Predicting team startup growth

[Rick TYler]

Originally Posted by artdutra04

Would it be feasible to calculate the results on a county-by-county basis?

Some larger states may have a large metropolitan area which "carries" the state, while leaving a lot of suburban or rural areas under-served.

With the exception of perhaps New Jersey, population density at a certain level is a fractal problem. Take a look at where people live in the following states:

Washington
New York
California
Georgia
Minnesota
(and I just grabbed these off the top of my memory stack)

All of them have populations of five million or more, but within the state the population is clustered in one (or two) major urban areas with lots of "flyover" towns and cities in the rest of the state. Even within counties, density is not level, with town vs. suburbs or rural areas occurring in many places. At every level down to the neighborhood, density will be unven.

Counties might be a more useful geographical entity than states, but I'm guessing that you will ultimately find that telephone area codes will do a better job of approximating population distribution. (County population densities are wildly disparate -- Texas, for example, has 24 million people and 254 counties, while California has 36 million people and 58 counties.) As the phone companies add area codes to handle mobile devices, they are becoming a better approximation of population distribution than other political boundaries. This list of area codes by state almost looks like a histogram: http://www.allareacodes.com/area_cod...s_by_state.htm . Of course, in some places, like Southern California, a single geographical space now may have multiple area codes, but these things get complex.

You might also want to look into Metropolitan Statistical Areas for analyzing the US. These are standardized areas used in urban analytics and planning. Google on metropolitan statistical areas and have fun wallowing in data!

Anyway, there are so few middle and high schools in North America with robotics STEM programs, that our collective challenge is to pursue either the easiest targets first (schools which indicate an interest) or those for whom volunteers have a special passion (never underestimate the power of someone with a dream). Trying to drive STEM education into the schools/school districts that aren't interested is something to be done when the "interested but aren't sure how" schools are being served. You utes might find this model interesting reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_Innovations. We are still in the Innovators and early Early Adopter phase of robotics in schools, and not yet at the level of mass adoption.