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- Physics texts give the example of determining the lifetime
of a particle from the observation of decay times 
of N decays.
- The probability distribution is Poisson:
- Now dt is meaningless---it is independent of
and only affects normalization of
likelihood. The unknown
,
terms in (B1) made this arbitrary
anyway!
- Likelihood
or 
where we
lazily convert proportionality into an = sign. Maximum is
Geoffrey Fox, Northeast Parallel Architectures Center at Syracuse University, gcf@npac.syr.edu