Monthly Archives: February 2015

“Big Data is the new Phrenology”

From mathbabe: Big Data is the new phrenology. Excerpt: Here’s the thing. What we’ve got is a new kind of awful pseudo-science, which replaces measurements of skulls with big data. There’s no reason to think this stuff is any less … Continue reading

Posted in anemic data, Bayes, Bayesian, bridge to nowhere, mathematics, maths, rationality, reasonableness, statistics | Leave a comment

“Merchants of Doubt: What Climate Deniers Learned from Big Tobacco”

Posted in carbon dioxide, climate, climate change, climate education, ecology, economics, education, environment, ethics, fossil fuel divestment, geophysics, history, humanism, investing, IPCC, meteorology, new forms of scientific peer review, obfuscating data, physics, politics, rationality, reasonableness, risk, science, science education, scientific publishing, sociology | Tagged , | Leave a comment

R vs Python: Practical Data Analysis

R vs Python: Practical Data Analysis (Nonlinear Regression).

Posted in Bayes, Bayesian, biology, climate change, ecology, environment, Python 3, R, statistics, Wordpress | Leave a comment

“How is Germany integrating and balancing renewable energy today?”

Update from the Energiewende.

Posted in civilization, consumption, decentralized electric power generation, economics, efficiency, energy, engineering, environment, forecasting, fossil fuel divestment, investing, investment in wind and solar energy, microgrids, politics, rationality, reasonableness, solar power | Leave a comment

Boston, Guv Charlie Baker, and MBTA-MBCR

Some people elsewhere in the world might know (listening IOC?), but in case you don’t, the Northeast U.S. and, notably, the greater Boston, MA, area got slammed with unprecedented snow in the past few weeks. Meteorologically, it was Arctic air … Continue reading

Posted in mass transit, public transport | Tagged | Leave a comment

Christian Robert on the amazing Gibbs sampler

Professor Christian Robert remarks on the amazing Gibbs sampler. Implicitly he’s also underscoring the power of properly done Bayesian computational analysis. For here we have a problem with a posterior distribution having two strong modes, so a point estimate, like … Continue reading

Posted in Bayes, Bayesian, BUGS, Gibbs Sampling, JAGS, mathematics, maths, MCMC, probabilistic programming, rationality, statistics, stochastic algorithms, stochastic search | Leave a comment

“I don’t want Earth to look like Venus”

Posted in astronomy, astrophysics, Carl Sagan, civilization, climate, climate change, climate education, education, geophysics, meteorology, Neill deGrasse Tyson, oceanography, physics, Principles of Planetary Climate, rationality, reasonableness, risk, science, science education, sea level rise | Leave a comment

Warming is proportional to CUMULATIVE CARBON EMISSIONS, not emission intensity

Highlighting the key parts of the Abstract of this very important paper below: The global temperature response to increasing atmospheric CO2 is often quantified by metrics such as equilibrium climate sensitivity and transient climate response1. These approaches, however, do not … Continue reading

Posted in astrophysics, carbon dioxide, climate, climate change, climate education, consumption, differential equations, ecology, engineering, environment, forecasting, geophysics, IPCC, mathematics, maths, meteorology, oceanography, physics, Principles of Planetary Climate, reasonableness, risk, science | 1 Comment

International Darwin Day: 12th February 2015

http://darwinday.org/ http://darwinday.org/about/

Posted in atheism, biology, Boston Ethical Society, Charles Darwin, civilization, Darwin Day, ecology, environment, evolution, science, science education, UU Humanists | Leave a comment

Christian Robert on Alan Turing

Alan Turing Institute. See Professor Robert’s earlier post on Turing, too.

Posted in Bayes, Bayesian, citizenship, education, ethics, history, humanism, mathematics, maths, politics, rationality, reasonableness, statistics, stochastic algorithms, stochastic search, the right to know, Wordpress | Tagged | Leave a comment

“Barking mad”

Today was a big day at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (“NAS”). The Academy released two important climate reports, each dealing with one of two categories of global countermeasures for the effects of dumping unprecedented amounts of carbon dioxide … Continue reading

Posted in astrophysics, bridge to nowhere, carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide capture, carbon dioxide sequestration, Carbon Tax, citizenship, civilization, climate, climate change, climate education, demand-side solutions, diffusion processes, ecology, economics, engineering, environment, ethics, forecasting, games of chance, geoengineering, geophysics, history, humanism, IPCC, meteorology, NCAR, NOAA, oceanography, physics, Principles of Planetary Climate, rationality, Ray Pierrehumbert, reasonableness, science, science education, sea level rise, the right to know | Tagged | Leave a comment

Richard Muller: “I Was Wrong On Global Warming, But It Didn’t Convince The ‘Sceptics'”

Update. 26th February 2015 This is not directly related to the BEST project described in the YouTube video above, but the Berkeley National Laboratory has experimentally linked increases in radiative forcing with increases in atmospheric concentrations of CO2 due to … Continue reading

Posted in astrophysics, Bayes, carbon dioxide, citizenship, civilization, climate, climate change, climate education, differential equations, ecology, environment, geoengineering, geophysics, IPCC, mathematics, maths, meteorology, model comparison, NASA, NCAR, NOAA, oceanography, physics, population biology, rationality, Ray Pierrehumbert, reasonableness, reproducible research, risk, science, science education, sea level rise, the right to know | Leave a comment

“Resistence is futile”: Central generation of electrical power is dead, and faster than anyone thinks

If you hold shares in fossil fuel industries, whether coal, oil, or natural gas, or traditional car manufacturers, get out now! And, if Lancaster, CA, is any indication of a trend, a “McMansion” will lose its value because it is … Continue reading

Posted in climate change, climate education, decentralized electric power generation, economics, efficiency, energy, fossil fuel divestment, investing, investment in wind and solar energy, microgrids, natural gas, nuclear power, wind power | Tagged | 1 Comment

Stephen Fry: “God … Bone cancer in children? … Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god …?”

A God as a monster.

Posted in atheism, capricious gods | Leave a comment

The New School puts climate change front, center … and acts

All in the New York Times And I’ve written about this elsewhere.

Posted in bridge to nowhere, carbon dioxide, citizenship, civilization, climate, climate change, climate education, education, humanism, physics, rationality, reasonableness, risk, science, science education, sociology, the right to know | Leave a comment

coastal damage: when will they be abandoned?

(Click image for a larger figure.) The graphic is from a story today, on this subject, in the Boston Globe. About the recent model, and that almost unspoken risk.

Posted in carbon dioxide, climate, climate change, games of chance, oceanography, rationality, reasonableness, sea level rise, sociology, statistics | 1 Comment

The B-Team

Yes!! B Team Leaders Call for Net-Zero Greenhouse-Gas Emissions by 2050 About the B Team. See also Track 0

Posted in astrophysics, biology, Boston Ethical Society, carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide capture, carbon dioxide sequestration, Carbon Tax, citizenship, civilization, climate, climate change, climate education, compassion, conservation, consumption, demand-side solutions, ecology, economics, environment, ethics, forecasting, geoengineering, geophysics, investing, investment in wind and solar energy, IPCC, meteorology, NOAA, oceanography, physics, rationality, reasonableness, science, sociology, the right to know, wind power | Leave a comment

Models don’t over-estimate warming?

At the reblogged article, I made reference to both a recommendation by Judith Curry for an article in Physics Today by Ray Pierrehumbert on infrared radiation and the original article. That article is available online. More is available in Professor … Continue reading

Posted in astrophysics, carbon dioxide, chemistry, citizen science, citizenship, civilization, climate, climate change, climate education, differential equations, diffusion processes, ecology, education, energy, forecasting, geophysics, IPCC, mathematics, meteorology, model comparison, NASA, NCAR, NOAA, oceanography, physics, Principles of Planetary Climate, rationality, Ray Pierrehumbert, reasonableness, science, statistics, the right to know | 2 Comments

engineering and understanding with stable models

Stable distributions or Lévy -stable models is a class of probability distributions which contains the Gaussian, the Cauchy (or Lorentz), and the Lévy distribution. They are parameterized by an which is . Values of of 1 or less give distributions … Continue reading

Posted in approximate Bayesian computation, Bayesian, citizen science, climate, climate change, climate education, differential equations, diffusion processes, ecology, economics, forecasting, geophysics, information theoretic statistics, IPCC, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, meteorology, model comparison, NOAA, oceanography, physics, rationality, reasonableness, risk, science, science education, stochastic search, the right to know | Leave a comment