Word: crowds
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...could you know something like that would happen?" one worker told the New York Times. "No one expected something like that." But for people who study crowd crushes, there was nothing surprising about what happened at Wal-Mart. It was reminiscent of many tragedies that have come before, at soccer stadiums, concerts and Ikea stores, which only makes it more awful. "We know exactly how crowds work," says G. Keith Still, a crowd management expert who has helped plan high-density events around the world, including the annual pilgrimage of Muslims to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. There is, he says...
Mobs are not mystical, it turns out. "All types of crowds, even relatively small gatherings, can quickly become dangerous if not carefully managed," John Fruin, a traffic engineer specializing in crowd safety, wrote in a recent National Fire Protection Association handbook...
...most notorious example of this problem, called a "craze" by crowd management experts, happened at a Who concert in 1979. A crowd of 18,000 fans had gathered outside the Cincinnati Coliseum to see the band. Seats were on a first-come, first-served basis. When the opening band began to play, the fans thought the show was beginning without them. There were only two doors open, and the crowd rushed toward them. Eleven people died...
...often looks like a crowd has intentionally trampled the victims. But what usually happens is that the people in the rear of a crowd do not know that someone in front has fallen. They still have room to move, unlike the people in front, so they continue to press forward. The compounding pressure can bend steel like it's made of rubber. "It only takes five people to push against one to break a rib, collapse a lung or smash a child's head," says Still. Most stampede victims (including the Wal-Mart worker) die of asphyxiation - they literally cannot...
...another exemplar of this new, layered dance music. Their eponymously titled debut album has met with both critical and limited commercial acclaim. It is clear then that people are more comfortable with the intersection of divergent styles than ever before, if signaled by nothing else than the sizable crowd for Girl Talk this past weekend at notoriously conservative Harvard. Given this comfort, the question now is how to move past the novelty of mashing up Mariah Carey and James Taylor, avoid another descent into nostalgia, and continue the eternal forward march of creation and discovery. Remarkably, in a security-obsessed...