DealBook: Ex-Peregrine Chief Sentenced to 50 Years in Prison

8:33 p.m. | Updated

A prominent futures-industry executive was sentenced to 50 years in prison on Thursday for embezzling from clients and misleading banks for two decades.

Russell Wasendorf Sr., the chief executive of the now-defunct brokerage firm the Peregrine Financial Group, stole more than $215 million, money that a judge said is likely never to be recovered.

Dressed in orange prison garb, his wrists and ankles shackled, Mr. Wasendorf sat expressionless as Judge Linda Reade of the United States District Court in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, handed down the maximum sentence recommended by the government.

“The lengthy prison sentence imposed today is just punishment for a con man who built a business on smoke and mirrors,” said Sean Berry, acting United States attorney in Cedar Rapids.

Mr. Wasendorf’s penalty is the latest in a string of stiff sentences handed down by judges for financial crimes. Bernard L. Madoff received 150 years for perpetrating the largest Ponzi scheme ever uncovered. Allen Stanford is serving a 110-year term after being convicted of swindling investors of nearly a $7 billion. Thomas J. Petters got a 50-year sentence for defrauding investors of nearly $4 billion.

Given the extremely lengthy sentences and advanced age of some of the defendants, many of these terms are largely symbolic, intended to reflect the gravity of the crimes and the need for retribution.

The fraud carried out by Mr. Wasendorf, 64, took place more than 1,000 miles from Wall Street, in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Federal regulators discovered the crime last summer after local police found Mr. Wasendorf unconscious in his car in Peregrine’s parking lot, a hose running from the exhaust pipe into the passenger compartment. He left a detailed suicide note explaining his crimes.

Mr. Wasendorf stole millions of dollars from his customers at Peregrine, which also did business as PFGBest, by using laser printers and software like Photoshop and Excel to make near-perfect replicas of account statements from US Bank. He duped regulators by supplying them with a false post-office box address for sending forms to the bank, which he would then intercept and send back on forged US Bank letterhead.

Mr. Wasendorf said that he acted alone, keeping his scheme from his approximately 240 employees by being the only Peregrine employee with access to customers’ accounts. No one else, including his son, Russell Wasendorf Jr., who worked at the firm, has been charged in the case.

“With careful concealment and blunt authority, I was able to hide my fraud from others at P.F.G.,” he wrote in his suicide note.

Mr. Wasendorf’s fraud shocked the financial world, coming just months after the implosion of MF Global, a commodities and futures brokerage firm where about $1 billion in client money disappeared. The scandal raised questions about oversight failures in the futures industry. Futures brokerage firms like Peregrine match buyers and sellers of contracts for commodities, charging a small commission for the service.

Peregrine’s clients — and Mr. Wasendorf’s 13,000 victims — including speculators betting on the price of orange juice and farmers who use such contracts to protect themselves from large price fluctuations.

The case also stunned Cedar Falls, a town of 40,000 perhaps best known as the home of the University of Northern Iowa, the college where Mr. Wasendorf, an Iowa native, earned his degree. He started his business there in the late 1960s before moving it to Chicago, the epicenter of the futures industry. (Cedar Falls is about 60 miles north of Cedar Rapids, where Mr. Wasendorf was sentenced.)

In 2009, Mr. Wasendorf returned to Cedar Falls, spending $20 million to build a gleaming headquarters on the outskirts of town. A delegation of Iowa lawmakers, including Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, attended the office’s grand opening.

He became a local hero, creating jobs, sponsoring numerous charitable causes and opening two restaurants in town. His Italian eatery, myVerona, became a Cedar Falls hot spot and a coveted place to land a job. In 2010, Mr. Wasendorf paid for the entire staff to travel to Italy — visiting Milan, Parma and Modena — to hone their culinary skills and sample the authentic cuisine.

“How can I expect them to prepare and cook north Italian food if they haven’t experienced it?” Mr. Wasendorf told The Waterloo Cedar Falls Courier.

His estate, a compound carved out of Iowa farmland, featured a 1,000-bottle wine cellar and a U-shaped indoor swimming pool with a retractable glass-paneled roof. He owned a private jet — nicknamed Air Wasendorf — that he flew out of nearby Waterloo, traveling frequently to Chicago for meetings.

Judge Reade rejected any leniency for Mr. Wasendorf because of his contributions to the community. “It is easy to be generous with other people’s money,” she said.

Iowa newspapers nicknamed Mr. Wasendorf “the Madoff of the Midwest.” Though Mr. Wasendorf’s criminal proceeds were a tiny fraction of Mr. Madoff’s, the two men suggested similar reasons for why they turned to a life of crime.

Mr. Madoff has said in interviews that he began his fraud after his investment performance soured and he couldn’t admit defeat. Similarly, Mr. Wasendorf, in his confession, said he began to steal from his clients when his business slumped and he began to run out of money.

“I guess my ego was too big to admit failure,” wrote Mr. Wasendorf. “So I cheated.”

On Thursday, Mr. Wasendorf, gaunt and diminished, expressed deep remorse.

“I feel I fully deserve whatever sentence I’m given,” he said. “The punishment I’ve caused myself is worse than anything you can impose.”

A version of this article appeared in print on 02/01/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Ex-Peregrine Chief Sentenced to 50 Years in Prison.

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Hagel to stress opposition to a nuclear Iran in Senate testimony

WASHINGTON -- President Obama’s nominee for secretary of Defense, former Sen. Chuck Hagel, will stress at his confirmation hearing Thursday that he opposes letting Iran acquire nuclear weapons and will focus on developing military options to set back Tehran’s program, according to a U.S. official familiar with his planned testimony.

It will be Hagel’s first chance to explain his views publicly since his selection last month ignited fierce opposition from several former Republican colleagues and pro-Israel groups. They contend Hagel was not tough enough on Iran during his two terms as a GOP senator from Nebraska, and warn he might not push for a U.S. attack on Iran if one is needed.

“He’s going to be very clear that he fully supports the president’s policy of preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon,” said the U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because Hagel had not yet testified. “His job as secretary of Defense is to ensure that the military is prepared for any contingency, and he believes all options should be on the table, including military options.”

Hagel’s willingness to back the use of force against Iran is likely to be the key area of questioning during what is expected to be a daylong hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee.

After a shaky start, Hagel’s nomination has picked up increasing support from Democrats, and the first Republican, Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, announced Monday that he would vote for Hagel.

White House officials say they expect more Republicans to back Hagel and predict that when the full Senate votes, he will win more than the 60 votes necessary to avoid the threat of a filibuster.

Some pro-Israel groups have greeted Hagel’s nomination with opposition or lukewarm support. Even Democrats who back Hagel are determined to press him for greater clarity on how long diplomatic pressure and sanctions on Iran should be given to work before a military strike becomes necessary.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the committee, said “most Democrats are leaning very strongly” for Hagel, including himself. “That doesn’t mean I don’t have questions,” he added.

Many Republicans have not forgiven Hagel for publicly criticizing the George W. Bush administration for its handling of the war in Iraq, and they are likely to be considerably harsher in tone.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), speaking on the Senate floor Wednesday afternoon, said Hagel’s nomination had “already done damage to the United States’ credibility” in dealing with Iran.

“I realize that Sen. Hagel is now repudiating many of his past actions and statements,” he added. “But we’ve seen this before.”

Like Obama, Hagel has long called for a mix of negotiations and international economic sanctions to pressure Iran, insisting that military action should be considered only as a last resort. As he has sought support for his nomination, Hagel has emphasized that unilateral U.S. sanctions and even military action could be required.

“If Iran continues to flout its international obligations, it should continue to face severe and growing consequences,” Hagel said in response to written questions from the committee. ‘‘While there is time and space for diplomacy, backed by pressure, the window is closing. Iran needs to demonstrate it is prepared to negotiate seriously.’’

Ironically, the pressure on Hagel to come out strongly for a possible military strike against Iran comes as some Israeli officials, who have long pressed the Obama administration to consider a preemptive attack, say Iran appears to have backed away, at least for now, from what the West believes is a program to develop a nuclear bomb.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the top Republican on the panel, said last week that he and Hagel were “too philosophically opposed on the issues" for Inhofe to support his nomination, citing Hagel’s support for defense budget cuts and for cutting nuclear stockpiles. Inhofe was one of three Republicans who voted Tuesday against confirming Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) as secretary of State.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday declined to rule out the possibility that Republicans would require a 60-vote threshold for confirming Hagel.

“Sen. Hagel hasn't had his hearing yet, and I think it's too early to predict the conditions under which his nomination will be considered,” McConnell said.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has said he would block Hagel’s nomination from coming to a vote unless the current Pentagon chief, Leon E. Panetta, agrees to testify about the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya. A White House official downplayed the possibility that Hagel’s nomination could be blocked, saying negotiations were underway to let Panetta testify.

david.cloud@latimes.com

michael.memoli@latimes.com

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Amazon's Future Is Not in Selling Stuff — And That's a Good Thing

During Amazon’s wonkish earnings call this week, Chief Financial Officer Tom Szkutak revealed a number that offered a surprising glimpse into the company’s ambitious future — a future where Amazon doesn’t sell stuff. At least not directly.

In the Q&A with analysts, Szkutak said that a full 39 percent of the “product units” sold on Amazon during the most recent quarter were from third-party sellers, up from 36 percent a year earlier. In other words, more than a third of everything sold on Amazon during the last three months wasn’t sold by Amazon itself, but by someone else selling through Amazon.

Szkutak went on to say that unit sales on Amazon overall grew 32 percent during the quarter. Third-party sales rose at an even faster clip — more than 40 percent.

When I shop on Amazon, I tend to check price first, then reviews, then whether the thing I want to buy is eligible for Prime. Only then do I tend to check the actual seller, which Amazon lists below whether the item is in stock. From the success of third-party sales on Amazon, I’m clearly not the only person indifferent to who has title to the merchandise I’m buying. If it’s on Amazon, I tend to think of it as from Amazon.

That might not always be wise, since third-party sellers might, for instance, have a different return policy than Amazon’s standard guidelines. But that kind of variation seems less and less likely as Amazon makes standardization the most appealing option.

The company’s not-so-secret secret to smoothing the path for third-party sellers is Fulfillment by Amazon, the Amazon Web Services of non-digital stuff. In the same way that Amazon leveraged its own existing digital infrastructure to become the backend of many of the web’s most popular sites, Fulfillment by Amazon offers up the company’s existing physical infrastructure to third-party sellers who want to outsource such joyless tasks as warehousing their inventory, shipping orders and handling returns.

While Fulfillment by Amazon gives even small mom-and-pop sellers access to Amazon’s global visibility and reach, the arrangement also works to Amazon’s advantage. Last year, Amazon opened up 20 new fulfillment centers and has plans for several more, including one near San Francisco and three planned for Texas, each more than 1 million square feet in size. By investing so much in shelf space, Amazon has every incentive to keep those shelves filled. And the more third-party stuff Amazon can move through its distribution hubs, the better, since that’s all inventory Amazon doesn’t have to pay for itself. As analysts at Baird Equity Research point out, third-party sales are 100 percent gross margin for Amazon. In other words, the only cost to Amazon of providing third-party fulfillment is money they would have spent anyway on the infrastructure, labor, transportation and whatever else they need to support their direct sales operation.

Considering these advantages, third-party sales loom as an important part of Amazon’s business future. Last year, sales of services — including commissions on third-party sales — accounted for about 15 percent of Amazon’s total sales. If current trends continue, that percentage will rise, giving all the more reason to stop thinking of Amazon as a seller of stuff and to start thinking of the world’s biggest online retailer as a platform for stuff — an API for the material world.

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ABC orders pilots for “Big Thunder” drama, Gothic soap opera

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – ABC has ordered pilots for the dramas “Big Thunder” and “Gothica,” the network said Tuesday.

“Big Thunder,” which is written by “Ice Age” writer Jason Fuchs (pictured) and executive produced by Chris Morgan (“Wanted,” “The Troop”) follows a brilliant doctor in late 19th century New York whose family is given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to relocate to a frontier mining town run by a powerful, but mysterious tycoon. However, they quickly realize that not everything in Big Thunder is as it seems.

ABC Studios is producing the pilot, which is based on the Big Mountain Thunder Railroad ride at several Disney-owned theme parks.

“Gothica,” meanwhile, is described as a “sexy gothic soap opera set in present day” that “weaves together a mythology that incorporates the legends of Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, Frankenstein and Dorian Gray among others.”

The project, written by Matt Lopez, comes from ABC Studios and the Mark Gordon Company.

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Well: Myths of Weight Loss Are Plentiful, Researcher Says

If schools reinstated physical education classes, a lot of fat children would lose weight. And they might never have gotten fat in the first place if their mothers had just breast fed them when they were babies. But be warned: obese people should definitely steer clear of crash diets. And they can lose more than 50 pounds in five years simply by walking a mile a day.

Those are among the myths and unproven assumptions about obesity and weight loss that have been repeated so often and with such conviction that even scientists like David B. Allison, who directs the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, have fallen for some of them.

Now, he is trying to set the record straight. In an article published online today in The New England Journal of Medicine, he and his colleagues lay out seven myths and six unsubstantiated presumptions about obesity. They also list nine facts that, unfortunately, promise little in the way of quick fixes for the weight-obsessed. Example: “Trying to go on a diet or recommending that someone go on a diet does not generally work well in the long term.”

Obesity experts applauded this plain-spoken effort to dispel widespread confusion about obesity. The field, they say, has become something of a quagmire.

“In my view,” said Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, a Rockefeller University obesity researcher, “there is more misinformation pretending to be fact in this field than in any other I can think of.”

Others agreed, saying it was about time someone tried to set the record straight.

“I feel like cheering,” said Madelyn Fernstrom, founding director of the University of Pittsburgh Weight Management Center. When it comes to obesity beliefs, she said, “We are spinning out of control.”

Steven N. Blair, an exercise and obesity researcher at the University of South Carolina, said his own students believe many of the myths. “I like to challenge my students. Can you show me the data? Too often that doesn’t come into it.”

Dr. Allison sought to establish what is known to be unequivocally true about obesity and weight loss.

His first thought was that, of course, weighing oneself daily helped control weight. He checked for the conclusive studies he knew must exist. They did not.

“My goodness, after 50-plus years of studying obesity in earnest and all the public wringing of hands, why don’t we know this answer?” Dr. Allison asked. “What’s striking is how easy it would be to check. Take a couple of thousand people and randomly assign them to weigh themselves every day or not.”

Yet it has not been done.

Instead, people often rely on weak studies that get repeated ad infinitum. It is commonly thought, for example, that people who eat breakfast are thinner. But that notion is based on studies of people who happened to eat breakfast. Researchers then asked if they were fatter or thinner than people who happened not to eat breakfast — and found an association between eating breakfast and being thinner. But such studies can be misleading because the two groups might be different in other ways that cause the breakfast eaters to be thinner. But no one has randomly assigned people to eat breakfast or not, which could cinch the argument.

So, Dr. Allison asks, why do yet another study of the association between thinness and breakfast? “Yet, I can tell you that in the last two weeks I saw an association study of breakfast eating in Islamabad and another in Inner Mongolia and another in a country I never heard of.”

“Why are we doing these?” Dr. Allison asked. “All that time and effort is essentially wasted. The question is: ‘Is it a causal association?’” To get the answer, he added, “Do the clinical trial.”

He decided to do it himself, with university research funds. A few hundred people will be recruited and will be randomly assigned to one of three groups. Some will be told to eat breakfast every day, others to skip breakfast, and the third group will be given vague advice about whether to eat it or not.

As he delved into the obesity literature, Dr. Allison began to ask himself why some myths and misconceptions are so commonplace. Often, he decided, the beliefs reflected a “reasonableness bias.” The advice sounds so reasonable it must be true. For example, the idea that people do the best on weight-loss programs if they set reasonable goals sounds so sensible.

“We all want to be reasonable,” Dr. Allison said. But, he said, when he examined weight-loss studies he found no consistent association between the ambitiousness of the goal and how much weight was lost and how long it had stayed off. This myth, though, illustrates the tricky ground weight-loss programs have to navigate when advising dieters. The problem is that on average people do not lose much – 10 percent of their weight is typical – but setting 10 percent as a goal is not necessarily the best strategy. A very few lose a lot more and some people may be inspired by the thought of a really life-changing weight loss.

“If a patient says, ‘Do you think it is reasonable for me to lose 25 percent of my body weight,’ the honest answer is, ‘No. Not without surgery,’” Dr. Allison said. But, he said, “If a patient says, ‘My goal is to lose 25 percent of my body weight,’ I would say, ‘Go for it.’”

Yet all this negativism bothers people, Dr. Allison conceded. When he talks about his findings to scientists, they often say: “O.K., you’ve convinced us. But what can we do? We’ve got to do something.” He replies that scientists have an ethical duty to make clear what is established and what is speculation. And while it is fine to recommend things like bike paths or weighing yourself daily, scientists must make sure they preface their advice with the caveat that these things seem sensible but have not been proven.

Among the best established methods is weight-loss surgery, which, of course, is not right for most people. But surgeons have done careful studies to show that on average people lose substanial amounts of weight and their health improves, Dr. Allison said. For dieters, the best results occur with structured programs, like ones that supply complete meals or meal replacements.

In the meantime, Dr. Allison said, it is incumbent upon scientists to change their ways. “We need to do rigorous studies,” he said. “We need to stop doing association studies after an association has clearly been demonstrated.”

“I never said we have to wait for perfect knowledge,” Dr. Allison said. But, as John Lennon said, “Just give me some truth.”

---

Here is an overview of the obesity myths looked at by the researchers and what is known to be true:

MYTHS

Small things make a big difference. Walking a mile a day can lead to a loss of more than 50 pounds in five years.

Set a realistic goal to lose a modest amount.

People who are too ambitious will get frustrated and give up.

You have to be mentally ready to diet or you will never succeed.

Slow and steady is the way to lose. If you lose weight too fast you will lose less in the long run.

Ideas not yet proven TRUE OR FALSE

Diet and exercise habits in childhood set the stage for the rest of life.

Add lots of fruits and vegetables to your diet to lose weight or not gain as much.

Yo-yo diets lead to increased death rates.

People who snack gain weight and get fat.

If you add bike paths, jogging trails, sidewalks and parks, people will not be as fat.

FACTS — GOOD EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT

Heredity is important but is not destiny.

Exercise helps with weight maintenance.

Weight loss is greater with programs that provide meals.

Some prescription drugs help with weight loss and maintenance.

Weight-loss surgery in appropriate patients can lead to long-term weight loss, less diabetes and a lower death rate.

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Chinese Hackers Infiltrate New York Times Computers

A Cyberattack from China:
Chinese hackers infiltrated The New York Times’s computer systems, getting passwords for its reporters and others.

SAN FRANCISCO — For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees.

After surreptitiously tracking the intruders to study their movements and help erect better defenses to block them, The Times and computer security experts have expelled the attackers and kept them from breaking back in.

The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.

Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network. They broke into the e-mail accounts of its Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who wrote the reports on Mr. Wen’s relatives, and Jim Yardley, The Times’s South Asia bureau chief in India, who previously worked as bureau chief in Beijing.

“Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied,” said Jill Abramson, executive editor of The Times.

The hackers tried to cloak the source of the attacks on The Times by first penetrating computers at United States universities and routing the attacks through them, said computer security experts at Mandiant, the company hired by The Times. This matches the subterfuge used in many other attacks that Mandiant has tracked to China.

The attackers first installed malware — malicious software — that enabled them to gain entry to any computer on The Times’s network. The malware was identified by computer security experts as a specific strain associated with computer attacks originating in China. More evidence of the source, experts said, is that the attacks started from the same university computers used by the Chinese military to attack United States military contractors in the past.

Security experts found evidence that the hackers stole the corporate passwords for every Times employee and used those to gain access to the personal computers of 53 employees, most of them outside The Times’s newsroom. Experts found no evidence that the intruders used the passwords to seek information that was not related to the reporting on the Wen family.

No customer data was stolen from The Times, security experts said.

Asked about evidence that indicated the hacking originated in China, and possibly with the military, China’s Ministry of National Defense said, “Chinese laws prohibit any action including hacking that damages Internet security.” It added that “to accuse the Chinese military of launching cyberattacks without solid proof is unprofessional and baseless.”

The attacks appear to be part of a broader computer espionage campaign against American news media companies that have reported on Chinese leaders and corporations.

Last year, Bloomberg News was targeted by Chinese hackers, and some employees’ computers were infected, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s internal investigation, after Bloomberg published an article on June 29 about the wealth accumulated by relatives of Xi Jinping, China’s vice president at the time. Mr. Xi became general secretary of the Communist Party in November and is expected to become president in March. Ty Trippet, a spokesman for Bloomberg, confirmed that hackers had made attempts but said that “no computer systems or computers were compromised.”

Signs of a Campaign

The mounting number of attacks that have been traced back to China suggest that hackers there are behind a far-reaching spying campaign aimed at an expanding set of targets including corporations, government agencies, activist groups and media organizations inside the United States. The intelligence-gathering campaign, foreign policy experts and computer security researchers say, is as much about trying to control China’s public image, domestically and abroad, as it is about stealing trade secrets.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 31, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the timing of a cyberattack that caused damage at Iran’s main nuclear enrichment plant. Evidence suggests that the United States and Israel released a computer worm around 2008, not 2012.

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Gun hearing starts with plea from Giffords

Shooting victim and former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords arrives for a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gun control. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images / January 30, 2013)

By Melanie Mason

January 30, 2013, 7:51 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- The year's first congressional committee hearing on guns began with an emotional jolt Wednesday, with former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was seriously wounded in a mass shooting two years ago, urging senators to "be bold, be courageous" in addressing gun violence.

Bucking tradition, Giffords spoke at the outset of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, before senators made their opening statements. She and her husband, former astronaut Mark Kelly, were escorted to the witness table by the committee's chairman, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, and its ranking Republican, Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa.

Giffords, whose speech is impaired after being shot in the head by Jared Loughner two years ago, spoke slowly and emphatically in a minute-long statement.

"Speaking is difficult, but I need to say something important. Violence is a big problem. Too many children are dying. Too many children. We must do something," she said.

"It will be hard, but the time is now," Giffords added. "You must act. Be bold. Be courageous. Americans are counting on you."

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Affordable Injection Molding Transforms Tinkerers Into Tycoons

While everyone is talking about the 3-D printing industrial revolution, Protomold is helping tinkerers become tycoons by making mass-production injection molding technology accessible for easily customized short-run batches — and their recent expansion of materials lets designers produce almost anything they need.

3-D printing something like a cellphone case can take hours — unacceptable when makers need mass quantities. In order to cost-effectively produce products in big batches, traditional manufacturing processes like injection molding are still the best option. Unfortunately, companies that specialize in these processes want to work on huge-volume projects, leaving the little guy, or even a moderately successful Kickstarter project, with few options.

Protomold has stepped in to provide servicing to those makers who need small orders by being able to produce 50-5,000 injection-molded parts in one business day with prices starting at $1,495 for a production tool, and each produced part costing a couple dollars or less. The experience isn't much different than ordering business cards online. A designer uploads their CAD file, chooses from a few preset options, and shelf-worthy injection-molded parts arrive on their doorstep.

The company has been successful, operating since May 1999, while continuing to grow their service. They've just added new materials to their list, including injection molded steel, stainless steel, magnesium, copper. Their newest is the option to mold parts in high temperature, medical grade resins, giving garage entrepreneurs the ability to produce parts for medical devices and high performance applications. Protomold is focused on helping turn big ideas into big companies.

Protomold is able to move so quickly because they optimize their offering for small businesses. While some companies treat moldmaking as an artform, with each production tool cherished like a Toulouse-Lautrec painting, Protomold is more like a Thomas Kincaid canvas used to cover a hole in the wall. This means mold cycle times are a few seconds slower, tools are made out of aluminum instead of steel, and need to be simple enough to be produced on a CNC milling machine. "We can't make everything," says CEO Brad Cleveland. "But the things we can make, we make faster than anyone."

What started as a single engineer looking to solve his own problem has turned into a publicly traded company with a billion dollar market cap and 511 workers filling 160,000 square feet of office space producing parts 24 hours a day.

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Spielberg seen winning director Oscar for “Lincoln”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – American filmmaker Steven Spielberg is clear favorite among the public to win the best director award for his film about President Abraham Lincoln at the Academy Awards this year, a Reuters poll showed on Wednesday.

While the race to win best film at the February 24 ceremony was shaken up by “Argo” stealing the thunder of “Lincoln” at two award ceremonies last weekend, the best director statuette was deemed destined for one man.

Spielberg, 66, who has been nominated seven times for best director at the Oscars and won twice – for the World War Two dramas “Schindler’s List” in 1993 and “Saving Private Ryan” in 1998 – was seen as far ahead in the all-male field of five.

A Reuters Ipsos poll of 1,641 Americans found 41 percent thought Spielberg should win and 38 percent said he was most likely to win for his U.S. Civil War-era drama in which British actor Daniel Day-Lewis plays Lincoln.

Almost half of the respondents to the survey conducted Friday through Tuesday were unsure who should or was most likely to be voted best director. The accuracy of the poll uses a statistical measure called a “credibility interval” and is precise to within 2.8 percentage points.

The online poll comes before the Directors Guild of America awards on Saturday in Los Angeles. Since 1948, there have been only six occasions where the winner of the DGA Award for Feature Film has not gone on to win the Oscar for best director.

But this year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, whose members choose Oscar winners, overlooked the directors of four of the year’s biggest movies – Ben Affleck (“Argo”), Kathryn Bigelow (“Zero Dark Thirty”), Quentin Tarantino (“Django Unchained”) and Tom Hopper (“Les Miserables”) – opening the possibility of a rare split in February in the best film and best director categories.

Betting agencies also have earmarked Spielberg as clear favorite, with William Hill offering odds of 1-5 on Spielberg.

“Our theory is that Spielberg will win best director but not best film,” said Rupert Adams, a spokesman for bookmaker William Hill. “If you listen to what people are saying it is that ‘Lincoln’ is a brilliant film in terms of direction but it is not that exciting to watch unlike ‘Argo.’”

Ang Lee, with his 3-D film adaptation of the best-selling novel “Life of Pi” about an Indian boy adrift at sea with a tiger, was ranked second in the Reuters poll with about one in 10 respondents saying he should or was most likely to win.

The Taiwanese director won the Academy Award for best director in 2005 for the gay-themed Western romance “Brokeback Mountain.”

David O. Russell with the quirky comedy “Silver Linings Playbook” was rated third in the poll with about 5 percent.

The two surprise contenders in the race ranked fourth and fifth: Benh Zeitlin, 30, with his first feature, “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” and Austrian director Michael Haneke with the French-language drama “Armour” about illness and old age.

The exclusion of Bigelow for her film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden has been controversial in the run-up to the 85th Academy Awards. Bigelow, 61, is the only woman to win a best director Oscar, for “The Hurt Locker” in 2009.

Affleck, 40, whose Iran hostage thriller “Argo” swept the board at last weekend’s Hollywood awards shows, was also notable by his absence, as were Hooper and Tarantino. However, all four of their movies are in the running for best film at the Oscars.

(Editing by Jill Serjeant and Belinda Goldsmith)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Phys Ed: Helmets for Ski and Snowboard Safety

Recently, researchers from the department of sport science at the University of Innsbruck in Austria stood on the slopes at a local ski resort and trained a radar gun on a group of about 500 skiers and snowboarders, each of whom had completed a lengthy personality questionnaire about whether he or she tended to be cautious or a risk taker.

The researchers had asked their volunteers to wear their normal ski gear and schuss or ride down the slopes at their preferred speed. Although they hadn’t informed the volunteers, their primary aim was to determine whether wearing a helmet increased people’s willingness to take risks, in which case helmets could actually decrease safety on the slopes.

What they found was reassuring.

To many of us who hit the slopes with, in my case, literal regularity — I’m an ungainly novice snowboarder — the value of wearing a helmet can seem self-evident. They protect your head from severe injury. During the Big Air finals at the Winter X Games in Aspen, Colo., this past weekend, for instance, 23-year-old Icelandic snowboarder Halldor Helgason over-rotated on a triple back flip, landed head-first on the snow, and was briefly knocked unconscious. But like the other competitors he was wearing a helmet, and didn’t fracture his skull.

Indeed, studies have concluded that helmets reduce the risk of a serious head injury by as much as 60 percent. But a surprising number of safety experts and snowsport enthusiasts remain unconvinced that helmets reduce overall injury risk.

Why? A telling 2009 survey of ski patrollers from across the country found that 77 percent did not wear helmets because they worried that the headgear could reduce their peripheral vision, hearing and response times, making them slower and clumsier. In addition, many worried that if they wore helmets, less-adept skiers and snowboarders might do likewise, feel invulnerable and engage in riskier behavior on the slopes.

In the past several years, a number of researchers have attempted to resolve these concerns, for or against helmets. And in almost all instances, helmets have proved their value.

In the Innsbruck speed experiment, the researchers found that people whom the questionnaires showed to be risk takers skied and rode faster than those who were by nature cautious. No surprise.

But wearing a helmet did not increase people’s speed, as would be expected if the headgear encouraged risk taking. Cautious people were slower than risk-takers, whether they wore helmets or not; and risk-takers were fast, whether their heads were helmeted or bare.

Interestingly, the skiers and riders who were the most likely, in general, to don a helmet were the most expert, the men and women with the most talent and hours on the slopes. Experience seemed to have taught them the value of a helmet.

Off of the slopes, other new studies have brought skiers and snowboarders into the lab to test their reaction times and vision with and without helmets. Peripheral vision and response times are a serious safety concern in a sport where skiers and riders rapidly converge from multiple directions.

But when researchers asked snowboarders and skiers to wear caps, helmets, goggles or various combinations of each for a 2011 study and then had them sit before a computer screen and press a button when certain images popped up, they found that volunteers’ peripheral vision and reaction times were virtually unchanged when they wore a helmet, compared with wearing a hat. Goggles slightly reduced peripheral vision and increased response times. But helmets had no significant effect.

Even when researchers added music, testing snowboarders and skiers wearing Bluetooth-audio equipped helmets, response times did not increase significantly from when they wore wool caps.

So why do up to 40 percent of skiers and snowboarders still avoid helmets?

“The biggest reason, I think, is that many people never expect to fall,” says Dr. Adil H. Haider, a trauma surgeon and associate professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and co-author of a major new review of studies related to winter helmet use. “That attitude is especially common in people, like me, who are comfortable on blue runs but maybe not on blacks, and even more so in beginners.”

But a study published last spring detailing snowboarding injuries over the course of 18 seasons at a Vermont ski resort found that the riders at greatest risk of hurting themselves were female beginners. I sympathize.

The takeaway from the growing body of science about ski helmets is in fact unequivocal, Dr. Haider said. “Helmets are safe. They don’t seem to increase risk taking. And they protect against serious, even fatal head injuries.”

The Eastern Association for the Surgery of Trauma, of which Dr. Haider is a member, has issued a recommendation that “all recreational skiers and snowboarders should wear safety helmets,” making them the first medical group to go on record advocating universal helmet use.

Perhaps even more persuasive, Dr. Haider has given helmets to all of his family members and colleagues who ski or ride. “As a trauma surgeon, I know how difficult it is to fix a brain,” he said. “So everyone I care about wears a helmet.”

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