It is well-established that subjective judgments of perceived urgency of alarm sounds can be affected by acoustic parameters. In this study, the authors investigated an objective measurement, the reaction time (RT), to test the effectiveness of temporal parameters of sounds in the context of warning sounds. Three experiments were performed using a RT paradigm, with two different concurrent visu...

The most popular numerical method for solving systems of reaction–diffusion equations continues to be a low order finite–difference scheme coupled with low order Euler time stepping. This paper extends previous 1D work and reports experiments that show that with high–order methods one can speed up such simulations for 2D and 3D problems by factors of 10–100. A short Matlab code (2/3D) that can ...

Despite their importance, forecasts of real economic activity can be unreliable. Forecasts based on macroeconomic models are often hindered by the lack of timely and accurate data and the complexity of the forecasting model. These difficulties have led to a growing interest in using financial variables to supplement traditional model-based forecasts of real economic activity. The advantages of ...

When relaxation towards an equilibrium or steady state is exponential at large times, one usually considers that the associated relaxation time τ, i.e. the inverse of the decay rate, is the longest characteristic time in the system. However, that need not be true, other times such as the lifetime of an infinitesimal perturbation can be much longer. In the present work, we demonstrate that this ...