Dynamics of 'the wave'

Just posted on the arXiv (the second author is definitely well-known in the complex systems community and the I've seen the first one's name at least a few times as well) is a paper on the dynamics of 'the wave', that insidious thing that people do in baseball stadiums instead of actually watching the game. Here is the abstract:


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 delay. Here we use a simple, but realistic model to explain how the combination of the local and global interactions of the spectators produces a breaking of the symmetry resulting in the replacement of the symmetric solution -- containing two propagating waves -- by a single wave moving in one of the two possible directions. Our model is based on and compared to the extensive observations of volunteers filling out the related questionnaire we have posted on the Internet. We find that, as a function of the parameter controlling the strength of the global interactions, the transition to the single wave solution has features reminiscent of discontinuous transitions. After the spontaneous symmetry breaking the two directions of propagation are still statistically equivalent. We investigate also how this remaining symmetry is broken in real stadia by a small asymmetrical term in the perception of spectators.


I've never seen this called the "Mexican" wave before. It's interesting that they decided to present this as a spontaneous symmetry-breaking phenomenon, as that way of looking at this situation has occurred to me before. Alas, I have been beaten to the punch as far as actually doing the work is concerned.

The question to ask now is which journal will be publishing this study. The one saying who is the center of the Marvel Comics universe appeared in PRE and the one on the community structure of rappers has now been accepted by Journal of Statistical Mechanics.