Comment on "Universal relation between skewness and kurtosis in complex dynamics"

Fatigue Test of 6082 Aluminum Alloy under Random Load with Controlled Kurtosis

This paper presents the results of experimental tests carried out on an electromagnetic shaker where the excited element was a specimen with additional weight attached to the slip table. The load was random with a different kurtosis parameter value, i.e., it was performed for non-Gaussian loads. The experiment was accompanied by basic fatigue calculations in the frequency domain and their verification with experimental results. A significant decrease in fatigue life was found to take place with an increase in kurtosis and the maintenance of the same standard deviation of the specimen load. The fatigue effect, caused by the deviation from the normal distribution that was described by the kurtosis parameter, on the fatigue life of aluminum alloy 6082 was presented. An analysis revealed the different amplitude probability distributions for the loading signal and the recorded deformation signal. It was concluded that there was a lack of sensitivity of the numerical model to the change in the kurtosis parameter of the distribution of random loads.

Fluctuation scaling in the visual cortex at threshold

Fluctuation scaling relates trial-to-trial variability to the average response by a power function in many physical processes. Here we address whether fluctuation scaling holds in sensory psychophysics and its functional role in visual processing. We report experimental evidence of fluctuation scaling in human color vision and form perception at threshold. Subjects detected thresholds in a psychophysical masking experiment that is considered a standard reference for studying suppression between neurons in the visual cortex. For all subjects, the analysis of threshold variability that results from the masking task indicates that fluctuation scaling is a global property that modulates detection thresholds with a scaling exponent that departs from 2, β=2.48±0.07. We also examine a generalized version of fluctuation scaling between the sample kurtosis K and the sample skewness S of threshold distributions. We find that K and S are related and follow a unique quadratic form K=(1.19±0.04)S^{2}+(2.68±0.06) that departs from the expected 4/3 power function regime. A random multiplicative process with weak additive noise is proposed based on a Langevin-type equation. The multiplicative process provides a unifying description of fluctuation scaling and the quadratic S-K relation and is related to on-off intermittency in sensory perception. Our findings provide an insight into how the human visual system interacts with the external environment. The theoretical methods open perspectives for investigating fluctuation scaling and intermittency effects in a wide variety of natural, economic, and cognitive phenomena.