decision by Compuware sets up a potential clash with Elliott, which has managed to score some big wins in its battles with technology companies. It bid for Novell, leading the software maker to sell itself to Attachmate for $2.2 billion.

People close to Elliott have argued that the hedge fund was fully prepared to pay the $2.3 billion it had offered for Compuware. But the hedge fund also believed that private equity firms would also express interest.

Though shares in Compuware began rising after Elliott disclosed an 8 percent stake in the company in November, they have remained largely below the $11-a-share offer, implying investor skepticism about a deal being done. The stock closed on Thursday at $10.76.

Jesse Cohn, the Elliott portfolio manager overseeing the hedge fund’s bid, said in a statement: ““This is a good outcome. Compuware has granted our request for access to diligence to confirm an offer for the company. We will immediately reach out to negotiate an appropriate N.D.A. and look forward to moving quickly to engage in diligence with the help of our legal and financial advisors. We remain very interested in the company.”

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Chinese Officials Fired Over Chongqing Sex Scandal

BEIJING — The young women met the officials for illicit trysts with video cameras hidden in their purses. Every detail of the encounters was recorded. Then a group of men confronted the officials with the video recordings and made demands.

China’s state news media reported on Friday details of a sex extortion ring that brazenly operated “honey traps” in the southwest metropolis of Chongqing for several years. The widening scandal, which first emerged late last year, has led to the dismissals of at least 11 officials of the Communist Party, government or state-owned companies for having sex with women in the ring and then being blackmailed by the men who had set up the snares.

Xi Jinping, China’s new top leader, has vowed to root out official corruption and said this week that “flies,” or relatively low-level bureaucrats, as well as top officials he referred to as “tigers,” must be brought down.

The most famous victim of the sex ring scandal has been Lei Zhengfu, a frog-eyed, middle-aged district party chief who was secretly filmed having sex in a hotel room in 2008 with a young woman. In late November, the leaked video of Mr. Lei began circulating on the Internet and he became the poster boy for a series of low-level or midlevel officials who have been brought down by scandals, often sexual in nature, across the nation. Mr. Lei was removed from his job and placed under investigation soon after the video appeared online. Now, according to Xinhua, the state news agency, 10 other officials have been removed as well for falling prey to the sex ring. Five of them were executives in state-owned companies.

The sex scandal might have come out earlier but Bo Xilai, the Chongqing party chief at the time, and Wang Lijun, his police chief, buried the results of an investigation into the ring. Mr. Bo and Mr. Wang were both felled last year by the fallout from the murder of a British business executive arranged by Mr. Bo’s wife; Mr. Bo is expected to be tried soon on a wide range of criminal charges. While the two scandals are unrelated, the airing of the blackmail ring at this time could reflect a decision by the Chinese leadership to highlight other problems in Chongqing under Mr. Bo’s rule.

The ring’s mastermind was a man named Xiao Ye, according to a report by Southern Metropolis Daily on Wednesday that was cited by Xinhua in its Friday article. Three women were used as bait. The state media reports did not say exactly what the officials gave the men in return for keeping their involvement secret, but one report said that a company run by Mr. Xiao was involved in a real estate development project in the district governed by Mr. Lei.

Mr. Xiao gave the women a list of Chongqing officials whom the women were to contact, Xinhua reported. The women sent text messages to the officials. They would tell the officials they worked for a local real estate company and had met the official at a banquet.

“Hope we can stay in touch a lot,” they wrote. If the officials said they had no memory of the meeting, the women would invoke the name of a chief executive and pretend to be angry that the official had forgotten the woman already. If the official bit, the woman would continue flirting by text or transmit seductive photos of themselves, Xinhua said.

A woman would then meet with the official in an upscale hotel to have tea, coffee or a snack. The official would hand her gifts, such as jewelry. Eventually, when the two were ready to have sex, the woman would make sure to show up at the hotel room with a hidden camera. The official would rarely stay the entire night, but the video caught all the action.

This happened over and over until the video was clear enough, Xinhua reported. Then at a later tryst, several men in the ring would show up while the official and the woman were in the middle of having sex. One of the men would pretend to be the woman’s boyfriend and throw a fit. Behind him would be another man pretending to be a private detective. A third man would then show up and say he was a member of a gang.

They would beat up the official and show him the video. Mr. Xiao entered the scene afterward to work out an agreement with the official and assure him that the video would remain buried, as long as the demands were met.

Of the victims, Mr. Lei was the one who tried to fight back most vigorously, one report said. He assumed the video would eventually come out, and so he went to senior Chongqing officials to explain his plight. Wang Lijun, who was then the police chief of Chongqing, took charge of the case. By 2009, the investigation was done and Mr. Wang and Mr. Bo had the results. But they decided to quash the case or ignored it, and the officials who were found to have been victims of the ring were eventually promoted.

The Xinhua article on Friday said people have been especially surprised that one district party chief in particular, Peng Zhiyong, who holds a doctorate, fell victim to the honey trap.

“He was spoken highly of by the people and enjoyed a reputation for being talented, smart, eloquent and outstanding in all ways,” Xinhua said. In addition, the report said, he “was widely regarded as having enormous political potential.”

Amy Qin contributed research.

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DealBook: Choice for S.E.C. Is Ex-Prosecutor, in Signal to Wall St.

2:48 p.m. | Updated President Obama tapped Mary Jo White, a former United States attorney turned white-collar defense lawyer, to be the next chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Mr. Obama announced the nomination at the White House on Thursday afternoon. As part of the event, the White House also renominated Richard Cordray to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a role he has held for the last year under a recess appointment.

In its choice of Ms. White and Mr. Cordray, the White House is sending a signal about the importance of holding Wall Street accountable for wrongdoing. Both picks are former prosecutors.

Regulatory chiefs are often market experts or academics. But Ms. White spent nearly a decade as United States attorney in New York, the first woman named to this post. Among her prominent cases, she oversaw the prosecution of the mafia boss John Gotti as well as the people responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. She is now working the other side, defending Wall Street firms and executives as a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton.

As the attorney general of Ohio, Mr. Cordray made a name for himself suing Wall Street companies in the wake of the financial crisis. He undertook a series of prominent lawsuits against big names in the finance world, including Bank of America and the American International Group.

The White House expects Ms. White, 65, and Mr. Cordray, 53, to draw on their prosecutorial backgrounds while carrying out a broad regulatory agenda under the Dodd-Frank Act. Congress enacted the law, which mandates a regulatory overhaul, in response to the 2008 financial crisis.

Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said Ms. White has “an incredibly impressive resume” and that her appointment along with the renomination of Mr. Cordray sends an important signal.

“The president believes that appointment and the renomination he’s making today demonstrate the commitment he has to carrying out Wall Street reform, making sure we have the rules of the road that are necessary and that are being enforced in a way” to avoid a crisis like that of 2008, Mr. Carney said.

Another White House official added that Ms. White and Mr. Cordray will “serve in top enforcement roles” in part so that “Wall Street is held accountable and middle-class Americans never again are harmed by the abuses of a few.”

Ms. White will succeed Elisse B. Walter, a longtime S.E.C. official, who took over as chairwoman after Mary L. Schapiro stepped down as the agency’s leader in December. Mr. Cordray joined the consumer bureau in 2011 as its enforcement director.

The nominations could face a mixed reception in Congress. The Senate already declined to confirm Mr. Cordray, with Republicans vowing to block any candidate for the consumer bureau, a new agency created to rein in the financial industry’s excesses. It is unclear whether the White House and Mr. Cordray will face another standoff the second time around.

Mr. Carney argued that there were no substantive objections to Mr. Cordray’s confirmation, only political ones. “He is absolutely the right person for the job,” Mr. Carney said.

Ms. White is expected to receive broader support on Capitol Hill. Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat, declared that Ms. White was a “tough-as-nails prosecutor” who “will not shy away from enforcing the laws to ensure that markets operate fairly.”

But she could face questions about her command of arcane financial minutiae. She was a director of the Nasdaq stock market, but has otherwise built her career on the law-and-order side of the securities industry.

People close to the S.E.C. note, however, that her husband, John W. White, is a veteran of the agency. From 2006 through 2008, he was head of the S.E.C.’s division of corporation finance, which oversees public companies’ disclosures and reporting.

Some Democrats also might question her path through the revolving door, in and out of government. While seen as a strong enforcer as a United States attorney, she went on in private practice to defend some of Wall Street’s biggest names, including Kenneth D. Lewis, a former head of Bank of America. She also represented JPMorgan Chase and the board of Morgan Stanley. Last year, the N.F.L. hired her to investigate allegations that the New Orleans Saints carried out a bounty system for hurting opponents.

Consumer advocates generally praised her appointment on Thursday. “Mary Jo White was a tough, smart, no-nonsense, broadly experienced and highly accomplished prosecutor,” said Dennis Kelleher, head of Better Markets, the nonprofit advocacy group. “She knew who the bad guys were, went after them and put them in prison when they broke the law.”

The appointment comes after the departure of Ms. Schapiro, who announced she would step down from the S.E.C. in late 2012. In a four-year tenure, she overhauled the agency after it was blamed for missing the warning signs of the crisis.

Since her exit, Washington and Wall Street have been abuzz with speculation about the next S.E.C. chief. President Obama quickly named Ms. Walter, then a Democratic commissioner at the agency, but her appointment was seen as a short-term solution. It is unclear if she will shift back to the commissioner role if Ms. White is confirmed.

In the wake of Ms. Schapiro’s exit, several other contenders surfaced, including Sallie L. Krawcheck, a longtime Wall Street executive. Richard G. Ketchum, chairman and chief executive of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Wall Street’s internal policing organization, was also briefly mentioned as a long-shot contender.

Peter Baker and Kitty Bennett contributed reporting

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New Mutations Discovered in Melanomas

In a leap forward in understanding the basic science of one of the most lethal cancers, two groups of researchers have found mutations in most melanomas that are unlike any they have seen before in cancer. The changes are in regions that control genes, not in the genes themselves. The mutations are exactly the type caused by exposure to ultraviolet light, indicating they might be among the first DNA changes in a cell’s path to melanoma.

The discoveries, published online Thursday in two papers in the journal Science Express, do not immediately suggest new treatments or ways to prevent melanoma, researchers said. But the findings help explain how melanomas — and, possibly, other cancers — develop and what drives their growth, insights that may be critical to long-term efforts to develop ways to prevent or stop the cancer.

For years, cancer researchers have searched for mutations in genes, but this time, they looked for — and found — mutations in a region that regulates genes. They did it by examining the entire DNA of multiple tumors, studying not just genes but also what has been called the dark matter, the 99 percent of the DNA that includes regions that control genes.

“You could think of this as one glimmer in what has been called cancer’s dark matter,” said Dr. Levi A. Garraway of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T.

The complete DNA sequences of 70 malignant melanomas led to the new discovery. A small control region was mutated in 7 out of 10 of the tumors, and also, the investigators found, in liver and bladder cancers. The cancer cells had one of two tiny changes that together were more common than any mutation ever found in the genes of melanoma.

A team led by Rajiv Kumar of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg and Dirk Schadendorf of the University of Essen looked for the mutations in a family whose members tended to get melanoma. Four relatives who developed melanoma had inherited one of them, while four who remained melanoma-free did not have it. They also found the mutation in a 36-year-old member of the family who had not developed melanoma but had had many moles, often a sign of risk in families prone to melanoma.

Their findings indicate that those who inherit the mutations might be born with cells that have taken a first step toward cancer.

The mutations spur cells to make an enzyme, telomerase, that keeps cells immortal by preventing them from gradually losing the ends of their chromosome, the telomeres. When telomeres erode, a cell dies. But the enzyme also has other, poorly understood functions that are thought to keep cancer cells alive, said Robert Weinberg, an M.I.T. researcher who studies telomerase and cancer and was not involved with the research. “The paradigm that it does nothing but extend telomeres is a gross oversimplification,” he said.

Abundant telomerase is so important to cancers that it occurs in 90 percent of them, said Immaculata De Vivo, a Harvard Medical School researcher who studies telomerase and cancer and directs a DNA sequencing program. She, too, was not involved with the research.

The results of the two studies presented in the papers “are like a court of law — it’s the preponderance of the evidence,” she said. “We all knew telomerase was important for cancer, but now we are finding the mechanisms, the machinery.”

Scientists were surprised that the mutations in the dark matter of melanoma tumors were so commonplace. Dr. Garraway and his colleagues had the entire DNA sequences for a collection of melanomas — genes as well as the rest of the DNA including areas that turn genes on and off.

“We said, ‘Let’s just take a look and see if there are any mutations in a regulatory region,” Dr. Garraway said.

At first, they looked at the DNA sequences of 19 tumors. They were amazed to find one or the other of the two mutations in 17 of them. So the researchers decided to look at 51 additional melanomas and a handful of bladder and liver cancers. The mutations popped up again.

“It was really quite striking,” Dr. Garraway said.

But it’s not clear how to reverse the mutations’ cancer-causing effects, Dr. Garraway said. And although people have long wanted to block telomerase production in cancer cells, they have not found a drug to do it.

Still, the findings are highly significant, experts said.

“We have always known that just looking at genes alone would provide a limited number of answers about why cancer develops,” said Elaine Mardis of Washington University, who was not involved with the research. “The brakes or the gas that control the genes that cause cancer are as important as gene mutations,” she said. The new papers, Dr. Mardis added, “show where additional answers may lie.”

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New Mutations Discovered in Melanomas

In a leap forward in understanding the basic science of one of the most lethal cancers, two groups of researchers have found mutations in most melanomas that are unlike any they have seen before in cancer. The changes are in regions that control genes, not in the genes themselves. The mutations are exactly the type caused by exposure to ultraviolet light, indicating they might be among the first DNA changes in a cell’s path to melanoma.

The discoveries, published online Thursday in two papers in the journal Science Express, do not immediately suggest new treatments or ways to prevent melanoma, researchers said. But the findings help explain how melanomas — and, possibly, other cancers — develop and what drives their growth, insights that may be critical to long-term efforts to develop ways to prevent or stop the cancer.

For years, cancer researchers have searched for mutations in genes, but this time, they looked for — and found — mutations in a region that regulates genes. They did it by examining the entire DNA of multiple tumors, studying not just genes but also what has been called the dark matter, the 99 percent of the DNA that includes regions that control genes.

“You could think of this as one glimmer in what has been called cancer’s dark matter,” said Dr. Levi A. Garraway of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T.

The complete DNA sequences of 70 malignant melanomas led to the new discovery. A small control region was mutated in 7 out of 10 of the tumors, and also, the investigators found, in liver and bladder cancers. The cancer cells had one of two tiny changes that together were more common than any mutation ever found in the genes of melanoma.

A team led by Rajiv Kumar of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg and Dirk Schadendorf of the University of Essen looked for the mutations in a family whose members tended to get melanoma. Four relatives who developed melanoma had inherited one of them, while four who remained melanoma-free did not have it. They also found the mutation in a 36-year-old member of the family who had not developed melanoma but had had many moles, often a sign of risk in families prone to melanoma.

Their findings indicate that those who inherit the mutations might be born with cells that have taken a first step toward cancer.

The mutations spur cells to make an enzyme, telomerase, that keeps cells immortal by preventing them from gradually losing the ends of their chromosome, the telomeres. When telomeres erode, a cell dies. But the enzyme also has other, poorly understood functions that are thought to keep cancer cells alive, said Robert Weinberg, an M.I.T. researcher who studies telomerase and cancer and was not involved with the research. “The paradigm that it does nothing but extend telomeres is a gross oversimplification,” he said.

Abundant telomerase is so important to cancers that it occurs in 90 percent of them, said Immaculata De Vivo, a Harvard Medical School researcher who studies telomerase and cancer and directs a DNA sequencing program. She, too, was not involved with the research.

The results of the two studies presented in the papers “are like a court of law — it’s the preponderance of the evidence,” she said. “We all knew telomerase was important for cancer, but now we are finding the mechanisms, the machinery.”

Scientists were surprised that the mutations in the dark matter of melanoma tumors were so commonplace. Dr. Garraway and his colleagues had the entire DNA sequences for a collection of melanomas — genes as well as the rest of the DNA including areas that turn genes on and off.

“We said, ‘Let’s just take a look and see if there are any mutations in a regulatory region,” Dr. Garraway said.

At first, they looked at the DNA sequences of 19 tumors. They were amazed to find one or the other of the two mutations in 17 of them. So the researchers decided to look at 51 additional melanomas and a handful of bladder and liver cancers. The mutations popped up again.

“It was really quite striking,” Dr. Garraway said.

But it’s not clear how to reverse the mutations’ cancer-causing effects, Dr. Garraway said. And although people have long wanted to block telomerase production in cancer cells, they have not found a drug to do it.

Still, the findings are highly significant, experts said.

“We have always known that just looking at genes alone would provide a limited number of answers about why cancer develops,” said Elaine Mardis of Washington University, who was not involved with the research. “The brakes or the gas that control the genes that cause cancer are as important as gene mutations,” she said. The new papers, Dr. Mardis added, “show where additional answers may lie.”

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Media Decoder Blog: A Resurgent Netflix Beats Projections, Even Its Own

1:51 p.m. | Updated For all those who have doubted its business acumen, Netflix had a resounding answer on Wednesday: 27.15 million.

That’s the number of American homes that were subscribers to the streaming service by the end of 2012, beating the company’s own projections for the fourth quarter after a couple of quarters of underwhelming results.

Netflix’s growth spurt in streaming — up by 2.05 million customers in the United States, from 25.1 million in the third quarter — was its biggest in nearly three years, and helped the company report net income of $7.9 million, surprising many analysts who had predicted a loss.

The results reflected just how far Netflix has come since the turbulence of mid-2011, when its botched execution of a new pricing plan for its services — streaming and DVDs by mail — resulted in an online flogging by angry customers. Investors battered its stock price, sending it from a high of around $300 in 2011 to as low as $53 last year.

“It’s risen from the ashes,” said Barton Crockett, a senior analyst at Lazard Capital Markets. “A lot of investors have been very skeptical that Netflix will work. With this earnings report, they’re making a strong argument that the business is real, that it will work.”

Investors, cheered by the results, sent Netflix shares soaring. By Thursday afternoon the shares were up more than 37 percent to $141.49.

Netflix’s fourth-quarter success was a convenient reminder to the entertainment and technology industries that consumers increasingly want on-demand access to television shows and movies. Streaming services by Amazon, Hulu and Redbox are all competing on the same playing field, but for now Netflix remains the biggest such service, and thus a pioneer for all the others.

“Our growth and our competitors’ growth shows just how large the opportunity is for Internet TV, where people get to control their viewing experience,” Netflix’s chief executive, Reed Hastings, said in a telephone interview Wednesday evening.

Questions persist, though, about whether Netflix will be able to attract enough subscribers to keep paying its ever-rising bills to content providers, which total billions of dollars in the years to come. The company said on Wednesday that it might take on more debt to finance more original programs, the first of which, the political thriller “House of Cards,” will have its premiere on the service on Feb. 1. Netflix committed about $100 million to make two seasons of “House of Cards,” one of five original programs scheduled to come out on the service this year.

“The virtuous cycle for us is to gain more subscribers, get more content, gain more subscribers, get more content,” Mr. Hastings said in an earnings conference call.

The company’s $7.9 million profit for the quarter represented 13 cents a share, surprising analysts who had expected a loss of 12 cents a share. The company said revenue of $945 million, up from $875 million in the quarter in 2011, was driven in part by holiday sales of new tablets and television sets.

Netflix added nearly two million new subscribers in other countries, though it continued to lose money overseas, as expected, and said it would slow its international expansion plans in the first part of this year.

The “flix” in Netflix, its largely forgotten DVD-by-mail business, fared a bit better than the company had projected, posting a loss of just 380,000 subscribers in the quarter, to 8.22 million. The losses have slowed for four consecutive quarters, indicating that the homes that still want DVDs really want DVDs.

On the streaming side, Netflix’s retention rate improved in the fourth quarter, suggesting growing customer satisfaction.

Asked whether the company’s reputation had fully recovered after its missteps in 2011, Mr. Hastings said, “We’re on probation at this point, but we’re not out of jail.”

He has emphasized subscriber happiness, even going so far as to say on Wednesday that “we really want to make it easy to quit” Netflix. If the exit door is well marked, he asserted, subscribers will be more likely to come back.

The hope is that original programs like “House of Cards” and “Arrested Development” will lure both old and new subscribers to the service. Those programs, plus the film output deal with the Walt Disney Company announced in December, affirm that Netflix cares more and more about being a gallery — with showy pieces that cannot be seen anywhere else — and less about being a library of every film and TV show ever made.

“They’re morphing into something that people understand,” said Mr. Crockett of Lazard Capital.

Mr. Hastings said this had been happening for years, but that it was becoming more apparent now to consumers and investors.

Mr. Hastings’s letter to investors brought up the elephant in the room, the activist investor Carl C. Icahn, who acquired nearly 10 percent of the company’s stock last October. Mr. Icahn, known for his campaigns for corporate sales and revampings, stated then that Netflix “may hold significant strategic value for a variety of significantly larger companies.”

Netflix subsequently put into place a shareholder rights plan, known as a poison pill, to protect itself against a forced sale by Mr. Icahn.

The company said on Wednesday, “We have no further news about his intentions, but have had constructive conversations with him about building a more valuable company.”

Factoring in the stock’s 30 percent rise since November and the after-hours action on Wednesday, Mr. Icahn’s stake has now more than doubled in value, to more than $700 million from roughly $320 million.

A version of this article appeared in print on 01/24/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: A Resurgent Netflix Beats Projections, Even Its Own.

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DealBook: Live Q. & A. on Wall Street's Untouchables

On Tuesday, “Frontline” investigated why the leaders of Wall Street had escaped prosecution for their role in the country’s financial crisis.

Peter Eavis of DealBook is moderating a conversation beginning at 2 p.m. Eastern time with the show’s producer, Martin Smith. Watch the show above and submit your questions now.

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Well: Can You Read the Face of Victory?

Picture a tennis player in the moment he scores a critical point and wins a tournament. Now picture his opponent in the instant he loses the point that narrowly cost him the title. Can you tell one facial expression from the other, the look of defeat from the face of victory?

Try your hand at the images below, of professional tennis players at competitive tournaments. All were included in a new study that suggests that the more intense an emotion, the harder it is to distinguish it in a facial expression.

The researchers found that when overwhelming feelings set in, the subtle cues that convey emotion are lost, and facial expressions tend to blur. The face of joy and celebration often appears no different from the look of grief and devastation. Winning looks like losing. Pain resembles pleasure.

But that is not the case when it comes to body language. In fact, the new study found, people are better able to identify extreme emotions by reading body language than by looking solely at facial expressions. But even though we pick up on cues from the neck down to interpret emotion, we instinctively assume that it is the face that tells us everything, said Hillel Aviezer, a psychologist who carried out the new research with colleagues at Princeton University.

“When emotions run high, the face becomes more malleable: it’s not clear if there’s positivity or negativity going on there,” he said. “People have this illusion that they’re reading all this information in the face. We found that the face is ambiguous in these situations and the body is critical.”

Dr. Aviezer and his colleagues, who published their work in the journal Science, carried out four experiments in which subjects were asked to identify emotions by looking at photographs of people in various situations. In some cases, the subjects were shown facial expressions alone. In others, they looked at body language, either alone or in combination with faces. The researchers chose photographs taken in moments when emotions were running high – as professional tennis players celebrated or agonized, as loved ones grieved at funerals, as needles punctured skin during painful body piercings.

According to classic behavioral theories, facial expressions are universal indicators of mood and emotion. So the more intense a particular emotion, the easier it should be to identify in the face. But the study showed the exact opposite. As emotions peaked in intensity, expressions became distorted, similar to the way cranking up the volume on a stereo makes the music unrecognizable.

“When emotions are extremely high, it’s as if the speakers are blaring and the signal is degraded,” said Dr. Aviezer, who is now at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “When the volume is that high, it’s hard to tell what song is playing.”

In one experiment, three groups of 15 people were shown photographs of professional tennis players winning and losing points in critical matches. When the subjects were shown the players’ expressions alone — separated from their bodies — they correctly identified their emotion only half of the time, which was no better than chance. When they looked at images of just the body with the face removed — or the body with the face intact — they were far more accurate at identifying emotions. Yet when asked, 80 percent said they were relying on the facial expressions alone. Twenty percent said they were going by body and facial cues together, and not a single one said they were looking only for gestures from the neck down.

Then, the researchers scrambled the photos, mixing faces and bodies together. The upset faces of players were randomly spliced onto the bodies of celebrating players, and vice versa.

When asked to judge the emotions, the subjects answered according to the body language. The facial expression did not seem to matter. If a losing face was spliced onto a celebrating body, the subjects tended to guess victory and jubilation. If they were looking at the face of an exuberant player placed on the body of an anguished player, the subjects guessed defeat and disappointment.

Although they were not aware of it, the subjects were clearly looking at body language, Dr. Aviezer said. Clenched fists, for example, suggested victory and celebration, while open or outstretched hands indicated a player’s disappointment.

In another experiment, the researchers looked at four other emotional “peaks.” For pain, they used the faces of men and women undergoing piercings. Grief was captured in images of mourners at a funeral. For joy, they used images of people on the reality television show “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” capturing their impassioned faces at the very moment they were shown their beautiful, brand new homes. And for pleasure, they went with a rather risqué option: images from an erotic Web site that showed faces at the height of orgasm.

Once again, the subjects could not correctly guess the emotions by looking at facial expressions alone. In fact, they were more likely to interpret “positive” faces as being “negative” more than the actual negative ones. When faces showing pleasure were spliced onto the body of someone in pain, for example, the subjects relied on body language and were often unaware that the facial expression was conveying the opposite emotion.

“There’s this point on ‘Extreme Makeover’ where people see their new house for the first time and the camera is on their face, so we have these wonderful photos of their expressions,” Dr. Aviezer said. “At that moment, they look like the most miserable people in the world. For a few seconds, it’s as if they are seeing their house burn down. They don’t look like you would expect.”

The researchers noted that they were not suggesting that facial expressions never indicate specific feelings – only that when the emotion is intense and at its peak, for those first few seconds, the expression is ambiguous. Dr. Aviezer said the facial musculature simply might not be suited for accurately conveying extremely intense feelings – in part because in the real world, so much of that is conveyed through situational context.

And this may not be limited to facial cues.

“Consider intense vocal expressions of grief versus joy or pleasure versus pain,” the researchers wrote in their paper. For example, imagine sitting in a coffee shop and hearing someone behind you shriek. Is it immediately obvious whether the emotion is a positive or negative one?

“When people are experiencing a very high level of excitation,” Dr. Aviezer said, “then we see this overlap in expressions.”

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DealBook: Microsoft May Back Dell Buyout

The effort to take Dell private has gained a prominent, if unusual, backer: Microsoft.

The software giant is in talks to help finance a takeover bid for Dell that would exceed $20 billion, a person briefed on the matter said on Tuesday. Microsoft is expected to contribute up to several billion dollars.

An investment by Microsoft — if it comes to pass — could be enough to push a leveraged buyout of the struggling computer maker over the goal line. Silver Lake, the private equity firm spearheading the takeover talks, has been seeking a deep-pocketed investor to join the effort. And Microsoft, which has not yet made a commitment, has more than $66 billion in cash on hand.

Microsoft and Silver Lake, a prominent investor in technology companies, are no strangers. The private equity firm was part of a consortium that sold Skype, the online video-chatting pioneer, to Microsoft for $8.5 billion nearly two years ago. And the two companies had discussed teaming up to make an investment in Yahoo in late 2011, before Yahoo decided against selling a minority stake in itself.

A vibrant Dell is an important part of Microsoft’s plans to make Windows more relevant for the tablet era, when more and more devices come with touch screens. Dell has been one of the most visible supporters of Windows 8 in its products.

That has been crucial at a time when Microsoft’s relationships with many PC makers have grown strained because of the company’s move into making computer hardware with its Surface family of tablets.

Frank Shaw, a spokesman for Microsoft, declined to comment.

If completed, a buyout of Dell would be the largest leveraged buyout since the financial crisis, reaching levels unseen since the takeovers of Hilton Hotels and the Texas energy giant TXU. Such a deal is taking advantage of Dell’s still-low stock price and the abundance of investors willing to buy up the debt issued as part of a transaction to take the company private. And Silver Lake has been working with Dell’s founder, Michael S. Dell, who is expected to contribute his nearly 16 percent stake in the company to a takeover bid.

Yet while many aspects of the potential deal have fallen into place, including a potential price of up to around $14 a share, talks between Dell and its potential buyers may still fall apart.

Shares of Dell closed up 2.2 percent on Tuesday, at $13.12. They began rising after CNBC reported Microsoft’s potential involvement in a leveraged buyout. Microsoft shares slipped 0.4 percent, to $27.15.

Microsoft’s lending a hand to Dell could make sense at a time when the PC industry is facing some of the biggest challenges in its history. Dell is one of Microsoft’s most significant, longest-lasting partners in the PC business and among the most committed to creating machines that run Windows, the operating system that is the foundation of much of Microsoft’s profits.

But PC sales were in a slump for most of last year, as consumers diverted their spending to other types of devices like tablets and smartphones. Dell, the third-biggest maker of PCs in the world, recorded a 21 percent decline in shipments of PCs during the fourth quarter of last year from the same period in 2011, according to IDC.

In a joint interview in November, Mr. Dell and Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, exchanged friendly banter, as one would expect of two men who have been in business together for decades.

Mr. Dell said Mr. Ballmer had gone out of his way to reassure him that Microsoft’s Surface computers would not hurt Dell sales.

“We’ve never sold all the PCs in the world,” said Mr. Dell, sitting in a New York hotel room brimming with new Windows 8 computers made by his company. “As I’ve understood Steve’s plans here, if Surface helps Windows 8 succeed, that’s going to be good for Windows, good for Dell and good for our customers. We’re just fine with all that.”

Microsoft has been willing to open its purse strings in the past to help close partners. Last April, Microsoft committed to invest more than $600 million in Barnes & Noble’s electronic books subsidiary, in a deal that ensures a source of electronic books for Windows devices. Microsoft also agreed in 2011 to provide the Finnish cellphone maker Nokia billions of dollars’ worth of various forms of support, including marketing and research and development assistance, in exchange for Nokia’s adopting Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system.

A version of this article appeared in print on 01/23/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Microsoft May Back Dell Buyout.

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