The British Pop Dandy by Stan Hawkins

Stan Hawkins
The British Pop Dandy: Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture
(Aldershot: Ashgate 2009)
Review by Nathan Wiseman-Trowse

"In 1999 the British pop band The Divine Comedy released one of their most successful singles ‘National Express’. Secreted away as a B-side on the second CD single was a wonderfully wry and affectionate Noël Coward pastiche ‘Overstrand’. ‘Overstrand’ told the story of a Londonite coveting a well-to-do address in the metropolis to such an extent that he is willing to pimp himself to a ‘dirty old man’, murder a young woman in the Thames or even write for the Evening Standard in order to get his ideal, bourgeois home. Neil Hannon’s clever take on Coward marks out a clear link not only to a tradition of British comedy songs that have their roots in music hall, but he also connects himself, if somewhat archly, with a dandified persona that manifests itself throughout British popular culture, and British popular music specifically. This persona is ambiguously gendered, complexly articulated, and above all, somewhat artificial. While Hannon’s voice might be understood in this particular instance to be not entirely his own (the exaggerated upper-class accent along with the arrangement and word play make the most visible links to Coward), it is the very level of artifice that marks him out as a dandy, through association and application. Such an identity is not merely manifest in this particular song; Hannon has consistently played the effete dandy, most obviously through the Casanova (1996) album, and within popular music more generally he is far from alone. Masculinity, authenticity and display are all problematised by the dandy figure within popular culture, and nowhere more so than within the realm of pop music"...

The full thorough review is at: IASPM - Stan Hawkins (2009) The British Pop Dandy: Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture

Star/Snatch Wars Video!

Meet Brick Vader, London's Lord of the Sith. The world of Guy Ritchie's Snatch and Lucas' Star Wars collide on the Eastend of the Death Star. Watch wideboy Vader handle business on the Death Star like he was back home in the mean streets of Bethnal Green.

Created by YouTube user 'BrickVader'. Brilliantly edited with hilarious consequences.


YouTube - Snatch Wars

Preview of The Goode Family on ABC TV

A new animated series from Mike Judge, creator of "King of the Hill." "The Goode Family" is obsessed with doing the "right" thing, whether it's environmentally, politically or socially. Unfortunately their efforts often have unintended comic consequences.

The preview:


YouTube - The Goode Family - New Midseason Series on ABC - Preview

Strunkenwhite Virus by Bob Hirschfeld

The Pluperfect Virus
By Cybersatirist Bob Hirschfeld of bobsfridge.com
(This column originally appeared in The Washington Post's Outlook section and was subsequently featured in the grammar book Eats, Shoots & Leaves )

A new computer virus is spreading throughout the Internet, and it is far more insidious than last week's Chernobyl menace. Named Strunkenwhite after the authors of a classic guide to good writing, it returns e-mail messages that have grammatical or spelling errors. It is deadly accurate in its detection abilities, unlike the dubious spell checkers that come with word processing programs.

The virus is causing something akin to panic throughout corporate America, which has become used to the typos, misspellings, missing words and mangled syntax so acceptable in cyberspace. The CEO of LoseItAll.com, an Internet startup, said the virus has rendered him helpless. "Each time I tried to send one particular e-mail this morning, I got back this error message:
'Your dependent clause preceding your independent clause must be set off by commas, but one must not precede the conjunction.' I threw my laptop across the room."

A top executive at a telecommunications and long-distance company, 10-10-10-10-10-10-123, said: "This morning, the same damned e-mail kept coming back to me with a pesky notation claiming I needed to use a pronoun's possessive case before a gerund. With the number of e-mails I crank out each day, who has time for proper grammar? Whoever created this virus should have their programming fingers broken."...

Full article at: Strunkenwhite Virus

The Edgar Allan Poe Digital Collection

This digital archive was launched to accompany the 2009 Poe Bicentennial exhibition, “From Out That Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe,” a joint venture of the Ransom Center and the Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia. The digital collection incorporates images of all Poe manuscripts and letters at the Ransom Center with a selection of related archival materials, two books by Poe annotated by the author, sheet music based on his poems, and portraits from the Ransom Center collections. Poe’s manuscripts and letters are linked to transcriptions on the website of the Poe Society of Baltimore.

Most of the items in the exhibition from the Harry Ransom Center collections once belonged to William H. Koester (1888-1964). Koester, a resident of Baltimore, began collecting first editions and manuscripts of Poe in the 1930s; his major acquisition was the collection of the Richmond Poe scholar and collector J. H. Whitty. In addition to the manuscripts of “The Domain of Arnheim,” “The Spectacles,” and some of Poe’s most famous poems, the Koester collection includes many letters written by and to Poe, books belonging to Poe (including the author’s annotated copies of the Tales and Poems and Eureka), and a large group of sheet music for songs based on Poe’s works. The Koester Collection was acquired by the Center in 1966.

Goto: The Edgar Allan Poe Digital Collection

Sleep Rehabilitations

The following is part of one of a number of helpful articles intended to inform people who experience sleeping abnormalities collected on one website:

A terrifying fall that seems to go on forever, or being chased by a horrible creature which could be anything fearful like a ghost, a monster, (or a zombie IRS agent!) while you try so hard to flee but you're fixed on the spot, are some of the most common, but disturbing nightmares, people could have.

A nightmare could be anything from terror -- you think your head will explode with fear -- to something so terribly upsetting that you wake up gripped with misery.

If you think chronic nightmares fall into the realm of the unexplained, you are in for a pleasant surprise: having chronic nightmares is a medical problem and it can be treated. Dr. Ross Levin, a psychologist and sleep researcher at Yeshiva University in New York says when you slip into REM sleep (made evident to observers by the rapid flitting of your eyes behind closed lids), "the whole brain changes. Neurochemically, it's like the Fourth of July. The limbic system becomes incredibly active, much more so than when you're awake, which is why you're emotionally on edge in dreams." The limbic system, as Dr. C. George Boeree says in a separate paper here, "appears to be primarily responsible for our emotional life, and has a lot to do with the formation of memories."

Scientists believe that nightmares are a result of the brain's struggle to process stress or severe trauma. Unfortunately for some people, they get stuck in a recurring pattern of troubling nightmares. Treatment of recurring nightmare is through "image rehearsal therapy." You will be delighted to learn that this type of treatment is usually brief-lasting only for two to three sessions...

The website in question is:
Sleep | Volition Thought House

Plato’s Idealism by J. B. S. Haldane, 1928

The most obvious differences between different animals are differences of size, but for some reason the zoologists have paid singularly little attention to them. In a large textbook of zoology before me I find no indication that the eagle is larger than the sparrow, or the hippopotamus bigger than the hare, though some grudging admissions are made in the case of the mouse and the whale. But yet it is easy to show that a hare could not be as large as a hippopotamus, or a whale as small as a herring. For every type of animal there is a most convenient size, and a large change in size inevitably carries with it a change of form.

Let us take the most obvious of possible cases, and consider a giant man sixty feet high-about the height of Giant Pope and Giant Pagan in the illustrated Pilgrim’s Progress of my childhood. These monsters were not only ten times as high as Christian, but ten times as wide and ten times as thick, so that their total weight was a thousand times his, or about eighty to ninety tons. Unfortunately the cross sections of their bones were only a hundred times those of Christian, so that every square inch of giant bone had to support ten times the weight borne by a square inch of human bone. As the human thigh-bone breaks under about ten times the human weight, Pope and Pagan would have broken their thighs every time they took a step. This was doubtless why they were sitting down in the picture I remember. But it lessens one’s respect for Christian and Jack the Giant Killer.

To turn to zoology, suppose that a gazelle, a graceful little creature with long thin legs, is to become large, it will break its bones unless it does one of two things. It may make its legs short and thick, like the rhinoceros, so that every pound of weight has still about the same area of bone to support it. Or it can compress its body and stretch out its these two beasts because they happen to belong to the same order as the gazelle, and both are quite successful mechanically, being remarkably fast runners.

Gravity, a mere nuisance to Christian, was a terror to Pope, Pagan, and Despair. To the mouse and any smaller animal it presents practically no dangers. You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by the air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal’s length, breadth, and height each by ten; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only to a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of the small animal is relatively ten times greater than the driving force...

... And just as there is a best size for every animal, so the same is true for every human institution. In the Greek type of democracy all the citizens could listen to a series of orators and vote directly on questions of legislation. Hence their philosophers held that a small city was the largest possible democratic state. The English invention of representative government made a democratic nation possible, and the possibility was first realized in the United States, and later elsewhere. With the development of broadcasting it has once more become possible for every citizen to listen to the political views of representative orators, and the future may perhaps see the return of the national state to the Greek form of democracy. Even the referendum has been made possible only by the institution of daily newspapers.

To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as a problem of size. The extreme socialists desire to run every nation as a single business concern. I do not suppose that Henry Ford would find much difficulty in running Andorra or Luxembourg on a socialistic basis. He has already more men on his pay-roll than their population. It is conceivable that a syndicate of Fords, if we could find them, would make Belgium Ltd or Denmark Inc. pay their way. But while nationalization of certain industries is an obvious possibility in the largest of states, I find it no easier to picture a completely socialized British Empire or United States than an elephant turning somersaults or a hippopotamus jumping a hedge.

See complete essay at:
Plato’s Idealism by J. B. S. Haldane 1928

Animals as Ambassadors For Goodness

Last July, Marc Bekoff wrote in Psychology Today:

..."How Jasper and other moon bears recover from their unspeakable trauma is a lesson to us all for expanding our compassion footprint and for spreading compassion throughout the world. Jasper, Jethro, and other animals are constantly telling us their stories in moon bear, dog, cat, elephant, chimpanzee, mouse, and other species-sorts of ways. It behooves us to be mindful and to listen to their tales very carefully for we will learn a lot about them and also a lot about ourselves. The gifts that Jasper, Jethro, and many other animals have shared with me are priceless. I can't put in words how indebted I am to Jasper and Jethro for letting me into their lives. I like to think I'm a better human being for gaining their generosity and trust. I also thank Jill Robinson and all the fine people at Animals Asia for their tireless commitment to rescue and rehabilitate abused moon bears and occasional dogs and cats. Thousands of bears still await rescue..."

Animals Can Be Ambassadors For Forgiveness, Generosity, Peace, Trust, and Hope | Psychology Today

YouTube Short, on John Lennon, wins Emmy

In 1969, when he was 14 years old, Jerry Levitan sauntered past a row of reporters lined outside John Lennon's Toronto hotel room, knocked on the door, and convinced his favorite Beatle to give him a short interview. Mr. Lennon was about to swaddle himself in bedsheets and conduct his Montreal Bed-In for Peace with Yoko, and the press was eager for him to settle rumors about a possible Beatles break-up and make a public comment about the Vietnam War...

...Over the years, Hollywood agents have been hounding him to make a movie or sell the rights to his photos and recordings. Mr. Levitan, now 55, finally decided to publish a book, I Met the Walrus: How One Day With John Lennon Changed My Life Forever, out this past May from Collins Design. In the back of the book, he includes a DVD of a five-minute, animated short he created with animator Josh Raskin. It was posted on YouTube in 2007.

On Aug. 29th, at the 36th Annual Creative Arts Emmy Awards, Jerry Levitan got an award for I Met the Walrus, the web short that has been in the works for four decades. It won the "New Approaches- Daytime" category, and was up against the "All My Children" video podcast, the New York Times Style Magazine screen tests, an Web site called Tac.TV and Web show Imaginary Bitches. The short was nominated for a 2008 Academy Award and won Best Animation at the Manhattan Short Film Festival, but the Emmy is one of Mr. Levitan's most prestigious honors yet...

Read more at:How a YouTube Video Got an Emmy | The New York Observer

Muhammad Ali Interview in Ireland Part 5

Part 5:

YouTube - When Ali met Cathal 5/5

Muhammad Ali Interview in Ireland Part 4

Part 4:

YouTube - When Ali met Cathal 4/5

Muhammad Ali Interview in Ireland Part 3

Part 3:


YouTube - When Ali met Cathal 3/5

Muhammad Ali Interview in Ireland Part 2

Part 2:


YouTube - When Ali met Cathal 2/5

Muhammad Ali Interview in Ireland Part 1

In five parts on Youtube is a superb interview from 1972 in which television presenter and journalist Cathal O'Shannon talks to boxer Muhammad Ali about his sporting career.

Part 1:

Sonny's Blues: James Baldwin

What follows is an excerpt towards the end of James Baldwin's perfectly-toned acclaimed short story, Sonny's Blues:

...For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.

And this tale, according to that face, that body, those strong hands on those strings, has another aspect in every country, and a new depth in every generation. Listen, Creole seemed to be saying, listen. Now these are Sonny's blues. He made the little black man on the drums know it, and the bright, brown man on the horn. Creole wasn't trying any longer to get Sonny in the water. He was wishing him Godspeed. Then he stepped back, very slowly, filling the air with the immense suggestion that Sonny speak for himself.

Then they all gathered around Sonny and Sonny played. Every now and again one of them
seemed to say, amen. Sonny's fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others. And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song. Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn't hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, and what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did. Yet, there was no battle in his face now, I heard what he had gone through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest in earth. He had made it his: that long line, of which we knew only Mama and Daddy. And he was giving it back, as everything must be given back, so that, passing through death, it can live forever. I saw my mother's face again, and felt, for the first time, how the stones of the road she had walked on must have bruised her feet. I saw the moonlit road where my father's brother died. And it brought something else back to me, and carried me past it, I saw my little girl again and felt Isabel's tears again, and I felt my own tears begin to rise. And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky. Then it was over. Creole and Sonny let out their breath, both soaking wet, and grinning.

There was a lot of applause and some of it was real. In the dark, the girl came by and I asked her to take drinks to the bandstand. There was a long pause, while they talked up there in the indigo light and after awhile I saw the girl put a Scotch and milk on top of the piano for Sonny. He didn't seem to notice it, but just before they started playing again, he sipped from it and looked toward me, and nodded. Then he put it back on top of the piano. For me, then, as they began to play again, it glowed and shook above my brother's head like the very cup of trembling."

The whole work is accessible at:
http://www.wright.edu/~alex.macleod/winter06/blues.pdf

YouTube - Samuel Menashe (from Life is IMMENSE)

YouTube - Samuel Menashe (from Life is IMMENSE)

A helpful biography of this beloved poet is at:
My Jewish Learning: Samuel Menashe

Thank You for Not Reading - Dubravka Ugresic

A couple of years ago The Guardian books section reviewed a sardonic book by Croatian author Dubravka Ugresic called 'Thank You for Not Reading' which does justice to its theme of artistic depreciation:

...The first essay here relates her attendance about 10 years ago at the London book fair, the year it was opened by Joan Collins. Collins appeared, "dressed like a quotation: in a little pink Chanel suit, with a pink pillbox hat on her head and a coquettish veil over her eyes ... What does all this have to do with literature?"

This was when she began to realise that literary life had become swamped by its epiphenomena, that books' blurbs and author photographs had become more important than their content, that the industry was overrun by middlemen and women whom writers had to pay for, that bookstores resembled supermarkets whose fruit and vegetables had mutated and lost their flavour in favour of external appearance. She contrasts this situation with that of the torcedores, the cigar-rollers, in Cuba's tobacco factories, where they hire readers to read to the workers. "The listeners in my Cuban fantasy are not passive ... Their literary taste is as sharp as a razor, they react to every badly used word, to every false note."

Having set out her territory, her arguments take flight. In another essay, "Alchemy", she writes that "The greatest shock for an east European writer who turned up in the western literary marketplace was the absence of aesthetic criteria." The easterner, brought up to believe in a distinction between "literature" and "trash", is introduced to a westerner and admits modestly that he is a writer. "What a coincidence!" the reply comes. "Our 10-year-old daughter is just finishing a novel. We even have a publisher!" This is the first insult in a series that makes him understand that the best way to be published is to make sure he has done something else to become famous for first: to be Joan Collins or Ivana Trump; a prostitute, murderer or model. An art-dealer friend reminds the author about Piero Manzoni's artwork, "Artist Shit", sold at the price of gold in 1961. While the price of gold has remained more or less stable in the past 40 years, he tells her, the price of shit has seen astronomical growth...

See the full summary at: Review: Thank You for Not Reading by Dubravka Ugresic | Books | The Guardian

Tom Wolfe Skewers The Rich in 'vanityfair.com'

Renowed author Tom Woolf did not hold back in wickedly judging the vices of Midas in his recent piece for Vanity Fair, called
The Rich Have Feelings, Too

Losing billions is stressful, and the brave financiers who risk other people’s money need a way to cool out—hopping on the GV, say, for a bimbo-boffing weekend in the Bahamas. Thanks to the bailout, that’s history. The author imagines one fictional highflier’s shock as he rejoins the commercial-aviation herd -

Up until the tarantulas arrived late last year waving their billions in “bailout” money before our faces, there were ten of us, including the two Harvard algorithm swamis, who could use the Gulfstream V, the Falcon, and the three Learjets pretty much anytime we needed them.

The vast majority of the flights—let’s get this straight before anyone starts clucking and fuming—were strictly business, but we also used the planes to “maintain an even strain,” as our C.E.O., Robert J. (Corky) McCorkle, liked to put it.

At the risk of sounding condescending, we should point out that ordinary people haven’t the faintest conception of the strain we had to endure daily. How many ordinary people have ever done anything remotely like betting $7.4 billion—bango!—just so!—that the price of energy will rise sharply 14 months from a certain date? How many of them ever had the animal spirits to go for it on the say-so of a young never-been-wrong-yet meteorology swami from M.I.T. who was convinced that, after a five-year lull in the cycle, a series of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes would pulverize the Gulf of Mexico, obliterating all offshore drilling operations, possibly shutting them down for years? How many ordinary people have woken up in the middle of the night, eyes popped open—swock!—like a pair of umbrellas, stark raving terrified by the possibility that they have just blown $7.4 billion on … a weather forecast? How many of them have ever sat for three days, 72 hours straight, in front of a gigantic plasma TV watching the Weather Channel as if it were the Super Bowl as Hurricane Enrique dithers, dawdles, malingers, messes around off the coast of Fort Lauderdale? How many ordinary people have been reduced finally, by sheer fear, to yelling at the screen, “Come on, Enrique, you pathetic wuss! Move your fat eye, you lazy worthless bitch! Be a man! Move inland! Cut straight across the Everglades, tear ‘em up by the roots and just let the greenies wail! Set your eye on the freaking Gulf! Take your goddamn steroids! Show some rage, you pussy! Barrel into those goddamn oil rigs! Destroy ‘em! Obliterate ‘em!”? How many ordinary people have finally sunk to their knees, hands clasped in prayer before a plasma-TV screen, imploring it, begging it, beseeching it … to save them?...

It's all at: Tom Wolfe on The Rich | vanityfair.com

The Minefield of Making Judgements

Dan Jones discusses the Knobe Effect on judgements in an article entitled
"The good, the bad and the intentional":

"A cornerstone question for the field is how the capacity for assessing whether an action was morally permissible relates to the capacity for making other, non-moral, judgements, such as who did what to whom and when, and whether someone did something intentionally. ‘The standard view was that there was a one-way relationship between the two domains,’ says Joshua Knobe, associate professor of philosophy at Princeton University. ‘On this view, we answer these non-moral questions first, and then work out whether a particular action was morally good or bad, praiseworthy or blameworthy.’

Rather than consulting his own philosophical intuitions, Knobe set out to find out how ordinary people think about intentional action......
In a study published in 2003, Knobe presented passers-by in a Manhattan park with the following scenario. The CEO of a company is sitting in his office when his Vice President of R&D comes in and says, ‘We are thinking of starting a new programme. It will help us increase profits, but it will also harm the environment.’ The CEO responds that he doesn’t care about harming the environment and just wants to make as much profit as possible. The programme is carried out, profits are made and the environment is harmed.

Did the CEO intentionally harm the environment? The vast majority of people Knobe quizzed – 82 per cent – said he did. But what if the scenario is changed such that the word ‘harm’ is replaced with ‘help’? In this case the CEO doesn’t care about helping the environment, and still just wants to make a profit – and his actions result in both outcomes. Now faced with the question ‘Did the CEO intentionally help the environment?’, just 23 per cent of Knobe’s participants said ‘yes’ (Knobe, 2003a).

This asymmetry in responses between the ‘harm’ and ‘help’ scenarios, now known as the Knobe effect, provides a direct challenge to the idea of a one-way flow of judgements from the factual or non-moral domain to the moral sphere..."

There's more on these important fascinating observations here:
http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk/archive/archive_home.cfm/volumeID_22-editionID_178-ArticleID_1544-getfile_getPDF/thepsychologist%5C0809jones.pdf

John Banville: A Century of Looking the Other Way - NYTimes

John Banville's comments on the release of Ireland's Ryan Report which were published in the New York Times on 22 May 2009, confronted social evasions of responsibility directly:

EVERYONE knew. When the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse issued its report this week, after nine years of investigation, the Irish collectively threw up their hands in horror, asking that question we have heard so often, from so many parts of the world, throughout the past century: How could it happen? ...

...Amid all the reaction to these terrible revelations, I have heard no one address the question of what it means, in this context, to know. Human beings — human beings everywhere, not just in Ireland — have a remarkable ability to entertain simultaneously any number of contradictory propositions. Perfectly decent people can know a thing and at the same time not know it. Think of Turkey and the Armenians at the beginning of the 20th century, think of Germany and the Jews in the 1940s, think of Bosnia and Rwanda in our own time...

Read all at: Op-Ed Contributor - A Century of Looking the Other Way - NYTimes.com

Crowd Behaviour? We'll let you know...

WE'LL LET YOU KNOW
How sad are we ?
And how sad have we been ?
We'll let you know
We'll let you know
Oh, but only if - you're really interested

You wonder how
We've stayed alive 'till now
We'll let you know
We'll let you know
But only if - you're really interested

We're all smiles
Then, honest, I swear, it's the turnstiles
That make us hostile
Oh ...

We will descend
On anyone unable to defend
Themselves
Oh ...

And the songs we sing
They're not supposed to mean a thing
La, la, la, la ...

Oh ...
You're lonely
Oh ... you're lonely
Oh ...
GET OFF THE ROOF !
Oh ...

Your Arsenal !

We may seem cold, or
We may even be
The most depressing people you've ever known
At heart, what's left, we sadly know
That we are the last truly British people you'll ever know
We are the last truly British people you will ever know

- Morrissey

Understanding Crowd Behaviours

Recently a review commissioned by the British Government looked at different aspects of the unpredictability and challenge of crowd behaviour:

In 2008 the Civil Contingencies Secretariat commissioned Leeds University to produce a series of research reports collectively titled ‘Understanding Crowd Behaviour’. These reports are now being published as part of the body of UK Civil Protection Guidance.

While definitive, precise and infallible rules for event preparation and crowd management simply do not exist, these reports have distilled and interpreted what represents good practice and they will provide planners with clear direction, and supporting information, about the assumptions that can very reasonably be made about crowd behaviour.

Five reports comprise the guidance. Each is briefly summarised below, with links to each report.

•Understanding Crowd Behaviours: A Guide for Readers [PDF 343KB] - This brief report summarises the substantive research reports and is the recommended starting point for readers.

•Understanding Crowd Behaviours: Guidance and Lessons Identified [PDF 1.98MB] - This is a highly practical report, which provides a comprehensive set of good practice guidelines for crowd events and management, and for emergency situations and evacuations. It also provides a comprehensive set of good practice guidelines for simulating crowd behaviours. This report should be of interest to all those involved in the field of crowd events.
•Understanding Crowd Behaviours: Supporting Evidence [PDF 3.3MB] - This report sets out the literature behind the good practice guidelines for crowd management, emergency situations and evacuations and crowd simulation techniques. It is expected that readers will want to explore this report as a supplement to “Understanding Crowd Behaviours: Guidance and Lessons Identified”, in order to better appreciate the derivation of the guidelines.

•Understanding Crowd Behaviours: Simulation Tools [PDF 1.1MB] - This report contains a detailed review of three of the leading agent-based simulation tools currently available. It is particularly relevant to those already involved with simulating crowd behaviours, or those who are looking to use simulation tools to assist with event preparation.

•Understanding Crowd Behaviours: Supporting Documentation [PDF 575KB] - This report sets out and references in detail the sources of the literature underpinning the guidance and lessons identified. As such it is a resource for readers wishing to further explore aspects of the literature in which they are most interested and researchers in the crowd behaviour field.

More at: Understanding Crowd Behaviours