Day 14 in math modeling

• Who to the departmental lunch? How was it?

• You have an assignment due today, about Ad expenditures.

• Thank you for your reviews. I was grading my first calculus exam this weekend (two sections!), so I haven't gotten to them yet. Hopefully I'll have those back to you by Wednesday, along with your grades on mini-project 1.

• The second part of Mini-project 2 is due Friday, and then I'll assign you your third and final city and partner(s) for Mini-project 3.

• I forgot to mention last time that I got an email from the American Journal of Climate Change, soliciting manuscripts for a special issue on "Climate Dynamics", with a submission due date of May 17th. This is our journal, and this is our special issue!

• I moved our first exam back to the week after Spring break (Friday, 3/16). Any problems with that?

• Next time we'll start in on some simple differential equations models, and I've given you a couple of "assignments" related to that (a reading assignment, and you will need a login to InsightMaker). Please do those by Wednesday.

• I wrapped up the derivation of non-linear regression as a succession of linear regressions, but we bumped up against the clock.
• So let's review that, first. Once we've finished with this, we'll be done with the mathematics of non-linear regression, and we'll just start to use it!

  Although I have one more little sidenote to show you, to illustrate why it works: fitting a single parameter model to a single data point. I borrowed the strategy from the Mathematica demo file for Newton's Method. I don't think that we'll look at this today, however, because I'm eager to get to cadavers...:)

Here's the Mathematica file.

As we think about modeling the onset of rigor mortis, we might start with the Bestiary of functions, from Ben Bolker's Ecological Models and Data in R. Do we hear any songs that sound like our data? If not, we may have to go off-road, to mix metaphors....