“Love is the Answer”  Artwork by Mr. Brainwash

Bansky’s upcoming film: Exit through the Gift Shop

How do pedestrians move in the street? How do they interact? Researchers from the Centre de recherches sur la cognition animale (Université Toulouse 3 / CNRS), in partnership with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, have carried out a series of studies to improve understanding of the group behavior of pedestrians in urban environments. Published in PloS ONE, their results establish realistic models of crowd dynamics to improve pedestrian traffic management.

The mechanisms that govern crowd motion remain largely unknown. However, this knowledge is essential for the management of pedestrian flows (walking comfort, traffic fluidity, etc.) in urban areas. The lack of information is due in part to the difficulty of studying these phenomena experimentally and of building quantitative models able to account reliably for them.

For simplicity’s sake, most current models of crowd dynamics consider that pedestrians move independently of one another, trying to reach their destination while avoiding collisions. Using video recordings made in urban areas, Guy Theraulaz’s team from the Centre de recherche sur la cognition animale (Université Toulouse 3 / CNRS), in partnership with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, has shown that depending on the situation, 50 to 70% of pedestrians do not walk alone but in small groups, most commonly composed of two to four members.

The study of the spatial organization of pedestrians within these groups reveals that when they have enough room, group members choose to walk side by side. Conversely, when crowd density increases the group no longer has enough room to walk abreast: the pedestrians in the middle move back slightly and those at the sides move towards each other, forming a concave structure. A group of three pedestrians adopts a “V”-like pattern. In groups of four, a “U”-like formation is observed. These configurations facilitate communication between group members, but they considerably reduce their walking speed. A concave configuration makes the group’s forward motion difficult and forces individuals moving in the opposite direction to perform avoidance maneuvers. At the scale of a crowd, this significantly modifies the spatial and temporal characteristics of pedestrian flows. Numerical simulations based on these observations demonstrate that the presence of pedestrian groups reduces overall traffic efficiency by about 17% compared to a situation in which pedestrians walk in isolation.

This study shows that it is important to take into account the highly heterogeneous composition of crowds and the presence of pedestrian groups who privilege their social activities to the detriment of their walking efficiency. This new knowledge will help improve the reliability of pedestrian traffic predictions in urban environments.

via CNRS

The online exhibition, The Living Room Candidate, at The Museum of the Moving Image, presents more than 300 presidential campaign commercials from 1952 - 2008. According to the site, it was Madison Avenue advertising executive Rosser Reeves who convinced Dwight Eisenhower that short ads played during such popular TV programs as “I Love Lucy,” would reach more voters than any other form of advertising.

“In a media-saturated environment in which news, opinions, and entertainment surround us all day on our television sets, computers, and cell phones, the television commercial remains the one area where presidential candidates have complete control over their images.”

To check the Curator’s Picks from culturally historic strategies, messages and slogans, visit Living Room Candidate.

A flock of birds, a school of fish, swarming ants and human crowds. The study of collective behavior, where there is no centralized control but rather where self-organizing pattern formation is the result of local interaction between neighbors and their environments, is now one of the leading computation models being applied to everything from gaming and social networks to military tactics, robotics, medicine and telecommunications. One programming example modeled after the synchronized movement of birds dancing in the sky is Boids, a simple algorithm that uses three basic rules: separation, alignment and cohesion. Instrumental in swarming architecture, the aim is to design on-demand “living diagrams” constructed by real-time information, where people and space “flock” together to create structures “on the edge of form.” Although the mechanisms underlying flocking have baffled scientists for years, with naturalists in the past even concluding that flocking was telepathy, today we find it’s suggested that birds use magnetoreception to sense Earth’s magnetic field, as well as the idea from biologist Rupert Sheldrake that quantum-field mechanisms may explain this phenomenon, with the suggestion that social groups are organized and directed by fields of energy and information. As to whether or not “the wisdom of the crowds” is greater than individual intelligence, or is stupid and boring, is currently up for debate. However, it is clear that chemical pheromone exchange between ants can be compared to social messaging in networks, and swarms, which have an amazing ability to act like a collective mind or “The Superorganism,” as suggested by Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, is undoubtedly culturally relevant in today’s interconnected times. Flock on, flock off.