Fig. 4

Distributions of avalanche size and duration for varying levels of the external input. The distributions of avalanche size (a, b, c) and duration (d, e, f) from simulations with $h=1/N$ (a, d), $h=0.1/N$ (b, e) and $h=0.01/N$ (c, f). As the level of the external input is decreased the system approaches the critical regime. For all simulations $N=800$, $\alpha =w=1$ and the distributions are pooled from 10 simulations each of length 10⁴ seconds. The red lines indicate linear fits on the double logarithmic scale (where appropriate), i.e. fitted power laws with exponents of 1.68 (b), 1.48 (c), 1.88 (e) and 1.64 (f)