DealBook: Hormel to Buy Skippy Peanut Butter

3:12 p.m. | Updated

The Hormel Foods Corporation, the producer of canned and cured meats and Spam, said on Thursday that it had agreed to buy the Skippy peanut butter business from Unilever for $700 million in cash.

The acquisition adds to the company’s growing stable of foods that do not contain any meats, which include Wholly Guacamole and a wide variety of Mexican foods and several of its Country Crock side dishes.

“We’re still very enthusiast about our meat portofolio, but we have been making a very deliberate effort to become a bigger player in general packaged foods,” Jeffrey M. Ettinger, chief executive of Hormel, said in a brief telephone interview.

Many of the company’s acquisitions reflect an effort to appeal to the growing ethnic diversity of American consumers, as well as their increasing awareness of the role that food plays in health. Mr. Ettinger noted, for instance, peanut butter’s high protein content as one attraction in the acquisition.

Unilever, the British-Dutch food and consumer products giant, announced in October that it was considering selling Skippy, the No. 2 peanut butter brand in the United States, behind J.M. Smucker’s Jif. Skippy has annual sales of roughly $370 million, with $100 million of that coming from outside the United States.

One attraction for Hormel is that Skippy is the leading brand in China, where peanut butter is in a relatively small number of households, but is growing rapidly. Skippy sales in China account for between $30 million to $40 million of the $100 million in international sales.

“Outside the U.S., peanut butter is a growth story,” Mr. Ettinger said. “Skippy has a good franchise in Canada, it’s growing in Mexico, and we really see opportunity in Asia.”

Skippy is the biggest acquisition by Hormel, known primarily for its meats business. Nonfrozen grocery products account for 14 percent of its annual revenue, according to Thomson Reuters data. Its brands include Chi-Chi’s, Dinty Moore, El Torito and perhaps its best known, Spam.

The last big purchase by Hormel, based in Austin, Minn., was its $334 million acquisition of the Turkey Store Company in 2001, according to Standard & Poor’s Capital IQ data. The company said it expected that the Skippy acquisition would add 13 to 17 cents to earnings per share in its 2014 fiscal year.

In August 2011, MegaMex Foods LLC, a joint venture between Hormel and Herdez Del Fuerte, acquired Fresherized Foods, the maker of Wholly Guacamole and Wholly Salsa products. The company did not disclose the amount spent on this acquisition.

Monday’s acquisition includes Unilever’s Skippy production plants in Little Rock, Ark., and in Weifang, China. “It will be our third facility in China producing on a daily basis,” Mr. Ettinger said.

He said he had been hearing all morning about different combinations of peanut butter, ranging from peanut butter and pickles to peanut butter and bananas and peanut butter and bacon, a favorite of a former Hormel chief executive.

“I’m kind of a traditionalist, I guess, because I like to have peanut butter – and it’s Skippy, actually – several mornings a week on a toasted English muffin,” Mr. Ettinger said.

Shares of Hormel were up more than 3 percent in late afternoon trading, at $33.10.

Skippy was first sold by the Rosefield Packing Company of Alameda, Calif., in 1933, according to a corporate Web site. Chunky peanut butter was introduced the same year. (One fun fact: It takes 772 peanuts to make a single 16.3-ounce jar of Skippy.)

Unilever has a huge portfolio of food and household goods brands, including Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, Dove soap and Lipton and PG Tips teas. It has shed brands in North America and Europe to focus on faster-growing emerging markets, which now account for more than half the conglomerate’s sales.

Barclays is advising Hormel Foods. Lazard and the law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore advised Unilever.

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Dozens of Syrians Killed in Explosions Around Damascus

Andoni Lubaki/Associated Press

Rebel fighters patrol a neighborhood in Aleppo on Wednesday.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Dozens of Syrians were killed or wounded in an explosion at a gas station east of Damascus, the Syrian capital, on Wednesday, and explosions in another Damascus suburb killed at least six people and wounded many more, including women and children, according to videos and reports from antigovernment activists.

The violence came as the United Nations released a study showing that more than 60,000 people had been killed in Syria’s 22-month-old conflict, a third higher than estimates by antigovernment activist groups.

Also on Wednesday, the family of James Foley, a reporter for the Global Post Web site, announced that Mr. Foley had been kidnapped on Nov. 22 by unidentified gunmen in northwest Syria. Mr. Foley had survived an abduction in Libya while covering the conflict there.

A recent flurry of diplomatic activity by Russia, the United Nations’ special envoy and others aimed at finding a political solution appeared to founder in recent days as neither Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, nor his opponents expressed a willingness to make concessions to end the bloody conflict.

The explosion near Damascus, which witnesses blamed on an airstrike, took place in a heavily contested suburban area. It hit a gas station where scores of people had lined up for fuel, which had just become available there after about a month, residents said. Videos posted by antigovernment activists showed charred bodies.

One man, using the nickname Abu Fuad, said in a telephone interview that he had just filled up his gas tank and was driving away when he heard the screech of fighter jets.

He was less than a quarter mile away when he heard the explosions, he said.

“There were many cars waiting their turn,” he said. “Yesterday, we heard that the government sent fuel to the gas station here, so all the people around came to fill up their cars.”

In a sign of the depth of distrust the conflict has spawned, Abu Fuad suggested that restocking the station was a government ruse. “They sent fuel as a trap,” he said.

In northern Syria, rebels used rockets to attack the Taftanaz military airport, a long-contested area in the province of Idlib, activists reported. Rebels have also stepped up attacks on airports in the neighboring province of Aleppo, trying to disrupt the warplanes and helicopters that government forces increasingly rely on for attacks, and even for supply lines, in the north.

The United Nations study suggested that the human toll of the war was even greater than previously estimated. Two days ago, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a rebel group that tracks the war from Britain, reported 45,000 deaths, mostly civilian, since the conflict began in March 2011.

“The number of casualties is much higher than we expected, and is truly shocking,” the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, said in a statement after her agency released the study.

“We must not compound the existing disaster by failing to prepare for the inevitable — and very dangerous — instability that will occur when the conflict ends,” she added. To avoid repeating the experience of collapsed states like Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, she said, “serious planning needs to get under way immediately, not just to provide humanitarian aid to all those who need it, but to protect all Syrian citizens from extrajudicial reprisals and acts of revenge.”

The study’s surprisingly high death toll reflected only those killings in which victims had been identified by their full name, and the date and location of their death had been recorded, leaving the possibility of many more dead.

Independent researchers compiled reports of more than 147,000 killings in Syria’s conflict from seven sources, including the government. When duplicates were removed, there remained a list of 59,648 people killed between March 2011 and the end of November.

Meanwhile, John Foley, James Foley’s father, stressed that his son was an “objective journalist” and issued a plea to his captors to contact the family so that they can work for his release.

“We want Jim to come safely home, or at least we need to speak with him to know he’s O.K.,” John Foley said. “Jim is an objective journalist and we appeal for the release of Jim unharmed. To the people who have Jim, please contact us so we can work together toward his release.”

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.

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Science Topics Find an Audience in Social Media

The largest and most sophisticated rover landed safely on Mars and the world’s most famous Moon visitor died, but the space event that most captured the public’s imagination in 2012 involved a journey to Earth.

On Oct. 14, YouTube counted 52 million streams of the Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner’s supersonic, record-breaking jump from a balloon 24 miles above the New Mexico desert. YouTube called it “one of the most-viewed live events ever,” and it landed at No. 10 on the video-sharing site’s year-end trending list — the first time a science-related subject made the list, a YouTube spokeswoman said. (Google listed the leap as No. 7 in its Zeitgeist 2012 of trending events.)

And it was far from the only science story to go viral. To put it in 140 characters or less, social media and science found each other in 2012.

Video by redbull

Felix Baumgartner's supersonic freefall from 128k' - Mission Highlights

In surprising numbers, people posted, viewed and searched for science-related topics last year — sharing news from space and undersea, commenting on new discoveries and uploading photos and video in a full-out embrace of the ability to communicate with thousands of others about global subjects in real time.

The first Twitter message on Aug. 5 from @MarsCuriosity, NASA’s official rover handle — “Gale Crater I Am in You!!!” — was retweeted more than 72,000 times. Photos of the space shuttle Endeavour flying over the West Coast, on its way to its final resting place, ricocheted across the planet. And the director James Cameron’s claim to have sent the “deepest tweet” — from the Mariana Trench, about seven miles below the surface of the Pacific — was rated one of Twitter’s “moments of serendipity and just plain awesomeness” (though it was actually sent by a friend above water). Four science-related events made that list, with the Mars landing at No. 1.In an age of despair over math and science acuity, it appears that what was once considered uninteresting or unfathomable has become cool and exciting.

Video by JPLnews

Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover Animation

People now feel that “if they’re not paying attention, they’re missing out on something,” said Kevin Allocca, the trends manager for YouTube.

The rover in particular has picked up followers and likes at amazing speed and volume, though it is the fourth landing of an American space exploration vehicle on the planet.

“We went from 120,000 on Aug. 4 to over 800,000 followers on landing night,” Veronica McGregor, the media relations and social media manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said of its Twitter account. “And then we hit a million really quickly.”

Two months after the landing, the mission was averaging about 30,000 Twitter mentions a month. The Facebook page for NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity is heading toward a half-million likes, and the hashtag #Curiosity was the fifth most used on Google Plus in 2012.

The trend is, in some ways, self-fulfilling. Social media platforms are growing in popularity. There is also more online content, which is becoming more accessible, entertaining and engaging, Mr. Allocca said. Science subjects are also universal, more likely to attract global audiences. And people who are interested in science and technology tend to be especially comfortable with seeking and sharing information in digital ways.

Still, an epidemic of science geekiness seems to have broken out.

On Facebook, Mr. Baumgartner’s jump ranked higher than Mitt Romney’s announcement of Representative Paul D. Ryanof Wisconsin as his running mate, according to the Talk Meter, a tool that compares chatter on the social site with baseline conversation.

On the Google Zeitgeist 2012 list, “Stratosphere jump” follows “Presidential debate” (No. 6) but surpasses “Penn State scandal” (No. 8) and “Trayvon Martin shooting” (No. 9). “Hurricane Sandy” is No. 1.

NASA (which now has about 1.6 million likes on Facebook) has also become more sophisticated and assertive about doling out information piece by piece to sustain interest. The strategy plays into the strengths of social platforms, which allow users to dip in and out of streams of news and information at their convenience.

NASA’s “Seven Minutes of Terror” video on YouTube, about the difficulties of landing the rover, attracted two million views. And a satirical video made independently of NASA, “We’re NASA and We Know It” — to the tune of “I’m Sexy and I Know It” (chorus: “Crane lower that rover”) — has gotten close to 2.7 million views.

Video by JPLnews

Challenges of Getting to Mars: Curiosity's Seven Minutes of Terror

There are also more ways for followers to engage in events: helping to name the rover, or picking up a Curiosity Explorer badge on Foursquare for checking in at a NASA visitor center, science museum or planetarium. Ms. McGregor said that NASA, in turn, was paying attention to what its fans want. It was learning that with so many followers just starting to connect with the whole space thing, the agency needs to provide more basic information.

Earthlings have long had a fascination with the unknown. But social media experts say people can now feel as if they are part of the adventure. They can watch events live, then incorporate the developments in their “timelines.” They can follow science — and not have to worry about taking the final exam.

Video by Satire

We're NASA and We Know It (Mars Curiosity)

A recent LiveScience article, “Why We’re Mad for Mars,” tries to explain the renewed popularity of Mars. The answer is simple, noted a commenter, Jerry. “People are explorers,” he wrote. “That is all the article needed to say.”

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Employers Must Offer Family Health Care, Affordable or Not, Administration Says

WASHINGTON — In a long-awaited interpretation of the new health care law, the Obama administration said Monday that employers must offer health insurance to employees and their children, but will not be subject to any penalties if family coverage is unaffordable to workers.

The requirement for employers to provide health benefits to employees is a cornerstone of the new law, but the new rules proposed by the Internal Revenue Service said that employers’ obligation was to provide affordable insurance to cover their full-time employees. The rules offer no guarantee of affordable insurance for a worker’s children or spouse. To avoid a possible tax penalty, the government said, employers with 50 or more full-time employees must offer affordable coverage to those employees. But, it said, the meaning of “affordable” depends entirely on the cost of individual coverage for the employee, what the worker would pay for “self-only coverage.”

The new rules, to be published in the Federal Register, create a strong incentive for employers to put money into insurance for their employees rather than dependents. It is unclear whether the spouse and children of an employee will be able to obtain federal subsidies to help them buy coverage — separate from the employee — through insurance exchanges being established in every state. The administration explicitly reserved judgment on that question, which could affect millions of people in families with low and moderate incomes.

Many employers provide family coverage to full-time employees, but many do not. Family coverage is much more expensive, and the employee’s share of the premium is typically much larger.

In 2012, according to an annual survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance averaged $5,615 a year for single coverage and $15,745 for family coverage. The employee’s share of the premium averaged $951 for individual coverage and more than four times as much, $4,316, for family coverage.

Starting in 2014, most Americans will be required to have health insurance. Low- and middle-income people can get tax credits to help pay their premiums, unless they have access to affordable coverage from an employer.

In its proposal, the Internal Revenue Service said, “Coverage for an employee under an employer-sponsored plan is affordable if the employee’s required contribution for self-only coverage does not exceed 9.5 percent of the employee’s household income.”

The rules, though labeled a proposal, are more significant than most proposed regulations. The Internal Revenue Service said employers could rely on them in making plans for 2014.

In writing the law, members of Congress often conjured up a picture of employees working year-round at full-time jobs. But in drafting the rules, the I.R.S. wrestled with the complex reality of part-time, seasonal and temporary workers.

In addition, the administration expressed concern that some employers might try to evade the new requirements by firing and rehiring employees, manipulating their work hours or using temporary staffing agencies. The rules include several provisions to prevent such abuse.

The law says an employer with 50 or more full-time employees may be subject to a tax penalty if it fails to offer coverage to “its full-time employees (and their dependents).”

Employers asked for guidance, and the Obama administration provided it, saying that a dependent is an employee’s child under the age of 26.

“Dependent does not include the spouse of an employee,” the proposed rules say.

Thus, employers must offer coverage to children of an employee, but do not have to make it affordable. And they do not have to offer coverage at all to the spouse of an employee.

The administration said that the rules — which apply to private businesses, nonprofit organizations and state and local government agencies — would require changes at many work sites.

“A number of employers currently offer coverage only to their employees, and not to dependents,” the I.R.S. said. “For these employers, expanding their health plans to add dependent coverage will require substantial revisions to their plans.”

In view of this challenge, the agency said it would grant a one-time reprieve to employers who fail to offer coverage to dependents of full-time employees, provided they take steps in 2014 to come into compliance. Under the rules, employers must offer coverage to employees in 2014 and must offer coverage to dependents as well, starting in 2015.

The new rules apply to employers that have at least 50 full-time employees or an equivalent combination of full-time and part-time employees. A full-time employee is a person employed on average at least 30 hours a week. And 100 half-time employees are considered equivalent to 50 full-time employees.

Thus, the government said, an employer will be subject to the new requirement if it has 40 full-time employees working 30 hours a week and 20 half-time employees working 15 hours a week.

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Markets Jump on Fiscal Deal

Global stocks kicked off the 2013 trading year with a strong start Wednesday, as investors welcomed a deal between President Obama and Congressional Republicans that ended, at least temporarily, an impasse over fiscal policy that had threatened chaos in the new year.

Michael Appleton for The New York Times

People watch traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday. Global stocks kicked off the year with a strong start.

The broad-based Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index leapt 2.1 percent in late trading. The Dow Jones industrial average jumped 2 percent, or about 260 points, and the Nasdaq composite index climbed 2.7 percent.

The deadline drama over the fiscal impasse ended when a sufficient number of Republicans in the House of Representatives joined Democrats to back a deal the Senate had reached earlier. The deal modestly raises income taxes on the highest-earning Americans, ends payroll tax cuts and creates permanent tax cuts for others.

“There’s clearly a big relief rally,” said Christian Schulz, an economist in London with Berenberg Bank.

The Euro Stoxx 50 index of euro zone blue chips ended 2.4 percent higher, while the FTSE 100 index in London gained 2.1 percent. The euro gained 0.6 percent to $1.3270, and yields fell on Spanish and Italian government bonds.

Asian indexes also gained, with the Hang Seng Index in Hong Kong rising 2.9 percent. But markets in Japan and mainland China were closed for holidays.

Still, analysts warned that the gains might not last, as the last-minute deal had only bought time.

The deal “is likely to prove only a temporary fix to address fiscal uncertainty in the U.S.,” Lee Hardman, an analyst at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ in London, wrote in a research note, pointing out that “the planned sequester government spending cuts merely delayed for two months.”

Investors, he added, probably will begin to focus on “whether U.S. politicians will be able to raise the debt ceiling in the next two months to avert a technical default, and whether the delayed sequester spending cuts will now come into force on March 1.”

Mr. Schultz noted that the United States hit the debt ceiling of $16.4 trillion, or 104 percent of 2012 gross domestic product, on Dec. 31, and could it exceed it as soon as February without Congressional action.

There are also questions about how America’s new commitment to cutting the deficit will affect the economy and its credit ratings.

“The austerity they’ve imposed is very modest,” Mr. Schultz said, “perhaps 1 percent of G.D.P. So maybe the most interesting thing will be to see how the ratings agencies react.”

Analysts at DBS in Singapore wrote in a research note: “Call it breathing room, call it kicking the can down the road, call it whatever you like — come mid-February, when the decision on the legal U.S. debt limit will be needed, the fight starts afresh.”

They added, “Two more months of shenanigans and waffling/seasick markets? It certainly looks that way.”

In economic reports, the Institute for Supply Management said manufacturing in the United States expanded slightly in December. Its manufacturing activity index rose to 50.7 points in December, up from 49.5 in November.

In Europe, manufacturing activity remained in the doldrums. Surveys of purchasing managers by Markit Economics showed euro zone factories ended 2012 in poor shape, with both production and new orders declining in December. German factories posted declines in both output and new orders, according to the Markit data, while the Spanish manufacturing shrank a 20th consecutive month, with both the decline and the pace of job cuts accelerating.

David Jolly reported from Paris. Bettina Wassener reported from Hong Kong.

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Clashes in West Bank Injure Palestinians

JERUSALEM — Violent clashes broke out on Tuesday between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians in a village in the northern West Bank, leaving up to 30 Palestinians injured, after an undercover Israeli force entered the village to arrest a wanted militant, according to Palestinian news reports and the Israeli military.

The military said two soldiers were wounded, neither seriously, by rocks thrown by Palestinians. A spokeswoman for the Israeli military, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under army rules, said the purpose of Tuesday’s raid on the village, Tamoun, was to arrest a resident, Murad Bani Odeh, who she said was suspected of being a terrorist. Both the military and Palestinian reports identified Mr. Odeh, who was captured by the Israeli forces, as a member of Islamic Jihad, an extremist organization.

In the raid, an undercover force, reportedly disguised as vegetable merchants, entered the village first. When youths started throwing stones and a violent riot broke out, regular forces came in and dispersed the crowd with rubber-coated bullets and tear gas. The military spokeswoman denied Palestinian reports that the soldiers also used live fire.

The confrontation was the latest manifestation of the simmering unrest and disturbances that have spread across the West Bank since mid-November, when Israel embarked on a fierce eight-day military campaign against the rocket-launching infrastructure in the Gaza Strip, controlled by the militant group Hamas.

It also comes after years of stagnation in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, an issue that has re-emerged in recent days as an Israeli election issue, with Israelis scheduled to go to the polls on Jan. 22.

The fate of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem — territories that the Palestinians claim for a future state — is always a core, if sometimes underlying, issue for Israeli voters. Until now, the leaders of the two largest political forces, the rightist Likud-Beiteinu joint ticket and the center-left Labor Party, had mostly avoided the subject, aware of public fatigue and skepticism about the prospects of a peace deal and preferring to refocus the debate onto security and socioeconomic issues.

But the president of Israel, Shimon Peres, a veteran politician who is now supposed to stay out of politics and play a mostly symbolic role, intervened in the election campaign on Sunday, telling a large group of visiting Israeli ambassadors that he considered the president of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, to be a partner for peace.

“No one will change my opinion about Abu Mazen,” he said in broadcast remarks, referring to Mr. Abbas by his popular name, “even if they say I cannot express it because I’m the president.” Israel, he added, “must complete the task of reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians without further delay.”

The remarks infuriated Likud-Beiteinu, which issued a sharp statement condemning Mr. Peres for expressing what it called a “personal political opinion that is disconnected from the Israeli public’s stance regarding Abu Mazen, the peace refusenik.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of Likud-Beiteinu, who has endorsed a two-state solution under certain conditions, responded on Tuesday with a statement that called for extreme caution and an Israeli foot on the brakes.

“In Egypt, the regime has been replaced, in Syria the regime is being shaken and this could also happen in the Palestinian Authority areas in Judea and Samaria,” he said, referring to the West Bank by its biblical names. “Everyone knows that Hamas could take over the Palestinian Authority,” he continued. “It could happen after an agreement; it could happen before an agreement, like it happened in Gaza. Therefore, as opposed to the voices that I have heard recently urging me to run forward, to make concessions and to withdraw, I think that the diplomatic process must be managed responsibly and sagaciously and not in undue haste.”

There has been a palpable rise in incidents of stone-throwing and firebombing by Palestinians against Israeli vehicles on West Bank roads, and an increase in localized clashes between Palestinian demonstrators and soldiers, according to Israeli officials. On Monday night, the military said, an Israeli civilian bus traveling south of Hebron was shot at. There were no injuries.

The spike in unrest comes after four years of relative stability in the West Bank, and it has led some Israeli commentators to speculate about the chances of a third Palestinian intifada, or uprising.

Israeli and Palestinian officials say privately that they have no evidence of plans for a full-blown uprising, though nobody could rule out a spontaneous outburst triggered by some unforeseen incident. Mr. Abbas has stated publicly that he will not support an armed uprising on his watch.

In the meantime, the Israeli military says it has been trying to balance proactive counterterrorism measures — like widespread arrests of militants belonging to Hamas and other armed groups — with a policy of restraint when faced with rioters, to try to prevent Palestinian fatalities and a subsequent spiral of violence.

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Bits Blog: Big Data: Rise of the Machines

For a column that laid out some second thoughts on Big Data, one of the people I talked to was Thomas H. Davenport, who has worked in the fields of knowledge management and analytics for 15 years. Data analytics is the predecessor to Big Data. He knows the context — what’s new and what’s not with Big Data — as well as anyone.

Mr. Davenport, a visiting professor at the Harvard Business School (on leave from Babson College), has authored and co-authored several books on analytics, including “Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning” (with Jeanne G. Harris, Harvard Business School Press, 2007). Shortly after the Big Data phenomenon took off, Mr. Davenport said, only half-joking, that he considered simply substituting the term “Big Data” for “analytics” for updated versions of his books.

But as he looked more deeply, there really was something different in Big Data. Data volumes have been steadily increasing for decades, Mr. Davenport noted, though the pace has accelerated sharply in the Internet age. “More than the amount of data itself, the unstructured data from the Web and sensors is a much more salient feature of what is being called Big Data,” he said.

I also asked David B. Yoffie, a technology and competitive strategy expert at Harvard, who is not part of the Big Data crowd, what he thought. The Internet, he observed, has been a mainstream technology for 15 years, and so has the ability to monitor and mine Web browsing behavior and online communications, even if those skills are much improved now.

Still, Mr. Yoffie is most impressed by the rapid spread of low-cost sensors that make it possible to monitor all kinds of physical objects, from fruit shipments (sniffing for signs of spoilage) to jet engines (tracking wear to predict when maintenance is needed).

“The ubiquity of sensors is new,” Mr. Yoffie said. “The sensors make it possible to get data we never had before.”

Machine-generated sensor data will be become a far larger portion of the Big Data world, according to a recent report by IDC. The research report, “The Digital Universe in 2020,” published in December, traces data trends from 2005-20. One of its forecasts is that machine-generated data will increase to 42 percent of all data by 2020, up from 11 percent in 2005.

“It’s all those sensors, the Internet of Things data,” said Jeremy Burton, an executive vice president at EMC, which sponsored the IDC report.

The implication is that Big Data technology will steadily move beyond the consumer Internet. Industrial companies like General Electric are already making big bets on the payoff. The IDC forecast also suggests that there is a lot of substance to the vision of machine-to-machine communication and intelligence that W. Brian Arthur terms “the second economy.”

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Study Suggests Lower Death Risk for the Overweight

A century ago, Elsie Scheel was the perfect woman. So said a 1912 article in The New York Times about how Miss Scheel, 24, was chosen by the “medical examiner of the 400 'co-eds'” at Cornell University as a woman “whose very presence bespeaks perfect health.”

Miss Scheel, however, was hardly model-thin. At 5-foot-7 and 171 pounds, she would, by today's medical standards, be clearly overweight. (Her body mass index was 27; 25 to 29.9 is overweight.)

But a new report suggests that Miss Scheel may have been onto something. The report on nearly three million people found that those whose B.M.I. ranked them as overweight had less risk of dying than people of normal weight. And while obese people had a greater mortality risk over all, those at the lowest obesity level (B.M.I. of 30 to 34.9) were not more likely to die than normal-weight people.

The report, although not the first to suggest this relationship between B.M.I. and mortality, is by far the largest and most carefully done, analyzing nearly 100 studies, experts said.

But don’t scrap those New Year’s weight-loss resolutions and start gorging on fried Belgian waffles or triple cheeseburgers.

Experts not involved in the research said it suggested that overweight people need not panic unless they have other indicators of poor health and that depending on where fat is in the body, it might be protective or even nutritional for older or sicker people. But over all, piling on pounds and becoming more than slightly obese remains dangerous.

“We wouldn’t want people to think, ‘Well, I can take a pass and gain more weight,'” said Dr. George Blackburn, associate director of Harvard Medical School’s nutrition division.

Rather, he and others said, the report, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that B.M.I., a ratio of height to weight, should not be the only indicator of healthy weight.

“Body mass index is an imperfect measure of the risk of mortality,” and factors like blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar must be considered, said Dr. Samuel Klein, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Dr. Steven Heymsfield, executive director of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study, said that for overweight people, if indicators like cholesterol “are in the abnormal range, then that weight is affecting you,” but that if indicators are normal, there’s no reason to “go on a crash diet.”

Experts also said the data suggested that the definition of "normal" B.M.I., 18.5 to 24.9, should be revised, excluding its lowest weights, which might be too thin.

The study did show that the two highest obesity categories (B.M.I. of 35 and up) are at high risk. “Once you have higher obesity, the fat’s in the fire,” Dr. Blackburn said.

But experts also suggested that concepts of fat be refined.

"Fat per se is not as bad as we thought," said Dr. Kamyar Kalantar-Zadeh, professor of Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, Irvine. "What is bad is a type of fat that is inside your belly. Non-belly fat, underneath your skin in your thigh and your butt area — these are not necessarily bad." He added that, to a point, extra fat is accompanied by extra muscle, which can be healthy.

Still, it is possible that overweight or somewhat obese people are less likely to die because they, or their doctors, have identified other conditions associated with weight gain, like high cholesterol or diabetes.

“You’re more likely to be in your doctor’s office and more likely to be treated,” said Dr. Robert Eckel, a past president of the American Heart Association and a professor at University of Colorado.

Some experts said fat could be protective in some cases, although that is unproven and debated. The study did find that people 65 and over had no greater mortality risk even at high obesity.

“There’s something about extra body fat when you’re older that is providing some reserve,” Dr. Eckel said.

And studies on specific illnesses, like heart and kidney disease, have found an “obesity paradox,” that heavier patients are less likely to die.

Still, death is not everything. Even if "being overweight doesn't increase your risk of dying," Dr. Klein said, it "does increase your risk of having diabetes" or other conditions.

Ultimately, said the study’s lead author, Katherine Flegal, a senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “the best weight might depend on the situation you’re in.”

Take the perfect woman, Elsie Scheel, in whose "physical makeup there is not a single defect," the Times article said. This woman who "has never been ill and doesn't know what fear is" loved sports and didn't consume candy, coffee or tea. But she also ate only three meals every two days, and loved beefsteak.

Maybe such seeming contradictions made sense against the societal inconsistencies of that time. After all, her post-college plans involved tilling her father’s farm, but “if she were a man, she would study mechanical engineering.”

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Study Suggests Lower Death Risk for the Overweight

A century ago, Elsie Scheel was the perfect woman. So said a 1912 article in The New York Times about how Miss Scheel, 24, was chosen by the “medical examiner of the 400 'co-eds'” at Cornell University as a woman “whose very presence bespeaks perfect health.”

Miss Scheel, however, was hardly model-thin. At 5-foot-7 and 171 pounds, she would, by today's medical standards, be clearly overweight. (Her body mass index was 27; 25 to 29.9 is overweight.)

But a new report suggests that Miss Scheel may have been onto something. The report on nearly three million people found that those whose B.M.I. ranked them as overweight had less risk of dying than people of normal weight. And while obese people had a greater mortality risk over all, those at the lowest obesity level (B.M.I. of 30 to 34.9) were not more likely to die than normal-weight people.

The report, although not the first to suggest this relationship between B.M.I. and mortality, is by far the largest and most carefully done, analyzing nearly 100 studies, experts said.

But don’t scrap those New Year’s weight-loss resolutions and start gorging on fried Belgian waffles or triple cheeseburgers.

Experts not involved in the research said it suggested that overweight people need not panic unless they have other indicators of poor health and that depending on where fat is in the body, it might be protective or even nutritional for older or sicker people. But over all, piling on pounds and becoming more than slightly obese remains dangerous.

“We wouldn’t want people to think, ‘Well, I can take a pass and gain more weight,'” said Dr. George Blackburn, associate director of Harvard Medical School’s nutrition division.

Rather, he and others said, the report, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that B.M.I., a ratio of height to weight, should not be the only indicator of healthy weight.

“Body mass index is an imperfect measure of the risk of mortality,” and factors like blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar must be considered, said Dr. Samuel Klein, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Dr. Steven Heymsfield, executive director of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study, said that for overweight people, if indicators like cholesterol “are in the abnormal range, then that weight is affecting you,” but that if indicators are normal, there’s no reason to “go on a crash diet.”

Experts also said the data suggested that the definition of "normal" B.M.I., 18.5 to 24.9, should be revised, excluding its lowest weights, which might be too thin.

The study did show that the two highest obesity categories (B.M.I. of 35 and up) are at high risk. “Once you have higher obesity, the fat’s in the fire,” Dr. Blackburn said.

But experts also suggested that concepts of fat be refined.

"Fat per se is not as bad as we thought," said Dr. Kamyar Kalantar-Zadeh, professor of Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, Irvine. "What is bad is a type of fat that is inside your belly. Non-belly fat, underneath your skin in your thigh and your butt area — these are not necessarily bad." He added that, to a point, extra fat is accompanied by extra muscle, which can be healthy.

Still, it is possible that overweight or somewhat obese people are less likely to die because they, or their doctors, have identified other conditions associated with weight gain, like high cholesterol or diabetes.

“You’re more likely to be in your doctor’s office and more likely to be treated,” said Dr. Robert Eckel, a past president of the American Heart Association and a professor at University of Colorado.

Some experts said fat could be protective in some cases, although that is unproven and debated. The study did find that people 65 and over had no greater mortality risk even at high obesity.

“There’s something about extra body fat when you’re older that is providing some reserve,” Dr. Eckel said.

And studies on specific illnesses, like heart and kidney disease, have found an “obesity paradox,” that heavier patients are less likely to die.

Still, death is not everything. Even if "being overweight doesn't increase your risk of dying," Dr. Klein said, it "does increase your risk of having diabetes" or other conditions.

Ultimately, said the study’s lead author, Katherine Flegal, a senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “the best weight might depend on the situation you’re in.”

Take the perfect woman, Elsie Scheel, in whose "physical makeup there is not a single defect," the Times article said. This woman who "has never been ill and doesn't know what fear is" loved sports and didn't consume candy, coffee or tea. But she also ate only three meals every two days, and loved beefsteak.

Maybe such seeming contradictions made sense against the societal inconsistencies of that time. After all, her post-college plans involved tilling her father’s farm, but “if she were a man, she would study mechanical engineering.”

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DealBook: Crime Forfeiture Pays for U.S. Attorney's Office (Sometimes in Dinosaur Bones)

The federal government runs a multibillion-dollar business in Lower Manhattan with an unusual and diverse revenue stream.

In the last year, the government’s prosecutorial branch in Manhattan has taken in about $160 million from an online poker operation and more than $2 billion from a failed Ponzi scheme. Last week, it even secured a Tyrannosaurus skeleton from Mongolia valued at more than $1 million.

This business is the asset forfeiture unit of the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan. In 2012, the unit recovered about $3 billion in crime proceeds — the largest amount ever recovered by a single United States attorney’s office since the Justice Department established the asset forfeiture program four decades ago. It also accounts for 68 percent of the national total last year from the country’s 93 United States attorney’s offices, according to government figures.

“Asset forfeiture is an important part of the culture here and an example of the government being efficient and bringing home the bacon,” Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said in a recent interview.

The aggressive use of forfeiture as a legal mechanism to seize and freeze criminal proceeds has long been a hallmark of Manhattan’s federal prosecutors. Securing forfeited assets is a priority of the office in part because many of the largest financial fraud cases are centered in New York.

“To put someone in jail is very important, but equally important is to provide the crime victims with some type of compensation,” said Sharon Cohen Levin, an assistant United States attorney who has run the office’s forfeiture unit for 16 years.

The Justice Department’s program has plenty of critics. Many judges and defense lawyers say that the policies can be arbitrary and harsh. In recent decades, forfeiture powers have greatly expanded, leading to overzealous and mean-spirited conduct by prosecutors, critics say. In 2000, Congress reined in prosecutors with the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act, which instituted a number of changes.

“Congress needs to revisit the forfeiture laws to curb continuing abuses,” said David B. Smith, a defense lawyer in Alexandria, Va., and the author of a leading treatise on forfeiture. “The procedures need to be made more fair, particularly for innocent third parties whose property rights can be easily destroyed without even having an opportunity to challenge the basis for the forfeiture.”

The seized money ends up in different places. Where there are not identifiable victims, as in drug crimes, proceeds are placed in two asset forfeiture funds: one controlled by the Justice Department and the other by the Treasury Department. Most of that money is used to bolster various law enforcement initiatives.

But the majority of the forfeited assets end up back in the hands of defrauded victims.

In March 2012, for instance, as part of a settlement, the publicly held Science Applications International Corporation, the primary contractor on New York’s scandal-ridden CityTime payroll project, forfeited about $500 million in connection with its role in a fraud and kickback scheme.

More than 90 percent of that amount was given back to the city as compensation for its losses on the CityTime project. That money allowed New York to fill more than 2,500 teaching positions that would otherwise have been eliminated in the budget for the coming fiscal year, according to the city.

In certain cases, the forfeiture process can be painstaking and take years to resolve, as in the Adelphia Communications accounting fraud, which led to the largest single distribution of forfeited assets to victims in the Justice Department’s history.

Last spring, a decade after the office began its investigation of the Adelphia fraud, about $730 million was distributed to victims. Adelphia’s former chief executive, John Rigas, and his son Timothy Rigas, who was chief financial officer, are both serving prison time after their convictions and agreed along with other family members to forfeit more than 95 percent of the family’s assets to the government.

The complicated process, overseen by a court-appointed special master, Richard C. Breeden, involved setting up a victim fund and then processing more than 13,000 petitions and verifying monetary losses of the company’s shareholders.

The Adelphia distribution, though, is likely to be dwarfed by the amount of money that the government returns to defrauded investors in the Ponzi scheme orchestrated by Bernard L. Madoff. Mr. Bharara’s office has worked alongside Irving H. Picard, the trustee in the Madoff case, to secure compensation for the victims.

Virtually all of the government’s recovery for Mr. Madoff’s victims comes from the settlement of claims against the estate of Jeffry M. Picower, who died in 2009 and was one of Mr. Madoff’s original and largest investors. Of the $7.2 billion that Mr. Picower’s widow agreed to return to victims, $2.2 billion went to the Justice Department, with the rest going to Mr. Picard for eventual distribution.

Last month, the government named Mr. Breeden, the supervisor of the Adelphia case, to serve as special master to administer the forfeiture proceeds in the Madoff case.

Of the $17.3 billion of actual cash losses in Mr. Madoff’s fraud, the trustee has recovered about $9.3 billion and distributed about $3.7 billion of that to eligible victims. The $2.35 billion seized by prosecutors under forfeiture laws will be doled out separately by the Justice Department, which has said it expects the victim claims process to begin shortly.

Another substantial forfeiture case last year involved Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars, two large online poker Web sites. To settle a lawsuit against the companies, Full Tilt agreed to forfeit essentially all of its assets and PokerStars agreed to forfeit $547 million — representing revenue from illegal gambling and proceeds from money laundering — that will be paid out in several installments. To date, about $160 million has been forfeited.

But last year’s most exotic forfeiture action involved the Mongolian dinosaur case. Last week, a paleontologist admitted to illegally shipping dinosaur fossils to the United States from Asia. As part of a plea agreement, the paleontologist, Eric Prokopi, agreed to forfeit a Tyrannosaurus skeleton that had been put up for auction for more than $1 million, along with five other dinosaur skeletons.

The fossils will be returned to the Mongolian government; Mr. Prokopi faces a possible prison sentence.

The reptile remnants represent just a fraction of the 2012 forfeiture proceeds secured by Mr. Bharara and his colleagues — proceeds that amounted to more than 60 times the office’s annual budget.

“As I like to joke,” Mr. Bharara said, “that’s a lot better than the investment return of any hedge fund.”

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