In this paper, I want to review theoretical models of two social phenomena: the dynamics of an applauding audience and the collective motion of people in a stadium forming a La Ola wave. In particular, I want to stress how phase transitions occur in these theoretical models and how these transitions emerge macroscopically.

Granular media are very common in nature and technology but present, due to the inelasticity of the collisions between grains very astonishing collective phenomena. One of them is the spontaneous formation of clusters as observed in intergalactic dust. We will discuss the role of dissipation in these effects and show recent progress in the understanding of the deviation from classical thermodyn...

Similar to electromagnetic forces, strong interactions might induce such collective effects as Cherenkov and Mach waves. Their conical structure would be responsible for specific ring-like events. The theoretical and experimental arguments in favor of these phenomena are discussed and their most important features are described.

We developed a type-theoretical framework for natural language semantics that, in addition to the usual Montagovian treatment of compositional semantics, includes a treatment of some phenomena of lexical semantic: coercions, meaning, transfers, (in)felicitous co-predication. In this setting we see how the various readings of plurals (collective, distributive, coverings,. . . ) can be modelled.

A drastic deformation was observed in Pd metal of various shapes after hydrogen absorption and desorption cycles at 150 degrees C at a gas pressure of 1-5 MPa. All of the phenomena observed indicate that some strong internal force is induced spontaneously during hydrogen absorption/desorption cycles to produce a collective deformation so as to minimize the surface.

The linear electrodynamic properties of graphene – the frequency-dependent conductivity, the transmission spectra and collective excitations – are briefly outlined. The non-linear frequency multiplication effects in graphene are studied, taking into account the influence of the self-consistent-field effects and of the magnetic field. The predicted phenomena can be used for creation of new devic...

Dixon et al. suggest that the psychological literature on intergroup relations should shift from theorizing "prejudice reduction" to "social change." A focus on social change exposes the importance of psychological theories involving collective phenomena like social norms and institutions. Individuals' attitudes and emotions may follow, rather than cause, changes in social norms and institution...

Hydrodynamics is usually adequate to describe the collective flow phenomena in macroscopic systems where thermodynamical relations are valid locally. Surprisingly enough, sometimes the hydrodynamical description is also useful as a model to describe the collective phenomena in microscopic and semi-microscopic systems. In fact, the collective flow behavior of hot, dense matter produced in relati...

We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of 'culturomics,' focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as dive...

Explosive collective phenomena have attracted much attention since the discovery of an explosive percolation transition. In this Letter, we demonstrate how an explosive transition shows up in the synchronization of scale-free networks by incorporating a microscopic correlation between the structural and the dynamical properties of the system. The characteristics of the explosive transition are ...