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I recently attended several conferences and saw rampant recording of lectures and posters. Because my talk contained a lot of unpublished work, I asked the audience to refrain from taking pictures. But just five minutes into my talk, I saw multiple cell phones up recording my lecture. I repeated my request, and the people put their phones down. Ten minutes later, however, the very same people did it again. I asked once more, yet one person continued to record my slides.
Scientific conferences are meant to inform the attending audience about the newest results. No one wants to hear only published work; we attend meetings to get the absolute latest information that is coming out of labs. To be able to do that, an honor ...
