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Showing posts with the label early warning signals

Metastability and Eye Movements: A Dynamical‑Systems Interpretation

  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...

EUROPEAN DEBT CRISIS: THE CURRENT ACCOUNT BALANCE IS AN EARLY WARNING SIGNAL

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Often the financial/economic crises  in the Euro-zone are attributed to government budget deficits in excess of the values stated in the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP)  [ SGP regulation ] , and the Maastricht Treaty  [ see the EU document ], but we'd better take  the external debts of the European countries as at the core of the current crises.  " Because they carry obligations to make future payments, external debt liabilities have the potential to create circumstances that render an economy vulnerable to solvency and liquidity problems. Moreover, as experience has shown, external vulnerability can have widespread economic costs, and not just for the initially affected economy. It is clear, therefore, that external debt needs to be measured and monitored. "  [ see here the IMF guide on external debt ]  Under this perspective, it will turn easy to realize that the most important variable to assess the financial health of a country is given by t...

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