In 2011, 90,000 fires in the United States were started by a lighted tobacco product. The dollar
Question:
In 2011, 90,000 fires in the United States were started by a lighted tobacco product. The dollar value of the property lost in these fires is staggering. In that same year, fires caused by dropped or discarded cigarettes resulted in 540 deaths. Twenty-five percent of the victims of cigarette induced fires were not the smokers, and about 40% of cigarette-induced fires started in the bedroom.
Certainly, it makes sense to develop a cigarette that extinguishes itself when left unattended (as would happen if someone falls asleep while smoking). The state of New York decided to require cigarettes sold in its stores to be designed so they self-extinguished when left unattended. Two types of cigarettes were tested to determine their propensity to self-extinguish. For each type (A and B), 40 cigarettes were lit and allowed to burn unattended until the cigarette either extinguished or did not. Cigarette brand A was designed to have ultra thin concentric paper bands affixed to the traditional cigarette paper. These bands are referred to as "speed bumps" and cause extinguishing of the cigarette by restricting the flow of oxygen to the burning ember. Cigarette brand B was a traditionally designed model. The results of the experiment are in the following table, where E represents an extinguished cigarette and F represents a full-burn cigarette.
Write a report detailing the propensity of each brand to self-extinguish and the level of nicotine in each brand. Include any relevant confidence intervals. If the normal model or Student's t-distribution cannot be used to construct a confidence interval, use alternative models (such as the Agresti-Coull model for estimating proportions-see Problems 45 and 46 from Section 9.1 or the bootstrap methods of Section 9.5). Would you support legislation that reduced the risk of fire from unattended cigarettes? How much extra would you be willing to pay for such a cigarette if you were a smoker?
Step by Step Answer:
Statistics Informed Decisions Using Data
ISBN: 9780134133539
5th Edition
Authors: Michael Sullivan III