Comment of Project
Brittany Scott, Craig Mitchell, Katherine Paterson and Vincent Smith
Good job! It must be hard work to collect so much data. The report is well-organized.
I like that you divide your report into sections and that will let the reader know easily
what you are doing in each part. It’s unlucky for you to get Baltimore as your city, since
it’s neither a good linear case nor a good exponential case. But your analysis on it is still
impressive, especially the explanation of huge growth and drop of the population. Here are
some suggestions:
• First, some mathematical mistakes. In the example of exponential growth, I will say
the population of bacteria is doubled rather than squared, since a sequence that is
squared per increment is like: 2, 4, 16, 256, 65536.... At the bottom of Page 3, b
should be 939024 − 765928 but not 939024/765928. With the correct b, your linear
model will also be bad.
• It would be better to cite the population data of Utah before calculating the absolute
change like what you did for Baltimore. And you should give a list of all works you
cited at the end of the report.
• In Part (i), when you are trying to say 3,485,367 in 2030 is realistic, I would expand
the graph and let the point (2030, 3,485,367) be included in it. I think the reader will
believe you after seeing the expanded graph.
• There is not a good way to develop a linear model or an exponential model for Baltimore. Perhaps the most acceptable way to establish a linear model is to set the slope
to be some kind of average of the slope between all possible pairs of two points. If you
only use two points to give a linear model, you will lose much information. The idea
of exponential model should be the same.
Mechanics
3
Mathematics & Analysis
13
Group Work & Presentation
5