Maciek Chudek

I tend to make small bits of software that do specific tasks I need. Some of these might be useful and I'll provide them here. Unless otherwise specified they're available under the GPLv3 license.

Bary_manipulate - When formally modelling dynamic systems with three interacting strategies, sometimes it is useful to plot the trajectory of the system on a triangle, the distance from each vertex representing the proportion of each strategy. This is a Mathematica function which will do just that for you. You define the functions which update the system, this program will plot the system's trajectory for you on a barycentric plot and let you manipulate the parameters in real time. Smooth :-) Of course you need the $1000 Mathemetica software to run it. May attempt to make stand-alone version if there's any interest.

Statistical Power Problems Simulator - Many students and even established scholars miss the importance of statistical power and meta-analysis, instead treating significance values as simple clear indicators of whether an effect exists. Under-powered studies will fail to detect real effects and over-powered studies will succeed in detecting meaninglessly small effects. This little program lets you specify the average sample size of a study and the real size of the underlying effect, and then shows you what happens as scholars do more and more studies and either do or don't meta-analyse them. It's written in Matlab, so you need their software to run it. With a few hours of fiddling I could probably compile it to a standalone executable, but you'd need to email me and convince me you were really excited.

Random-Assignment Redirect Generator - Psychologists often need to randomly assign individuals to web-surveys. This little page automatically generates php-redirect script for non-programmer types.

Simple To-Do List - I just needed something simple, where I could easily create arbitrarily many many lists and then add and remove items from them. Just unzip this on your web-server, tweak the parameters at the top of the index.php file, give write permission to the “data” directory and it should just work. A demo version is here.

Timelogger - Very simple: you run it, it shows you a text box, you type something and it drops it in a text file with a time stamp. Assign it a hot key, hit that key, type what you're doing - presto, you have a complete log of your activities. Good if you need to charge someone for hours worked, or if you want to stop yourself procrastinating by being accountable for your time. By default it write to a file called “log.txt”, but you can specify any other file by changing the first life of the file “timeLogger.conf” in the same directory as the executable. Source code included. The “_html” version puts a ”<br />” at the end of each line, to make it more readable on the web.

Virtual Loom - Do you weave on a double heddle loom? Have you ever wanted to quickly visualise what your patterns will look like before you try them? Small audience, I know, but my girlfriend is among them so the software now exists. It's raw - not very forgiving and expects you to already know the weaving technology and terminology - but it does the job.

Altered Dokuwiki Bibtex Plugin - I needed a way to collaborate on putting together extensive review papers. That requires a place where a bunch of coauthors can all quickly and easily add any citations they find, sort them into categories that can create and reorganised on the fly, be able to make notes about the citations, the structure, the paper we were going to write, and so on. My solution was Dokuwiki, with this bibtex plugin. The wiki makes it easy to create arbitrary conceptual structures and categories (via networks of links, lists or headings/subheadings), the plugin means we can copy-paste the raw bibtex (which you can export from most citation searches) into the page and it automatically gets formatted nicely, then later just copy-paste it back out for the paper. I tampered with the plugin slightly to make it the headings display more like an APA style and for it to show up notes on each paper (which you add as an extra bibtex field: “notes”) in a light grey box. Download Dokuwiki, then grab my alterted plugin and unzip it in your /lib/plugins/ folder. To produce citations like this:

Boyd, R. and Richerson, P. J. (1985): Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (1985). Culture and the Evolutionary Process University Of Chicago Press.

This one will be critical but we'll need to be very careful about not misrepresenting the results
Cavalli-Sforza, L.L an Feldman, M.W. (1981): Cavalli-Sforza L.L an Feldman, M. W. (1981). Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantative Approach Princeton University Press.

Just copy and paste the bibtex cites into your dokuwiki page, snuggled between “bibtex”, ”/bibtex” tags, like this:


<bibtex> 
        
@BOOK{BandR85,
  title = {Culture and the Evolutionary Process},
  publisher = {University Of Chicago Press},
  year = {1985},
  author = {Boyd, R. and Richerson, P. J.},
   notes = {This one will be critical but we'll need to be very careful about not misrepresenting the results},
}

@BOOK{CSandF81,
  title = {Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantative Approach},
  publisher = {Princeton University Press},
  year = {1981},
  author = {Cavalli-Sforza, L.L an Feldman, M.W.},
}

</bibtex>

Books