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This ran on the front page of the Brunswick News this morning. I just wish they'd spelled my last name right.

I'm jumping back into my GDP-to-DOW multiple regression analysis project and I wanted to report two recent discoveries. The first is a tool to help manage D3 graphs. For anyone that's used D3 you soon realize that it gives you way to many choices. You want something to create reasonable assumptions. That's apparently called Vega:

Vega is a visualization grammar, a declarative format for creating, saving and sharing visualization designs. With Vega you can describe data visualizations in a JSON format, and generate interactive views using either HTML5 Canvas or SVG.

I'll give it a try and report back.

The other thing I've learned is something called “retrodiction”, specifically retrodictive model interpolation. One thing I'll be doing is using R to “go back in time” and recalculate the regression model and then use that to predict the next months values to see how predictive the model is. For example, lets say I have 100 entries in a time series. I can run the regression and get an R-squared that shows that the model has a good “fit”. But what that doesn't tell me is how “predictive” that model is.

So if you have 100 entries why do the regression again but this time for only the first 99 items. Then plugin the variables for the 100th entry and see how well it compares to the target variable. Now do that for the 98th, 97th, 96th, etc. At each point you will get a different set of coefficients and a different prediction for the target variable. Now, one would expect that a predictive model would have stable co-efficients and a relatively low variance in the target variable. If the co-efficientsa are vary a great deal then you know you can't calculate the model until you have the data you're trying to predict.

Ben Brockert scraped the video from NASA of Xombie's latest flight and put it on Youtube:

This was the last flight in the Draper Genie series. As Ben points out, this airframe and other hardware has been flying since 2009.

Next up is Xaero-B.

HBO is part of a “week of free” on most cable providers so I was able to watch the first episode of season three of Game of Thrones. We don't have HBO because I really don't need more TV to watch. But I'll make an exception for Game of Thrones.

So yes, that means I have to wait until next year to see the next episode. A few years ago I did some work for a cable company and learned from the inside that the greatest fear is becoming “a big, dumb pipe”. Since HBO is part of the Time Warner family of companies you can see how it is intimately tied to the cable industry.

As Trevor Gilbert described last year:

If HBO was to start selling its content on a per-episode basis via iTunes or online subscriptions to HBOGo, it would enable people to cut the cord. From the perspective of the Time Warner executives that run HBO, it is entirely reasonable to assume that people are being held back from cutting the cord because of HBO (for now). This means that not only are they keeping their HBO subscription, but that the customers are also likely paying Time Warner indirectly via CNN, Cartoon Network, and all of Time Warner’s other subsidiaries. That’s something the company — financially speaking — shouldn't mess with.

The risk that HBO and Time Warner are running is that they can time the switch well enough to hold off competitors and that they can replace the current model with something that works as well as what they are currently doing.

What should HBO and Time Warner be looking for to pull the trigger? What would their model look like on the other side?

Pipefish's facebook app uses Rails as its backend. As we built the first version we began using Backbone.js to begin moving the 'view' into the browser. We are now updating the app to be a true single page app.

One of the more useful resources for learning how to do this the right way was Brian Mann's 6-part video series on building complete web apps using Rails and Backbone.js. The series costs $30 and it is definitely worth it. If you want to build an single page app with Rails then this is the way to learn it.

Word has come from the Georgia Space Working Group that the Governor's office needs to hear from citizens that they should do whatever is necessary to beat Texas and Florida for SpaceX's new launch site.

As reported yesterday, Governor Deal discussed incentives with Elon last Friday. The Governor offered a typical set of incentives for Georgia: free land, job creation incentives, and tax breaks. Things that both Texas and Florida are also offering. But Texas is also offering $6.2 million in cash. Florida is offering $10 million. Elon has also asked Texas for laws protecting them from frivolous lawsuits similar to one that stopped operations near Waco:

Referring to the spaceport’s potential location: “Texas is the leading candidate, but we need certain legislation to pass that’s supportive of space launch,” Musk said. “One of the things we need for example is we need to be able to close the beach while we’re doing a launch. And Texas has the 'open beaches act' so it’s like ‘Okay…we can’t launch if there’s someone right next to the rocket on the beach,’” He also said they also need some legal protection from nuisance lawsuits, such as that one person that will complain about a space-port being built — so they won’t spend all their time in court.

Georgia should do absolutely whatever it takes to win this bid. If Florida is bidding $10 million and Texas is bidding $6.2 then we should bid $16.2. To prevent frivolous lawsuits create a port authority that has immunity granted by statute. Go overboard and double whatever Texas and Florida offer. If the bid needs something the Governor can't provide then call the House and Senate back into session and make it happen.

I was born in Byron, Georgia just outside Macon. I grew up in Tifton and Brunswick. I have family in Waycross and Moultrie. I've lived in this state my entire life. I know how desperately South Georgia needs jobs. But not just any job. Something that looks far into the future. Something that doesn't depend on agriculture and prisons. It needs something that kids in places like Ocilla and TyTy can look at and know their future is a positive one that the entire world notices.

If the Governor has to declare a state emergency then do it.

Make. This. Happen.

An article in today's AJC reports that

Last Friday, Gov. Nathan Deal pitched Georgia and its 4,000-acre site to SpaceX founder and noted entrepreneur Elon Musk. State and local economic development officials are considering possible inducements — free land, job-creation incentives, equipment and machinery tax breaks, workforce training — to persuade Musk.

This is a new and significant development since the executive and legislative branches of the state government were reluctant to get involved prior to the Environmental Impact Study being complete. Apparently the spectre of Texas being in the lead prompted some action. Texas may still have something Georgia doesn't which is the ability for a first stage to take off from Texas and land in Florida.

Keep you fingers crossed!

In Seeking Guidance for the Dow? Try GDP, Dr. Charles W. Mulford and Dr. Narayanan Jayaraman, assert that:

Following the market swoon of 2008 and 2009, equity prices have enjoyed a significant rebound. Investors are understandably interested in where stocks are headed next. An interesting long-term perspective on the subject can be gained by examining the extent to which Nominal Gross Domestic Product has explained the movement of share prices, in particular, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, over time. In this report, we look at the relationship between the two metrics since 1916, updated with data through the fourth quarter, 2010. Barring any unforeseen shocks, we find strong historical precedent for the Dow to be trading in the vicinity of 15,000 in 2011.

While it wasn't at 15,000 in 2011, it is now. By this analysis anything that inflates the GDP inflates the DOW. The paper's reasoning is that the simple regression between the GDP and the DOW shows a correlations that is predictive.

But is that indeed, the case?

Yesterday XCOR Aerospace announced the successful 65 second burn of a flight weight piston pump fed rocket engine

For those not in the business this is a very significant milestone for chemical propulsion systems. This test showed that a piston based pump can pump cryogenic and non-cryogenic liquids at high enough flow rate and pressure to run a typical biprop engine. Until now rocket engins have either been fed from pressurized tanks (making them much heavier than necessary) or from turbopumps that run at such high speeds and pressures that most are built to be on the hairy edge of self destruction. Turbine pumps are not designed so much as evolved. They are usually the most expensive and bug prone pieces of a rocket engine.

What XCOR did was remove the turbo pump and replace it with something someone from any high school shop class would recognize. It looks like most other pumps we use in industry, using pistons to drive the fluids instead of centrifugal force. But what they wouldn't recognize is how to make the same design pump both kerosene and liquid oxygen. Most of the seals and tubes you would put on a regular pump would simply burst into flame in the presence of liquid oxygen and even a tiny bit of friction. Most of the time a design built for cryogenic temperatures is very different from things that run near normal temperatures. That is a very significant piece of engineering.

Great job guys!

Tomorrow, March 26, is this month's Atlanta Startup Village meeting and I will be presenting Pipefish and providing a demo our Facebook movie app. Stop by if you can!

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