A sense of dread shrouds Nintendo’s Wii U

The latest Wii U sales numbers are out from Japan, the United States and the United Kingdom — and unease is deepening. In Japan, Famitsu Magazine reported Wii U weekly sales slipping to 70,000 units from 76,000 units during the important period ending in January 6. This is the week many Japanese teenagers spend their New Year’s money and sales of consoles tend to bounce. During the week, the portable 3DS sold 305,000 units, up sharply from the already impressive 266,000 units in the previous week. The seven-year-old Sony (SNE) PlayStation 3 managed to increase its sales to 64,000 units from 54,000 units. The equally ancient PSP climbed to 53,000 from 34,000. Even the star-crossed PS Vita managed to vault to 31,000 from 18,000.

[More from BGR: LG reportedly halts Nexus 4 production to make way for new Nexus device]

As Wii U sales are mired close to PlayStation 3 levels in Japan, it is getting hammered by the aging Microsoft (MSFT) Xbox 360 in America. NPD just reported that Xbox 360 moved 1.4 million units in December while Wii U limped through the holiday season with 460,000 units. This is below the 600,000 unit level that the earlier Wii console managed years ago against a much younger console competition in 2006. Back then, Wii launched head-to-head with Sony’s PlayStation 3 in the US market, and the Xbox 360 had been launched just one year earlier.

[More from BGR: BlackBerry Z10 shown off in leaked marketing materials]

In 2012, Wii U debuted against two rival home consoles that were more than half a decade old. The results are not pretty. Meanwhile in the U.K., the Wii U shifted 40,000 units during its launch weekend, but none of the titles cracked the top 10 of the GfK game software chart.

It is clear that the lack of compelling software is hurting Wii U right now. Nintendo (NTDOY) wanted to push it out well before the buzz around the next generations of Sony and Microsoft consoles started building. The problem with the rush is that Wii U is now facing several fallow months before big titles arrive. The January-April sales period could be spectacularly ugly and may cause real damage to Nintendo’s home console reputation if it leads to U.S. sales dipping below 300,000 a month and Japanese sales dipping below 30,000 a month. The danger here is that if consumers start suspecting that the Wii U is a lame duck, they may choose to wait for one of the big rival vendors to roll out some spectacular hardware next winter.

All in all, it’s hard to avoid the notion that the console gaming universe is shrinking. In the U.S., game software sales contracted by a disastrous 26% in December. PS Vita is in dire straits and may leave Nintendo’s 3DS as the only viable portable console in 2014. Wii U is wobbling badly, possibly leading to a 2014 scenario when only Sony and Microsoft are left standing in the home console battle. U.S. consumers are still wild about huge, violent console epics like Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed and Halo. Those are titles that define PlayStation and Xbox. The casual gaming that defines Wii U is under siege by the smartphone/tablet gaming frenzy that shows no sign of abating.

This article was originally published on BGR.com

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“Gangster Squad” takes $650K in midnight showings, battle with “Zero Dark Thirty” awaits

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – Warner Bros.’ “Gangster Squad” grossed $ 650,000 in midnight showings Thursday night, a strong start to what should be a weekend-long fight for the box-office crown.

Ruben Fleischer’s tale of cops and organized crime in mid-20th century Los Angeles will duke it out with Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty,” the Oscar contender that expands to almost 3,000 screens this weekend.

Box office experts projected “Zero Dark Thirty” would eke out the win before the weekend began, though it remains a close race with both movies looking at openings of about $ 20 million.

“Gangster Squad,” which stars Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone and Sean Penn, has a breezy action feel, and runs under two hours. Despite a strong cast, reviewers have not responded warmly to the film, which charts at 43 percent on Metacritic and 34 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

The Academy rewarded “Zero Dark Thirty” with five Oscar nominations on Thursday buffeting its pursuit of viewers despite its two hour and 37 minute length.

Warner Bros. did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.

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No Jail Time for Doctor, 85, Convicted of Drug Charge

The former doctor sat in courton Friday waiting to be sentenced for a crime that breached every tenet of his professional code. He had run his house in Staten Island like a drug mill, selling the prescription painkiller oxycodone to all comers — including undercover federal agents. The guideline sentence for his crimes was up to six years.

But just by the look of the defendant, Felix Lanting, it seemed likely that he would never serve that much time. Frail and hunched-over at 85, he could only hope to live that long. And with a wife even frailer who depends on him for care, he posed a special challenge for the sentencing judge, Roslynn R. Mauskopf.

A lawyer for Mr. Lanting, James R. Froccaro, asked that his client receive no jail time at all.

“I’m agonizing about what to do,” said Judge Mauskopf, who presided over the case in United States District Court for the Eastern District.

Mr. Lanting’s crimes are typically committed by men a generation younger. A 2010 investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation found that in seven months, Mr. Lanting wrote and sold more than 3,000 prescriptions for oxycodone, an average of 15 per day, seven days a week.

Neighbors complained about the foot traffic. A relative of someone who overdosed on the pills attacked the front door of Mr. Lanting’s house with an ax. Mr. Lanting hired bouncers to protect his growing business, but they did not stop the undercover agents. When F.B.I. agents arrested him, they found $37,000 in cash and 100 solid silver bars. Eighty thousand dollars more turned up in a safe-deposit box.

In court on Friday, Mr. Lanting, who lost his medical license, stood and pleaded for his life and that of his wife. “I beg the court not to put me in jail because my wife will die,” he said. “I am the only one who is taking care of her.”

He began to cry. “I’m very sorry. I made a mistake. If I could undo it, I would. I’m begging you please.” Judge Mauskopf called a five-minute recess to think.

“If there ever were a case that cried out for mitigation, it is this one, based on the defendant’s age and based on the responsibilities to his wife,” Judge Mauskopf said when she returned. But she said she wanted to punish him.

She sentenced him to six months of house arrest, five years of probation and a $25,000 fine. She said Mr. Lanting might have to get someone else to take his wife to her medical visits.

“You need to feel the restrictions on your liberty,” she said. “The fine is meant to hurt and to punish you for what you did.”

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DealBook: Wells Fargo's Mortgage Gains May Be Unsustainable

8:40 p.m. | Updated

Wells Fargo has turned its mortgage business into an enormous profit machine. The San Francisco-based bank posted earnings of $5.1 billion in the fourth quarter, a 24 percent increase from the previous year.

But its strong gains may not be sustainable, unless interest rates drop significantly or the housing market recovers substantially. Both are long shots.

“Rates really don’t have to go up very much to discourage a whole swath of people from returning to the housing market,” said Lance Roberts, chief economist at StreetTalk Advisors, an investment advisory firm.

In recent years, Wells Fargo has aggressively expanded its mortgage business, a strategy that has helped drive record profits. The company reported net income of $18.9 billion in 2012, up 19 percent from 2011. Revenue rose 6 percent in the same period.

“We saw robust growth across the entire bank, proving that there is a lot of value in a strong, diversified business,” said Timothy J. Sloan, chief financial officer of Wells Fargo.

But after 12 consecutive quarters of rising profits, Wells Fargo may find it difficult to keep up the pace.

The bank’s recent mortgage profits largely reflect the government’s efforts to stimulate the economy, rather than a robust recovery in the housing market.

As the Federal Reserve has cut interest rates, millions of borrowers have refinanced their home loans to reduce costs. Refinancing accounted for 72 percent of Wells Fargo’s mortgage origination in the fourth quarter.

That business has been especially lucrative of late.

Banks pass on most of their mortgages to government entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which guarantee that the loans will be repaid. With the guarantee attached, banks sell the mortgages to bond investors and book a financial gain.

Profits have ballooned with the government intervention. The Fed has been a big buyer of mortgage bonds in an effort to drive down interest rates. But banks have not cut ordinary borrowers’ rates by the same amount.

That means the difference, or spread, between the rates increased last year. Wells Fargo’s gains from this activity totaled $10.3 billion in 2012, more than double the previous year.

Those gains may be hard to beat.

While the Fed has promised to purchase more mortgage bonds, interest rates may not fall much further. If mortgage rates stagnate or rise, fewer borrowers are likely to refinance or buy a house. And if the mortgage bond market weakens, banks will make less of a gain when selling the mortgages.

Already, refinancing activity appears to be slowing. In the fourth quarter, Wells Fargo handled $125 billion of mortgage originations, up 4 percent from the previous year. But loan production was higher earlier in the year, peaking at $139 billion in the third quarter.

At the same time, the Fed’s low rates are actually hurting other parts of the business. An important measure of a bank’s overall lending profitability, the net interest margin, has eroded. In the fourth quarter, Wells Fargo’s net interest margin dropped slightly to 3.56 percent, from 3.89 percent a year earlier.

Investors shrugged off the strong profits because of such concerns. Wells Fargo’s shares fell slightly on Friday, to $35.10, a 0.85 percent drop.

In an effort to assuage investors’ concerns about the refinancing business, Mr. Sloan, the chief financial officer, said in a conference call on Friday that he saw “billions of dollars in refinancing opportunities.”

Housing market numbers support his optimism. Over 70 percent of mortgages had interest rates above 4 percent in the fall, according to CoreLogic, a housing data firm. Some of those borrowers would benefit financially from refinancing, given that the interest rate on fixed, 30-year loans is 3.4 percent.

If the refinancing boom does sputter, a significant increase in new mortgages could help fill the void. That depends largely on the health of the housing market. While house prices posted annual gains last year, the recovery is far from robust.

Wells Fargo’s servicing business, in which the bank collects payments from homeowners, could also soften the blow. In the fourth quarter, the company reported $926 million in fees from that activity, up 6 percent from a year earlier.

Wells Fargo can also rely on other businesses to pick up some of the slack. In an interview on Friday, Mr. Sloan said that strong loan growth throughout the bank, including in autos and credit cards, reflected potential opportunity.

The bank reported gains in its wealth management business, where profit increased 13 percent, to $351 million. It has also been focusing on its brokerage business as regulations have curbed profits in other areas.

Cost-cutting could be another option. In the past, the bank has shown it can be aggressive on that front.

Recently, Wells Fargo has been developing its online and mobile banking operations so that it can trim staffing costs in its branches. It has also refocused on core businesses and sold units like H. D. Vest Financial Services, which it put on the auction block in 2011.

The company has also cleaned up much of the costly legal mess stemming from the mortgage crisis, striking several deals with federal regulators over the last year. This week, Wells Fargo was among the 10 banks that agreed to an $8.5 billion settlement with the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve over claims of shoddy foreclosure practices, including sloppy paperwork used in home seizures and botched loan modifications. Separately, the bank has allotted $1.2 billion to prevent foreclosures.

With the settlement, Wells Fargo puts an end to an expensive foreclosure review that was mandated by regulators. The review cost the bank an estimated $125 million each quarter.

“By putting these issues behind us, we can focus more of our resources on serving our customers,” the bank’s chief executive, John G. Stumpf, told analysts on Friday.

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Irvine City Council overhauls oversight, spending on Great Park

Capping a raucous eight-hour-plus meeting, the Irvine City Council early Wednesday voted to overhaul the oversight and spending on the beleaguered Orange County Great Park while authorizing an audit of the more than $220 million that so far has been spent on the ambitious project.

A newly elected City Council majority voted 3 to 2 to terminate contracts with two firms that had been paid a combined $1.1 million a year for consulting, lobbying, marketing and public relations. One of those firms — Forde & Mollrich public relations — has been paid $12.4 million since county voters approved the Great Park plan in 2002.

"We need to stop talking about building a Great Park and actually start building a Great Park," council member Jeff Lalloway said.

The council, by the same split vote, also changed the composition of the Great Park's board of directors, shedding four non-elected members and handing control to Irvine's five council members.

The actions mark a significant turning point in the decade-long effort to turn the former El Toro Marine base into a 1,447-acre municipal park with man-made canyons, rivers, forests and gardens that planners hoped would rival New York's Central Park.

The city hoped to finish and maintain the park for years to come with $1.4 billion in state redevelopment funds. But that money vanished last year as part of the cutbacks to deal with California's massive budget deficit.

"We've gone through $220 million, but where has it gone?" council member Christina Shea said of the project's initial funding from developers in exchange for the right to build around the site. "The fact of the matter is the money is almost gone. It can't be business as usual."

The council majority said the changes will bring accountability and efficiencies to a project that critics say has been larded with wasteful spending and no-bid contracts. For all that has been spent, only about 200 acres of the park has been developed and half of that is leased to farmers.

But council members Larry Agran and Beth Krom, who have steered the course of the project since its inception, voted against reconfiguring the Great Park's board of directors and canceling the contracts with the two firms.

Krom has called the move a "witch hunt" against her and Agran. Feuding between liberal and conservative factions on the council has long shaped Irvine politics.

"This is a power play," she said. "There's a new sheriff in town."

The council meeting stretched long into the night, with the final vote coming Wednesday at 1:34 a.m. Tensions were high in the packed chambers with cheering, clapping and heckling coming from the crowd.

At one point council member Lalloway lamented that he "couldn't hear himself think."

During public comments, newly elected Orange County Supervisor Todd Spitzer chastised the council for "fighting like schoolchildren." Earlier this week he said that if the Irvine's new council majority can't make progress on the Great Park, he would seek a ballot initiative to have the county take over.

And Spitzer angrily told Agran that his stewardship of the project had been a failure.

"You know what?" he said. "It's their vision now. You're in the minority."

mike.anton@latimes.com

rhea.mahbubani@latimes.com

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Baby Bones Found Scattered in Ancient Italian Village

SEATTLE — The death of an infant may not have been an occasion for mourning in ancient Italy, according to archaeologists who have found baby bones scattered on the floor of a workshop dating to the seventh century B.C.

The grisly finds consist of bone fragments uncovered over years of excavation at Poggio Civitate, a settlement about 15 miles (25 kilometers) from the city of Siena in what is now Tuscany. The settlement dates back to at least the late eighth century B.C. Archaeologists excavating the site have found evidence of a lavish residential structure as well as an open-air pavilion that stretches an amazing 170 feet (52 meters) long. Residents used this pavilion was as a workshop, manufacturing goods such as terracotta roof tiles.

In 1983, scientists uncovered a cache of bones on the workshop floor, consisting mostly of pig, goat and sheep remains. But among the bony debris was a more sobering find: two arm bones from an infant (or infants) who died right around birth.

In 2009, another baby bone surfaced at the workshop, this one a portion of the pelvis of a newborn. [See Images of the Infant Bones]

The bones “were either simply left on the floor of the workshop or ended up in an area with a concentration of discarded, butchered animals,” said Anthony Tuck, an archaeologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who presented an analysis of the bones Friday (Jan. 4) at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America.

Abandoned bones

The discovery of the discarded infant bones in an area used for work could suggest that the people who labored in the workshop had little social status, Tuck said. They may have been slaves or servants whose lost infants would garner little sympathy from the community at large.

However, a third find complicates the picture. In 1971, archaeologists found an arm bone from another newborn or near-term fetus pushed up against the wall of the lavish residence along with other bones and debris. It seems as if someone swept the debris up against the wall, not differentiating between baby bones and garbage, Tuck said. [8 Grisly Archaeological Discoveries]

There’s no way to know whose infant came to rest up against the wall of a wealthy person’s home, said Tuck, who plans to submit the findings to the journal Etruscan Studies. Perhaps the infant belonged to a desperate servant, or perhaps to a member of the family. If so, it may be that even high-status families didn’t consider babies worth mourning when they died in infancy.

The possibility can sound horrifying to modern ears, Tuck said.

“This kind of new data makes people a bit uncomfortable,” he told LiveScience. “People have a tendency to romanticize the past, especially in a place like Tuscany. When we have direct evidence for this kind of behavior, it can be a little tricky to present.”

Death in infancy

Nevertheless, Tuck said, there is reason to think that people have not always given infants the same community status as adults or older children. However, baby bones tend not to preserve well, which makes it difficult to know how ancient Italians in Tuscany treated their deceased infants.

Very few signs of infant burial appear in central Italian cemeteries from this time period, though, Tuck said. The handful of coffins containing baby bones that have been found are loaded with ornaments and jewelry, suggesting that only families of great wealth could have given a lost baby an adult-style funeral.

Even in modern times, societies have sometimes seen babies as belonging to a different category than adults, Tuck said. In areas of extreme poverty and stress that have high infant mortality, the death of a newborn may not trigger many outward displays of mourning, he said.

And many cultures have naming traditions that only recognize the baby’s identity significantly after birth. For example, in traditional Jewish culture, a baby boy’s name isn’t revealed outside the family until the bris, or the ritual of circumcision eight days after birth. According to superstition, naming the baby before then would attract the attention of the Angel of Death.

The Maasai people of Africa give their newborns temporary names until a ceremony as late as age 3, in which the child receives a new name and has his or her head shaved to symbolize a fresh start in life.

On the other hand, not all ancient cultures differentiate between the burials of babies and adults. Stone Age infant graves found in Austria in 2006 date back to 27,000 years ago and contain the same beads and pigments as adult gravesites.

The people who lived in Poggio Civitate more than 2,000 years ago have left little evidence of how they viewed infants, but Tuck and his colleagues expect more finds to emerge as the researchers continue to dig in the Tuscany hills. More evidence that high- and low-class babies were buried differently would suggest that the civilization had a rigid hierarchy, they said.

Images of more than 25,000 objects recovered from the site can be found at Open Context, an open-source research database developed by the Alexandra Archive Institute.

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas or LiveScience @livescience. We’re also on Facebook & Google+.

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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ABC Chief Says Network Needs Hits, Will Abandon “All-Star” Format for “Dancing”

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – ABC entertainment president Paul Lee summed up his fall season by saying his network has “a lot to shout about, and we also have a lot to do.”

Lee’s network finished the fall in fourth place in the key 18-49 demographic and third place in total viewers. He lamented the fall’s lack of any “big breakout hits on broadcast on any of the networks and on ABC in particular.”

NBC, which passed ABC and its other rivals to become fall’s top-rated network in 18-49, might dispute that: It has touted the new drama “Revolution” as a hit.

Lee assessed his network’s fall at a Television Critics Association panel on Thursday. He said he was particularly disappointed not to see better numbers for reality standby “Dancing With the Stars,” which adapted an “all-star” format in the fall and brought back former contestants. He said that for its spring cycle, the show would go back to recruiting fresh talent, in hopes of drawing a younger audience.

Looking for a positive spin on the disappointing ratings for the show – which still averages 16 million total viewers per episode – he said the dancing this fall may have been too good.

“It turns out people like to have bad dancing as much as they do good dancing,” he said.

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Fatally Ill, and Making Herself the Lesson

SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. — It was early November when Martha Keochareon called the nursing school at Holyoke Community College, her alma mater. She had a proposal, which she laid out in a voice mail message.

“I have cancer,” she said after introducing herself, “and I’m wondering if you’ll need somebody to do a case study on, a hospice patient.”

Perhaps some nursing students “just want to feel what a tumor feels like,” she went on. Or they could learn something about hospice care, which aims to help terminally ill people die comfortably at home.

“Maybe you’ll have some ambitious student that wants to do a project,” Ms. Keochareon (pronounced CATCH-uron) said after leaving her phone number. “Thank you. Bye.”

Kelly Keane, a counselor at the college who received the message, was instantly intrigued. Holyoke’s nursing students, like most, learn about cancer from textbooks. They get some experience with acutely ill patients during a rotation on the medical-surgical floor of a hospital. They practice their skills in the college’s simulation lab on sophisticated mannequins that can “die” of cancer, heart attacks and other ailments. But Ms. Keochareon, 59, a 1993 graduate of Holyoke’s nursing program, was offering students something unique: an opportunity not only to examine her, but to ask anything they wanted about her experience with cancer and dying.

“She is allowing us into something we wouldn’t ever be privy to,” Ms. Keane said.

So it was that a few weeks later, two first-year nursing students, Cindy Santiago, 26, and Michelle Elliot, 52, arrived at Ms. Keochareon’s tiny house, a few miles from the college. She was bedbound, cared for by a loyal band of relatives, hospice nurses and aides. Both students were anxious.

“Sit on my bed and talk to me,” Ms. Keochareon said. The students hesitated, saying they had been taught not to do that, to prevent transmission of germs. What they knew of nursing in hospitals — “I’m here to take your vitals, give you your medicine, O.K., bye,” as Ms. Santiago put it — was different, after all.

They had come with a list of questions. Ms. Keochareon was suffering from pancreatic cancer, and they had researched the disease ahead of time. They were particularly curious about why she had survived for so long. She had lived with her illness for more than six years — an extraordinary span for pancreatic cancer, which often kills within months after diagnosis.

Why, the students asked, had she managed to keep eating and keep on weight? What was she taking for the pain? How long had it taken for doctors to give her a diagnosis?

“They ask good questions,” Ms. Keochareon said one morning, her lips stained red from the liquid oxycodone she was sipping frequently between doses of other drugs. “I forget half the stuff I learned as a nurse, but I remember everything about pancreatic cancer. Because I’m living it.”

For Ms. Keochareon, this was a chance to teach something about the profession she had found late and embraced — she became a nurse at 40, after raising her daughter and working for years on a factory floor.

“When I was a nurse, it seemed like most of the other nurses were never too happy having a student to teach,” she said, lying in her bedroom lined with pictures of relatives, friends, and herself in healthier times. “I loved it.”

A Last Project

Now, her disease had left her passing the days watching Animal Planet, reading a book about heaven and calling friends — so much that her cordless phone never left her side. She also was planning meticulously for her death, down to the green wool cardigan and embroidered shirt she would be buried in. But Ms. Keochareon wanted more as she prepared to die. The project she envisioned would be not just for students, but also for her — a way to squeeze one more chapter out of life.

Spending time with the dying is not fundamental to nurse training, partly because there are not enough clinical settings to provide the experience. The End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium, a project of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, has provided training in palliative care to some 15,000 nurses and nursing instructors around the nation since 2000, focusing not just on pain management but also on how to help terminally ill patients and their families prepare for death.

In addition, some students do rotations with hospice nurses, said Pam Malloy, the project’s director. But Ms. Malloy said that nursing schools still do not focus on end-of-life care nearly as much as they should. “We live in a death-denying society, and that includes nursing,” she said. “People have begun to understand it’s important, but we’re nowhere where we need to be at this point.”

In their conversations with Ms. Keochareon, the students learned that her symptoms had included a burning sensation after eating, for which doctors prescribed an acid blocker. Then came wrenching abdominal pain, which she said doctors dismissed as psychosomatic. She also developed diabetes, another potential sign of pancreatic cancer, and itchiness, possibly from blocked bile ducts.

In 2006, after she had felt sick for several years, a doctor finally ordered a CT scan, and the cancer was diagnosed. Ms. Keochareon was 53 and working at a hospital in Charleston, S.C. She was told that she would probably die within a year or two.

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In New Year, Errors Mount at High-Speed Exchanges

Confidence-shaking technology mishaps have been an almost daily occurrence at the nation’s stock exchanges in the new year.

The latest example came Wednesday night when the nation’s third-largest stock exchange operator, BATS Global Markets, alerted its customers that a programming mistake had caused about 435,000 trades to be executed at the wrong price over the last four years, costing traders $420,000.

A day earlier, the trading software used by the National Stock Exchange stopped functioning properly for nearly an hour, forcing other exchanges to divert trades around it. The New York Stock Exchange, the nation’s largest exchange, has had two similar, though shorter-lived, breakdowns since Christmas and two separate problems with its data reporting system. And traders were left in the dark on Jan. 3 after the reporting system for stocks listed on the Nasdaq exchange, the second-biggest exchange, broke down for nearly 15 minutes.

The stream of errors has occurred despite the spotlight on the exchanges since a programming mishap nearly derailed Facebook’s initial public offering on Nasdaq last May and BATS’s fumbling of its own I.P.O. two months earlier. At the end of 2012, a number of exchange executives said they were increasing efforts to reduce the problems. But market data expert Eric Hunsader said that the technology problems have become, if anything, more frequent in recent weeks.

Matt Samelson, the founder of the industry consultancy Woodbine Associates, said, “Now that the world is watching, everyone is trying to be more rigorous. Their increased rigor is not yielding the benefits they hoped.”

Joe Ratterman, the chief executive of BATS, said Thursday that he viewed the firm’s announcement this week as a sign of markets that were functioning well, given his firm’s ability to find a problem that he called an “extreme edge-case scenario.”

“We discovered this problem and reported it — it’s a positive thing,” Mr. Ratterman said. “It’s being covered as if it’s a negative issue, and a continuation of a series of problems.

“Call me an optimist, but I see positive indications of the markets moving forward,” he said.

Regulators and traders have said that malfunctions are inevitable in any complex computer system. But many of these same people say that such problems were less frequent before the nation’s stock exchanges were thrown into a technological arms race in the middle of the last decade as a host of upstart exchanges like BATS challenged incumbents like the New York Stock Exchange.

The nation’s 13 public stock exchanges now compete fiercely to offer the latest, fastest and most sophisticated trading software, in part to appeal to the high-speed trading firms that have come to account for over half of all stock trading. With each tweak comes a new opportunity for a mistake to be inserted into the system.

“The rate of change is getting so rapid that the quality assurance process isn’t as robust as it should be,” said George Simon, a partner at Foley & Lardner who used to work at the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees the nation’s stock markets. “This has been something that has been brewing now for five years, and it keeps getting worse.”

Mr. Simon said that in less fragmented and complex markets, technology problems had been less common.

The market malfunctions have been assigned part of the blame for the diminishing amount of trading happening on the nation’s stock exchanges. The total volume of daily trading was down 17.6 percent in 2012 from 2011, according to Rosenblatt Securities.

Mr. Samelson of Woodbine Associates said the problems had long rattled retail investors, but they were becoming increasingly worrying for big institutional investors as well. While he was talking about the BATS mishap on Thursday, he received a text message from one big investor who said, “as if we didn’t have enough bad news.”

The problem reported by BATS was different from many other recent problems because it did not halt trading. Instead, the programming error meant some trades were not executed at the best price, as exchanges are required to do by law.

Only a small category of very complex trades were executed at the wrong prices, all of them coming from investors trying to do a so-called short sale of stocks. The 435,000 erroneous trades were only 0.003 percent of all trades over the last four years, according to Mr. Ratterman.

“This is so hard to identify that no customer ever identified it,” Mr. Ratterman said.

Mr. Ratterman said that 119 member firms lost money. He said he was not yet sure if BATS would compensate its members for their losses. BATS informed the members and the S.E.C. of the problem on Wednesday night, after discovering it on Friday.

The S.E.C. was not previously aware of the problem, but the enforcement division is already reviewing the issue, according to people with knowledge of the review who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

S.E.C. officials have acknowledged that they do not have adequate tools to properly police the high-speed, highly fragmented stock markets. But the agency has started several initiatives to catch up. Last year, the agency purchased software from a high-frequency trading firm that will give regulators a real-time window into the markets.

The agency has also been considering a rule that would force exchanges to submit their technology for regulatory review, something that some exchanges currently do voluntarily. At recent hearings called to examine the automation of the markets, members of the industry have supported other reforms to strengthen the system, like kill switches that would automatically stop errant trading.

Mr. Ratterman said regulators could make small changes to rules that would simplify the market infrastructure and make it less prone to mishaps.

But executives at some other exchanges have said that more sweeping changes are necessary. At a hearing in December, Joe Mecane, an executive at the New York Stock Exchange’s parent company, said that “technology and our market structure have created unnecessary complexity and mistrust of markets.”

Amy Butte Liebowitz, the former chief financial officer at the exchange, said that “you are only going to see more and more of this until someone says, ‘I’m not going to put up with this level of errors.’ ”

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San Juan Capistrano panel wants dinosaur statue removed

The San Juan Capistrano dinosaur is one step closer to extinction after city planning commissioners voted to evict the 40-foot long Apatosaurus statue from a petting zoo in the heart of the city's oldest neighborhood.

Commissioners said the dinosaur, which peeks onto historic Los Rios Street from the tiny zoo, does not reflect the history of San Juan, which would have been underwater when such animals roamed the Earth.

Carolyn Franks, owner of Zoomars Petting Zoo, said she plans to appeal the commission's 4-2 vote.

Franks bought the 13-foot-high statue for $12,000 in June, installing it without city permission. Since then, she and a donor have spent more than $30,000 on improvements to the statue and its setting, including leveling the ground where it was placed.

"We're a historical animal park," she said, noting that her zoo includes alpacas, goats, rabbits and a few zedonks — a cross between a zebra and a donkey. "The dinosaur is fiberglass. It's been so exciting for the kids — and what a great way to get kids started in history at the start of history."

Opponents cite the zoo's location on historic Los Rios Street, a narrow passageway dotted with buildings more than 200 years old. The road is one of the oldest in California.

Franks said she offered to screen off the statue — which is known by its fans as Juan the Capistrano Dinosaur — from pedestrians' view if the commission lets the dinosaur stay.

"She came in with good ideas, including screening with trees, and I thought we could find a way to preserve the statue," said Jeff Parkhurst, a city planning commissioner who said he took both of his daughters to the zoo when they were younger.

"I'm all for learning for kids, but our focus is on the history of San Juan — not the history of dinosaurs," said Robert Williams, who chairs the planning commission and believes the statue is out of place.

Franks has 15 days to appeal the vote. If the commission isn't swayed, she can appeal its decision to the City Council.

She said that when she returns to City Hall, she's considering bringing along some of the children, parents and teachers who support the dinosaur's continued residency on Los Rios.

"They wanted to wear dinosaur T-shirts because they love the statue," she said.

anh.do@latimes.com

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