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ECSE-2500 Engineering Probability, RPI, Spring 2011 Home Page

Homework 1, due 2pm Tues Feb 1, 2011 (corrected date)

Notes

  1. Email your solutions to

wrfranklin+homeworkATgmail.com , replacing AT with @.

  1. You may do this homework in teams of two people.
  2. Put the homework number, your names and RCS-IDs on the homework. (E.g. I would say something like Homework 1, W. Randolph Franklin, frankwr.)

Questions

  1. (6 pts) One of the hardest problems is forming an appropriate probability model. E.g., suppose you're working for Verizon deciding how much data capacity your network will need once it starts selling the iphone. Suppose that you know that each customer will use 5GB/month. Since a month has about 2.5M seconds, does that mean that your network will need to provide only 2000KB/s per customer? What might be wrong with this model? How might you make it better? (This is an open-ended question; any reasonable answer that shows creativity gets full points.)
  2. (2) One hard problem with statistics is how they should be interpreted. For example, the more iphones that are sold, the higher the national debt gets. Does this mean that the US should pay Verizon not to sell the iphone next month?
  3. (6) Do exercise 1.3 in the text on page 19.
  4. (6) Do exercise 1.6 on page 19.
  5. (6) Do exercise 1.11 on page 20.