predicting panic

It's that time of the year again. Last week we were all "urged" to get a flu shot at work, both to keep us healthy, but also so the Mass Dispensing Clinic could run a simulation of "an emergency vaccination situation". I was reminded of this when I read an article in the latest Futurist entitled "Predicting Panic" and came across this quote

"Training public safety and security professionals is difficult because scenarios involving groups of people are extremely hard to simulate realistically, according to Paul M. Torrens, an assistant professor at Arizona State University's School of Geographical Sciences. "You couldn't stage a realistic rehearsal of an evacuation because people are not going to panic appropriately," Torrens says, "or you could never bulldoze large sections of the city to see how it affects pedestrian flow." And creating a riot in midtown for training purposes is obviously neither practical nor safe."

The article goes on to explain how they are using computer simulated models to analyze and anticipate the dynamics of a crowd based on both emotional and environamenatl situations.

But what I latched onto was that "people are not going to panic appropriately". I know that I work in an area that is dealing with this more than some, and in fact there is a whole group in my department who are looking at safety and emergency preparedness. I'm certainly not advocating doing nothing, but people not panicing appropriately in a test of our response system has got to be a major hinderance to developing a useful plan. It's entirely likely that we were told that we were helping to run a simulation just to get us get a flu shot, but in an actual disaster, there would be such a different feel/attitude for both the dispensers and the dispensees, that I don't know how much value there is there. In the same way that the "test of the emergency broadcasting system" on TV is probably a good thing to do, but also dulls us to the sound/annoyance so that if you're anything like me. As soon as you hear it, you turn the mute on and don't pay any attention assuming it's "just another test".

OK, things I want you to comment on

1. Is emergency preparedness worth stressing when you can't simulate an actual emergency?
2. Did you get a flu shot?
3. How do you spell "panicing"? "paniking?" "panicking?" "panic-ing"?
4. Give me your opinion on people who pull a random quote from a random journal to try to support a point they have neither researched nor thought through fully (or at all).
5. Should I have used this picture instead, or does it give you the willies?