Xu Cui

The most common password is 123456, about 1% people are using it.

Mostly used password

In terms of number of visits, Facebook takes ~50% of the US market share.

Market share of social web

Liz and Signe each published a review paper recently. They share their tips and experience …

According statistics published in PubMed, the average number of coauthors per paper was 1.56 in 1950, meaning at least half of papers were single authored at that time. This number now reaches to 4.77 in 2008. The age of publishing a paper alone is gone.

Average number of coauthors in PubMed

In extreme cases, the maximal number of coauthors each year is always bigger than 600 in the past 8 years (2001 to 2008). The all time winner is a paper with 743 coauthors published in 2001 (Aubert et al, 2001, Phys Rev Lett). This paper has 8 pages in total; author list and affiliation takes 3 pages.

Another trend is the increasing use of collective names. For example, Global Alliance for Women’s Health, or Mended Hearts, Inc appear in the author list of a 2007 paper (Mosca et al).

Not surprisingly, the number of authors also increases steadily. The number of indexed authors (including duplications) per year reaches to 3 million in 2007, compared to 1.3 million in 1990. Competition is serious!

Refer to: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/authors1.html

FDR function, English version

FDR function, Chinese version 普通话 Mandarin

FDR function, Chinese version 河南话

First, your asdoc.exe should be in your system path

1. Open command window, cd to your project folder. In this folder, you should find src folder
2. Run command
   asdoc -source-path .\src -doc-sources .
3. Then a folder called “asdoc-output” will be generated

What is the limit of this infinite exponential?

Solution 1:

$$x=\sqrt{2}^x$$

This leads to x=2 or 4

Solution 2:

$$x=[\sqrt{2}^\sqrt{2}]^x$$

This leads to x not equal to 2 or 4

Solution 3: MatLab simulation of series

$$\sqrt{2}, \sqrt{2}^\sqrt{2}, [\sqrt{2}^\sqrt{2}]^\sqrt{2},…$$

leads to infinity

Solution 4: MatLab simulation of series

$$\sqrt{2}, \sqrt{2}^\sqrt{2}, \sqrt{2}^{[\sqrt{2}^\sqrt{2}]},…$$

leads to 2

Then what’s is value of this tower of sqrt(2)?

I find saveppt2 is very useful in data exploration. I often have to view a lot of plots/figures for individual subjects during quality checking or data exploration. It would be ideal to have a script to automatically save the plots into PowerPoint and then view the result later. saveppt2 does this and it saves me a lot of time.

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/19322

One limitation (or bug?) is that it doesn’t save a figure generated by surf or pcolor.

Adobe AIR 2 beta is out last night (Nov 16, 2009). It includes a number of highly expected features including launching native applications. It also improves CPU/memory usages. Some sample applications include:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air2/samples/

File Tile

1. FileTile
   Open a document with system default application (e.g. doc by Word)
   USB drive mount/unmount detection
   get icons from a file
2. SearchCentral
   Call native applications (spotlight)
3. Microphone
   Record voice from local microphone directly
4. KeePIPE
   p2p application of file sharing in the same network
5. TouchTest
   Multi-touch

When you submit a manuscript, many journals ask you to send your figures in TIFF format with some requirements such as 300dpi, flattened, LZW compressed, etc. How to do that?

My figures are usually finalized in MS PowerPoint. I don’t use PowerPoint’s own “save image as …”  b/c it’s not flexible. I use Adobe Photoshop.

1. Group and copy the figure in PowerPoint
2. Launch PhotoShop, File | New to create a new image. Don’t forget to set Resolution to 300 pixels/inch (dpi). Background is white. Then click OK.
3. Paste your figure.
4. (optional) do some cropping, trimming …
5. File | Save As, select “TIFF” as saving format; uncheck “Layers” (i.e. flatten your figure), click Save
6. Check “LZW” compression
7. OK.