<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?

[Dopo un anno che non ci vedevamo, mi trovo a pranzo con il mio vecchio amico Michele Monina, scrittore e giornalista (qui una sua homepage di quasi dieci anni fa)]

IO - Allora, stai scrivendo?

MICHELE - No, mi sono preso una pausa. Faccio il capoprogetto per il programma di Ambra su MTV.

IO - Che bello! E che programma è?

MICHELE - Un varietà. Senza formato, con balletti e sketches, come quelli di Corrado negli anni 60. Secondo noi questo programma vuol dire che Telecom ha deciso di fare fare un salto di qualità a MTV, da rete di nicchia a rete generalista.

IO - Ma senti, non ti sembra un po’ in controtendenza? Voglio dire, i personal media, la coda lunga, tutta questa roba, e questi decidono di prendere una rete con un brand di nicchia forte e ci mettono il varietà? Ma che senso ha?

MICHELE - Ha il senso che la televisione generalista la guarda ancora un sacco di gente, ci sono molti soldi e io mi diverto. Se guardi gli spot che vanno sul nostro programmi non ci trovi i giocattoli hi-tech che compriamo io e te, ma i gelati e le automobili.

Due considerazioni. La prima è un fortissimo deja vu: ho già vissuto questa storia, nell’industria musicale. Dopo il 2001, man mano che i giovani sparivano nella nuvola di Napster/eMule prima e MySpace e YouTube poi, gli executives del disco si concentravano sul pubblico relativamente stabile, fatto prevalentemente di persone a bassa scolarizzazione, anziani, donne, meridionali: il pubblico di Sanremo, insomma. Questa scelta aveva una propria razionalità: totalmente spiazzate da un fenomeno che non capivano, competevano sulla quota della parte bassa del mercato, teledipendente e con una spesa pro capite bassa. Il risultato sono stati anni di decrescita, ultimamente a due cifre. Lo stesso Michele, ex giornalista musicale, è un profugo di quella fase.

La seconda va in direzione opposta: attenti all’autoreferenzialità. Tra uno State of the Net e una Girl Geek Dinner è facile dimenticare che noi (qualunque definizione di “noi” vogliate usare va bene, visto che state leggendo un blog, oltretutto di nicchia) siamo una sparuta minoranza. Forse un’avanguardia, forse il futuro, ma di sicuro non rappresentativi del presente (tra l’altro, come ci ricorda Chris Anderson, ci sono grandi soddisfazioni manageriali e di profitto nel gestire un prodotto matura a crescita zero o anche negativa, purché abbastanza grande). Conclusione: forse Telecom si sta suicidando, forse sta gestendo con oculatezza una vecchiaia dorata. Molto dipenderà da quanto ci metteremo noi - i “pionieri” - a colonizzare la frontiera digitale e costruire sistemi di mercato altrettanto redditizi.

Doriano Rabotti of the daily newspaper Il Resto del Carlino has been tracking Fiamma Fumana closely for years. This time, too, he devotes a lot of attention to the Liberation Day concert on April 25th at Casa Cervi. Admittedly, it is going very well: we started off looking for 100 bloggers, and 186 have volunteered as I write; meanwhile my friends Velas (in the picture), Asian and Joannes have started to spread the idea within Second Life. Outside of the great net, too, we feel a great turmoil: all over Italy rides are being hitched and coaches are being organized to reach the concert site; the municipality of Gattatico and Fuori Orario are organizing a canteen to feed hungry fans and are letting the weary unroll their sleeping bags in the local sports hall. We are all overwhelmed by such a great participation.

It always impresses me how differently traditional media and the net look at things. If you Google for “Radiciresistenti” or look at the From mother to daughter blog, which launched the initiative, you get a feel from a community: Valeria writes most of the FMTD posts, but the protagonists are legion: the 186 bloggers, the authors of the 300+ coments (more than 100 a week!) the many friends and fans sending photos, videos, thoughts and love. On the newspaper, on the other hand, the emphasis in on me personally. Ok, ok, I understand the mechanism in traditional media narrative building, and therefore Doriano’s (an excellent professional) choice. But, personally, I find myself more at home in the community spirit of the blogoand of the Net in general.

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As we FF were in Holland to perform at Fidder Folk Festival, Valeria and Freddy were having their first-ever Barcamp experience at Torino BarCamp 2008 The From mother to daughter project, as my readers know well, has its own blog, Mondine 2.0. We would like this blog to help a community that is not self-aware yet to perceive itself: the community we feel gathering around mondine and their values. The net is swarming with lore about communities (just now I am reading Howard Rheingold’s seminal book); the characteristic peculiar to this one community is that only one of its two wings, the “new” one, uses the net at all, whereas the “traditional” one, stemming from villages like Novi. The Mondine di Novi Choir itself communicates with the net mainly through us Fiamma Fumana and our people: Valeria and Freddy themselves come from this side.

V&F came back fron the BarCamp feeling satisfied and hyperstimulated (see their nice post). In the best Internet tradition - geared towards knowledge sharing and mutual support - the net people offered them encouragement and useful advice: their presentation was followed by a numerous and attentive audience. The most frequently quoted BarCampers were Elena “Brezzadilago”, Roberta Milano, Marco and Susan, but already before Torino BarCamp some friends and high-ranking bloggers like had offered Alberto D’Ottavi and Mondine 2.0’s guru, Vanz had helped us a lot. I am very happy about this, bringing our roots into the net and drawing some of the net’s attention to our roots seems to me a goal worth investing some energy in.

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