Assignment

Part 1:

 Go to http://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables.htm and locate the table for CPI - U U.S. All Items Indexes and Annual Percent Changes From 1913 to Present (as of May 2016 the table is number 24). Look for the entry CPI Detailed Report (tables 1 - 29 only) PDF. Beginning with the month prior to the current one, count back 60 months. Use that value and the one for the prior month to find a five year inflation rate. Use this rate to project the cost of the items from your budget in Worksheet 1 for five years in the future.

Part 2:

You have just completed a mission to Sierra Leone. The goal of the mission was to improve the quality of water in 100 wells in a certain region. You collected data on the E. coli count from each well before (Q₁) after your mission (Q₂). You need to write a report on the success of the mission and for that you need to perform some statistical analysis on the data.

• To begin with find the mean and standard deviation of each set of data. Compare the two means and standard deviations, intuitively does it appear that there has been improvement in water quality?

• Mean of Before Data =
• Mean of After Data =
• SD of Before Data =
• SD of After Data =

• Pick a particular well (that has E. coli), if you drank 24oz of water how many E.coli would you ingest if you drank from the well before the mission? After the mission?

• Amount Before Mission =
• Amount After Mission =

• Say that water quality is "good" if the count of E coli is 0. Consider the proportion of wells with "good" water to wells whose water is not good. From this measure does it appear that the quality of water improved? Explain and use the proportions that you calculated.

• Proportion of good water wells before mission =
Proportion of good water wells after mission =

• Since you collected water from the same source twice it makes sense to consider the mean of the differences, i.e., the mean and standard deviation (SD) of the differences Q₁ - Q₂. Find the mean of the differences and create a histogram for Q₁ - Q₂.

• Mean of differences =

•  Find the standard deviation of the mean of the differences for Q₁ - Q₂. Note the standard deviation of the mean of the differences is also called the standard error of the mean (SE). (See section 3.5.)

• Standard deviation of differences =
• Standard Error =

• Assuming that the mean of differences is normally distributed (see associated file) find the 95% confidence interval. If 0 is inside this interval what can you say? If 0 is not inside this interval, what can you say?

• Confidence interval: