1. Suppose that the manager of the Cleveland Guardians is faced with
a difficult situation in the last inning of a baseball game later this
evening and he asks for your input. Here is the situation. He has two right-handed
batters, say Moe and Joe, available to pinch hit in the last inning to
try to win the game. However, he is not sure which player to use. The performance
of the players during the 1995 season is shown in the table below.
| Player | Pitcher | Hits | At Bats |
| Joe | Right | 40 | 100 |
| Left | 80 | 400 | |
| Moe | Right | 120 | 400 |
| Left | 10 | 100 |
a. Construct a two-way table of player (Joe or Moe) versus outcome (hit or no hit).
b. Compute the overall batting average (hits divided by total number of times at bat) for each of the players.
c. For each of the two types of pitching, construct a two-way table of player by outcome (hit or no hit).
d. Use the tables in part (c) to compute the batting averages of the two players for each type of pitcher.
e. Based on the calculations in (b) and (d), who would you recommend? Explain your recommendation in language that the manager will understand.
2. The University of California at Berkeley was charged with having
discriminated against women in the graduate admissions process for the
fall quarter of 1973. The table below identifies the number of acceptances
and denials for both male and female applicants in each of the six largest
graduate programs at the institution at that time:
| Men Accepted | Men Denied | Women Accepted | Women Denied | |
| Program A | 511 | 314 | 89 | 19 |
| Program B | 352 | 208 | 17 | 8 |
| Program C | 120 | 205 | 202 | 391 |
| Program D | 137 | 270 | 132 | 243 |
| Program E | 53 | 138 | 95 | 298 |
| Program F | 22 | 351 | 24 | 317 |
| Total | 1195 | 1486 | 559 | 1276 |
(a) Start by ignoring the program distinction, collapsing the data into
a two-way table of gender by admission status. To do this, find the total
number of men accepted and denied and the total number of women accepted
and denied.
| Admitted | Denied | Total | |
| Men | |||
| Women | |||
| Total |
(b) Consider for the moment just the men applicants. Of the men who applied to one of these programs, what proportion were admitted? Now consider the women applicants; what proportion of them were admitted? Do these proportions seem to support the claim that men were given preferential treatment in admissions decisions?
(c) To try to isolate the program or programs responsible for the mistreatment
of women applicants, calculate the proportion of men and the proportion
of women within each program who were admitted. Record your results in
a table like the one below.
| Proportion of Men Admitted | Proportion of Women Admitted | |
| Program A | ||
| Program B | ||
| Program C | ||
| Program D | ||
| Program E | ||
| Program F |
(d) Does it seem as if any program is responsible for the large discrepancy between men and women in the overall proportions admitted?
3. The influence of race on imposition of the death penalty for murder
has been much studied and contested in the courts. The following
three-way table classifies 326 cases in which the defendant was convicted
of murder. The three variables are the defendant's race, the victim's
race, and whether the defendant was sentenced to death.
| White Defendant | ||
| Death Penalty | No Death Penalty | |
| White Victim | 19 | 132 |
| Black Victim | 0 | 9 |
| Black Defendant | ||
| Death Penalty | No Death Penalty | |
| White Victim | 11 | 52 |
| Black Victim | 6 | 97 |
a. Construct a two-way table of defendant's race by death penalty.
b. Show that Simpon's paradox (see Section 2.5) holds: A higher percent
of white defendants are sentenced to death overall, but for both black
and white victims a higher percentage of black defendants are sentenced
to death.
c. Explain why the paradox holds in language that your roommate
would understand.