1.   Much of the discussion at recent conferences has been on the recession and how hard it is hitting the industry.

2.   At a recent conference in London industrial guru Sir John Harvey Jones set out the reasons why.

3.   And those cuts, Ridder told analysts at a recent conference in New York, will be permanent.

4.   At a recent conference on prison hospices in Atlanta, drug diversion was one of the most popular topics.

5.   At a recent conference on technology stocks, Andrew Stern noticed that nearly all the brokers soliciting his business used Yahoo as their launching pad for financial information.

6.   At a recent conference sponsored by Morgan Stanley, Biggs said there was a strong consensus that in the months to come the Japanese market would see new lows.

7.   At a recent Intel conference on product design, some attendees belittled the concept as nothing more than clever marketing by companies trying to sell new products.

8.   At a recent conference in Prague, Czech National Bank Governor Josef Tosovsky warned of demands for higher wages in the public and service industries.

9.   At a recent conference at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, biologists rated the two genome sequencing machines of roughly equal quality.