1. A university is starting a new college of engineering, has extensive funding, and wants to use com- petitive benchmarking. What U.S. universities might be useful as objects of the competitive benchmarking effort?
2. As a machine produces steel rods, accumulated deposits and mechanical wear cause the rod diameters to increase gradually over time. What type of control chart should be used in determining when the process has gone out of control? Why?
3. In producing bulk rolls of paper for sale to newspapers, a firm wishes to control the quality of the paper by keeping track of how many discolored spots or other flaws are present in continuous strips of a given length. What type of control chart should be used and why?