“…Burst shape analysis is a sharper probe than analysis of size distribution alone, because systems with the same power laws can exhibit different average shapes (Sethna et al, 2001). Scale-dependent deviations in average shapes, such as flattening and asymmetrical skewing (Spasojević et al, 1996;Baldassarri et al, 2003;Colaiori et al, 2004;Zapperi et al, 2005), have been observed in both empirical data and theoretical models, yielding new insights into the underlying mechanisms. To improve the signal-to-noise ratio for the average shape analysis, we pooled bursts over narrow ranges of durations and averaged within these bins (Papanikolaou et al, 2011), rather than averaging only over bursts of exactly the same duration.…”