Paul K responde

Aquí va un post que nos envía Paul K:

So I hear that the guys at FREE criticize me for my statements that any budget constraint is inherently wrong and that such a contraption should not be used in constructing economic models.

Wow. Um. Burp. I am amazed at the raw ignorance that characterizes the comments of the FREE bunch, much like so many of the freshwater comments. It’s a sad story. Their analysis, which comes straight out of "El Doble", is flawed in a fundamental sense. They fail to realize that we are in a liquidity trap and that there is this thing called the zero percent bound, which makes all conventional modeling useless. Um. Sigh. Is it not better to rely on my guesswork? I was awarded a Nobel prize, you know?

Further, in the models they use they fail to take into account that some people are smelly while others are not. Um. Gulp. This is, of course, an enormous simplification of reality. I don't want to get into the nitty-gritty technical details, but any half-witted ape will realize that a fraction of the population smells. Huh. So much for their analysis. I certainly wouldn't want to believe anything that comes out of such an unrealistic model!

If you need more proof that members of FREE are hacks, recall that Spaniards supported George W Bush by sending troops to Afghanistan. This proves that they are Republican. And Republicans are evil.

Well. Um. Fart. Something is going very wrong in the heads of a substantial number of economists.

Y David Levine hizo algo mejor...

Le contestó al artículo anti-economía de Paul K en una carta abierta digna de ser leída.

Por sus aportes a la lucha contra los enemigos del FREE, propongo a David "Big Lebowski" Levine como primer miembro honorífico del FREE.

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Y Paul K hizo algo bueno...

El FREE aplaude, sin que sirva de precedente, a Paul K (gran enemigo, junto con EON) por su artículo reconociendo la importancia de las ecuaciones, entre otras cosas.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/mathematics-and-economics/

FREE Seminar Rules

La versión 1.0 de las nuevas reglas para los seminarios se encuentra disponible aquí.

Seminarios del FREE

Comienza un nuevo año académico y el FREE vuelve a despertar. Una actividad importante en la misión del FREE son los seminarios. El año pasado fue exitoso en este sentido y hubo algunas presentaciones memorables. Lamentablemente también algunos fracasos e incluso presentadores con inexplicables ausencias. Como consecuencia de estas fallas, la asistencia de público se vio mermada sobre el final del año.

Algunas críticas lanzadas por amigos y enemigos del FREE hacia el ciclo de seminarios fueron las siguientes:

1. excesiva variedad en los temas,
2. impuntualidad del presentador,
3. seminarios demasiado largos,
4. y la más importante de todas: falta de modelos con agentes maximizadores
   

Este año tendremos un formato de seminarios rediseñado basado en las famosas Cowles Foundation Rules (pdf). Estoy trabajando en adaptarlas a nuestro ciclo de seminarios. Una innovación importante es que los seminarios tendrán una sección core de 20 minutos al comienzo y que deberá contener toda la información importante. Después de eso el público tendrá derecho a irse sin tener que dar explicaciones y el tiempo restante queda para entrar en detalles. ¿Comentarios?

Consejos desde Chicago

John Cochrane's Writing Tips for Ph.D. Students.

Powerpoint tips

No utilizo Powerpoint muy seguido. Algunos tips robados de algún lado:

A good powerpoint presentation is better than a beamer presentation, but a beamer presentation is better than a bad powerpoint presentation...Keynote is probably the best presentation tool but not too common in academics.

You're probably best off just creating your own template. You can spend 6 hours looking at templates and compromising on one you don't quite like, or you can spend 3-4 hours designing one you really think works well for the information you wish to convey. Once designed, you would ideally never need to edit the slide layout or font sizing for standard slides.

- Use one or two mellow colors with only basic shapes/lines to highlight the sections of the slide itself (most templates, especially anything with an image in the background, are far too noisy)
- Leave lots of room for the body of the slide
- Keep your titles 1 line long in a 26-34 pt fontsize, keep the font & size constant for all slides. This restriction makes writing slides harder but makes for a better presentation.
- For text slides, keep the first two indentation levels of the body of the slide the same size on every slide. If you have to go to a third indentation level, that can be one size (2-4pt) smaller.
- For empirical slides, you may wish to crate a special template page with a footnote area for describing the tables in the slides. This will standardize presentation and ease the transition between slides.

When creating tables, make them in Excel first so they look really clean.
- Sub-tip on this: Fill the cells with a white background and draw your own borders for the table.
- Sub-tip two: It's often easier to print your Excel table to a .pdf document and copy/paste the table in from the .pdf.
- Sub-tip three: Don't copy tables from your paper, they are not formatted for slide presentation and look stupid when they don't fit on the page properly.

White Space is your friend. It's amazing how well white space can separate two sections. My exception to standardization is that I often add little bits of white space between major points on the slide by including a blank line in 4-8 point font size. This helps fill out the slide more uniformly and suits my aesthetic sense.

Custom animations muck up the presentation of any math, instead set up the animation manually by splitting the slide into multiple slides and using the slide transition rule to do the animation. This process is tricky (b/c your deck includes the same text on multiple slides) and should be the last thing you do before a presentation to maintain consistency. On the upside, it provides a good way to walk through your talk the night before the presentation and is something you need to do to create a pdf version of your presentation (which is what you should be talking from, anyway).

Anonymous (www.econjobmarket.org)