Recently, I was at Away Day 2013 of my company
ThoughtWorks. Social justice being the central theme this time around, we were lucky to have several illustrious speakers to nudge us out of our comfort zones and "open our eyes" at India. A wide range of topics were discussed - land mafia, farmer suicides, medical care for the poor, free software movement, communalism, economic blunders (read 'Aadhar') and entrepreneurship. All the speakers had first-hand information on these topics, and managed to leave us with a lump in our throats. Most of the speeches ended with the proverbial "thunderous applause" and a "standing ovation".
I'm curious to understand the dynamics of crowd psychology. The applause varied from speech to speech: some received standing ovations, and some just claps. Even among these, there was a lot of variation in terms of time period of applause. Some questions coming to my mind are:
- Did the audience have an implicit consensus regarding the quality of presentations?
- Or, did some passionate lead clappers clap all their way till the end - sub-consciously forcing others to follow?
I just did a bit of googling around, and came across this wonderful
technical paper on audience applause. It is interesting how the authors of the paper saw semblance to the spread of diseases and epidemiology.
All this has left me all the more convinced that I should take the
statistics course at udacity - it'll also lay some foundation on my path to become a data scientist.
