iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

lovely! the giant map of distributions on the front page is fun

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Last minute semester prep and I find this paper. Adding to my slides ASAP!

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

yes exactly. They say "if I randomly assign a 1 to some control units and a 0 to other control units, do I find a difference in outcomes for them"

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

A quote that I think is particularly relevant in thinking about AI doing writing for us. From Deirdre McCloskey's brilliant Economical Writing www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/pdf/Art...

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

Another day, another DID paper review where the authors "randomize treatment across locations" as a robustness check. *Sigh*

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

Anyone want to see what a DID "paper mill" I've discovered while refereeing?

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

TIL you can calculate the mean and the variance in one pass through a vector 🤯 Really nice article showing how: nullbuffer.com/articles/wel...

nullbuffer.com

Numerically stable algorithm for computing the running mean

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

If you have any questions about the U of A, please reach out! Happy to answer any questions :-)

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

And finally, the department! Our group is a very young and research focused. We have a great group of development/urban/labor folks with a mix of reduced form and structural approaches; A really strong experimental group; and a few applied econometricians who are happy to help!!

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

Concerned about the southern heat? Being within the Ozarks, makes the summer not too bad. Plus the winter is very temperate..

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

If sports are your thing, there's no place better than the SEC

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

Walmart, JB Hunt, Tyson Chicken are all headquartered here. Many large companies have campuses here as well. This younger demographic brings a lot of consumptive amenities, like great food! Dinner with speakers is a nice treat..

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

The arts scene is magnificent: - Walton Arts Center brings in Broadway shows all year - Crystal Bridges is a world class art musuem - The AMP has great live music

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

We are in the beautiful Ozark mountains with tons of hikes and incredible mountain biking opportunities. The Razorback greenway makes biking to and from campus very easy and there's a few breweries along the way..

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

Come be a razorback! We are hiring two positions this year at the U of Arkansas! Macro/General Equilibrium: www.aeaweb.org/joe/listing.... Applied Micro: www.aeaweb.org/joe/listing.... Northwest Arkansas is consistently ranked one of the best places to live. Here's some highlights!

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

yup! wrote this after refereeing yet another paper randomizing policy rollout in DID...

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

I have a script that should pop up after installing the extension and opening a do file. Does it not do that?

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

Does anyone have really good examples of a github repository for a research paper. Trying to get good examples for a lesson I'm giving

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 08/06/2025

github.com/kylebutts/vs... If you are using vscode and stata, you should try out my extension. It uses interactive window which let's you write in a `.do` file but get a notebook type experience.

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

The answer is all 0s !!! what a frustrating choice !!!!

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

Stata quiz. what do you think the output of `tab` will be? ``` sysuse auto, replace reg mpg i.rep78 if rep78 == 2, nocons predict xb tab xb if rep78 != 2 ```

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 19/04/2025

kylebutts.com/blog/2025-04... A short blog post for efficient stats coding. All about the importance of dimensionality when doing matrix operations ft. 100x speed-up of my code

kylebutts.com

Kyle Butts

Kyle Butts -- Urban Economics and Applied Econometrics

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

TIL how to download census data (www2.census.gov) super simply. Finder: Go > Connect to Server > ftp://ftp2.census.gov/. Login as guest and 🤯

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

R tip: If you run code but forget to save it in a variable, you can use `.Last.value` in the console. More, if you want to copy the result to your clipboard, use `clipr::write_last_clip`:

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Reposted by Kyle Butts

Achim Zeileis @zeileis.org · 24/02/2025

🚨 The "penguins" data is coming to the base #rstats{datasets} in 4.5.0! @ellakaye.co.uk & @HeathrTurnr.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy r prepared an adapted and a raw version of the data set based on the {palmerpenguins} 📦 by @allisonhorst.bsky.social @apreshill.com and Kristen Gorman. 📈 Scatter plot:

Scatter plot of bill depth vs. length by species (color) and sex (symbol). It shows positive correlations for all species with males tending to have bigger bills than females.

sym <- c(1, 16)
pal <- c("darkorange","purple","cyan4")
plot(bill_dep ~ bill_len, data = penguins, pch = sym[sex], col = pal[species])

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

WHAT YOU THOUGHT I ONLY HAVE 1 CUTE DOG ?? THINK AGAIN

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

Probably doesn’t matter much for this map, but I like st_point_on_surface() because centroids could be not within the shape for weird shaped counties

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

I use this tip more so when I find a pdf in github I want to skim. Github’s pdf preview is a terrible experience, so I switch to nbviewer

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 17/01/2025

Quick tip: If you store a pdf on GitHub, like this: github.com/kylebutts/Ge... You can make an easy to view link by replacing `github.com/` with `nbviewer.org/github/` and it looks like this: nbviewer.org/github/kyleb...

github.com

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Reposted by Kyle Butts

eli yudin @eliyudin.com · 03/01/2025

You can tell companies’ AI projects are going really well because every app is bait-and-switching their most commonly pressed button with something called like “Answers By Glorp” to get people to even accidentally use it

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 30/12/2024

for the love of the game. spent all day yesterday making my julia function go from 70 microseconds to 500 nano seconds. the paper is already submitted 🤓

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

judge: “so you said the true vote share is in this interval 95% of the time? how could that be true if the true vote share is not in that interval”

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

yes, please! You can email me and I'll tell you if it's what I had in mind!

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

Working on a new R package. Looking for applications that do two things: 1. DID with y to show an effect 2. DID with X to show a possible “mechanism” of why treatment changed y This could be a published paper or a paper you're working on (that I might help make "fancier" / cooler !!)

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 15/12/2024

Is there a better sign of AI hype than MICROSOFT creating a package to convert docx/pptx -> md USING CHAT GPT ????https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

I agree re zed; It's so nice visually. If I was a better programmer, maybe I could just `source()` but I'm too much of a print debugger 🙃

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

Now would be a great time for overleaf users (my coauthors) to delete their account and stop making me use the bad web app

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

Typst is *so fast*. Type a sentence, add a table, etc. and hit save. By the time you turn your head to look it's updated. I haven't used it with citations yet, but it looks super easy typst.app/docs/referen.... If you have a .bib file, you can do citations

typst.app

Bibliography Function – Typst Documentation

Documentation for the `bibliography` function.

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Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 11/11/2024

Working on my applied metrics course; Here are my figures using Ashenfelter's dip (1978 paper)

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