How to Answer Questions During Seminar or Job Talk

This is an excellent twitter thread written by Michael Kraus, a psychologist at Yale. 

I will summarize the basic idea (and of course adding my own opinions while I'm at it). The ability to answer questions during a job talk is very important. The best way to prepare to answer questions is to..make sure you know the answers to the questions. Give as many practice job talks as you can to many different people so that the questions do not come as a surprise. Some questions come up often. Consider answering those within the talk. If that isn't possible, be sure to have a well-prepared answer to those (maybe a link in your slides to the answer). Also, know the background of  your topic. If you're studying the impact of a particular policy, know the details of that policy. Have a quick look at the most closely related papers on the night before your talk so you know the literature. 

Even if you do all of these things perfectly, there will still be questions you can't answer.  My favorite piece of advice from the thread: 

..it is okay to say you don't have an answer to a question--your data can't possibly be comprehensive enough to answer every important question. But, don't stop with "my data can't speak to that." Add what data you'd need, the analysis you might do, or the study you'd design.

Career Advice for Graduate Students and Folks on the Tenure Track

This PowerPoint was written by Amy Catalinac to show women how to overcome barriers in political science departments. The advice is excellent for women and men in economics. Many of the things she mentions I have heard before but always good to be reminded over and over again. 

My favorite advice (this one is on how to get good letters of recommendation): 

Jump at every opportunity offered, if it increases exposure to you/your work or involves an experience that advisors can write about. Comes at a bad time? The quicker you get used to that, the better! Feel you’re not capable? Then you must say yes. People who only do things they’re comfortable doing won’t reach their potential. 

I also really like the advice about framing the paper. Many graduate students believe that the hard work is doing the data analysis and preparing those tables. Yes, that is absolutely important, but it also takes A LOT of time, energy, and thought to understand the significance of the numbers in those tables. It is your job to make that significance "obvious" to the readers. The tables are not enough. 

My advice for third year paper writers at UConn: Do not wait until the week before the deadline to start writing up results. Writing is hard work. You can always do more data analysis after you have a draft of the introduction written.  My bet is that the process of writing will inspire really nice ideas for further data analysis. 

Measurement Error and Attenuation Bias

I know, I know. It's been a while since I've posted anything. Crazy-busy semester. Again. I'll be back in action soon, but in the meantime have a look at this amazing animation showing why (classical) measurement error leads to attenuation bias. It looks like you can even make the animation yourself in R. Thank you, Lionel Page, for tweeting about this and Maarten van Smeden for making it. 

It always made sense to me: Random noise has zero correlation with anything. As you add more noise to a variable, you'll get closer to that zero correlation. But to see it in an animation, that's just really cool.