Tools, apps and side projects

Web apps, games, music tools and research side projects, mostly outside my work on The Unjournal. See them all with screenshots at projects.davidreinstein.org.

Music

Blues Flow: Play and study 18 versions of the 12-bar blues in any key, from the basic three-chord form to Charlie Parker’s ‘Bird’ changes. (Source)
Can AI write a modern jazz tune?: Claude and GPT coding agents each composed modern jazz tunes over two rounds. Listen, read the charts and vote before seeing the results.
Jazz Practice Hub: Repertoire tracker, setlist builder, 12-key technique grid, practice-plan generator and metronome drills in one page.
Local jazz calendar: Jazz concerts and jam sessions within about an hour of Monson or Framingham, Massachusetts.
GTD Trio: Guitar, tuba and drums jazz trio in Western Massachusetts.
K-House Jazz: A flexible live jazz group in Exeter, Devon.

Word Bocce: A multiplayer word game played in meaning-space. Add and subtract words to roll your ball toward a target word; word-vector similarity decides who is closest. (How to play) (Source)
Library of Things finder: Search about 2,000 tools, tech and gear you can borrow from public libraries and tool-lending libraries, starting in Massachusetts and spreading across the US. (Source)
Meeting scheduler: Offer candidate times, share one link, watch responses come in and pick the best slot. Built for Unjournal team meetings. (Source)
Who’s available: A shared room where people say when they’re free for a chat and how to reach them. No account needed; make a room for any group.

A suggestion box that rewards useful criticism: Anonymous suggestion boxes backed by a reward pool, so organizations pay for the criticism that turns out to be useful.
The OpportunityCard, ten years on: A second look at my 2015 proposal for voluntary, income-verified discounts, with a research agenda for testing it.
Research training outside the university: A testable design for training researchers around judgment and supervised practice, in a world where AI does more of the routine work. (Quantitative economics version)
AI Foundations for Research Judgment: How language models work, for researchers who have to judge their output: tokens, measurement, evidence workflows, compute economics and safety.

Impact Products Directory: Search organizations and products connected to substantial charitable giving. Every entry links to the original claim, its source and a confidence rating. (Source)
Just Ask the Model: Co-authored study comparing one-shot LLM evaluations of social-science research with structured expert review.
Will AI wealth flood EA philanthropy soon?: A sourced model and dashboard of how wealth from AI labs might, or might not, turn into philanthropic funding.
Prioritization ML Lab: Simulations of preference learning, reward models, calibration and active learning, built while designing a research-prioritization pipeline.
Increasing effective giving: The puzzle of why people don’t give more effectively, what the evidence says, and what we still need to learn.
Impact of impact information on giving: Field experiments and synthesis on whether telling donors about effectiveness changes what they give.
EA Market Testing: Public reports from a team running marketing and messaging trials with effective-giving organizations. (Data analysis)

Econometrics, statistics and data science notes: Working notes with a micro, behavioral and experimental focus.
Researching and writing for economics students: A practical guide to economics dissertations and research projects.
Microeconomics (MSc): Notes for an MSc microeconomics module at Exeter.
Bayesian power for group comparisons: Power analysis for comparing two independent groups with a Bayesian test.
Quarto book template: The house style I use for web books and long reports. (Source)

Unjournal Tools & Interfaces: Evaluation forms, a claim highlighter, the research-prioritization dashboard, pivotal-questions workshops and models, and analysis tools for The Unjournal’s evaluation work. (unjournal.org) (Pivotal Questions workshops)

This list is generated from the same data as projects.davidreinstein.org.