I've checked the box. It didn't help.

Perhaps it would be worth you getting the earpiece microphones? That would move the point of recording away from the pen and also gives you stereo sound. It would be an odd look, to have earphones in during a meeting, so I haven't invested in them myself, but it might be good in some contexts - lectures, perhaps.

Marine science.

For one thing, the OCR is much, much better (especially if you have poor handwriting, like I do), since it has the order and timing of the pen strokes to help it along.
For another, it's much quicker and easier than scanning, running the scans through OCR, saving and organising the files. It's even quicker and easier that photographing each page directly into Evernote, which is what I was doing before I had the Livescribe.

For another, the matched sound recording is very useful: it makes your notes much more complete while letting you concentrate on listening rather than trying to write down every little point.

It's not the microphone that sucks, but the speaker built into the pen. When I play back recorded sound on the pen itself, the pen scraping sound often dominates, but if I plug in some earphones or play it back on my computer, the sound quality is good.

Again, this depends on your field. In my field, conferences are where you present your latest results before you submit them as a journal paper, or while they are being considered for publication by a journal, or are in press, or occasionally, have just recently been published in a journal.

In my field, conference papers are worth nothing on your CV unless you are a student and they are the only publications you have. It is considered poor practice to cite conference papers (even from peer-reviewed proceedings) if there is a journal paper that you could cite instead. In general, published conference papers are read only by those who attended the conference, so they are for the most part a waste of everyone's time.

Yes, or to make animal noises or set up and solve sudoku grids or write "beer" and have it translated into six languages. I have that pen. I love the pen, but the novelty of those applications wears off after the first day.

Two more advantages of a smartpen: 1) it's less distracting for others than a laptop or tablet. Most people just think it's a fountain pen. 2) It's less distracting for me. I can't check my email on it.

Depends on the field. In my field of science, for instance, most conferences - even the best of them - do not publish full proceedings, only abstracts. Even for those that do publish proceedings, I prefer to take my own notes rather than search through thousands of proceedings papers to find details of a few interesting talks. Often, in any case, speakers will mention things that weren't included in the short conference paper they submitted six months before.

I should add: The downside of the Livescribe pen for science conferences is that if you have audio recording on all day, the battery is likely to run flat by the end of the day, unless you recharge at lunchtime. The battery is fine if you only want to record written notes, so I tend to switch on audio recording only for the important talks.

Which is why a smartpen like the Livescribe helps. It is just pen and paper to operate, but it lets you upload your notes afterwards, makes them searchable, and records sound to go with your notes in case you do miss anything. Knowing that means you don't have to write every little thing down, but can stick to key points and jump to the relevant part of the audio simply by pointing to the note with your pen on your paper notes, or clicking on the uploaded version on your computer later. It can even automate most of the conversion of written notes to text.

If you have a smartphone, there are apps that will work this out for you. You can sit on your roof where you expect the panels to be, open the app and see, overlaid on the camera view, where the sun's path would be on any given day of the year.

> 3) Airbags were never designed for use in conjunction with seatbelts

Not entirely true. Airbags in the US are designed to work without seatbelts, and so are larger and faster (and more likely to cause injury) than airbags designed for use with seatbelts (as in Australia, for example) [Ref: http://www.ancap.com.au/faqs ]

Funny you should mention that. I'm in Australia. I spent today in a planning meeting, where we were told that it's a GREAT time for us to recruit senior scientists from Spain, North America and the UK, but not the rest of Europe, since most of the rest of Europe has insulated its research spending somewhat from current economic woes.