Anyhow, this morning started off pretty normally. I set my alarm for 8:30 and woke up at 7:15. So instead of taking advantage of it... I just lounged around until I had to go to my office. I think it's actually a good thing because I ended up having a very full day. After I got to my office Timbo and I worked on our stats project for most of the time. One of my students came in for a few minutes to get help on the extra credit assignment. When she left Timbo and I worked some more on the assignment. I actually feel pretty good about it. We were working on deriving the moment generating functions of four different continuous distributions (gamma, beta, exponential, and chi square). We pretty much split them in half and tried our best to derive them by hand, but checking our work online. We did well for the most part, but after we started finding the various moments (mean, variance, skewness, and kurtosis) some of the answers were slightly different when we worked them out by hand and when we checked them with Wikipedia and Wolfram-Mathworld. So I'm not really sure what was going on there. But oh well. Timbo was having an especially difficult time with the beta distribution, so we looked in up online and realized that there is no easy way to derive the moment generating function. According to Wikipedia (which was one of the very few places online at even mentioned it), it was the sum of a bunch of products...
, to be specific (where the capital sigma represents the summing of the things following it and the capital pi represents the product of all the things in the parentheses. We had no idea how to find the various moments given that form so we decided to just ask Dr. Begum in class.I had planned on staying on campus all day, but I forgot my statistics notebook at home. So I had to go get it. While I was home I did some grading. It didn't take long at all. Most of my students seemed to really get this stuff. Tomorrow will be quite different though....
At the beginning of stats Timbo asked Dr. Begum whether there was a better way to derive the moment generating function for the beta distribution. She suggest he use Mathematica. Which he already done and yielded nothing. She didn't really have a suggestion other than that... so... hopefully she gets back to us. Because I'm not quite sure how we're supposed to get that nonsense from a simple little integral....
After class I was walking back from class when Richard came up to me. Apparently he was out of class early. So after I took Dustin home I went to Jessie and Richard's for dinner. Jessie had made a chili with chicken in it. It was pretty tasty. Much better than the can of soup I had planned on eating tonight. We had a good time. After dinner I went to Wal-mart to get some stuff. Like a toothbrush. When I got home I prepared my lesson for tomorrow. I'm going to try really hard to keep things practical. I'm going to use the same example throughout the entire class...so hopefully that helps. I guess we'll see!
Alright. I'm going to bed now. Night!
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