Hornik, Canter & the Momentary Merits of Conferences: "So why [attend all these conferences]? Well, for a long spell I wasn't, but I am now because we are at a kind of technology & market inflection point. There is an organic coalescence going on around some nascent platforms, technologies, ideas, and so on -- broadly this could be called Web 2.0, but I'll cede that label to O'Reilly -- and attending these things is currently the best way to get an in-you-face idea of where the smart people are looking. It's a kind of 'follow the alpha geeks' strategy, to paraphrase a meme." —Paul Kedrosky (UCSD)