There are serious concerns about the growth of the human population. There were about 1.65 billion people at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it closed by going over 6 billion people. This trend cannot continue with the limited resources. Many agencies study population trends and issue projections, which use some type of modeling techniques. Your project is to examine the world population growth using the techniques studied in class (such as Malthusian growth and logistic growth), making your best projections from these models, then comparing them to projections made by other agencies. Try to determine what methods the UN uses to make its projections, then discuss their modeling techniques. One common technique is the use of Time Series, so you should discuss the theory behind time series and how this can be applied to modeling population growth. Alternately, you may choose to discuss some of the statistical modeling techniques developed in a draft manuscript by John Long.

You should begin your study by going to the following webpage and reading through many of its links to understand the nature of human population growth and discover some of the projections (that you may try to realize in your modeling efforts): 1. http://www.undp.org/popin/ and 2. http://www.undp.org/popin/wdtrends/wdtrends.htm. You may want to begin with a historical perspective from the work of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834). I will give you a copy of a paper that discusses some of the techniques used in the U.S. and has additional statistical references. Below is listed one good reference for understanding time series.

Reference:

1. D. Kaplan and L. Glass (1995), Understanding Nonlinear Dynamics, Springer-Verlag, New York, p.279f.

Additional web references:

http://www.geom.umn.edu/education/calc-init/population/

http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html

http://dept.physics.upenn.edu/courses/gladney/mathphys/subsection2_1_2.html