- Star Wars: The Force Awakens opens tonight. Analytics was important a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away: the Galaxy Republic even had an Analytics department (HT wookieepedia)
- Harrison Schramm writes about forecasting the new movie’s sales in his latest post in the Analytics magazine.
- SAS has a webinar about Star Wars and the art of data science: “Be brave young Data Padawan – it’s time to conquer the dark side of unstructured data!”
- Awakening “The Force” with analytics: how the Star Wars franchise impacts actors’ careers
- And finally, here are two of my exam questions about Star Wars from my stochastic processes course this semester.
1. Chewbacca heads to his home planet of Kashyyyk attend a family reunion with 10 other wookiees (11 including Chewbacca). The times at which wookiees arrive at the party are independent Uniform (0,1) random variables. Find the expected number of wooikees that arrive before Chewbacca if Chewbacca’s arrival process time is a triangular(0,0,1) random variable.
2. When provoked, Han Solo will fire a shot with his blaster. The time it takes him to fire a shot is exponentially distributed with a mean of 0.12 seconds. Greedo also has a blaster, and the time it takes him to shoot is exponentially distributed with a mean of 0.34 seconds. If they both start to shoot at the same time, find the probability that Han Solo shoots first*
* This question is just a hypothetical question about probability models. We all know that Han Solo shot first!
Punk Rock Operations Research 
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