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This week, as they do every four years, hundreds of earthquake experts huddled in Los Angeles in dimly lit rooms where complicated mathematical formulas representing such things as seismic energy and building strength were projected onto large screens.

To outsiders these discussions can be all but incomprehensible. And some experts who gathered at the conference here this week say that is symptomatic of a larger problem: communicating with the public.

But big questions remain: How resilient are buildings in earthquake-prone areas? Should we build stronger ones?

A number of speakers and participants at the conference urged engineers to be better at addressing the disconnect between what the public often thinks the building code protects them from — and what it actually does.