For these reasons, I limit myself to North American conferences. I derive a great deal from conferences; the face to face interactions and asking questions duri

For these reasons, I limit myself to North American conferences. I derive a great deal from conferences; the face to face interactions and asking questions during question period are crucial to understanding the limits of the presented work (and not particularly apparent at all in the final paper). But, travel, esp. overseas, is time-consuming and expensive. The acceptable trade-off personally seems to be self-imposed geographical restriction.