Fig 1. (Color) Avalanche size and duration distributions from an inhomogeneous Poisson process (IPP, blue, see methods), which approximates power laws that resemble those observed in typical experiments.

Shuffling the events of the IPP results in a homogeneous Poisson process (HPP, gray). For HPPs, the size and duration distributions are (approximately) exponential rather than following a power law. Dashed lines indicate power laws with exponents -1.6 and -2.0 in the left and right panel, respectively.