This is my first week as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow. Exciting! Marie Curie fellowships are post-doctoral grants from the European Commision. They give young(ish) researchers like me the opportunity to focus full time on research for two years. Being a Marie Curie fellow is a good thing in every way, so I’m thrilled to finally start!

I will blog occasionally about the project. Most will be about the research itself, but in this first post I want to write a bit about how we are going to approach this project. (“We” refers also to Françoise Vitu, senior researcher of the project, and other collaborators.) To use a heavily overused buzzterm, this is going to be an open-science project.

An actress performing Marie Curie. The left-most badges have been designed by the Center for Open Science. The right-most badge is the officious open-access logo, designed by PLoS.

So what does this mean? The guiding principle is that all scientific output will be made publicly available. This may sound obvious (why do research if you’re not going to make the results available?), but it’s not typical of today’s research. Traditionally, scientific output consists solely of papers that are published in academic subscription journals. The data behind these papers is never shared. And the papers themselves are only accessible to a small group of people with journal subscriptions: i.e. other researchers, but not the taxpayers who paid for the research, nor clinicians who might benefit from the …

Right now you’re reading dark text on a bright background. This is called a positive-polarity display. Bright text on a dark background, like this, has a negative polarity. Positive polarity is much more common than negative polarity. Microsoft Word uses dark-on-bright text. This website uses it. And books use it, of course.

But a minority of people prefer it the other way around: bright-on-dark text. Negative polarity is particularly popular among software developers. For example, Atom is a programming editor that is developed by GitHub, the hippest of all hipster programmer communities. And Atom uses bright-on-dark text by default. Another example is OpenSesame, an editor for psychological experiments that I develop myself. By default, the editor component in OpenSesame uses negative polarity as well.

Examples of positive-polarity displays (left, dark-on-bright text), and negative-polarity displays (right, bright-on-dark) text.

So we have the nerds on one side, preferring bright-on-dark text, and the rest of the world on the other side, preferring good-old-fashioned dark-on-bright. So who’s right? Is this only a matter of taste? Or is one polarity really better than the other?

Well … There is a phenomenon called the positive-polarity advantage, which, as you might guess, refers to the fact that dark-on-bright text is better. In other words, Microsoft Word got it right, and GitHub and I got it wrong. But in what sense is positive polarity better? And why is it better?

One way to asses how well people can read text is through proofreading. In a proofreading experiment …

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 …