Week 8 — Independent Research Project II: Execution, Robustness, Poster, and Defense

Run it, break it on purpose, distill it onto a 48”×36” research poster, write a 200–300-word JSSR abstract, and defend the work in eight minutes at the ASSIP Research Symposium on Wednesday, August 12, 2026. See ../../TOC.md for the full plan.

This is the final active week of ASSIP. The week-7 design (PAP, identification memo) and the week-8 execution (confirmatory run, multiverse, robustness battery) all funnel into three artifacts the symposium audience and the Journal of Student-Scientists’ Research (JSSR) will actually see: a research poster (PDF, GMU College of Science template, ~48”×36” landscape), a JSSR abstract (200–300 words), and an 8-minute poster talk during the in-person poster session (with virtual breakouts for remote interns — Prof. Gao’s 2026 ASSIP slot is officially remote). An optional full paper is available for students who want to push the work further; the graded ASSIP deliverable is the poster + abstract + talk + replication packet.

Chapters

  1. Ch 8.1 — Execution & Specification Curve (confirmatory run; multiverse analysis; deviations log)
  2. Ch 8.2 — Robustness & Inference Stress-Tests (alt SEs, placebos, sensitivity, BH-FDR, Oster δ)
  3. Ch 8.3 — Writing the Empirical Paper (the prose discipline — argument-not-transcript, the one-sentence contribution, causal-language discipline — that the abstract and the poster narrative inherit)
  4. Ch 8.4 — Peer Review & Revision (the referee report; the revise-and-resubmit memo — adapted for poster-draft critique at ASSIP)
  5. Ch 8.5 — The 8-Minute Poster Talk & the Replication Packet (slide / poster-panel discipline; defending identification; one-click reproducibility)

Notebooks (../../../notebooks/week-08/)

  • nb8.1 Specification-curve generator (144-spec multiverse) · nb8.2 Robustness battery (placebos, wild cluster bootstrap, Oster δ) · nb8.3 Publication tables/figures → LaTeX (pyfixest etable) · nb8.4 Reproducibility check (seeded, bit-identical reruns + manifest) · nb8.5 Final poster build (LaTeX/PowerPoint → PDF, engine-gated; the abstract block is \input{}ed from a generated file so the 250-word JSSR abstract cannot drift from the analysis)
  • All verified to run headless.

Problem sets (project deliverables; model exemplars in Appendix E)

  • PS 8.1 Specification curve · PS 8.2 Robustness battery · PS 8.3 JSSR abstract + poster results narrative vs. style guide · PS 8.4 Referee report + R&R memo on a peer poster draft · PS 8.5 8-min poster talk + replication-packet checklist

Lab, mentor, assessment