For determining half-lives of radioactive isotopes, it is important to know what the background radiation is in a given detector over a specific period. The following data were taken in a γ-ray detection experiment over 98 ten-second intervals:

Assume that these data are observations of a Poisson random variable with mean λ.
(a) Find the values of and s2.
(b) What is the value of the maximum likelihood estimator of λ?
(c) Is S2 an unbiased estimator of λ?
(d) Which of and s2 would you recommend for estimating λ? Why? You could compare the variance of with the variance of S2, which is

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