  Observations of individual bursts chosen by the vagaries of telescope
availability demonstrated that bursts are not standard candles and that their
apparent energy can be as great as 10^54 erg. However, determining the
distribution of their apparent energy (and of other burst properties) requires
the statistical analysis of a well-defined burst sample; the sample definition
includes the threshold for including a burst in the sample. Thus optical groups
need to the criteria behind the decision to search for a spectroscopic
redshift. Currently the burst samples are insufficient to choose between
lognormal and power law functional forms of the distribution, and the parameter
values for these functional forms differ between burst samples. Similarly, the
actual intensity distribution may be broader than observed, with a low energy
tail extending below the detection threshold.

Astrophysics