R: Empirical Cumulative Distribution Function

There's a handy R built-in function for calculating the empirical cdf called ecdf.  I had 40 separate distributions (molecular weight for different series of molecules) and wanted to look at the cdf for this.  In R it's really straightforward.  Here's an example where we simulate some molecular weight data and plot the CDF for the whole set:

# create the data
R> data <- data.frame(mw=rnorm(10000, mean=400, sd=50), name=1:10000, group=sample(c('a','b','c','d'), 1000, replace=T))
R> mw_cdf <- data.frame(cdf=ecdf(data$mw)(data$mw)*100, mw=data$mw)

R> qplot(mw, cdf, data=mw_cdf, geom="step", xlab="Molecular weight", ylab="Total (%)", main="CDF of MW")


The ecdf() call returns a function (of class "ecdf") which you can call with a MW to calculate the probability of seeing a molecule of this, or smaller, MW in your set.


The R code above produces the following plot:

I found this useful for looking at the MW distributions for disparate groups of molecules, both together and separately.  If you're going to apply a molecular weight cutoff when analysing a set of molecules, it's good to get an idea of how many you'll be excluding and this provides a very quick way of seeing that information.

Running chrome on multiple displays

By display here I mean $DISPLAY not multiple monitors.

I often leave Chrome running at work (on a ton of virtual desktops with a ton of tabs) and then get home and need to log into work (via VPN + NX) in order to check on things.  It's frustrated me that if I try to run chrome in the NX session then it appears on my screen at work rather than in the NX session.  Well, who would have thought that reading the man page would solve the frustration?  This method sets up a new profile, so you loose all  your bookmarks and settings, but that's ok for occasional use I think

/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome --user-data-dir=<dir>

Where <dir> is a dir of your choosing. The default for chrome is ~/.config/google-chrome/. So I've been using ~/.config/google-chrome/nx. Phew, friction resolved.