Metastability and Eye Movements: A Dynamical‑Systems Interpretation

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  1. Why metastability is a natural language for gaze behavior The idea that perception, attention, and neural activity evolve through transiently stable states has deep roots in cognitive science and neuroscience. Concepts such as attractors , basins , noise‑induced transitions , and escape times appear in work on perceptual switching, decision‑making, and neural population dynamics (Kelso, 1995; Rabinovich et al., 2008; Deco & Jirsa, 2012). Eye movements, especially the alternation between fixations and saccades ,   fit remarkably well into this metastable picture. The Freidlin–Wentzell theory of rare events (Freidlin & Wentzell, 2012) provides a rigorous mathematical language for these intuitions. 2. Fixations as metastable states  Consider the gaze position X t as the state of a stochastic dynamical system. During a fixation the  gaze remains confined to a small region, microsaccades and noise generate small fluctuations, and the gaze tends to return...
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SIDE EFFECTS OF THE FAILURE OF DETROIT

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The financial failure of the city of Detroit [here] will also have consequences on some European banks, exposed towards the debt contracted by the American metropolis.

 Among the banks involved there is also UBS: in 2005 the bank was handling the sale of $ 1.4 billion of municipal bonds. Operations conducted on behalf of the administration of Detroit, to enable it to finance its pension fund.

 Similar operations involving other banks - for a total of another billion dollars - and these include many institutions that already live in conditions of difficulty.
As in the case of the "bad bank" of Hypo Real Estate, which is the most exposed with $ 200 million, to Commerzbank, which owns a total of 4.5 billion euro in American local governments, or Deutsche Bank, not involved however excessively.

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