Many of today’s leading companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Facebook, are based on technologies developed within universities. Lisa Fisher is a business school professor who believes that a university’s research expenditure in $ millions (Research) and the age of its technology transfer office in years (Duration) are major factors that enhance innovation. She wants to know what the average values are for the Research and the Duration variables. She collects data from 143 universities on these variables for the academic year 2008. A portion of the data is shown below; the complete data set, labeled Startups, can be found on the text website.
Research ($ millions) Duration
$145.52........... 23
$237.52........... 23
: ............ :
$154.38........... 9
a. Construct and interpret the 95% confidence interval for the mean research expenditure of all universities.
b. Construct and interpret the 95% confidence interval for the mean duration of all universities.