Related papers: Crowd behaves as excitable media during Mexican wa…
An interesting example for collective decision making is the so-called Mexican wave during which the spectators in a stadium leap to their feet with their arms up and then sit down again following those to their left (right) with a small…
Excitable media are systems which are at rest in the absence of external input but which respond to a sufficiently strong stimulus by sending a wave of "excitation" across the medium. Examples include cardiac and cortical tissue, and in…
In the era of social media, every day billions of individuals produce content in socio-technical systems resulting in a deluge of information. However, human attention is a limited resource and it is increasingly challenging to consume the…
Impulse propagation in crowds is a phenomenon that is crucial for understanding collective dynamics, but has been scarcely addressed so far. Therefore, we have carried out experiments in which persons standing in a crowd are pushed forward…
A social system is considered whose agents choose between several alternatives of possible actions. The system is described by the fractions of agents preferring the corresponding alternatives. The agents interact with each other by…
This paper presents a modeling process in order to produce a realistic simulation of crowds in the ancient Greek agora of Argos. This place was a social theater in which two kinds of collective phenomena took place: interpersonal…
This paper explores the growth of online mobilizations using data from the 'indignados' (the 'outraged') movement in Spain, which emerged under the influence of the revolution in Egypt and as a precursor to the global Occupy mobilizations.…
Collective motion of large human crowds often depends on their density. In extreme cases like heavy metal concerts and Black Friday sales events, motion is dominated by physical interactions instead of conventional social norms. Here, we…
In high-density crowds, local motion can propagate, amplify, and lead to macroscopic phenomena, including 'density waves'. These density waves only occur when individuals interact, and impulses are transferred to neighbours. How this…
The effects of real-world events on the dynamics and sentiment expressed through online conversations is not entirely understood. In particular, the dynamics of highly polarized communities, deeply invested in the outcome of a particular…
Crowd flow describes the elementary group behavior of crowds. Understanding the dynamics behind these movements can help to identify various abnormalities in crowds. However, developing a crowd model describing these flows is a challenging…
Many observations in the dynamics of pedestrian crowds, including various self-organization phenomena, have been successfully described by simple many-particle models. For ethical reasons, however, there is a serious lack of experimental…
Motivated by recent observations that long-range connections (LRC) play a role in various brain phenomena, we have observed two distinct dynamical transitions in the activity of excitable media where waves propagate both between neighboring…
We study the dynamics of public media attention by monitoring the content of online blogs. Social and media events can be traced by the propagation of word frequencies of related keywords. Media events are classified as exogenous - where…
The study of crowd dynamics is interesting because of the various self-organization phenomena resulting from the interactions of many pedestrians, which may improve or obstruct their flow. Besides formation of lanes of uniform walking…
Although the traits emerged in a mass gathering are often non-deliberative, the act of mass impulse may lead to irre- vocable crowd disasters. The two-fold increase of carnage in crowd since the past two decades has spurred significant…
We study the spread of a persuasive new idea through a population of continuous-time random walkers in one dimension. The idea spreads via social gatherings involving groups of nearby walkers who act according to a biased "majority rule":…
The recent wave of mobilizations in the Arab world and across Western countries has generated much discussion on how digital media is connected to the diffusion of protests. We examine that connection using data from the surge of…
Although much has been published regarding street protests on social media, few works have attempted to characterize social media users' spatial behavior in such events. The research reported here uses spatial capture-recapture methods to…
A recent study [D. Helbing, A. Johansson and H. Z. Al-Abideen, {\it Phys. Rev. E} 75, 046109 (2007)] has revealed a "turbulent" state of pedestrian flows, which is characterized by sudden displacements and causes the falling and trampling…