Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Assertive student

Hi Erwin,

In short, I'm student and wish not to receive "ask your supervisor" answer.

Is there a function, like the error function, to compute the probability of random variable that has a beta distribution? if not, is there any way to statistically represent a bounded variable?

Thanks for you consideration,

This is probably related to http://yetanothermathprogrammingconsultant.blogspot.com/2010/09/student-mails.html. My hint in this case was: See http://www.amsterdamoptimization.com/pdf/specfun.pdf.

2 comments:

  1. If it's any consolation, I recently got an e-mail message from a student somewhere in China who, as part of a graduate thesis, needed to benchmark his algorithm against a standard solver such as CPLEX (possibly using a particular modeling language; I forget some of the details now). As he was unfamiliar with the modeling language/solver in question and understood that I knew the software, it would clearly be faster for me to write the code than for him to do so, and so he asked me to _write all his code_ for him (no compensation offered, of course).

    From which an economist can quickly infer that the marginal value of my time is zero. At least your time is occasionally assigned a positive marginal.

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  2. he he with a marginal value of zero on your time, you got nothing to loose :-) On the serious side, I am surprised how direct and upfront, these student are about their scams. I guess I am naive and thought hard work were the only way (unless you are blond female.. ).

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