Steven A. Cohen Is Absent at Art Basel Miami Beach

Katie Orlinsky for The New York Times

Art Basel's V.I.P. opening at the Miami Beach Convention Center on Wednesday, seen through Olafur Eliasson's work, "Your Shared Planet."

MIAMI BEACH — The opening of Art Basel Miami Beach, under way here this week, looked like the start of the most glamorous doorbuster sale in history, with hundreds of V.I.P.’s streaming into the convention center wearing high-end resort casual, ready to rummage through more than 200 of the world’s most prestigious galleries.

Among the shoppers were prominent collectors like Peter Brant, the newsprint executive, who strolled with the actor Owen Wilson. At the Gagosian Gallery booth, P. Diddy gave a hug to the casino mogul Steve Wynn beside a $2 million sculpture by Roy Lichtenstein.

But one notable titan of this realm was missing: Steven A. Cohen, the hedge fund billionaire, who in less than six years has acquired one of the market’s richest troves, with works by Manet, Monet, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst, to cite just a few.

In recent weeks, his name has surfaced with the legal troubles of Mathew Martoma, whom federal prosecutors have accused of insider trading while working at Mr. Cohen’s firm in Connecticut, SAC Capital Advisors. Mr. Cohen has not been charged with any wrongdoing, but there has been speculation that the government hopes to leverage the case against Mr. Martoma into charges against Mr. Cohen.

Does that possibility worry luminaries in the art world? A quick survey of gallerists, advisers and collectors suggests it depends on whom you ask. Plenty of people doubt that Mr. Cohen will ever be in genuine jeopardy and others think that even if he is, the art market now has so many well-heeled players that the absence of one buyer wouldn’t have a notable impact.

Then there were the gallery owners who had sold works to Mr. Cohen. As a general rule, the more business they have conducted with the man, the more worried they are likely to be.

“It’s disconcerting,” said Timothy Blum, co-owner of Blum & Poe, a gallery in Los Angeles. “We’re talking about a lot of liquid,” he added, meaning money. “A lot of liquid. I’ve never calculated it out, but he’s responsible for a significant percent of our business.”

For Mr. Blum and other elite gallery owners, there is sincere dread at the notion, however remote, that Mr. Cohen may one day be sidelined. Known in the securities world for astounding investment returns and an occasionally volcanic temper, he is described by dealers as the ideal collector — warm, dedicated, eager to take home the best pieces and unafraid to spend what it takes.

“We would absolutely hate to have him not active in the market, I can wholeheartedly say that,” said David Zwirner, who owns a gallery that bears his name in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. “This man is a friend of mine. I called him last week — ‘How are you? What’s going on?’ I think the art world is rooting for him. I’m rooting for him. I wish he were here right now.”

Two years ago, Mr. Cohen arrived at Mr. Zwirner’s booth in the opening minutes of the V.I.P. preview day and dropped $300,000 on a work by Adel Abdessemed, an Algerian-born artist who lives in Paris. Within the hour, Mr. Cohen had reportedly spent an additional $180,000 at Blum & Poe for a work by Tim Hawkinson called “Bike.”

The fair didn’t officially open until Thursday, but on Wednesday the convention center was already radiating an air of unabashed opulence. Cavernous, and crammed with product, the place is a kind of Costco for the rich, where the prices range from a low of a few thousand dollars to a high of “we don’t give out that information.” Women pushing carts handed out free flutes of Ruinart Champagne, the official Champagne of Art Basel Miami Beach.

Will Ferrell, the comedian, was one of handful of celebrities in the crowd. Wearing mirrored aviator sunglasses and sporting a green shirt with “Ireland” emblazoned on the back of the neck, he said he already knew what he wanted.

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Typhoon in Philippines leaves nearly 300 dead, hundreds missing

Deadly flooding in the Philippines from a typhoon has claimed dozens of lives.

As Typhoon Bopha veered west from the Philippines on Wednesday, disaster officials continued their grim tally in its wake, counting nearly 300 deaths from the overpowering storm.

The storm knocked over trees, destroyed homes and triggered devastating floods, including an unexpected burst of water in Compostela Valley province that swept away soldiers and swamped emergency shelters that had been believed to be safe. Nearly half of the storm deaths occurred in that province, according to government counts released Wednesday.

As of Wednesday evening in the Philippines, disaster relief officials had only identified 26 of the 274 people who were known to be killed.

PHOTOS: Typhoon Bopha

The death toll is feared to grow still higher as rescuers search battered areas caked with mud and strewn with the wreckage of collapsed homes. Downed electrical wires and damaged bridges have hindered crews from reaching some villages. Hundreds more people remain missing.

Dead bodies lay side by side in the village of New Bataan after the typhoon barreled on, leaving distraught villagers to search the corpses for friends and family. As he studied the dead, Juniper Serato told the Philippine Daily Inquirer that he was looking for six missing family members, including his parents.

He stopped after spotting a friend. “I know him,” he told the paper.

Others tried to find their loved ones online, using a Google website to submit information about people and search reports for names of friends and family. Twitter hash tags #rescuePH and #reliefPH helped connect Filipinos seeking help.

More than 217,000 people were affected by the deadly storm, known in the Philippines as Pablo, including more than 167,000 people seeking help at government evacuation centers, according to disaster officials. The typhoon stranded nearly 4,400 passengers in ports across the Philippine archipelago, scuttled scores of flights and cut off power and clean water to some parts of the islands.

Though heavy storms hit the Philippines every year, they usually batter the northern and central stretches of the country, not the southern islands where Bopha struck. The powerful storm came less than a year after Typhoon Washi slammed the south, claiming more than 1,200 lives.

Aid agencies and government officials said the memory of Washi had spurred families to leave their homes hours before the latest storm struck. Paul del Rosario, humanitarian coordinator for Oxfam in the Philippines, praised government efforts.

Those preparations, “plus the cooperation of affected residents, indeed saved lives,” Del Rosario said in a statement issued Wednesday by the nonprofit.

But the United Nations humanitarian office said food, water and shelter were badly needed as the storm cleared. Many displaced families are camping out in the open in areas sullied with mud. The typhoon also stripped some mountainsides of vegetation, raising fears that farms could be crippled in the aftermath of the typhoon.

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Add an HTML5 Webcam to Your Site With Photobooth.js

The big web development news for 2013 is shaping up to be WebRTC, a set of APIs being developed by Mozilla, Google and others at the W3C that allows web developers to access device hardware — your camera, microphone, accelerometer and so on. Even now hardly a day goes by without a new demo showcasing WebRTC in some way.

The latest WebRTC hotness to catch our eye is developer Wolfram Hempel’s Photobooth.js, a JavaScript library for working with a device’s camera. Photobooth.js allows users to take pictures directly on your website, for example, to add an avatar. It also acts a bit like the OS X Photobooth app, offering real-time adjustments for hue, saturation and brightness (one word of warning, hue can really slow down Firefox).

Want to add a Photobooth-style camera app to your site? Just download Photobooth.js and add this code to your page:

myPhotobooth = new Photobooth( document.getElementById( "container" ) ); 

That’s it. Of course there’s a little more to do if you actually want to do something with your newly instantiated Photobooth — like capture images or resize and save them. But Photobooth.js makes the whole process pretty simple; see the documentation for more details.

Photobooth.js works in current versions of Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and any other browser that supports the WebRTC getUserMedia method. You can see a complete list of browsers that support getUserMedia over on caniuse.

Hempel’s code is available on GitHub (BSD license) and can be used as a standalone app or a JQuery plugin.

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Jazz pianist Dave Brubeck dead at 91

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Jazz pianist Dave Brubeck, whose choice of novel rhythms, classical structures and brilliant sidemen made him a towering figure in modern jazz, has died at the age of 91, his longtime manager and producer Russell Gloyd said on Wednesday.

Brubeck died of heart failure on Wednesday morning after he fell ill on his way to a regular medical exam at Norwalk Hospital, in Norwalk, Conn., a day short of his 92nd birthday, Gloyd said.

His Dave Brubeck Quartet put out one of the best selling jazz songs of all time: “Take Five,” composed by alto saxophonist Paul Desmond. Like many of the group’s works, it had an unusual beat — 5/4 time as opposed to the usual 4/4.

“We play it differently every time we play it,” Brubeck told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2005. “So I never get tired of playing it. That’s the beauty of jazz.”

“Take Five” was the first million-selling jazz single.

Dressed in a suit and horn-rimmed glasses and living a clean-cut lifestyle in the 1950s, Brubeck did not fit the stereotype of a hipster jazzman and his music was not nearly as brooding as that coming from East Coast be-bop players.

Despite his innovative approach, some critics interpreted Brubeck’s popularity as a sign of un-coolness, but his fans were undeterred.

Brubeck was born in Concord, California, on December 6, 1920. His father was a rancher and as a teenager Brubeck was a skilled cowboy. But his mother, a music teacher who had five pianos in the house, saw that he took up piano at age 5.

At the College of the Pacific in Stockton, California, he planned to be a veterinarian, but within a year he was majoring in music and playing jazz in nightclubs.

“After my first year in veterinary pre-med I switched to the music department … and that was at the advice of my zoology teacher,” Brubeck said in a Reuters interview. “He said ‘Brubeck, your mind is not here, with these frogs and formaldehyde. Your mind is across the lawn at the conservatory. Will you please go over there.’”

Brubeck later met the co-director of a weekly campus radio show, Iola Marie Whitlock, and they eventually married.

After graduation, Brubeck studied under French composer Darius Milhaud and played in a U.S. Army jazz band during World War Two.

In the late 1940s, he moved to the San Francisco Bay area, where he headed an experimental jazz octet. He formed a trio in 1950 and the following year expanded to a quartet with Desmond, who he had known since the war.

Brubeck injected classical counterpoint, atonal harmonies and modern dissonance into his music, hinting at composers such as Debussy, Bartok, Stravinsky and Bach.

The group built an enduring fan base by taking its subdued bluesy brand of classically influenced jazz to colleges.

As a leading figure in the West Coast jazz scene, which also included Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker, Brubeck was featured in a Time magazine cover story in 1954. Some critics and black musicians, who felt jazz was a central part of black culture, resented the story about the prominence of a white artist.

In the article Brubeck said Milhaud had told him “if I didn’t stick to jazz, I’d be working out of my own field and not taking advantage of my American heritage.”

Brubeck disbanded the quartet in 1967 after nearly 17 years to concentrate on composing. He wrote several choral works, all religiously influenced.

He later began performing jazz regularly again and appeared with his sons, Darius, a composer and pianist; Chris, who played electric bass and trombone; and drummer Danny. They were billed as Two Generations of Brubeck.

In February 1989 Brubeck, who had a history of heart problems, underwent triple-bypass surgery but kept playing. Well into his 80s, he still put on some 80 shows a year. He had a pacemaker implanted in October 2010.

Actor-director Clint Eastwood, a jazz fan, announced plans to make a documentary on Brubeck in 2007. Eastwood also was named chairman of the Brubeck Institute at the University of the Pacific, designated as the home of his papers, private recordings and other memorabilia.

Brubeck and his wife, who also was his agent and lyricist, had two other sons, Matthew, a cellist, and Michael, and a daughter, Catherine. The couple lived in Wilton, Connecticut.

(Reporting by Christine Kearney; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Study Raises Questions on Coating of Aspirin

While aspirin may prevent heart attacks and strokes, a commonly used coating to protect the stomach may obscure the benefits, leading doctors to prescribe more expensive prescription drugs, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal Circulation.

The conclusion about coated aspirin was only one finding in the study, whose main goal was to test the hotly disputed idea that aspirin does not help prevent heart attacks or stroke in some people.

For more than a decade, cardiologists and drug researchers have posited that anywhere from 5 to 40 percent of the population is “aspirin resistant,” as the debated condition is known. But some prominent doctors say that the prevalence of the condition has been exaggerated by companies and drug makers with a commercial interest in proving that aspirin — a relatively inexpensive, over-the-counter drug whose heart benefits have been known since the 1950s — does not always work.

The authors of the new study, from the University of Pennsylvania, claim that they did not find a single case of true aspirin resistance in any of the 400 healthy people who were examined. Instead, they claim, the coating on aspirin interfered with the way that the drug entered the body, making it appear in tests that the drug was not working.

The study was partly financed by Bayer, the world’s largest manufacturer of brand-name aspirin, much of which is coated.

Aside from whether coating aspirin conceals its effects in some people, there is little evidence that it protects the stomach better than uncoated aspirin, said Dr. Garret FitzGerald, chairman of pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the study’s authors.

“These studies question the value of coated, low-dose aspirin,” he said in a statement accompanying the article. “This product adds cost to treatment, without any clear benefit. Indeed, it may lead to the false diagnosis of aspirin resistance and the failure to provide patients with an effective therapy.”

In a statement, Bayer took issue with some of the study’s conclusions and methods and said previous studies of coated aspirin, also called enteric-coated aspirin, have been shown to stop blood platelets from sticking together — which can help prevent heart attacks and stroke — at levels comparable to uncoated aspirin. Bayer also noted that the price difference between its coated and uncoated aspirin was negligible, although Dr. FitzGerald argued there was no reason patients should use anything other than uncoated generic aspirin, which is cheaper.

“When used as directed,” the company said, “both enteric and nonenteric coated aspirin provides meaningful benefits, is safe and effective and is infrequently associated with clinically significant side effects.”

Although researchers had long observed that, as is true with most drugs, aspirin’s effects varied among patients, the existence of “aspirin resistance” gained currency in the 1990s and early 2000s. One often-cited study, published in 2003, found that about 5 percent of cardiovascular patients were aspirin-resistant and that that group was more than three times as likely as those not aspirin-resistant to suffer a major event like a heart attack.

But some said the popularity of aspirin resistance got a boost in part because of the development of urine and blood tests to measure it and the arrival on the market of drugs like Plavix, a more expensive prescription drug sold by Bristol-Myers Squibb that also thins the blood.

In the most recent study, the patients who initially tested positive for aspirin resistance later tested negative for it and by the end of the study, Dr. FitzGerald said, none of the patients showed true resistance. “Nobody had a stable pattern of resistance that was specific to coated aspirin,” he said. If resistance to aspirin exists, he said, “I think that the incidence is vanishingly small.”

Dr. Eric Topol, one of the authors of the 2003 study, said he strongly disagreed with Dr. FitzGerald’s conclusions, noting that it looked only at healthy volunteers, “which is very different than studying people who actually have heart disease or other chronic illnesses who are taking various medications.” Those conditions or medications could affect the way aspirin works in the body, he said.

But Dr. Topol and Dr. FitzGerald did agree that there was little value in testing for whether someone was aspirin-resistant, in part because there was little evidence that knowing someone is resistant to aspirin will prevent a heart attack or stroke.

Representatives for Accumetrics, which sells a blood test, and Corgenix, which sells a urine test, maintained that there was value in determining how well aspirin worked in individual patients, and said more recent research on the issue has moved away from a stark determination of whether someone is resistant to aspirin. “This whole concept of drug resistance has moved past that term and moved into the level of response that someone has,” said Brian Bartolomeo, market development manager at Accumetrics.

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State of the Art: Reviewing All-in-One Luxury PCs From Vizio, H.P. and Apple - State of the Art

Try this simple test at home: What’s the name of Dell’s best-selling PC? Anybody? Anybody?

Right. Nobody knows.

And nobody cares. Today, it’s all about phones and tablets, baby. Nobody buzzes about the PC anymore. Innovation is dead. Sales are down, right?

Actually, there’s one pocket of surging sales and innovation in PC land: the luxury all-in-one computer, of the type made famous by the iMac.

I took a look at three silver, high-design, screen-on-a-stalk competitors: Apple’s new iMac ($1,300 and up), Hewlett-Packard’s SpectreOne ($1,300 and up), and the Vizio All-in-One Touch PC ($1,000 and up). (Lenovo, Dell, Samsung and Acer also offer, or soon will offer, very similar all-in-ones.)

What characterizes these computers? First, a tremendous emphasis on looks. They’re shiny, sleek, futuristic, uncluttered and cordless (they come with Bluetooth wireless keyboard and trackpad or mouse). They’re sculpture. In your kitchen or on your desk, they contribute to the décor even when they’re turned off.

The usual box of innards is missing. In the iMac, the guts are concealed behind the screen. In the Vizio, they’re in the foot of the monitor. In the H.P., they’re inside the stalk that supports the screen.

The second common trait is state-of-the-art components. These computers offer gorgeous, vivid, high-definition screens. And they’re fast; they’re powered by the latest Intel chips and lots of memory.

Third characteristic: no DVD drive.

What? Do these companies really think that the era of the disc is over? That nobody will ever again want to digitize music from a CD? Or burn some files to a disc to hand to a colleague? Or borrow a DVD from the library?

Apple, H.P. and Vizio seem to believe that everything is online now. Well, it’s not. Want to rent an Indiana Jones movie, “Jurassic Park” or “Schindler’s List”? How about “Star Wars,” “A Beautiful Mind,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” or “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”? Too bad; they’re not available to rent online.

You can, of course, buy an external DVD drive. But aren’t these called “all in ones”? An external drive just looks stupid.

Now, on a laptop, eliminating the DVD drive is understandable. You carry laptops. Weight matters. Bulk matters. But why eliminate DVD drives on computers that stay in one place?

All right, end of rant.

The new iMac, clad in its traditional aluminum, is stunning. The stand is still a thin, curved L of metal — but now, the screen appears to be just as thin (0. 2 inches). Where are the guts?

Turns out it’s a trick — an illusion. Behind the screen, you see a substantial bulge; Apple tapered the aluminum as it approaches the screen, so that from front angles it seems that the whole screen is razor thin.

Apple has also eliminated much of the glare that has long dogged today’s glossy screens. Viewed side-by-side with its rivals, the iMac is a lot less reflective.

There are two iMac sizes: 21.5 and 27 inches. The $1,300 and $1,800 base models come with a 1-terabyte hard drive, 8 gigabytes of memory and an i5 Intel processor. Each has four USB 3.0 jacks, two Thunderbolt jacks (for video input or output or external hard drives), and camera memory-card slot, awkwardly positioned on the back. Apple has ditched the FireWire jack it spent so many years promoting.

On the 21.5-incher, you can’t upgrade the memory yourself; what you buy is what you’ll have forever, unless you take it into the shop.

On the 27-inch model, you can install as much as 32 gigabytes yourself, through an easily opened door. (That, for the record, is about 262,144 times the memory as the original Macintosh.) Online, you can order your iMac with a 3-terabyte hard drive, 32 gigabytes of memory, a 768-gigabyte flash-memory drive and a $3,700 invoice.

Vizio isn’t a company you expect to be in the PC business; it made its mark selling high-quality, low-price TV sets. And sure enough, by far the best part of the All-in-One Touch PC is its lovely touch screen, available in 24- and 27-inch versions. .

A nontouch version is also available, but the Vizio comes with Windows 8, which is far more pleasant to use with a touch screen.

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Villaraigosa says ports, union to use federal mediator to try to end strike

By Times Staff

December 4, 2012, 10:23 a.m.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said at a news conference today that the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports and a union representing 800 clerical workers will use a federal mediator to try to end an eight-day strike.

 Speaking in Wilmington, the mayor did not say workers would return to their jobs during the mediation process. The walkout has shut down the ports, forcing ships to anchor off the coast or head to competing ports in Northern California, Panama and Mexico.

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Opportunity Rover Finds Mars Minerals That Formed in Life-Friendly Water

SAN FRANCISCO — While attention has been focused on the Mars rover Curiosity, NASA’s other active Mars rover, Opportunity, has quietly been going about its business and may have stumbled across an intriguing new geologic puzzle. Opportunity has begun examining ancient clays on Mars that would have formed in the presence of water with neutral acidity, a condition favorable for life as we know it.

“This is our first glimpse ever at an ancient Mars where conditions would be suitable for life,” said astronomer Steve Squyres of Cornell University, the lead scientist for Opportunity’s mission, here at the American Geophysical Union conference on Dec 4.

Previous minerals that Opportunity and its defunct twin Spirit had found thus far on Mars would have required extremely harsh conditions to form, something akin to battery acid, and not very conducive to life. The clays that the rover is now exploring would have been created billions of years earlier in water with a neutral pH. “These clays point to water you could drink,” said Squyres.

Since it landed on Mars in 2004, Opportunity has roved more than 22 miles. After nine years on Mars, the rover is getting a bit old, with a squeaky right front wheel and a creaky arm joint, though is overall in good condition. Last year, the probe arrived at Endeavor crater, where it discovered the most unambiguous evidence for water on ancient Mars ever found.

Scientists directed Opportunity to Endeavor crater to study the clays, which had been spotted earlier from orbit. Roving around one of the half-buried rims of the crater, Opportunity found a small hill that Squyres described as the “sweet spot” where clays are known to be present. The rover took photos showing two types of rocks.

The dominant material is light-toned, flat-lying, and easily eroded by Martian wind. This is the rock that contains the clays and shows a chemistry typical of Martian material. But Opportunity also found a fin sticking up through the dominant rocks made of another material that is dark, gray, and more resistant to erosion.

“What we have stumbled upon is what is turning out to be one of the most delightful geologic puzzles we have ever found on Mars,” said Squyres.

When they drove up to the fin, the science team found it covered in a dense concentration of spherical bubbles quite similar looking to the iron-containing Martian “blueberries” that Opportunity has seen before. But when they looked at the chemical composition of these spheres, scientists found they contained no iron.

“It’s something totally different, and I’ve started calling them ‘newberries’,” said Squyres.

The team doesn’t yet know what these newberries are made of and will spend the next few months investigating them. They could be mineral concretions, impact ejecta spherules, or volcanic hailstones. Squyres said that researchers will also examine the clays to determine what conditions on early Mars would have been like. He said many questions remained and Opportunity had a lot of work ahead of it.

“It’s like we’ve been exploring Mars for nine years, and now Mars has given us a final exam,” said Squyres.

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Longtime editor at DC’s Vertigo imprint leaving

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — DC Entertainment says its executive editor and senior vice president of Vertigo — a groundbreaking imprint whose titles have included “Hellblazer,” ”DMZ” and “Sandman” — is leaving early next year.

Karen Berger will step down in March after nearly 20 years at the helm, saying in a statement released by DC late Monday that she is ready for a professional change.

During her tenure at Vertigo, the imprint saw a wide range of writers and artists — Neil Gaiman, Jill Thompson, Becky Cloonan and Brian Wood, among them — who produced titles beyond the traditional superhero and villain archetype.

Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance and writer of “The Umbrella Academy” tweeted that Berger gave “us weird kids in high school a Sub Pop Records for comics.”

___

Online:

http://www.vertigocomics.com

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Sign Language Researchers Broaden Science Lexicon

Imagine trying to learn biology without ever using the word “organism.” Or studying to become a botanist when the only way of referring to photosynthesis is to spell the word out, letter by painstaking letter.

For deaf students, this game of scientific Password has long been the daily classroom and laboratory experience. Words like “organism” and “photosynthesis” — to say nothing of more obscure and harder-to-spell terms — have no single widely accepted equivalent in sign language. This means that deaf students and their teachers and interpreters must improvise, making it that much harder for the students to excel in science and pursue careers in it.

“Often times, it would involve a lot of finger-spelling and a lot of improvisation,” said Matthew Schwerin, a physicist with the Food and Drug Administration who is deaf, of his years in school. “For the majority of scientific terms,” Mr. Schwerin and his interpreter for the day would “try to find a correct sign for the term, and if nothing was pre-existing, we would come up with a sign that was agreeable with both parties.”

Now thanks to the Internet — particularly the boom in online video — resources for deaf students seeking science-related signs are easier to find and share. Crowdsourcing projects in both American Sign Language and British Sign Language are under way at several universities, enabling people who are deaf to coalesce around signs for commonly used terms.

This year, one of those resources, the Scottish Sensory Centre’s British Sign Language Glossary Project, added 116 new signs for physics and engineering terms, including signs for “light-year,”  (hold one hand up and spread the fingers downward for “light,” then bring both hands together in front of your chest and slowly move them apart for “year”), “mass” and “X-ray” (form an X with your index fingers, then, with the index finger on the right hand, point outward). 

The signs were developed by a team of researchers at the center, a division of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland that develops learning tools for students with visual and auditory impairments. The researchers spent more than a year soliciting ideas from deaf science workers, circulating lists of potential signs and ultimately gathering for “an intense weekend” of final voting, said Audrey Cameron, science adviser for the project. (Dr. Cameron is also deaf, and like all non-hearing people interviewed for this article, answered questions via e-mail.)

Whether the Scottish Sensory Centre’s signs will take hold among its audience remains to be seen. “Some will be adopted, and some will probably never be accepted,” Dr. Cameron said. “We’ll have to wait and see what happens.”

Ideally, the standardization of signs will make it easier for deaf students to keep pace with their hearing classmates during lectures. “I can only choose to look at one thing at a time,” said Mr. Schwerin of the F.D.A., recalling his science education, “and it often meant choosing between the interpreter, the blackboard/screen/material, or taking notes. It was like, pick one, and lose out on the others.”

The problem doesn’t end at graduation. In fact, it only intensifies as new discoveries add unfamiliar terms to the scientific lexicon. “I’ve had numerous meetings where I couldn’t participate properly because the interpreters were not able to understand the jargon and they did not know any scientific signs,” Dr. Cameron said.

One general complaint about efforts to standardize signs for technical terms is the idea that, much like spoken language, sign language should be allowed to develop organically rather than be dictated from above.

“Signs that are developed naturally — i.e., that are tested and refined in everyday conversation — are more likely to be accepted quickly by the community,” said Derek Braun, director of the molecular genetics laboratory at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., which he said was the first biological laboratory designed and administered by deaf scientists.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 4, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the origin of the ASL-STEM Forum.  It was developed by researchers at the University of Washington, not Gallaudet University.  Researchers at Gallaudet and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology work with the University of Washington to provide content and help the forum grow.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 4, 2012

An earlier version of a correction with this article misstated the name of an institute that works on the ASL-STEM Forum. It is the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology not the National Institute for the Deaf. 

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