Daniel Schreij reports that he's running OpenSesame, the open-source experiment builder, on Mac OS. Screenshot or it didn't happen (click for full version):
I'm very excited about this! The installation procedure appears to be quite daunting, but at least we know that it works, which brings the goal of providing a user-friendly Mac OS package that much closer. As soon as we have compiled a decent installation tutorial (for the tech-savvy Mac users), it will be posted here, so stay tuned.
A few days ago, a paper was posted at the arXiv, in which the authors looked at where the top 10% cited scientific papers come from. The distribution is not terribly surprising: Most papers come from Europe, North America and Japan, followed by Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia. But, looking at the maps, you notice a few interesting things. If you compare the maps for Physics, Chemistry and Psychology, you see that the US is dominant in Psychology, but less so in the exact sciences. This is even more apparent for Canada: Most of the green dots on the Psychology map are not even present on the Chemistry map. In Europe the difference between Psychology and the exact sciences doesn't appear to be as pronounced, and in Singapore and Hong Kong it's the other way around.
Bornmann, L., & Leydesdorff, L. (2011). Which cities produce worldwide more excellent papers than can be expected? A new mapping approach--using Google Maps--based on statistical significance testing. 1103.3216. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.3216
In Python you can choose whether you want to indent your code using spaces or tabs. However, mixing the two can cause problems. Therefore, I made a simple Python script to fix mixed indentation.
If you are frequently procrastinating at work by watching YouTube videos, you might be familiar with this one (It's not very new, but I learned about it only recently):
Amazing, right? The study to which the video refers was quitebignews: Chimps outperform humans in a working memory task!
But, although it's a cool video, these reports were overly enthusiastic. I'm sure you've spotted a few huge confounds in the comparison between the humans and the chimp. First, the celebrity chimp was selected based on his excellent performance on this particular task. So, who knows, he might be an idiot savant? But a far more serious concern is the amount of practice that the chimp received. According to the supplementary data, the chimp's practice consisted of four sessions a day, 5 to 6 six days a week. The humans' practice routine doesn't appear to be specified, but according to the criticism by Silberberg and Kearns they received no practice at all.
At any rate, even if the humans received some practice, we may safely assume that they were not trained as extensively as the chimp. So the obvious question is what happens if humans are heavily trained. And the unspectacular answer is that they become just as good as the chimp. So, did chimps beat humans at this memory task? Yes, because they practiced...
References
Inoue, S., & Matsuzawa, T. (2007). Working memory of numerals in chimpanzees. Current Biology, 17(23), R1004-R1005. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2007.10.027 …
A while back I wrote about NeuroDebian, a repository of neuroscientific software (Linux only, I'm afraid). I'm happy to announce that OpenSesame is now officially part of NeuroDebian! This page explains how you can add the NeuroDebian repository to your software sources. After you have done this, you simply install OpenSesame through your package manager or by typing the following commands in a terminal:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install opensesame
Right now, the version in the repository is the latest snapshot (0.23-pre1), so you will even have a minor edge (at the risk of some instability) over the regular OpenSesame packages (which are at 0.22)! And, of course, NeuroDebian has many more software packages to offer. Special thanks go out to Michael Hanke, who has handled the packaging.
