Author: Douglas Galbi

COB-3: gender in college bureaucratic work

This month’s contest for Bureaucrat-of-the-Month was close and difficult to decide. But decisions must be made. Petitions for Reconsideration will be accepted as usual.

Top bureaucratic honor this month goes to a committee of 18 eminent public figures. The Committee was sponsored by the National Academies — the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council. This committee included five university presidents and chancellors, a Dean of Science, an Executive Vice Provost, a Co-Director, two Heads, an Editor-In-Chief, and nine Impressively Titled Professors. A large committee of prominent experts is bound to produce bureaucratic excellence. This committee exceeded expectations.

In addition to holding meetings, the Committee produced a 364-page report on a fundamental challenge to the U.S. “amid increasing economic and educational globalization.” This challenge isn’t to make a better future for men and for women who care about men in a country where about 140 women now receive college degrees for every 100 men who receive degrees. The challenge isn’t to meet better the needs of boys who are often deprived of contact with their fathers, who face a public education system in which most of their teachers are female, and who are disproportionately drugged into docility and conformity. No, keenly intelligent readers, the grave challenge is to increase the share of female professors in science and engineering. After all, as the report explains, “the United States must aggressively pursue the innovative capacity of all its people.” In emphasizing the importance of increasing the share of female professors in science and engineering, this committee of leading educational figures in science and engineering (17 women, 1 man) brilliantly illustrates the value of bureaucracy for aggressively pursuing innovative approaches.

Despite an apparent lack of constraint on the type of recommendations it might issue, The Committee, like most bureaucracies, did not act as vigorously as it might have. The Committee emphasized the importance of gender accounting and forming new administrative bodies:

And departments should be held accountable for the equity of their search processes and outcomes, even if that means canceling a search or withholding a faculty position. The report also urges higher education organizations to consider forming a collaborative, self-monitoring body that would recommend standards for faculty recruitment, retention, and promotion; collect data; and track compliance across institutions. [National Academies news release]

The Committee also issued recommendations to journals, foundations, professional and educational societies, honorary societies, federal agencies, and Congress. But note: The Committee failed to issue recommendations to bloggers. It did not recommend mandating careful blog reading.

The Committee’s review of scientific evidence revealed an extremely significant but seldom recognized problem:

Anyone lacking the career and family support traditionally provided by a “wife” is at a serious disadvantage in academe, evidence shows. [National Academies news release]

With respect to “specific recommendations on how to make the fullest use of a large share of our nation’s talent,” that is, the talents of single persons, the Committee offered nothing. It did not even issue a call to action to ensure that single persons “see a career path that allows them to reach their full intellectual potential.” This is truly Beyond Bias. With my meager influence as an obscure blogger, I’ve attempted to address the pressing problem that our educational leaders have recognized.

A close second to the Committee for bureaucratic honors is Wikipedia. Nicholas Carr at Rough Type has thoroughly documented this achievement, as well as explored the interesting related issue of expertise. Mr. Carr describes Wikipedia as an “emergent bureaucracy.” He notes that Wikipedia has already surpassed key performance standards: “Wikipedia today has more layers of bureaucracy than the average Fortune 500 company and more factions than the Italian parliament.”

Of considerable importance is the question of whether Wikipedia qualifies for the Carnival of the Bureaucrats under Rule 2.a. No parties have disputed that Wikipedia is an Internet enterprise. Internet enterprise operate on Internet Time. According to commonly recognized standards, one year of normal time equals seven years of Internet Time. Wikipedia was founded on January 15, 2001. It is thus approximately 5.71 years old in normal time. Hence we estimate that Wikipedia is 39.99 years old in Internet Time. Thus Wikipedia satisfies Carnival of the Bureaucrats’ Rule 2.a.A, or, in the alternative, Rule 2.a.B.

Other carnival entries:

Purpleslog presents Physical Security and Social Engineering With A Bonus PurpleSlog Story, saying, “My Failed Attempt To Fight Workplace Theft and My Interaction With Security Bureaucrats.”

Aleksandr Kavokin, MD, PhD at RDoctor Medical Portal presents How do they make a guinea pig out of you? Part 2 saying, “about process of drug development – bureaucratic and not,” and How do they use you as guinea pig? Part3, saying, “about clinical trials.”

That concludes this edition of the Carnival of the Bureaucrats. Submit your blog article to the next edition using our carnival submission form.

more empirical evidence on making sense

Brain effects are communicative goods. A recent study found common effects among reading and seeing actions:

Participants observed actions and read phrases relating to foot, hand, or mouth actions. In the premotor cortex of the left hemisphere, a clear congruence was found between effector-specific activations of visually presented actions and of actions described by literal phrases.

For example, reading the phrase “biting the peach” and seeing a video of a person bite a peach activate a common set of premotor neurons called “mirror neurons.” These neurons also trigger muscular actions such as actually biting a peach.

Consider the economics of activating these neurons. Making sense of text is relatively expensive. Actually executing actions involve the caloric cost of moving bodily mass. Observing actions is probably the cheapest means to activate the common neurons associated with these different sensory circumstances. Perhaps this helps to explains why so many persons spend so much time on couches, watching sports on television.

Past physical experience affects the extent of neural activation. A scholar who has studied this relation noted:

“When we watch a sport, our brain performs an internal simulation of the actions, as if it were sending the same movement instructions to our own body. But for those sports commentators who are ex-athletes, the mirror system is likely to be even more active because their brains may re-enact the moves they once made. This might explain why they get so excited while watching the game!” [supporting scholarly paper (pdf)]

Sense of presence involves attunement to another like oneself. Common experience of physical action heightens sense of presence. Current demand for televised sports probably depends strongly on explicit marketing investment. An interesting challenge might be to try to calculate the implicit marketing value of sports participation.

a first-person shooter game

Recently I ate a cantalope and threw the rind into the trash bin, which remained unemptied longer than it should have been. I also had on the counter some peaches ripening past ripened. Attracted by this resource-rich environment, fruit flies invaded my kitchen.

Generally speaking, I’m a live-and-let-live kind of guy. As a kid I always argued for not cutting the grass. I believe that most household mold is actually a beneficial antibiotic. I favor spiders over insecticide.

But having swarms of fruit flies in the kitchen is gross.

I decided to take back the kitchen. Unlike Insectopia, this game was for real.

I threw out the peaches and emptied the trash. I then took up my nearly unused bottle of Lysol All Purpose Household Cleaner and gunned down a division of fruit flies that were occupying the area around my kitchen window.
carnage - dead flies on the window sill
But chemical warfare of any sort is neither civilized, sporting, nor manly. I decided take the rest out using my own hands. I tore off a paper towel and started going after them.

This was more interesting than any first-person shooter game I had ever played. I wasn’t just a matter of quick thumbs. You have to move your whole hand quickly. And, instead of just scanning a screen in front of you, you have to scan 360 degrees around the whole kitchen. While games now push a huge number of polygons to create realistic surfaces and textures, there’s nothing as real as kitchen walls, cabinets, a refrigerator, and counters. The surface matters a lot. On a curved surface of a cabinet, it’s much more difficult to trap the fruit fly when it jumps in response to an attack.

The paper towel recorded my score. But not totally, because sometimes the crushed fruit fly would stick to the wall, or fall to the ground.
dead fly score
Fruit flies are bred in biology labs around the world. They are relatively simple organisms. More is probably known about fruit flies than about any other living organism. But I don’t think anyone yet knows how to make such an exquisite little flying machine.

Looking over the paper towel, I realized that, when crushed, fruit flies bleed. I killed them quickly, and did not intentionally try to cause them suffering. I believe that it is morally permissible for me to kill common flies in my kitchen. But is it wrong for me to make a game out of killing flies in my kitchen? I don’t think so, but the queston troubles me a little. Maybe that shows the power of connecting games to the real world.

a Shakespearean portrait of bad public reason

Purported portraits of Shakespeare have attracted considerable public interest. A scholar recently explained:

If Shakespeare study today is a lively mix of wishfulness, mythology and scholarship, this may simply be because we don’t know what he looked like, and what we do know about him is unsatisfactory. … How did this money-worried little capitalist, who conducted his life in a flurry of land deeds and small business ventures, write Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet?

An authentic portrait of Shakespeare could not answer this question. It would provide only an easier way to understand what everyone already knows: irrespective of the facts of his biography and despite his inexhaustible creativity, Shakespeare could be recognized as a human being with a human face.

A separate motivation for interest in Shakespeare is the thrill of publicly recognized discovery. Just a few months ago:

ALEC COBBE was strolling around the Searching for Shakespeare exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery when he was stopped in his tracks by a painting that was the spitting image of one he had on his wall at home. … Scholars have confirmed that Mr Cobbe’s painting is the original of the famous portrait in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington that was on loan at the National Portrait Gallery exhibition….[The Times]

This is a modern enchantment: the possibility of a true, material discovery, made solely by chance.

Discovery usually requires more time and effort. Over the past decade, Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel, a professor at the university of Marburg and Mainz, has been a scholarly leader in discovering more about Shakespeare. Professor Hammerschmidy-Hummel has extensively investigated primary sources, including continental pilgrims’ registries that have not previously been studied in relation to Shakespearean biography. Her biography, William Shakespeare: seine Zeit, sein Leben, sein Werk (2003) (forthcoming in an English edition entitled The Life and Times of William Shakespeare) extensively explored Shakespeare’s Catholic connections. This work includes considerable conjecture and interpretive construction. But much recent Shakespearean scholarship recognizes the importance of Catholic faith to Shakespeare and also richly employs conjecture and interpretive construction. Prof. Hammerschmidt-Hummel puts more emphasis on Catholicism in understanding Shakespeare than most current Shakespearean scholarship, but her standards of reasoning put her work well within the form of legitimate contemporary scholarship.

Thrilling discovery depends upon good public reason. Early in 2005, The Culture Show on the BBC broadcast an exclusive report on scientific investigations of the Flower Portrait. Some considered the Flower portrait to be a portrait of Shakespeare. The report declared: “it can be categorically stated that Flower portrait of Shakespeare is a nineteenth century painting.”

With respect to public reason, some aspects of the report on the Flower Portrait are not impressive:

  1. The report didn’t indicate the scientists making the claim. Using a passive voice for a new knowledge claim obscures agency and accountability. That’s particularly inappropriate for a new, categorical claim.
  2. The claim wasn’t made public in circumstances associated with scholarly scrutiny. Making findings public on “The Culture Show” is rather different than publishing them in a peer-reviewed journal.
  3. Details of supporting evidence that would make the claim subject to significant, independent review were not made readily available to the public. Such evidentiary details could be made available globally on the Internet at low cost. But they weren’t.

Modern scientific analysis can provide highly convincing evidence about the date of paintings. But the public support for the claim that the Flower Portrait of Shakespeare was painted in the nineteenth century seems to be not much more than the authority of the National Portrait Gallery. Francis Bacon, the English philosopher and statesman who made a great contribution to the development of science, would not be proud of this. Belief based solely on the authority of a well-established, well-respected institution isn’t thrilling.

More exciting, and bewildering, is Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s beautifully illustrated new book, The True Face of William Shakespeare (2006). This book provides new information about four images that Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel argues are contemporary images of Shakespeare: The Chandos Portrait, the Flower Portrait, the Davenant Bust, and the Darmstadt Death Mask. And what of the National Portrait Gallery’s claim that the Flower Portrait was painted in the nineteenth century? Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel claims that the National Portrait Gallery tested a copy the Flower Portrait, not the original. She includes two photographs showing clear differences between what she describes as the original portrait and the copy. However, the National Portrait Gallery’s test of the Flower Portrait documents that the tested painting covered a sixteenth-century Italian painting of a Madonna and child. That underlying painting is a recognized aspect of the Flower Portrait. This gross conflict leads to at least one firm conclusion: good public reason is here out of joint.

Fay, is there any hope for better reason? The Searching for Shakespeare exhibition ignored Prof. Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s work, except for a short, dismissive footnote buried in the catalog. The final essay in that catalogue concluded:

We will never know what Shakespeare looked like. What is important for us is to recognize the extent and diversity of reproductive portraiture of the Bard and to acknowledge what lies behind the continuing desire for the authentic image, the Shakespeare grail…. As an emblem of national identity and cultural pride, it is without rival.

How dull. If scholars agree that what’s important in scholarship, including science, is high politics, then much of the personal thrill of discovery becomes impossible.

My love, even certainties cannot justify your acting as if you were dead.

I never saw that you did painting need,
And therefore to your fair no painting set.
I found, or thought I found, you did exceed
The barren tender of a poet’s debt.
And therefore have I slept in your report,
That you yourself, being extant, well might show
How far a modern quill doth come too short,
Speaking of worth, what worth in you doth grow.
This silence for my sin you did impute,
Which shall be most my glory, being dumb.
For I impair not beauty, being mute,
When others would give life, and bring a tomb.
There lives more life in one of your fair eyes
Than both your poets can in praise devise.
[Sonnet 83]

I think Shakespeare’s lover would have dismissed this kind of play, and insisted, “Try!”

incentive-compatible, just-in-time dishwashing

Mr friend Dr. S. (B.A., Princeton; M.S., MIT; M.D., Yale) shared with me a long time ago a stunningly innovative solution to a difficult group-living problem. I will now share that solution with you, my highly esteemed blog co-participants.

The group-living problem: No one does the dishes. They pile up, festering in the sink. The longer the dishes stay in the sink, the less anyone wants to wash one and use it. The equilibrium is all the dishes piled in the sink and culturing new weapons for germ warfare, and the housemates using papers plates and plastic utensils.

Can economics offer economic man a better life? Indeed it can.

The solution is refrigeration. Actually, freezing. In group living situations, no one goes shopping, either. Thus the freezer is empty. So you just put the dirty dishes in the freezer. Then when someone wants to use a dish, he simply takes it out of the freezer and gives it a quick rinse. This is incentive-compatible, just-in-time dishwashing.

I realize that the parameters might be different for women. I myself have always believed that “economic man” is a ridiculously narrow, unrealistic model of humanity.

communicative punishment of non-criminal "sex offenders"

Ohio is establishing a registry of sex offenders who weren’t criminally convicted of sex offenses.  The Blade of Toledo, Ohio, reported:

A recently enacted law allows county prosecutors, the state attorney general, or, as a last resort, alleged victims to ask judges to civilly declare someone to be a sex offender even when there has been no criminal verdict or successful lawsuit.

The rules spell out how the untried process would work. It would largely treat a person placed on the civil registry the same way a convicted sex offender is treated under Ohio’s so-called Megan’s Law.

The person’s name, address, and photograph would be placed on a new Internet database and the person would be subjected to the same registration and community notification requirements and restrictions on where [the person] could live.

Especially with the Internet, the government declaring a person to be a sex offender is a potent communicative punishment.  Most persons consider sex offenders to have committed some of the most vile crimes imaginable.  Ohio’s electronic sex offender registration and notification system communicates detailed, immediate information about sex offenders’ movements to interested parties.  “Visitors to the {Ohio sex offender Internet site} can register to have an e-mail message sent directly to them any time a registered sex offender moves within a mile of any specified address.”

The political incentives to impose such communicative punishments are relatively strong.  The first sex offender registry was established in New Jersey in 1994 (Megan’s Law).  Within a decade, sex offender registries were established across the U.S.. Such a registery is now under consideration in the U.K. (Sarah’s Law).  The story of a young girl viciously raped and killed easily attracts public attention.  Protecting children is a propitious basis for legislation.  Even better, legislation that imposes communicative punishments don’t cost much public expenditure. Communicative punishment is much cheaper than imprisonment.

Given these circumstances, communicative punishments merit strict scrutiny for due process.  What about “the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury; to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor; and to have the assistance of counsel in his defense”?  Forget about those rights.  A declaratory judgment, based on the preponderance of the evidence, is all that is necessary for the government to communicate powerfully that a person has joined the heinous category of sex offenders {see Sec. 2721.21 of the Act}.

Ohio’s civil communicative punishment of sex offenders seems to have been the product of a sordid deliberative failure. The Blade reported:

The concept was offered by Roman Catholic bishops as an alternative to opening a one-time window for the filing of civil lawsuits alleging child sexual abuse that occurred as long as 35 years ago.

The Ohio Supreme Court a few months earlier issued a ruling affirming a time limit for filing abuse cases.  This matter is more awful than the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk.  It’s more awful because priest have in fact awfully abused children.  I would guess that was also true in the early nineteenth century.  From 1950 to 2002, however, about $650 million has changed hands in judgments against Catholic churches and religious communities concerning sex abuse. This new legal development provides new motivation to address the serious problem of sex abuse.  The solution that the Roman Catholic bishops proposed in Ohio shows that the problem concerns everyone.

Protection of civil liberties are central to the rule of law.  But perhaps the only deliberative fate worse than being an accused sex offender is being accused of defending accused sex offenders.  The Blade reported:

No one in attendance voiced opposition to rules {concerning civil denunciations of a person as a sex offender} submitted by Attorney General Jim Petro’s office to the Joint Committee on Agency Rule Review, consisting of members of the Ohio House and Senate.

In fact, you can find right in the New Jersey State Constitution this text:

Notwithstanding any other provision of this Constitution and irrespective of any right or interest in maintaining confidentiality, it shall be lawful for the Legislature to authorize by law the disclosure to the general public of information pertaining to the identity, specific and general whereabouts, physical characteristics and criminal history of persons found to have committed a sex offense. {NJ Constitution, Art. IV, Sec. VII, para. 12, added Dec., 7, 2000}

This text essentially states that the rest of the Constitution does not apply to persons “found to have committed a sex offense.”  And what does it take to make such a finding? In Ohio, it’s a civil declaratory judgment based on preponderance of the evidence.  Liberty under law, including liberty from personally damaging government communication, should be more secure than this.

carnival of the bureaucrats #2

Featured this month as Bureaucrat-of-the-Month is Funtwo. That’s not Fun2.0, but Funtwo. Bureaucrats have no need of superfluous precision.

You can see Mr. Funtwo working intensely in front of his desk in the video below (or here). With characteristic bureaucratic modesty, he appears faceless.

Mr. Fun continues in the tradition of bureaucrats that have made Korea a world broadband leader. I predict a great future for this young man in the Korean Ministry of Information and Communication.

The fruits of his work are for all to hear. Sweet child o’ mine, purple haze envelopes purple motes, free bird flying on a stairway to heaven, all along the watchtower, watch this! Bureaucrats rock!!!

Other submissions:

The Obvious? laments:

As I get to see more and more organisations I sometimes get overwhelmed by a feeling I can only describe as melancholy at the number of clever, well meaning people in business who spend their working lives making it harder to get things done.

Cheer up, sir. That’s called private-sector job creation.

Pope Benedict XVI offers St. Gregory the Great as a model for public administrators. But why aspire to be just a servant of the servants of the public? I’ve already achieved several bureaucratic levels lower than that! Additional insight for old media leaders: Gregory the Great, by reaching out to the so-called “Barbarian” peoples, fostered the development of a new civilization.

Generative Transformation reviews Henry David Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience. Thoreau’s 1849 essay begins:

I HEARTILY ACCEPT the motto,—”That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—”That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

Under Rule 6, submissions to the carnival of the bureaucrats may not include the phrase “‘mindless bureaucrats,’ or any other similar terms.” The sentence “That government is best which governs not at all” does not directly use the phrase “mindless bureaucrats.” However, it has connotations similar to that of “mindless bureaucrats” except if the former phrase is interpreted to mean that conscientious bureaucrats will do nothing. But that interpretation is not tenable, because most bureaucrats in fact work hard. Based on the preceding analysis, this particular submission is rejected by us as not meeting the requirements of the applicable regulations, which do not necessary preclude future submissions concerning civil disobedience, which we recognize has served the public interest in certain circumstances, which will not be described herein by us.

That concludes this edition of the Carnival of the Bureaucrats. Submit your blog article to the next edition using our carnival submission form. Submissions should conform to the Carnival regulations. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

get off the couch

The Anti-Humbaba Action Coalition has staged a few small and futile protests outside DC art establishments. Walking in ragged figures while holding poorly drawn signs, they chanted:

2-4-6-8
what do we want
to liberate?
Art Art
Art in action,
art in use
hanging on walls,
ain’t no excuse!

Apparently disgruntled handicraft workers, they’re easy to dismiss as cranks. But they offer a powerful critical perspective on Conversions, a juried group exhibition at the Ellipse Arts Center in Arlington through Sept. 29, 2006.

Most of the works in Conversion are attached to walls. Joan Sarah Wexler’s “Tearooms and Restaurant Interiors” are photographs arranged on a wall, as are Susan Eder / Craig Dennis’s work, “Which Image Never Fades Away?” Lisa Kellnor’s “Oil Spill,” constructed from pins with large yellow heads, is firmly tacked to the wall.

Amy Glengary Yang attached to a wall an array of cyanotypes (images made with an early photographic process) mounted in lightboxes. Protruding in front of the lightboxes is a bell jar containing a neon-lighted sea urchin skeleton and topped with an air pressure gauge. It’s an enchanting work, set against a wall.

Some works, such as Michele Kong’s “Reticula” and Amy Martin Wilber’s “Three Fates,” hang from walls to cover windows. “Reticula” is an exquisite lace of translucent glue. Kong made her boundary from wire. Only a few strands are oriented like a fence, while many are coiled around those few.

Tai Hwa Goh’s luscious intaglio on hand-waxed paper hangs from a wall like ponds compressed into a multi-layered scroll. Yet when she moved her intaglio away from the wall, she formed it into cubes.

One work is attached to a free-standing panel. M. Sedestrom Guthrie’s “Through the Glass” arranges photographs horizontally on one side of this panel. The photographs are views of a working window-washer through the glass of the window he is washing. The work also included some text. The text, which I’ve forgotten, was far too self-consciously serious for me to take seriously. I walked around the panel and found only a white plane on the other side. Life is usually not that disappointing.

Another work meets a wall in a more interesting way. Tomás Rivas’s “Erechtheum Uno, Dos y Tres” features delicate carvings into the surface of drywall panels leaning against the gallery wall. I particularly liked that Rivas included penciled outlines, some uncarved. I see in the drywall panels effects of a mundane call for beauty, modulated by the unchanging, supporting wall of the gallery. According to his biography, “His ongoing investigation of the representation of space addresses the complexity of art production today, where the ‘center’ and the ‘periphery’ vie for political clout within the mainstream.” Indeed!

One work offers a view into a long, narrow room. Kathryn Cornelius’ work “Address” lines this room, which is only about five feet wide, with roughly twenty white plastic chairs attached to the walls about four feet above the floor. Projected onto a wall just outside this room, a video evokes mass-market clothes hanging in a retail outlet.

An art reviewer writing in The Washington Post described “Address” as “making a statement about the violence and trauma that occasionally underlie the quiet domestic exteriors of our homes.” That’s a hackneyed interpretation. My sense is that this work evokes the tedium and worthlessness of many jobs. Working in retail, like blogging, forces you to confront ignorant and annoying opinions of ordinary persons. Just buy that one — it looks best!

Even worse are jobs involving endless, meaningless meetings. Cornelius has arranged the long, narrow room to provide a critical viewpoint on the center of this enterprise — the long, narrow table of the board room. Imagine if your family’s livelihood depended on an address that you had to make to lines of empty suits strictly ordered around the bored room table. You’d want to scream like you were on a amusement park ride. But if you did that, you’d be fired. March forward through the marble corridors of power, and do your job!

Views of Renee Butler's Movement in B Flat

The best work in the exhibition, it seems to me, is Renee Butler’s “Movement in B Flat.” Forms with different shapes and reflective properties hang from the ceiling and break up video projected from orthogonal points. The effect is to ramify points of view on the projected (mundane) scenes and make those points of view physically explicit. At the same time, the whole ensemble, including the rectangular tiles and grated florescent light fixtures in the ceiling, forms a pleasing, dynamic harmony.

In the room containing “Movement in B Flat,” two couches rest against walls near where they meet in a corner. They signal a shift in viewing modes: from “look at art on the wall” to “watch television.” These are not the only possibilities. With care and respect for the construction of “Movement in B Flat,” you can move around it and even into it in some places.

Persons moving challenge the idea of points of view. Mobile phones have integrated space-annihilating communication with persons moving through the real world around themselves. Artists interested in spatial interpretations and points of view should take seriously this distinctively modern experience of communicating.

Get off the couch. Go see Conversions. And be sure to walk through “Movement in B Flat.”