I don't remember when I first saw a video of an octopus's amazing camouflaging abilities, but I know that I've been fascinated ever since.

Its not just the octopus that is a master of disguise, though. Pressured by the unique challenges of marine life, many marine animals have evolved elaborate forms of camouflage. Prime examples of this can be found in the twilight zone, the colloquial term for the oceanic zone that lies a few hundred meters beneath the surface. Because of the three-dimensional nature of their aquatic environment, it is extremely difficult for animals in the twilight zone to camouflage themselves properly: When viewed from below, they need to blend in with the (relatively) bright surface. When viewed from above, they must blend in with the dark ocean floor, or the equally dark depths. A singular form of camouflage will simply not do!

In response to this challenge, many "twilight fish" have evolved multiple, complementary forms of camouflage. To be hidden when viewed from above, they tend to have a darkly pigmented back that avoids standing out against the oceanic darkness below (a in the figure). Another, more ingenious form of camouflage is provided by silvery, reflective sides (b). These function as mirrors that reflect light from the surface, thus providing near invisibility when viewed from below at a slight angle. Obviously, having a dark back or reflective sides offers little protection when viewed from directly below. To be invisible from this angle as well, these fish employ a …

Over the past few months a lot of work has been done on OpenSesame, the graphical experiment builder. And, if all goes well, version 0.25 ("Dashy Darwin") will be released soon! For this release, the focus wasn't on new functionality, but on bug-fixes and adding polish to the user interface. Thanks to a large (and rapidly growing) amount of user feedback, 0.25 is looking to be a great release! Thanks to everybody who helped out, even if just in a small way by dropping a note and/ or giving some constructive comments.

At this point, the pre-release packages are pretty stable, but of course there's always the chance of bugs that have been overlooked. If you have some time to spare (or are starting a new experiment), I would encourage you to try the latest pre-release packages and let me know of your experiences (particularly bad ones). When 0.25 is officially released, you will receive a notification so you can immediately switch to the official, stable version.

Download (0.25-pre13 is the latest pre-release right now):

• [OpenSesame 0.25 has been released, pre-release builds are no longer available]
  

A few weeks ago it became known that Diederik Stapel, a Professor at the University of Tilburg, and one of Hollands most celebrated social psychologists, committed academic fraud. I didn't write anything about it before, because the details and the extent of the fraud were largely unknown. But after the publication of an interim rapport on Monday, I felt the urge to write a few words about it. After all, this case reflects very badly on psychological research, and perhaps on the whole of science.

So what happened? Basically, Stapel made up data. Lots of it. And some of it got published in prestigious academic journals such as Science. It appears that Stapel acted alone, and played an elaborate act to fool his co-workers. According to the interim rapport, the usual chain of events was as follows:

Together with a co-worker, which could be one of his PhD-students, a post-doc, or a fellow senior academic, Stapel came up with a research question and, together, they designed an experiment. All the details of the study were discussed and decided on, again, together. So far, so good. Next, Stapel went to a school to conduct the actual experiment (he often worked, or pretended to work, with schools). By himself, this time. Because, or so Stapel argued, the schools knew him. They trusted him. And it would be inappropriate and unnecessary for other researchers to accompany him on these visits.

In actuality, we now know, Stapel did not visit any schools at all …

Gnotero, the standalone sidekick to the Zotero reference manager, has gotten a major revamp, and has been renamed to Qnotero. The (slight) name change reflects a switch in the underlying graphical toolkit, from Gtk to Qt (for those who care about nerdy details). The functionality offered by Qnotero is basically the same: You can quickly search through your Zotero references, and open attached PDFs. So what's new?

Compared to Gnotero, Qnotero is 

• prettier
• themeable (right now there are a few different color and icon schemes)
• faster
• fully functional on Windows
• drag-and-droppable (you can drag PDFs from the search results onto, say, your desktop)

Get it here!

Yesterday I received a semi-spam e-mail from Royal Society Publishing, publisher of Biology Letters and Philosophical Transactions, saying that all of their articles that are more than 70 years old are now freely accessible. In itself, this is a laudable move, of course. And you could say it's an important step in the more general shift towards an open access model of academic publishing (i.e., a model were all academic papers are freely accessible for everyone). But I couldn't help being a little skeptical, particularly after having read this note, attached to a torrent, which I came across a few months back (a torrent is a file that serves as a 'handle' for downloading more and larger files). The Pirate Bay is not a place were you would normally expect to encounter political statements, but this torrent of 18,592 papers, all published prior to 1923, from the archive of the Philosophical Transactions is accompanied by a text that conveys many of the same frustrations that I feel when it comes to academic publishing.

First, the uploader (who calls himself Greg Maxwell, which kind of sounds like a real name) explains that the part of the archive that the Royal Society has so valiantly decided to make freely available, was largely, if not entirely in the public domain to begin with. Copyright simply expires after some time. As the uploader writes (this was before the Royal Society opened up their archive):

"The documents are part of the shared heritage …