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Quick Basic programs available on request |
I wrote my first programs in mid 1980s when 8-bit microcomputers, endowed with an interpreter of Basic, were assigned to the Jagiellonian University faculty (at the turn of that decade, those computers were supplanted by PCs 286-486 and, since the end of 1990s, by Pentium I-IV machines). In 1995, the laboratory at the Chair of Research on Group Processes was equipped with 6 PCs connected into a network working under the Novell Netware system. We followed our colleagues from the University of South Carolina who had by 1990 armed their lab with such a network and started computer-aided experiments on exchange networks. As they made available to us their program for managing negotiation sessions, we could carry out similar experiments. The program in question, named ExNet, was written by John Skvoretz in Quick Basic 4.5. I had to get familiar with this language in order to produce “Polish versions” of the programs sent by our American partners. Quick Basic 4.5 is an amateur-friendly programming language which has a facility to compile the source code into an EXE file. It also has tools for managing network-mediated communication within a group of people, namely, the programs operated by the subjects on network stations can be granted shared read and write access to a common file residing on the server. In our experiments, the subjects sent offers and responded to their partners’ offers. All actions and transactions concluded by the group members were being written to the shared access file containing the record of an experimental session. We used QBasic programs working under Netware OS until 2000 when our lab was upgraded and changed over to Windows software following a research grant won by Professor Szmatka. When I mastered programming in Quick Basic 4.5, this language had already been outdated and no longer developed as soon as Visual Basic was released by Microsoft to replace it. Instead of learning the new tool I remained faithful to the old one, having put up with its main shortcoming - the EXE programs produced by Quick Basic 4.5 compiler are rather slow. Three major Quick Basic 4.5 programs which I wrote in 1993-2004 (besides many minor programs I prepared as teaching aids for the courses of statistics and game theory) are now offered free to all visitors of my homepage.
● POWERIND (2004) ● NETAID (1993-2003) ● HDWRITER (2000) Detailed descriptions of these programs are given in the respective pdf files. The applications themselves won’t be automatically downloadable as I would like to have some control over the circulation of my products. If you need a given program, please, send your request by email (see address in Contact). If you are a stranger, put the program name in the Subject field (during virus alert I delete messages from unknown people). Unless I am away on vacation or traveling l will send you all necessary files packed into one zip file (e.g. powerind.zip) attached with an email message. If you are going to publish in any form results obtained with the use of my programs, please, place a reference of the form: Tadeusz Sozański, program name, month and year (found on the first screen), followed by my homepage address. No updates are planned until the end of 2006. ● I wrote POWERIND in January-April 2004 to have a tool for computing indices of power for voting systems used or considered for use by the EU Council. The distribution of voting power across 25 EU Member States has been a hot issue in politics and mathematical political science since 2001 (the Treaty of Nice). Go to the chapter on Voting Games to read more on POWERIND. ● My work on NETAID went on simultaneously with my work on the mathematics of Exchange Networks The first version of this program, written in 1993-1997, was offered to the readers of my 1997 paper (see the list of publications) in which I examined mathematical implications of the principle of equal dependence in exchange networks. In 1998-2003, NETAID was enriched with procedures for analyzing power relations in one-exchange networks (strong and weak variety of power generated by unequal vulnerability to “exclusion”). I’m planning to add further procedures for analyzing n-person games associated with exchange networks. ● NETAID is a specialized tool I wrote for myself and a small group of mathematical sociologists interested in exchange networks. HDWRITER (Handy Data Writer) is targeted at an incomparably larger group of potential users: sociologists doing survey research. I wrote the first dedicated version of HDWRITER in 2000 on request of my colleague who needed to produce a database having over 300 variables. The program was subsequently used in few other surveys done at the JU Institute of Sociology. The purpose of HDWRITER is to help you solve the problem you will inevitably face as soon as you are done with data collection - the problem of how to move your data from a pile of paper to a computer file that must be prepared in order to carry out data analysis with the use of the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). If you can’t employ an integrated package like TELEFORM to both design your questionnaire and define the list of variables whose values would be subsequently read into a database directly from completed forms by means of an optical scanner, then you will appreciate the tool I'm offering: a user-friendly, menu-driven program that will enable you to produce data files for use with SPSS, You will be happy with the result, although you or your typist will have to enter figures from keyboard and stare at the screen instead of feeding paper sheets to the scanner. With Handy Data Writer you can:
● set up a system of 1 to 4 databases appropriately structured to store in them the values of up to 600 variables; ● fill out the databases by writing successive records on the screen data form with default or customized layout; ● view and edit already written records; ● append records from a database having the same structure (say, filled out by your collaborator using the same program); ● delete marked records from a database; ● sort a database with respect to 'record identification mark'; ● create a text file which can be printed on paper to obtain code sheets compatible with the screen layout; ● rewrite the QBASIC database into a file which can be read into SPSS by the DATA LIST command; ● automatically write the file containing the DATA LIST command in question. |
