While it can be justified by an interesting alternative form of entropy, statistically it is a scaled reparametrization of the Student's t -distribution introduced by W. Gosset in 1908 to describe small-sample statistics. In Gosset's original presentation the degrees of freedom parameter ν was constrained to be a positive integer related to the sample size, but it is readily observed that Gosset's density function is valid for all real values of ν. The scaled reparametrization introduces the alternative parameters q and β which are related to ν.