Ireland's international trade: the real story | "The Positive Economist ...

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Haven?t I been continuously promoting exports, and saying that exports are a wonderful way to increase your client base, that you can get so much help from government agencies, and that I am working to establish links to the UK?

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Yet, our exports boom has also been called the ?jobless recovery?. So what?s all the fuss about then? Once again, it is a matter of making the difference between macroeconomics and microeconomics. On a micro level, the level of your household or your business, exports are a very good idea and once again I want to encourage you to start exporting or export more.

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That?s the level I am always positive and optimistic about, because that is the level at which you can take action.

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But on the macro level, the level of the national economy, while there has been much talk of growing exports, I am not sure we have been looking at the numbers hard enough. What story do these numbers actually tell us?

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We do export far more than we import overall, and that number has been growing steadily, which is always good news. But trumpeting news of exports growth shouldn?t make us forget that our domestic economy is still going through a harsh contraction: consumer confidence is still low and of course, Budget Day doesn?t help that.

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In addition, people don?t just spend or save based on their current circumstances, but rather the situation they anticipate they will find themselves in the future. And at the moment they are saving, not spending. That alone should tell us volumes about the state of our home economy. No, exports alone can?t single-handedly save the day, and we shouldn?t forget that.

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Then I want to question a few assumptions that are regularly bandied about, like ?The UK is our biggest trade partner?. The UK is one of our biggest trade partners only because it has one continuous geographical border around it. Indeed, we might do less trade with other single countries, but in terms of currency trading partners, the Euro area is a much, much bigger trading partner for Ireland.

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Does this mean that I am backtraking on my strategy to export to the UK? Not at all. I?m simply pointing out a fact that is not always highlighted: we need to continue to nurture our trade relations with more than just the UK and US. And at the same time, I am enthusiastically working on exporting to the UK, because it makes a lot of strategic sense for my business at a micro level.

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Exports are not performing equally well across the board. Actually 90% of our exports come from foreign direct investment: their positive influence on the local economy might not be as ?sticky? or as long-lasting as the influence of indigenous businesses. This is likely to happen in an open economy (one that engages in a lot of international trade) and an attractive FDI location, but we still need to make sure that at policy level, Irish SMEs are encouraged to go out there on the world stage, to protect themselves as well as the wider economy.

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And as has been repeatedly pointed out, FDI needs to be wooed, which we have taken care of with internal devaluation, favourable regimes as well as building a high quality workforce. By working on bringing down our wages and the overall cost of doing business in Ireland, we have increased our value and our competitiveness.

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Also, 50% of our products exports are thanks to pharmaceutical companies. Many of them also represent FDI. What?s more, exports results from pharma are slightly uncertain: although the latest merchandise projections point to growth, a lot of patents for medicines and molecules are expiring, which might adversely affect those results.

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Another thing we should pay closer attention to is ? how much money generated from exports actually stays in the country. More than just heady exports figures, we need to look at the balance of payments. Because that?s where the actual better news is.

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Our balance of payments came into surplus last year, for the first time perhaps since 1999. This is something that we lost sight of during the boom: at the time we took our eye off the ball and our balance of payments was in deficit, due to growing domestic demand ? the opposite of what?s happening now.

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FDI is often criticised for an artificial exports boost, that is soon cancelled out by profits being repatriated to the foreign company?s headquarters. But it seems that FDI businesses have been contributing their share to the Irish economy, after all: the first clue is in the corporation tax returns, and the second is the positive balance of payments; settling in Ireland, they had to have buildings built, they had to buy supplies and of course they hired a lot of people. Today 1 in 7 jobs in Ireland is down to FDI.

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For the first time, the balance of payment for services is in surplus ? this is more good news, and another driver of exports that we need to nurture. The technology sector is in no small part responsible for this, thanks to software and services sales.

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This rise in service exports is also due to a change of governmental policy: Enterprise Ireland is now much more willing to talk to internationally traded service companies (like mine!), when in the past it focused solely on manufacturing businesses.

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Because we built a world class expertise in this sector, some of the biggest investment companies all over the world are domiciling their funds in Ireland. This is another form of FDI. Those investment funds in Ireland are responsible for the management of assets worth over two trillion euros. Now by the very nature of the business, this money may well be coming to Ireland, but it isn?t spent: it is there to be stored. It doesn?t make its way into the economy.

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On the upside, it still creates jobs: the more assets you have to manage, the more people you need to hire to manage, administer, service, audit those assets. Let?s take three examples, advertised on the IDA?s website: Fidelity Investments have been present in Ireland since 1996 and will potentially create 200 jobs in the near future, saying ?We?re not here for any recession arbitrage, we?re here for the long haul? (in this video). Other companies are seriously thinking of expanding or creating operations in Ireland, like Clearstream, and Amanie Advisors.

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Very interestingly, now that Ireland is the investment management hub of Europe (with Luxembourg), from July next year the AIFMD (Alternative Investment Funds Management Directive) will generate lots of new opportunities in this sector. This directive regulates hedge funds for the first time ? and there is a lot of work to be done to comply with valuation, administration, custody, as well as a plethora of new policies and regulations to be implemented.

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So here is my take on Ireland?s true international picture. While exports are wonderful from a microeconomic point of view for single companies, there has been too much talk of their growth, and not enough discussion of how much money actually remains in the economy, while the Balance of Payments tells us the real story. Also, the idea that ?we?re closer to Boston than Berlin? just isn?t true: the Euro area is a huge market for Irish exports.

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Our international picture is much improved, but the computation of economic growth masks the other issues that we should be working harder to solve: the mortgage crisis, the still staggering amount of debt, the cost of doing business?

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Our domestic economy needs more attention and particularly from an outside perspective, we need to highlight the fact that despite the fact that we are out of recession, our domestic economy is still in the throes of its depth.

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On the positive side, we have real good news. Our balance of payments is now in surplus, the indigenous service sector is indirectly getting a boost, our internal devaluation has been rewarded through more jobs and the AIFMD only bodes well for the Irish economy.

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It?s important to be able to clearly identify what?s really going on in the economy and arm yourself with the knowledge before listening to one point of view or the other, as then you can make up your own mind.

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Previous post: Are your financial goals keeping you at square one?

Source: http://thepositiveeconomist.com/irelands-international-trade-the-real-story/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=irelands-international-trade-the-real-story

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Money in focus as UN climate talks enter last day

DOHA, Qatar (AP) -- A dispute over money clouded U.N. climate talks Friday, as rich and poor countries sparred over funds meant to help the developing world cover the rising costs of mitigating global warming and adapting to it.

Developing countries want firm commitments from rich nations to scale up climate aid to poor countries to $100 billion annually by 2020, a general pledge that was made three years ago.

Rich nations are unwilling to commit to specific targets now, citing world financial turmoil and pressure on their budgets.

After overnight negotiations, a draft agreement was presented Friday that does not include midterm targets, which developing countries had called for. The U.N. climate secretariat said "further consultations are necessary."

That issue has overshadowed the talks since they started last week in Qatar, the first Middle Eastern country to host the slow-moving annual negotiations aimed at crafting a global response to climate change.

Climate activists said the talks were being held back by short-sighted financial concerns among developed countries.

"The tone of the negotiations is extremely sour now," said Greenpeace international leader Kumi Naidoo, who predicted that discussions would continue into the weekend.

Rich nations pledged in 2009 to deliver long-term financing to help poor nations switch to clean energy and adapt to rising sea levels and other impacts of global warming. They offered $10 billion a year in 2010-2012 in "fast-start" financing, pledging that the amount would be increased to $100 billion in 2020. But they didn't say how.

The latest text on the table urges developed countries "to make firm commitments to provide scaled up climate finance beyond 2012" but didn't include any midterm targets.

Negotiators were also trying to finalize an agreement to formally extend the Kyoto Protocol, an emissions reduction pact for rich countries that expires at the end of this year.

The U.S. never joined Kyoto while Japan, New Zealand, Canada and Russia don't want to be part of the extension, meaning it would only cover about 15 percent of the world's emissions of greenhouse gases.

Governments have set a deadline of 2015 to agree on a wider deal that would include both developed and developing countries, which now produce a majority of the world's emissions.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/money-focus-un-climate-talks-084549385.html

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Business Innovation In Healthcare - Business Insider

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Cleveland Clinic CEO Dr. Delos "Toby" Cosgrove

Of the many policy battles being fought in the United States, few are as important to the long term future of the country as that over healthcare.

Simply put, if we don't find a way to slow down the growth of healthcare costs, we're eventually going to drown in debt. Increasingly expensive treatments, longer lifespans, chronic illnesses, and demographic trends all but guarantee it.?

The passage of the Affordable Care Act was the first big effort in many years, and turned the issue into a political live wire, making progress even more difficult. Part of the effect has been a movement towards hospital consolidation as small practices are pressured and bigger systems hope to gain efficiency through scale.?

But bigger hospitals are only the beginning. For costs to come down, hospitals need to embrace innovation in how they do business, and start to change some of the behaviors that have made healthcare more and more expensive without making it any better for patients.

We spoke to Dr. Delos Cosgrove, the CEO of the Cleveland Clinic. In the Presidential debates, both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney mentioned the hospital as a model of innovation and of how to bring healthcare costs down.?

"You've seen by the recent shout-outs we got in the Presidential debates that we're being looked at a model of how to go forward," Dr. Cosgrove said, "And I really think our model is our secret sauce."

98 percent of the people that request a same day appointment at the Cleveland Clinic get one, and there were over one million such appointments last year. Focusing on costs doesn't have to come at the expense of the patient.?

Changing the incentives?

So what exactly do they do? One of the biggest issues in healthcare in the United States has been an emphasis on quantity of care rather than quality, as insurance companies and doctors often get paid more for expensive tests and procedures.?That's led to a great deal of inefficient, expensive treatment.?

The Cleveland Clinic's solution? All doctors are salaried and on one year contracts. "We have no financial incentives to do more or less. We just try to look after what the needs are for a patient because it doesn't make a difference to us personally," Dr. Cosgrove said. "We all have one year contracts, there's no tenure, and we have annual professional reviews. I don't know of another institution that has annual professional reviews and one year contracts. In the annual professional review we go over all individual contributions to the organization, and that contributes to our decisions about what we do about salary or whether we reappoint or don't."

Doctors focus on what's best for the patient, rather than what gets them paid, leading to fewer unneeded tests and surgeries. They're evaluated on the quality of care rather than earnings. When you can have cheaper care that's also better for the patient, it's clear that there needs to be some change in the industry.?

Those one year contracts go all the way to the top level. Dr. Cosgrove's had 37 one year contracts in his time at the hospital. "You stop and think, almost every major business I can think of has annual reviews. And healthcare traditionally has not," Dr. Cosgrove said. "You got privileges at a hospital and they were yours for life unless you committed murder or something. So it's very seldom that people look at the qualities and the outcomes for each individual."

The data revolution

Part of changing the focus and how people are evaluated is actually having the data to do so. That's an area where hospitals can improve on cost and quality. "The more we measured, the more we found problems," Dr. Cosgrove said. "And when you found a problem you could really sort of screw down into it and find out what the root of it was and begin to deal with that particular issue. And what resulted is that we got better and better as we went along." ?

Now, every part of the hospital system transparently publishes its outcomes, adds more data every year, and continually works to get better. Cost is even easier to measure, and it needs to start to be a part of every decision. ?"Cost has been looked at what you get paid to do something, not what it costs to do it," Dr. Cosgrove said." So what we've done, over the years we've begun to understand how much it costs to do each one of our procedures. We've asked each of our institutes to go and look at the cost of their number one or two or three things they do. The urologists looked at prostatectomies, they looked at the cost of the sutures, how many instruments they had on the table, how long the patients stay in the recovery room, etc. and they were able to take 25 percent out of the actual cost of what they did."

Ending the Departments of Surgery and Medicine

One of the keys to what the Cleveland Clinic's done is not being afraid to change structures that have been around forever. Just because something's persisted, doesn't mean it's good, especially in an industry that's slow to change.?

"Most hospitals are organized around the department of surgery, the department of medicine, the department of pediatrics. There's essentially a guild system for whatever your profession is. And what we said was, wouldn't it be nice to organize a hospital around what a patient needs? Novel idea, right?" Dr. Cosgrove said. "If you've got a headache, you don't know whether you need to see a psychologist, a neurologist, or a neurosurgeon. So let's put everybody who deals with a neurologic system in a neurologic institute, and we'll have one head. So if you go in for your headache you can see, there in one location, everybody who you could potentially need to see. And they talk to each other, they're physically proximate to each other."

It's more efficient and less costly because patients spend less time in the hospital bouncing around between departments. It was a huge change. Hospitals have been organized around departments of surgery and medicine for years, and people were nervous at first. Rather than slow down, Dr. Cosgrove sped it up.

"The whole organization was anxious. We started one by one to move people to various locations, and finally everybody was so nervous that we said we're going to do the whole thing at once. In one year we changed the whole organization, so there's no more department of surgery, no more department of medicine, it's all by institutes," Dr. Cosgrove said. "It wasn't beating guys over the head. Nobody came to me and said that's a terrible idea, not one person, but everybody was anxious. And nobody has come to me and said we have to go back.?So everybody could see the value of doing it."

Cutting costs is also about doing little things, and being physician led has helped the Cleveland Clinic do that. "We also put a price tag on supplies in the operating room," Dr. Cosgrove said. "In the past, if a doctor thought he needed a suture he would just grab it, open it, and throw it away. Now, they see the price." ?

As a former surgeon, Dr. Cosgrove knows how they behave. "We didn't know what things cost, so we'd just say, 'give me one of those.'"?

Where are the copycats?

So if this has all been so successful at the Cleveland Clinic, why haven't other hospitals emulated it? Dr. Cosgrove told this story to illustrate how entrenched certain habits are. ?

"Two years ago, I was invited to the White House and I'm there with 9 other CEOs of hospital systems, you know there's the New York Hospital System, Columbia, Penn, Hospital CEOs from all over the place. Everybody's given three or four minutes to tell their story about what they can do to improve healthcare delivery. I'm the last guy to talk and I described our system, how we're integrated and how we're all employed. And everybody says, 'Oh we couldn't do that.' I said, 'Wait a minute, guys. How many of you would like to have that system?' Everybody raised their hand.?So the point is, that we're entrenched in a different system. We're going from an individual sport ot a team sport, and getting everybody to change their headspace is a big deal."

We're only at the beginning of what's going to be a long period of change for the healthcare industry. The Affordable Care Act hasn't even been fully implemented yet. Hospitals either need to be proactive about changing, or they're going to be forced to.?

"I think the pendulum is moving fast," Dr. Cosgrove said, "it's really amazing how fast things are changing."

NOW READ: The One Massive Trend That's Going to Change Healthcare Forever

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/business-innovation-in-healthcare-2012-12

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Irish Property Tax - Main UK Economics & Finance Forum - THE ...

Council tax is a tax on the user of the property, not the owner.? In fact it was also designed to protect the rich with the cheapest properties paying 1/3 that of the most expensive.? E.g. a 36sqm flat may cost ?1k/year, while a rambling Victorian pile with a couple of acres* will cost ?3k/year.? In addition no allowance is made for location leading to council tax rates in Westminster being almost a third those of Middlesbrough.? Finally the last valuation was carried out over twenty years ago, rendering the valuations essentially meaningless.

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*More than a couple of acres & you probably start getting subsidies.

Source: http://www.creditcrunch.co.uk/topic/11597-irish-property-tax/

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Is Your Business Online? Learn The Tips To Successful Internet ...

Network marketing is a great business opportunity for someone with lots of energy and that yearns for success. There are some intelligent ways to go about network marketing in order to win.

Think about methods you want to use to advertise your webpage. Free or relatively inexpensive ways to advertise your site include hanging posters in community businesses, using social networking sites, or posting on blogs. There is an abundance of methods for attracting visitors to your website. Get creative!

Put customer testimonials on your site. Be believable in your claims and try to demonstrate the benefits of what you are promoting with a video, so that customers can see for themselves. This is a great illustration of why you should sell products you have actually used whenever possible.

Make a simple video where you demonstrate using the products that you are selling. This allows the customer to see you utilizing the product. Be sure to demonstrate any and all features and benefits that the product has. You can host your video on your own website as well as posting it to video-sharing sites.

Make sure you have a good logo even if you are a small company. This will make customers remember your business and allow you to build a brand. A great tagline will be remembered by customers. When a customer is ready to buy a product, he might remember your slogan even if he doesn?t remember the name of your business. In the age of the internet, that?s not a big problem.

Studying HTML tagging procedure can enable you to employ more effective tags. HTML tags are one way that you can make note of what is important on your site, and the tags will highlight that information in bold. Search engines take emphasized text into account when determining rankings. Be sure to highlight your critical keywords.

Take a hard look at the true value of your service or product. No amount of marketing can change a product that is faulty or otherwise inferior. Having a product better than the competition is a key to raising sales.

One good idea is to think about Internet marketing like a hobby instead of something to replace your job, at least initially. If you find that you are very good at this, than you may want to consider making it a career, but at first it should be more for fun than profit.

Make sure that your website is both current and intriguing. The core of your Online marketing is going to be the website you build. It should be a pleasant place for people to visit. The site?s design should be engaging to the visitors and make them want to visit and stay there long enough to maybe purchase something.

Make sure to have detailed records and statistics. You need to focus on things like your traffic numbers per month, your hits, your conversions, your referrals, and other types of stats that may be pertinent to your business. Detailed statistics can help you to devise your plan for the future and see where you are lacking.

Adding emotive descriptions will help potential customers feel an attachment to what you are selling. It will help you to become a recognized brand. Use language that consumers will view as favorable.

On your site, utilize lots of words that are rich and descriptive. People like adjectives, so be sure to use plenty of them. Use surprising combinations and even invent your own adjectives. Make them long for more.

The above advice can be of enormous assistance to you in your business efforts. These ideas can form a rock solid grounding for your success in network marketing.

Go for success!

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Source: http://www.empowernetwork.com/goodideas/blog/is-your-business-online-learn-the-tips-to-successful-internet-promotion/

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NASA Opportunity rover finishes walkabout on Mars crater rim

ScienceDaily (Dec. 4, 2012) ? The latest work assignment for NASA's long-lived Mars rover Opportunity is a further examination of an area where the robot just completed a walkabout.

"If you are a geologist studying a site like this, one of the first things you do is walk the outcrop, and that's what we've done with Opportunity," said Steve Squyres, the mission's principal investigator at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

Coming up on its ninth anniversary, Opportunity still is a capable robotic explorer. It has been investigating a crater-rim site where observations from orbiting Mars spacecraft detected traces of clay minerals, which form under wet, non-acidic conditions that can be favorable for life. The rover's current activities were presented at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

The rover team chose this site as a driving destination years earlier. The site is named Matijevic Hill in honor of the late Jacob Matijevic, who led the engineering team for the twin Mars exploration rovers Spirit and Opportunity for several years.

Opportunity drove about 1,160 feet (354 meters) in a counterclockwise circuit around Matijevic Hill in October and November, bringing the total miles driven on the mission to 22 miles (35.4 kilometers). Researchers used the rover to survey the extent of Matijevic Hill outcrops and identify the best places to investigate further.

"We've got a list of questions posed by the observations so far," Squyres said. "We did this walkabout to determine the most efficient use of time to answer the questions. Now we have a good idea what we're dealing with, and we're ready to start the detailed work."

The hill is on the western rim of Endeavour Crater, a bowl 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter. An impact from a celestial object dug this crater more than 3 billion years ago, pushing rocks onto the rim from a greater depth than Opportunity reached during its first several years on Mars. Since the impact, those rocks may have been altered by environmental conditions. Sorting out the relative ages of local outcrops is a key to understanding the area's environmental history.

"Almost nine years into a mission planned to last for three months, Opportunity is fit and ready for driving, robotic-arm operations and communication with Earth," said the mission's deputy project scientist, Diana Blaney, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Two outcrops of high interest on Matijevic Hill are "Whitewater Lake" and "Kirkwood." Whitewater Lake is light-toned material that science team members believe may contain clay. Kirkwood contains small spheres with composition, structure and distribution that differ from other iron-rich spherules, nicknamed blueberries, that Opportunity found at its landing site and throughout the Meridiani Planum area it has explored. Squyres calls the Kirkwood spheres "newberries."

"We don't know yet whether Whitewood Lake and Kirkland are from before or after the crater formed," he said. "One of the most important things to work out is the order and position of the rock layers to tell us the relative ages. We also need more work on the composition of Whitewater and debris shed by Whitewater to understand the clay signature seen from orbit, and on the composition of the newberries to understand how they formed."

NASA launched Spirit and Opportunity in 2003. Both completed their three-month prime missions in April 2004 with Spirit ceasing operations in 2010. The mission's goal is to learn about the history of wet environments on ancient Mars. JPL manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

For more information about Opportunity, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/rovers .

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

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Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121204142918.htm

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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 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.?

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 6, 2012

An article on Tuesday about efforts to develop standardized sign language for common scientific terms misidentified the university that started the ASL-STEM Forum, a Web site dedicated to such improvements. It was developed by researchers at the University of Washington, not at Gallaudet University. (Researchers at Gallaudet and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf work with the University of Washington to provide content and help the forum grow.)

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/04/science/sign-language-researchers-broaden-science-lexicon.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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