Shiru Caf serves college students free coffee every 2 hours in exchange for students names, email addresses,

Shiru Café serves college students free coffee every 2 hours in exchange for students’ names, email addresses, field of study, and professional interests. In exchange, students allow Shiru’s corporate sponsors to access their information.

Figure 5.22 shows two distributions: the number of cups of coffee consumed per day for students at Brown University the year before and the year after Shiru opened a location across the street from campus.

a. Health practitioners in Brown’s Student Health Center found that variation in students’ coffee consumption increased after Shiru opened. Which curve represents coffee consumption before Shiru, and which is the distribution for coffee consumption after Shiru?

b. Which curve has higher kurtosis?

c. It turns out that Shiru recruits its student customer base primarily from the fields of math, science, and technology. It also turns out that several departments in the social sciences staged a protest against what they saw as Shiru’s exploitation of college students for their private information. Protestors were also encouraged to abstain from drinking coffee as a symbolic gesture. Use this information to explain why the coffee consumption curve changed the way it did after Shiru moved in.