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.

Over the past month I’ve seen a huge increase in the number of visitors to the Gabor-patch generator on this site. A Gabor patch is a type of stimulus that psychologists like to use for experiments. It’s a pretty weird stimulus, as you can see in the example below, not really useful for anything except experimentation. So why the sudden interest? Why are thousands of people suddenly generating Gabor patches?

The rush on Gabors appears to have been triggered by a paper that appeared last month in Current Biology. In this paper, Deveau and colleagues claim that you can dramatically improve vision through repeated training on a simple visual task that uses–you guessed it!–Gabor patches. Even more remarkably, the participants in the study, who were university baseball players, even showed a marked improvement in on-field baseball performance!

Whoah! Improving your eyesight simply by looking at some weird images! If you can’t wait to get started, you can buy the training program in the form of an iPad app called ULTIMEYES Pro ®. The app, priced at a mere $5.99, is developed by Carrot Neurotechnology, a company founded by the senior author of the paper.

But wait, what’s that smell? Oh yes … It’s something fishy.

Source: 4hours1000places.com

Let’s start with a bit of background. The main claim of the paper is that real-life vision can be improved through a simple visual brain-training program. How plausible is this claim? Most …

Boston-based start-up Spritz aims for the sky with its recently announced mobile application, which, according to the developers, will drastically change the way we read. Forget about sentences, paragraphs, and layout. Spritz fires text directly at your eyes, one word at the time, at a break-neck speed. The motivation behind this presentation mode is straightforward: The eye movements that we make during reading are just a waste of time and energy. Remove these eye movements from the equation, and our reading pace easily doubles–or even quadruples–without much extra effort. With hardly any practice, anyone should be able to “spritz” at an astonishing rate of a 1000 words per minute. The prospect of devouring The Hobbit in merely one-and-a-half hour made Spritz go viral on the Internet. Even though the application is yet to be released, the world seems ready to welcome it with open arms.

But is the hype justified? Here, we take a critical look at the science behind this reading of the future.

Getting rid of eye movements

Even though reading doesn’t seem to take much effort, our brain needs to work-out heavily to process the enormous amount of text that we are confronted with every day. Indeed, reading is a very complex exercise. For one thing, our eyes do not stop to process each word of a sentence individually. Instead, our brain strategically picks the next position for our eyes to fixate on, and only then programs the eyes to jump …

Scientists should do lots of things. Just search for #openscience on Twitter. It’s buzzing with reform!

Scientists should make their papers freely available, and no longer hide them behind the paywalls that are put up by commercial publishers. They should make their datasets available, so that analyses can be independently verified. They should post their ongoing work to pre-print servers (as many from the exact sciences already do), where it can be discussed, shared, and debated without unnecessary publication delays. They should spend more time replicating each others findings. They shouldn’t care about journal impact factors, but judge quality on a per-manuscript basis, using altmetrics. And the list goes on!

Sharing can be a little scary at first. But a young generation of scientists is doing it more and more. (Source)

But despite all the buzz, actual scientific practice has hardly changed. And I’m at fault here as much as anyone. I’ve written a few blogs on the subject, but I haven’t really conducted much #openscience at all. So, with our new-years resolutions fresh in mind, my colleagues and myself decided to put our money where our mouth is, and take the ‘high road’ to what will hopefully become our next publication.

As a first step, I posted all experimental materials to a GitHub repository. You can think of GitHub as a public DropBox with infinite history. All versions of all files within a specific project remain available, and you can easily inspect the changes …