So, this is progress?

When you write an academic paper you anticipate that few people, with the possible exception of your Mother, will read your tremendous scholarship. Now technology is making the situation even worse.

I'm in Bratislava speaking at EuroLogo 2007 and while the abstracts for each session are published in convenient book form, the actual papers are on a CD in the back of the proceedings.

This means that even fewer people will read the conference papers and fewer yet will have read them before the presentation. This leads some speakers to commit the sin of reading their paper aloud to an increasingly sleepy audience.