Anna Feinberg began working for the Pfeiffer Company in 1968 at age seventeen. By 2005, she had attained the position of bookkeeper, office manager, and assistant treasurer. In appreciation for her skill, dedication, and long years of service, the Pfeiffer board of directors resolved to increase Feinberg’s monthly salary to $4,000 and to create for her a retirement plan. The plan allowed that Feinberg would be given the privilege of retiring from active duty at any time she chose and that she would receive retirement pay of $2,000 per month for life, although the Board expressed the hope that Feinberg would continue to serve the company for many years. Feinberg, however, chose to retire two years later. The Pfeiffer Company paid Feinberg her retirement pay until 2014. The company thereafter discontinued payments.

a. What are the arguments that the company’s promise to pay Feinberg $2,000 per month for life is enforceable?

b. What are the arguments that the company’s promise is not enforceable?

c. What is the proper outcome? Explain.

Filling Machines A quality-control engineer wants to find out whether or not a new machine that fills bottles with liquid has less variability than the machine currently in use. The engineer calibrates each machine to fill bottles with 16 ounces of a liquid. After running each machine for 5 hours, she randomly selects 15 filled bottles from each machine and measures their contents. She obtains the following results:

(a) Is the variability in the new machine less than that of the old machine at the  level of significance? Note: Normal probability plots indicate that the data are normally distributed.

(b) Draw boxplots of each data set to confirm the results of part (a) visually.