Cost Estimation in the Real World
Thursday, July 30, 2009 22:03
For a few years, CBS has been running a television show called Numb3rs. The premise is the standard take off on the brothers-solving-mysteries cliché that has been around since at least the Hardy Boys. Granted, Numbers has a couple of differences – the boys are older and employed. Don Eppes,the older brother, heads a team of federal agents located in LA – a giant step above the amateur detective ways of the Hardy boys. Charlie Eppes, the younger brother, is a math genius and a professor at the fictional “Cal Sci”.
Each week, Don and his street-savvy FBI team encounter a problem, usually a time sensitive one, which is just too tough to figure out through traditional police work. Like clockwork, Professor Charlie Eppes and his team of socially-awkward yet brilliant mathematicians are able to use some form of advanced mathematics to accomplish a whole list of things from predicting where a kidnapping will happen next to the contents of boxes.
And while most of that is the magic of Hollywood, taking lab theory and fiting it into unrealistic time periods with even less realistic amounts of data, there is one portion of Numb3rs that demands admiration. During the hour-long show, the young Professor Eppes must give an explanation to a complex, doctoral-level mathematical system in a way that a team of federal agents can understand. This happens on each television episode with such regularity that the person in the show has begun to expect it; making small jokes and trying to give their own explanations.
Charlie’s explanations are definitely a way to move the story forward and also to convince the television viewers that his genius mathematical insights aren’t simply a weekly deus ex machine. However, just as Charlie has to explain how his math models the real world, the use of software estimation can often seem just as improbable. True, you can sit back and say “Well, the program relies on parametric modeling of our current situation,” but that look is far more likely to generate blank stares than anything else.
Article provided by Galorath, Cost Estimation Software Tools.
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