Word: normal
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...like a giant Ms. Pac-Man colony. But the most vexing problem endures. And it is not signage or architecture or traffic flow. It's us. Large groups of people facing death act in surprising ways. Most of us become incredibly docile. We are kinder to one another than normal. We panic only under certain rare conditions. Usually, we form groups and move slowly, as if sleepwalking in a nightmare...
...what determines which category you fall into? You might expect decisive people to be assertive and flaky people to come undone. But when nothing is normal, the rules of everyday life do not apply. No one knows more about human behavior in disasters than researchers in the aviation industry. Because they have to comply with so many regulations, they run thousands of people through experiments and interview scores of crash survivors. Of course, a burning plane is not the same as a flaming skyscraper or a sinking ship. But some behaviors in all three environments turn out to be remarkably...
...like a plane crash, I visited the FAA's training academy in Oklahoma City, Okla. In a field behind one of their labs, they had hoisted a jet section on risers. I boarded the mock-up plane along with 30 flight-attendant supervisors. Inside, it looked just like a normal plane, and the flight attendants made jokes, pretending to be passengers. "Could I get a cocktail over here, please? I paid a lot of money for this seat...
...told, it was an important five innings for a squad that saved its normal pitching rotation for a crucial weekend series at Brown. Harvard coach Joe Walsh remained mum on the championship game starter until shortly before game time...
...acutely dangerous country for Americans who look and sound a specific way, but for a Harvard student from Morocco, or with family from Morocco, for instance, the equation is completely different. Within countries like Israel, there are dangerous places and there are places where life is almost completely normal. The fact that Harvard students are allowed to travel to the Indian side of Kashmir, yet are banned from studying at universities within Israel proper betrays the extent to which Harvard has overlooked the true dangers facing its students in favor of conforming to easily justifiable State Department warnings...