1). Fair Trials

Use statistical techniques to come up with your best estimates for the following questions about Prince George's County Jury Selection.

a). The jury pool of adults registered to vote in Prince George County is 60% African American.How likely would it be to have a twelve-person jury with two or less African Americans?

N = 12 60% African Americans S = 0,1,2,3,4

b). How likely would it be to have a twelve person jury with less than five African Americans?

c). How likely would the a jury have eight or more African Americans?

d). How likely would it be to have less than five African Americans on twelve-person juries in five successive trials at the county courthouse in Upper Marlboro, MD. (assume independence between separate juries)

e). What other issues besides for discrimination might lead to a surprisingly low percentage of African Americans on some of these juries?

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2). Sports Probabilities from my Youth

In the 1985 NCCA Men's title game, Villanova upset the mighty Georgetown Hoyas. Being a college basketball fan at the time in Philly (Temple University fan mainly as a kid), I knew that Villanova always played Georgetown well and, therefore, had a 20% chance to win the game.

a). How likely would it have been for Villanova to upset Georgetown if they needed to win 4 out of 7 games as in the NBA?

b). How likely would it have been for Villanova to have won 4 straight games against Georgetown?

3). Cool Poll Question:

Please find a poll question that you find relevant to your own policy interests. I enjoyed hearing your policy interests on Thursday ranging from drug policy to immigration policy to education policy to foreign policy to health policy to issues in race and gender in the US and many more.

a). Find the poll question and develop a 95% confidence interval around the sample average (meaning the poll result). Be sure to explain exactly what this confidence interval means. Be sure to mention who conducted the poll.

b). Discuss sampling or measurement issues that might exist with your poll result.

4). Three Social Policies not in the Inflation Reduction Act

The "Inflation Reduction Act" in the fall of 2022 included climate policies, health care policies and revenue enhancers, but none of the child policies that were originally part of "Build Back Better" from the previous year.

My guess is that none of the three major family/child policies will become law any time soon. Still, it is a useful data based policy exercise to analyze what outcomes, good, bad or in between might have resulted from the following three policies.

1) a $3,000 fully refundable (means parents get it whether they paid taxes or not) tax credit per child per year.

2). Universal free and effective pre-school for all children.

3). Reliable and affordable government subsidized day care for US parents.

Please ignore costs in the analysis that I am going to have you go through below. (of course costs matter...one of the main down sides of larger government spending is higher taxes).

Additionally, imagine that if you were going to means test any of these three proposals, you would do it the same way for each policy.

a). With costs and means testing held constant, what are some of the output or Y variables that you would want to measure in future years to test whether these policies prove effective?

b). What would be the ideal experiment to test the extent to which each of these three policy proposals improves the outcome or Y variables that you discussed in part a).

c). Absent an ideal experiment, how might you imagine trying to measure whether these policies, if put into law, prove effective?