CSC: Modeling the USA Population

Report on Chapter ____

What this is.

This is a report on a chapter of the Case Study in Calculus: Modeling the USA Population Growth. Every CSC involves real applications of calculus with real data. In this CSC, we are studying the official USA census data from the first census in 1790 to the most recent in 1990.

What you should do.

(a) First, you should go through the Chapter of the CSC on which you will be reporting. The chapter is in the form of a Maple worksheet. Although it is fine to print the chapter and read it, in most cases this will not be sufficient. A worksheet is an interactive document. The chapter has been designed to facilitate your experiments so that you can gain a full understanding of the mathematical ideas. You will also be filling in details that are left for you to complete. Take notes because you will be reporting on what you discover.

(b) You should type your answers to the questions and directives given below (e.g. express, show, write an equation). Simply type them where the instructions appear, as they arise in the text. In some cases you may want to create an input cell and execute it. Don't forget that it is perfectly legitimate to copy and paste Maple cells from the CSC chapter or other course materials.

(c) You should turn in a printed copy of your completed report.

(d) For your own records, be sure to save an electronic copy of the report on your hard disk with a name such as CSC.1 Report - Dwight Lahr. Don't forget that you will need to refer to the reports again as part of the final exam.

_______________________________________________________________________

Body of the Report

Major Activities

What are the major questions that we seek to answer in the chapter? List them with a short (one or two line) description.

[The best way to fill in this section is first to read the chapter to get an overview of what it is about. Take notes as you go along. Then use your notes to develop an outline of the major activities of the chapter and the questions that those activities aim to answer.]

Questions

There will be a list of questions for you to answer related to the material of the chapter. The questions are intended to stimulate your thinking about how you carried out the activities, and how you should interpret the results you obtained.

[The best way to answer these questions is for you to go through the chapter as an interactive Maple worksheet. Start at the beginning of the chapter and work your way to the end, plotting data, making tables, following instructions, etc. The questions will make more sense after you have done this at least once.]

Results

What are the major conclusions of the chapter? State the key results without interpreting them. That will come in the following section. List them with a short (one or two line) description.

[By now you have read the chapter and you have engaged it interactively. You should be in a position to list the major conclusions that you reach.]

Interpretation and Summary

Pretend that you are reporting on this chapter of the CSC for a publication such as Scientific American , and that your Interpretation and Summary is going to head the report. Include enough details so that a reader would learn what the major issues of the chapter are, how you went about addressing them, and the most important interpretations and conclusions. Assume that readers of this summary will not see the earlier sections of this report, or the Maple worksheet for this chapter. Be sure to write in complete sentences using correct rules of standard English grammar.