Five subjects mimicked the sensation caused by their tinnitus with a complex sound pattern consisting of the sum of sine waves. The imitation tinnitus was generally broadband, spanning an average of 2.94 kHz. Measures of the pitch of the tinnitus were made using both a forced-choice double-staircase (FCDS) task and a method of adjustment (MOA) task. Even tinnitus portrayed as broadband was matc...

The devil’s staircase – a continuous function on the unit interval [0,1] which is not constant, yet is locally constant on an open dense set – is the sort of exotic creature a combinatorialist might never expect to encounter in “real life.” We show how a devil’s staircase arises from the combinatorial problem of parallel chip-firing on the complete graph. This staircase helps explain a previous...

The enhancement of tunneling probability in the nearly integrable system is closely examined, focusing on tunneling splittings plotted as a function of the inverse of the Planck's constant. On the basis of the analysis using the absorber which efficiently suppresses the coupling, creating spikes in the plot, we found that the splitting curve should be viewed as the staircase-shaped skeleton acc...

In a recent work J. Sci. Comput. 16 (2001), 479-524, B. Despr es and F. Lagouti ere introduced a new approach to derive numerical schemes for hyperbolic conservation laws. Its most important feature is the ability to perform an exact resolution for a single traveling discontinuity. However their scheme is not entropy satisfying and can keep nonentropic discontinuities. The purpose of our work i...

Forced stratified flows are shown to suffer two types of linear long-wave instability: a ‘viscous’ instability which is related to the classical instability of Kolmogorov flow, and a ‘conductive instability’, with the form of a large-scale, negative thermal diffusion. The nonlinear dynamics of both instabilities is explored with weakly nonlinear theory and numerical computations. The introducti...

We analyze the anisoplanatic adaptive receiver system field of view (FOV) and the possibility of controlling the system FOV by using an adaptive optics system with multiple wave-front sensors that sense wave-front phase aberrations of reference waves with different arrival angles. The conventional decoupled stochastic parallel gradient descent (D-SPGD) technique is generalized to include output...

Let S be a simply connected orthogonal polygon in the plane, and let T be a horizontal (or vertical) segment such that T ′ ∩ S is connected for every translate T ′ of T . If every two points of S see via staircase paths a common translate of T , then there is a translate of T seen via staircase paths by every point of S. That is, some translate of T is a staircase illuminator for S. Clearly the...