[OOC] The Rusty Dragon Inn

[OllieNorth]

I run towards a naked post generally, but I don't particularly care about other people's.

[UncaJJ]

I'll be postig my request for post content tomorrow (Tue) and we'll get under way shortly after that.

[Disciple]

Apologies for being the last one to post, was having a bit of writer's block - too much economics homework driving out the important stuff!

[UncaJJ]

At least it's not sadistics statistic's homework!!

EDIT: Also, go ahead and RP both sides... As soon as I'm done vetting your character sheets, we'll get going!

[Disciple]

It kinda is... one of my classes is Econometrics, which is basically applied stats.

[DukeofTuring]

As a former statistics major myself, can I point out that a knowledge of statistics is necessary for pretty much any sort of real world application of higher level education? Just saying

Lord knows I've had my fair share of time spent banging my head against the desk with some stats problem in front of me though...

[Disciple]

Yeah, I'm pretty much hating it. To me the class has the feeling of, "In order to drive a car, you have to know how to build an engine block from parts." If I can interpret the data Stata spits out, shouldn't that be enough? Why do I have to know how it derives that data - especially since I'd typically be working with data sets too large to compute by hand? Why do I need to prove that the OLS model is the best estimator of a linear regression - isn't it enough that some stats major can do so, and thus I can use it? Luckily, the program I am in does not require an econometrics comprehensive exam, just a micro and macro one.

[OllieNorth]

At the risk of sounding old, it's because unless you know how it works, you're going to end up being blindsided by the little glitches. You have to know the pitfalls and things to avoid inputting. Still sucks though.

[DukeofTuring]

What Ollie said

---

A fair point to make. There have certainly been times when I've wanted to just skim over the theoretical underpinnings of some technique and just get to the "meat" of applying the theorem itself. That's an entirely natural urge, and it doesn't sound like the work you're doing in class is going to be useful in any way.

For "our" perspective, though, it is terribly painful to teach someone about statistics only to find that they know just enough to not realize that they're confidently misapplying what they do know. I'm sure that you can think of some charistmatic but incompetent public persona who routinely misuses techniques from your field, it's the same feeling. It all is just a matter of learning what you can't do or what conclusions you can't draw that's the equally important but often under-appreciated half of education. So we err on the side of caution, and sometimes make you all do useless crap like learn matrix operations by hand out of the best of intentions

[UncaJJ]

OK, post composition thread up in the House Mechanics folder...

Lots of tickets at work... slowly vetting the char sheets... *sigh*

[DukeofTuring]

Can you explain in a bit more detail what you're looking for in that secret d20 roll? Is that for attacks of opportunity and that sort of "passive" thing?

[UncaJJ]

secret perception checks, dwarven stonecunning checks, things of that nature... AoO will be rolled as normal.

[TheMystic]

Copy code updated, I added Taika's prepared spells too, I hope that is acceptable

[UncaJJ]

OK, half the character sheets checked... More tomorrow!

[UncaJJ]

So the site crashes when I'm ready to look at things, and now my boss is here! ARG!!