Sorry if this is a naive question. We tried finding guidelines, but have failed to find concrete advice.   There are N authors (where N>2) in our publication. Two authors have equal contribution. We are aware of the custom of putting an asterisk and writing a footnote about equal contribution.  However, while arranging the names of authors with equal contribution, how should they be arranged – alphabetically by last name? For instance, if the names are John Foe and Jane Doe, should they be arranged alphabetically by last name: Jane Doe*, John Foe*?
I've seen papers (e.g., in Science) where the first two authors are listed in non-alphabetical order, and yet there are asterisks behind their names to say that they contributed equally.   It seems strange to me, because if the two authors are in alphabetical order, then it could be that the first author contributed more or the two contributed equally, and this can be made clear with asterisks in the paper if it's the latter case. When they're in non-alphabetical order, however, if someone only sees the author list without seeing the paper, he/she will likely assume that the first author contributed most.  So my question is: Are there particular reasons why people do that? (This  is related, but I don't think the answers there get to my question.)
What is the EV scale? I have seen an "EV" (exposure value) scale that's sometimes used to express a camera's exposure settings, or scene brightness. How exactly does this scale work? Can a 64-bit OS run as a guest on a 64-bit VirtualBox host? Is it possible to run a 64-bit OS as a guest on a 64-bit machine with VirtualBox? I'm guessing it should be, but I'd like to make sure.  Do some virtualization technologies allow a single guest machine to use multiple cores? I guess it should be possible, but my VirtualBox open-source edition doesn't seem to do it. How to uninstall broken programs in windows 7 Could anyone tell me how to uninstall programs that their installation had a problem and therefore their uninstall doesn't work?  I removed all their references in the registry and their folder on the hdd but still don't know how to get rid of them completely from Add/Remove Programs list.  Thanks How do I compare version numbers in Python? I would like to take a picture of a street during the day to depict how much traffic and cars there are on the street.  Is there anyway to do this with a long exposure photograph?  I have a Nikon D90 and I set the f stop down to 1/16 (the lowest of my lens) and set the time to 2 seconds. Doing this, the exposure is almost saturated when taken around 5pm with the sun setting behind a tree. Doing this, the cars passing by were very hard to make out against the stationary background, being visible as a blur in the color of the car.  Perhaps this is not possible and I should just do this at night where the cars lights are much brighter than the background.  Please suggest how else I might depict the traffic in a photograph?  Are daytime long exposure photographs even possible? Say we have the following sample and we are trying to estimate the variance of the sample mean of the population.  X = [0, -1, 2, 10, -3]   If I take an increasing number of bootstrap (e.g. 100, 1000, 10,000, 100,0000), the bootstrap distribution of the sample mean gets narrower and narrower. In other words, I can make the bootstrap distribution arbitrarily narrow.   Given the above, what's the point of using a different number of bootstrap samples here? And wouldn't this mean that I could make the standard error of the mean arbitrarily small by just taking more and more bootstrap samples? What am I missing?  Please note that I am doing a proper bootstrap sample in the sense that each bootstrap sample has the same exact size as the original sample (input array). Run TTY script every time I open a GUI terminal How to test multiple variables against a single value? I was going to ask , but I came to the conclusion that I'm not going to do it (asking and building).  Now my question is: why is it (usually, if we leave the silly high-end prices alone) more expensive to build a bike from scratch? Why the number of indexed pages decreased for a "site:" search Recently I created a website with hundreds of thousands of unique pages. A week ago, Google had indexed about 250,000 pages. It has now decreased to 90k URLs (using a site:domain.com query).   What should I do to have Google index all the pages again? Why did all these pages get de-indexed from Google?. Exit of "> " mode in Unix shell In sh (not Bash), how would we abort execution of command when the prompt is in &gt; mode?  For example, when entering a string with quotes only at the beginning, it makes the prompt look like &gt;, without the ability to quit it normally, unless hitting Ctrl + D. Example:  root@MyPC:~# echo "hello &gt; I am &gt; (How do I exit of this mode?)   In case that I don't know which character delimits the string (" or ' or simply escaping a newline/spaces with backslash), is there a way to let Bash know that I want to abort the execution of the current command? Summing a series having a geometric component The standard files/tools that report memory seem to have different formats on different Linux distributions. For example, on Arch and Ubuntu.   Arch  $ free               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available Mem:        8169312     3870392     2648348       97884     1650572     4110336 Swap:      16777212      389588    16387624   $ head /proc/meminfo  MemTotal:        8169312 kB MemFree:         2625668 kB MemAvailable:    4088520 kB Buffers:          239688 kB Cached:          1224520 kB SwapCached:        17452 kB Active:          4074548 kB Inactive:        1035716 kB Active(anon):    3247948 kB Inactive(anon):   497684 kB  Ubuntu  $ free              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached Mem:      80642828   69076080   11566748    3063796     150688   58358264 -/+ buffers/cache:   10567128   70075700 Swap:     20971516    5828472   15143044   $ head /proc/meminfo  MemTotal:       80642828 kB MemFree:        11565936 kB Buffers:          150688 kB Cached:         58358264 kB SwapCached:      2173912 kB Active:         27305364 kB Inactive:       40004480 kB Active(anon):    7584320 kB Inactive(anon):  4280400 kB Active(file):   19721044 kB    So, how can I portably (across Linux distros only) and reliably get the amount of memory—excluding swap—that is available for my software to use at a particular time? Presumably that's what's shown as "available" and "MemAvailable" in the output of free and cat /proc/meminfo in Arch but how do I get the same in Ubuntu or another distribution? PostgreSQL: running count of rows for a query 'by minute' Is there any web browser with NPAPI plugins support? As per  article, Mozilla has dropped the support of NPAPI plugins from Mozilla Firefox version 52. Is there any web browser with NPAPI plugin support? I have to use a website frequently, which uses Oracle Java plugin. I'm using Ubuntu 16.04 64 bit with Java JDK 8u121. Helps are much appreciated. Thanks. Edit1: After 3 years of asking this question, Java plugin still works fine in Palemoon v28.9.2-1 64 bit on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Java version is JRE 8u251 64 bit Edit2: As of 20th October 2020, Oracle completely removed Java Plugin from 8u271 JRE and JDK packages mentioned in  article. But 8u261 or prior versions works just fine. Given a $k$-manifold $M$, such that $\partial M$ is a $(k-1)$-manifold, there is a standard way in which $\partial M$ inherits the orientation of $M$. So if $M$ is oriented by the form field $\omega$, then $\omega_\partial=\omega(v_{\text{out}},v_1,\dots,v_{k-1})$ orients $\partial M$, where the $v_1,\dots,v_{k-1}$ are basis vectors for a tangent space on a point of the boundary, and $v_\text{out}$ is an outward pointing vector (see here: , which follows the exposition of Hubbard &amp; Hubbard).  In practice I find this very difficult to interpret. How can one find this $v_\text{out}$ in practice?   For instance, take $M$ to be defined by $z=x^2+y^2$ for $x\ge0$ (technically a manifold with boundary, in fact a half-paraboloid). It's a fact that $\partial M$ is defined by the parabola $z=y^2$. If $M$ is oriented by $dx\wedge dy$, how does this induce an orientation on the boundary (in fact we should obtain a 1-form that induces an orientation on the boundary)?   Note: I find the whole discussion of boundary orientation to be rather clumsy in its exposition. In the case of surfaces inducing orientations on boundary curves, I was originally taught to imagine that the normal vector that induces the surface orientation is me walking on the surface. This normal should walk along the boundary such that the surface lies to its left. OK - but how does this translate to the $v_{\text{out}}$ interpretation, so that we can generalize to other dimensions easily?)  Edit: An ideal answer would merge the intuitive approach with the rigorous approach, if possible. I would grateful to anybody who could help order my (at present confused) understanding! Given that $xyz=1$, prove that $\frac{x}{1+x^4}+\frac{y}{1+y^4}+\frac{z}{1+z^4}\le \frac{3}{2}$ $\lim_{x\to 0} \frac{\sin x - x}{x^2}$ without L'Hospital or Taylor How to add lists with unequal length? Prove $kf(x)+f'(x)=0 $ when conditions of Rolle's theorem are satisfied . Prove that if $f$ is differentiable on $ [a,b]$ and if $ f(a)=f(b)=0$ then for any real $k$ there is an $ x \in (a,b) $such that $$kf(x)+f'(x)=0 $$  As all the conditions of Rolle's theorem are satisfied one can say that there is at least one  $c \in (a,b) $ such that $f'(c) =0$ How should I proceed furthur ? How can I use this to get to the required equation ?