I stumbled across an interesting paper by Bshary and colleagues about collaboration between fishes¹. The study is already a few years old (see a recent follow up). But, new or not, collaborating fishes are always cute and worth writing about.

The fishes in question are the roving coralgrouper and the giant moray. Both are hunters, but their hunting styles differ. The grouper hunts for prey in the open water. To escape from the grouper, fishes tend to hide in the coral reefs, in small crevices where the grouper cannot reach. In contrast, the moray hunts by slithering through the reefs and capturing smaller fishes that hide in the reef’s crevices. To escape from the moray, fishes swim out into the open water. The potential for collaboration is clear: If the grouper and moray would hunt together, there would be nowhere to hide. They would make a deadly team indeed.

And they do hunt together. I tend to be skeptical of claims like this, which (to me) seem extraordinary. But Bshary and colleagues show quite convincingly that some form of collaboration must be going on. It works as follows: When the grouper is hungry, it actively seeks out a nearby moray and shakes its head to signal its intention to hunt. Most of the time, the moray responds by following the grouper. And they’re off–Swimming side by side and hunting. You can see this in the video below:

What I like about Bshary and colleague’s paper …

This is a guest post for the Open Science Collaboration Blog. You can read the full post here.

A little more than three years ago I started working on OpenSesame, a free program for the easy development of experiments, mostly oriented at psychologists and neuroscientists. The first version of OpenSesame was the result of a weekend-long hacking sprint. By now, OpenSesame has grown into a substantial project, with a small team of core developers, tens of occasional contributors, and about 2500 active users.

Because of my work on OpenSesame, I've become increasingly interested in open-source software in general. How is it used? Who makes it? Who is crazy enough to invest time in developing a program, only to give it away for free? Well ... quite a few people, because open source is everywhere. Browsers like Firefox and Chrome. Operating systems like Ubuntu and Android. Programming languages like Python and R. Media players like VLC. These are all examples of open-source programs that many people use on a daily basis.

But what about specialized scientific software? More specifically: Which programs do experimental psychologists and neuroscientists use? Although this varies from person to person, a number of expensive, closed-source programs come to mind first: E-Prime, SPSS, MATLAB, Presentation, Brainvoyager, etc. Le psychonomist moyen is not really into open source.

Continue reading on the Open Science Collaboration blog!

If you’re a student, or young enough to remember what being a student was like, you know how expensive textbooks are. For example, the paperback version of Gazzaniga’s Cognitive Neuroscience sells for €57 on Amazon. The hardcover version will even set you back €120. It’s a beautiful book, to be sure, but practically speaking it’s mostly bought by students who only use it for a single course. After the course, the book fades to black on a dusty bookshelf, together with other pricey textbooks.

A dusty bookshelf. (Source: The Guardian)

There is a limited trade in second-hand textbooks, but publishers prevent this trade from blossoming by frequently releasing new editions, which are always structured a bit differently from their predecessors. Different page numbering, different paragraphs, etc. Just differently enough, of course, so that students practically have to have the same edition as their professor, who generally has the latest. Libraries are also of little use, because they have at most a handful of copies of each textbook. Not nearly enough for all students.

Meet OpenStax college, a nonprofit organization that aims to publish high-quality textbooks under an open-access license. This means that you can get the books for free in a digital format–as PDF, E-Book, or viewed on-line. Interestingly, OpenStax also provides printed copies, which are sold at cost. I haven’t gotten my hands on a printed copy yet, but the digital versions are impressive. Are they something special? No, basically they are just …

Version control is all the rage in academia. And when people talk about version control, they generally mean Git, which is by far the most popular version-control system. But what exactly is Git? We all want to control our versions. Especially when you have experienced versions-run-amock situations like these:

document-v1-latest_(commented)-trackchanges_3.2-wed_12:00.docx

But how?!

In very simple terms, Git is a program that allows you to take snapshots of your files at a particular moment. A snapshot is called a ‘commit’. A ‘repository’ is a collection of files that are monitored by Git. If you are familiar with DropBox, there is an obvious parallel: Your DropBox folder is your repository, and DropBox automatically ‘commits’ each and every change. But Git is far more flexible and controlled.

Git has been developed by Linus Torvalds to manage the development of the Linux kernel. Managing a project as large as the Linux kernel is very complicated, and Git has lots of advanced functionality that allows people to work in parallel on the same project, without things drifting hopelessly apart. Therefore, git can be a tool for hardcore nerds. But it doesn’t need to be. Git is equally suitable for managing a simple, one-man project. And in this case, Git is very simple to use.

For this tutorial, I will assume that you are running Windows 7, because most of my readers do. But with minor variations, everything is applicable to other platforms as well.

So let’s begin! You …

This was, of course, an April fools joke. The open-source status of OpenSesame is protected by the GNU General Public License. And there are certainly no back doors to remotely disable the software!

Earlier today it was announced that OpenSesame has been bought by Psychology Software Tools Inc. (PST). OpenSesame is a popular package for the development of psychological and neuroscientific experiments, and is currently available under an open-source license. Avril Lessots, spokesperson for PST, confirmed that usage of their own experiment-building package, E-Prime, has seen a steady decline, and described the take-over of OpenSesame as “part of our strategy to stay relevant in the shifting scientific landscape.”

As of May 1st 2014, OpenSesame will be available in two formats. OpenSesame Professional will be priced at $995 / €725 / ￡600 for a single license. OpenSesame Free will be available at no cost, but requires that participants watch a five-second video commercial after every ten minutes of experiment. According to Lessots, video commercials are unlikely to interfere with experiments: “People are so used to commercial breaks that it is almost unnatural not to present commercials during an experiment. Participants might wonder whether the lack of commercials is a hidden manipulation.”

Currently active copies of OpenSesame will be remotely disabled after a grace period of one month, on June 1st 2014.