The current wrangling on Capitol Hill over the so-called Dreamers has come down to the usual political deal-making. Trump has signaled he’s willing to compromise on deportations — that is, initiate fewer of them — if he can get funding for his border wall.

Also at issue is whether or not Dreamers already in the US ought to be able to sponsor their parents for legal residency or for citizenship. 

Whenever there is a mass shooting in the media, commentators rush to figure out on what to blame the latest violence. Predictably, those who want gun control blame gun control. Others blame mental illness — and perhaps a lack of government programs related to it.

Reactions to presidential budget proposals generally run along predictable party lines: the party occupying the White House lauds it as a sober and responsible reflection of the nation’s priorities, while the opposition party insists it will kill babies and bring about the general downfall of the nation. We might expect this political grandstanding to grow more intense in the Trump era, and so it has: the administration’s new 2019 budget proposal has been met with howls of disapproval from many corners. 

A star high school basketball player was incidentally mentioned in an FBI probe because he was allegedly paid $15, 000 for “committing” to play for the University of Arizona.  The student has recently committed to another university but may be ineligible to play college basketball next year. 

On Friday February 9, 2018, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 24,190.9 a decline of 1,958.49 points from the end of January 2018 or a decline of 7.5%. The S&P500 fell during this period from 2,823.81 to 2,619.55 – a decline of 7.2%.

Most commentators are trying to assure stock market participants that this correction is normal by drawing attention to the prolonged uptrend in the Dow and the S&P500. Thus, both the Dow and the S&P500 were in an uptrend since February 2009 when the Dow closed at 7,062.93 while the S&P500 closed at 735.09.

Modern economics in addition to sophisticated mathematics also employs probability distributions. What is probability? The probability of an event is the proportion of times the event happens out of a large number of trials.

For instance, the probability of obtaining heads when a coin is tossed is 0.5. This does not mean that when a coin is tossed 10 times, five heads are always obtained.

However, if the experiment is repeated a large number of times then it is likely that 50% will be obtained. The greater the number of throws, the nearer the approximation is likely to be.