Question

5. In a busy 24-hour copy center, malfunctions of the copy machine occur as a Poisson process, rate 3/hour (These are minor malfunctions such as bad copies not breakdowns causing an interruption in service.) On a certain day, Fred counts the machine malfunctions from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. and Jon independently counts malfunctions from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m (a) What is the expected number of malfunctions counted by Jon, and what is the variance? (b) What is the covariance between the number counted by Fred, and the number counted by Jon?

Answer 1