The Finnish conference I inaugurated yesterday with a keynote address ended with a celebration of a project involving Finnish building-automation technology. After several years of hard work, it came to a successful completion. The project’s acronym was SAMBA. After several awards were given to the people responsible for the project, each followed by lukewarm applause, the curtain on the stage of the conference hall was drawn to reveal a dozen men dressed in Brazilian football shirts and holding a variety of Brazilian percussion instruments, as well as a score of half-naked women with colorful feathers in their headgear. The conference was to end with real samba. When the wild drumming started and the women began to wriggle and shake their bums, the entire hall—holding more than two hundred people, mostly men—turned dead quiet. At the end, the dancers joined the conference crowd and escorted them to the lobby, where champagne was served. The dancers became wilder and wilder, shaking their all with abandon. Although the women turned out to be Finnish on closer inspection, the shy and awkward Finnish men were ill at ease in their presence. It was clear much champagne would be needed before the first spark would fly between the women and the men. But the dancers had vanished just as the first toast was going around.