R help - Mar 2011 - Likelihood of deviation

Hi,
I have a dataset of 78.903 news articles pertaining to 340 corporate 
takeovers.
Mean 231.3871 [articles per takeover]
Std. Dev. 673.6395

I would like to calculate the probability of a certain number of news 
articles if I had more takeovers available.
How likely is it to have X articles if I had Y takeovers?

How can I do that?

Thank you very much,
Michael

On Mar 25, 2011, at 12:17 PM, Michael Hecker wrote:
> Hi,
> I have a dataset of 78.903 news articles pertaining to 340 corporate  
> takeovers.
> Mean 231.3871 [articles per takeover]
> Std. Dev. 673.6395
>
> I would like to calculate the probability of a certain number of  
> news articles if I had more takeovers available.
> How likely is it to have X articles if I had Y takeovers?
You should submit homework ( or self-learning-general-stats questions)  
to other lists. In the old days this meant one of the sci.stat.*  
groups, but they are now over-run by spammers. Now the stats.exchange  
website is probably the best resource.

-- 

David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT