Il tour americano dei Fiamma Fumana coincide, quest’anno, con la crisi finanziaria che partendo da Wall Street sta investendo l’economia mondiale. In materia di finanza sono ignorantissimo, per cui non mi sento proprio di pontificare su posssibili soluzioni: per chi condivide con me l’impreparazione specifica e la voglia di capire segnalo questo articolo di Sandro Brusco che spiega quali sono i problemi del piano Paulson, naufragato giusto ieri. Come economista, mi interessa invece, e molto, la traduzione dell’andamento degli indicatori economici a livello della vita quotidiana delle persone. E l’occasione è ghiotta: la sera del nostro arrivo a Chicago, mercoledì, la televisione dell’albergo trasmetteva Bush a reti unificate che chiedeva 700 miliardi di dollari per comprare le attività finanziarie basate sui mutui casa; venerdì c’è stato il primo confronto televisivo tra McCain e Obama; ieri sera il piano Paulson è stato respinto dalle camere (hanno votato contro deputati di entrambi i partiti, ma in maggioranza repubblicani). Assisto dalla prima fila a un sussulto della storia economica americana e mondiale: certamente eventi di questa portata devono avere riflessi sulla vita di ogni giorno.

Sono a Vancouver: ieri siamo partiti da Seattle. Non c’è traccia dei miserabili in fila davanti ai pentoloni di minestra dell’Esercito della salvezza trasmessici dall’iconografia della Grande Crisi del 1929. Le strade sono piene di gente allegra e visibilmente benestante. I ristoranti alla moda sono pieni. Anche il nostro concerto di Seattle, nel suo piccolo, è stato un successo, con il teatro pieno. Nonostante questo, il nostro agente, Steve, ci racconta che il settore entertainment risente del nervosismo generale, ed è diventato più difficile riempire le sale. In effetti la spesa culturale è molto prociclica, cresce molto durante i periodi di boom e cala più della spesa aggregata durante le recessioni. Peccato, però. Certi consumi culturali (come il nostro tour Fiamma Fumana-Mondine di Novi, Di madre in figlia) possono dare un vero aiuto ad affrontare l’insicurezza finanziaria anni 2000: le mondine, per esempio, si sono fatte una guerra mondiale, la Resistenza, la ricostruzione, le legnate dalla Celere di Scelba ed eccole qua, sessant’anni dopo, indistruttibili e solari. Una meravigliosa dose di ottimismo per affrontare la revisione del bilancio familiare!

Sono le spillette di Kublai, variante ispirata a Clay Shirky. Me le chiedono tutti! Sono state distribuite tra i membri del gruppo di lavoro di Kublai, tra cui Marco, Giuseppe, Antonella e Marta, quindi se li incontrate in giro chiedetegliele! Io sarò abbastanza irreperibile per un po’, vado in tour negli USA con i Fiamma Fumana.

So, it seems that “Mondine – From mother to daughter”, the film on mondine di Novi I originally proposed to the team Ferrario (producer) – Zambelli (director), has gone down well in Toronto. Of course I am pleased with the attention of the media, from La Stampa (“pride and joy of living”), to Repubblica (“standing ovation”), to Corriere Canadese (“unanimous and unconditional applause of both critics and audience”). But what really will stay with me is the overwhelming emotion of many Canadians and Italian Canadians present, like Maurizio, who tracked on this blog to leave me this comment, or the sweet lady Giselle who burst into tears at the end of the film and wanted to write a long letter of thanks to us all:

Your film made me understand that my mother was not alone when se had to leave her family and the Como lake to emigrate, to work. You were there with her.. and this makes me feel less lonely.

Sometimes this job is really, really great

Andrea Zambelli, director of Mondine – From mother to daughter, is in Toronto for the film’s world première. I just got this email from producer Davide Ferrario. I translated and copied it below, I am too overwhelmed to add anything.

Zambe tells me that the first show was sold out (300 people). No one left. We had two applauses during the movie, and tears and enthusiasm at the end.
“I didn’t expect such an emotional reaction”, said the director…
A long debate with many questions followed. To be fair, half the audience consisted of Italian Canadians, but their heritage was not necessarily the only reason for them to like it.
Filmitalia people were also deeply moved, they send many congratulations. All in all, we all deserve them. Tonight second show for the general public. Tomorrow I’ll speak with Andrea again.

Davide

The Visioni Urbane project – just now entering a new phase – taught me a lot. Our problem, in a nutshell, was this: a legacy decision bound the Basilicata regional administration to spend €4.3 million to build “creative workspaces”. These funds were to be “one shot” and earmarked for capital expenditure: we were to spend them in bricks-and-mortar at the beginning of the process, and then there would be no more. There were no ongoing resources for activities to take place therein. How to prevent creative workspaces closing doors immediately after their launch?

The answer could only be “by turning to the market”. The workspaces would become a platform for Basilicata creatives to invent, produce and bring to cultural market, products, products that could attract paying customers. Fine. But what products? Film? Music? And which kinds of film and music? Who would be their customers? How to produce them? Through which channels to distribute them? It was crystal clear that the small advisory group put together by the central government and the regional administration had no chance of solving the puzzle on its own. The only way of doing it was to mobilize the fine-grained knowledge embedded in the Basilicata creatives themselves.

The issue was not to “do research” to extract this knowledge form local creatives. Culture in Basilicata is predominantly financed by the public sector, a common situation in Italy. The market coincides with the local politician who greenlights the project. Local creative people, therefore, have almost no experience of markets: they actually tend to be scared of them. We needed a process that would produce at the same time the awareness of both the problem (public sector funding of cultural activities is scarce and unreliable) and the possible solutions (thinking up cultural products that are “hot”, that “people want”). Perception of the problem without its solutions would produce a defensive reaction, whereas we needed creatives to be optimistic and adventurous enough to innovate.

To get creatives fully involved we needed to treat them as equals, as a subject – as opposed to the target – of policy. So we structured Visioni Urbane as a conversation, much in the Cluetrain Manifesto spirit. And a solution – quite sophisticated, hand-on and utterly unconceivable at the beginning of the process – emerged. I tell the tale in a short essay, Policy as conversation,, to be presented at eChallenges 2008, in Stockholm, on October 24th. You can get it here.

A little exaggerated, I admit it. The new baby is in fact Lady Jessica’s, but we all feel like family. A very warm welcome to Leonardo, who is 54 cm long, weighs 3,8 kilos and is well, as is his mother!

<disclaimer>I do NOT express anything but my deepest respect for the thinkers I quote in this post. They are infinitely smarter and wiser than I will ever be: I am dust beneath their feet. But this is internet, so even the likes of me needs to edit and comment, on the Great and the Good more than on the guy in the next cubicle. So, Ladies and Gentlemen, without further ado I give you my own Top 3 fun math errors made by internet gurus!</disclaimer>

First prize: the great Howard Rheingold. In Smart Mobs he describes Reed’s Law and compares it to Metcalfe’s. Like this:

[...] but the value of ten nodes is one hundred (ten to the second power) under Metcalfe’s Law and 1024 (two to the tenth power) under Reed’s Law [...]. [p. 60]

Truth be told, these formulae do not compute a network’s value. A ten-nodes network would be worth 1024… what? Dollars? Peanuts? Lottery tickets? Certainly not. The answer is that 1024 is simply the number of subgroups theoretically possible in a graph of ten nodes, each linked to the other nine. A better formulation would be the one used by David Reed himself: the value of a group-forming network increases exponentially, in proportion to 2 to the nth power. In addition to this, the formulae used by Rheingold are just plain wrong: ten nodes have 10x(10-1)/2 = 45 possible links (not one hundred), and the number of possible subgroups is 2 to the tenth power minus ten minus one, hence 1013 and not 1024.

Second prize: one of my favourite authors, Clay Shirky. In Here comes everybody – a great book – Clay correctly describes the equilibria in the ultimatum game. Then he relates what happens when you run ultimatum game experiments in the lab:

[...]In practice, though, the recipient would refuse to accept a division that was seen as too unequal (less than a $7-to-$3 split, in practice) even though this meant that neither persone received any cash at all. Contrary to classical economic theory, in other words, we have a willingness to punish those who are treating us unfairly, even at a personal cost, [...] [p. 134]

This is not exactly an error, but it contains an omission so huge as to jeopardize Clay’s conclusion, namely that these experimental results have a number of well-documented methodological problems and should be taken with extreme care. The main problem is that results are thought to depend not only on the split, but also (and crucially) on the absolute value of the prize. If you play ultimatum with a billion dollars, and player 1 offers you a hundredth of that, are you sure you re going to turn 10K down for the pleasure of taking 990K away from him? The matter is open for debate… whereas Clay dismisses it as settled.

Finally, a special award for the nicest attitude goes to Chris Anderson, that guru of gurus, who has recently devoted a very clever post to the risk inherent in generalization.

 But now we’re entering a world of unbounded sets, and it’s messing up our language habits. What is the number of “writers” in the world in an age of blogs, the number of “photographers” in an age of Flickr and cameraphone or “videographers” in the age of YouTube?

Pure guru wisdom. The problem is in the title of the post, “Thirteen words that lose their meaning when the denominator approaches infinity”. The words in question are locutions like “most” (as in “most blogs”) or “average” (as in “the average Youtube video”). As Chris’s readers have not failed to note, it’s certainly true that saying stuff like “most blogs have very few readers” is meaningless, because it attempts to describe the blogs phenomenon through a mean which is just not representative when the population is described by a power law distribution. But this has nothing to do with denominators approaching infinity. A phrase like “For most of time, humans didn’t and won’t exist” makes total sense even if the denominator (the universe’s age at the time of the Big Crunch) is as close to infinity as it gets. After a volley of comments making this point, Chris adds a comment of his own:

Yes, you can count me among those who sometimes use mathematical language sloppily to make a point. But at least I admit it!

How can you not love the guy?