Monthly Archives: January 2016

Causal Diagrams

Like Sankey diagrams, causal diagrams are a useful tool to assess and communicate complicated systems and their intrarelationships: It’s possible to use these for analysis and prescription: Here is the (promised) presentation on reenforcing loops: So how can these techniques … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, bridge to nowhere, Carbon Cycle, carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide sequestration, Carbon Tax, Carbon Worshipers, causal diagrams, clean disruption, climate, climate change, climate disruption, climate education, climate models, demand-side solutions, differential equations, dynamical systems, ecology, economics, energy utilities, environment, exponential growth, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuels, global warming, greenhouse gases, greenwashing, Hyper Anthropocene, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, methane, mitigation, natural gas, planning, prediction, rationality, reasonableness, recycling, Sankey diagram, sustainability, the right to know, zero carbon | Leave a comment

K-Nearest Neighbors: dangerously simple

Yeah, Mathbabe’s got it right: People who use kNN often don’t think about these things. For those who aren’t familiar with this technique, here’s a description from Zhi-Hua Zhou in Ensemble Methods: Foundations and Algorithms (section 1.2.5): “The -nearest neighbor … Continue reading

Posted in big data, data science, evidence, machine learning | Leave a comment

Massachusetts Solar Suburbs (a Google group)

I have just created the Massachusetts Solar Suburbs Google group. It’s Welcome Message reads: Welcome to the Massachusetts Solar Suburbs! This group exists to provide a forum for owners of solar installations, typically residential, or serving residences, to share their … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, Anthropocene, Carbon Tax, Carbon Worshipers, citizenship, civilization, clean disruption, climate, climate change, climate disruption, corporate litigation on damage from fossil fuel emissions, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, destructive economic development, diffusion, diffusion processes, economics, education, efficiency, energy, energy reduction, energy utilities, engineering, environment, ethics, fear uncertainty and doubt, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuels, global warming, Google, greenhouse gases, Hyper Anthropocene, investing, investment in wind and solar energy, MA, meteorology, microgrids, optimization, physics, planning, politics, public utility commissions, rationality, reasonableness, risk, Sankey diagram, solar energy, solar power, SolarPV.tv, sustainability, Tony Seba, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon | Leave a comment

Life cycle analysis of emissions from various forms of energy converted to electricity

There was a recent discussion regarding the life cycle analysis of various forms of energy, principally to be converted to electricity. Given that everything I know about sustainability and life cycle analysis suggests is it is a very complicated business, … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, anemic data, Anthropocene, biofuels, bridge to nowhere, carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide sequestration, Carbon Worshipers, citizenship, civilization, clean disruption, climate, climate change, climate disruption, complex systems, corporate litigation on damage from fossil fuel emissions, corporate supply chains, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, demand-side solutions, destructive economic development, economics, efficiency, energy, energy reduction, energy utilities, engineering, environment, evidence, forecasting, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuels, global warming, Hyper Anthropocene, investment in wind and solar energy, IPCC, James Hansen, Life Cycle Assessment, Mark Jacobson, methane, natural gas, nuclear power, nuclear weapons, pipelines, Sankey diagram, solar energy, solar power, SolarPV.tv, Tea Party, transparency, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon | 1 Comment

Google’s DeepMind consistently beats Fan Hui, the European GO grandmaster

This is pretty amazing news. DeepMind’s program AlphaGo beat Fan Hui, the European Go champion, five times out of five in tournament conditions, the firm reveals in research published in Nature on 27 January. It also defeated its silicon-based rivals, … Continue reading

Posted in artificial intelligence, deep recurrent neural networks, Go, machine learning, perceptrons | Leave a comment

Professor Marvin Minsky dies at 88: What a noble mind is here o’erthrown

As a prospective and actual graduate student in MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory during the years 1974-1976, it is difficult to convey the draw and the incisiveness of Minsky’s mind. As an undergraduate in Physics with a very keen interest in … Continue reading

Posted in artificial intelligence, machine learning, Marvin Minsky', neural nets, perceptrons, Seymour Papert | Leave a comment

Generating supports for classification rules in black box regression models

Inspired by the extensive and excellent work in approximate Bayesian computation (see also), especially that done by Professors Christian Robert and colleagues (see also), and Professor Simon Wood (see also), it occurred to me that the complaints regarding lack of … Continue reading

Posted in approximate Bayesian computation, Bayes, Bayesian, Bayesian inversion, generalized linear models, machine learning, numerical analysis, numerical software, probabilistic programming, rationality, reasonableness, state-space models, statistics, stochastic algorithms, stochastic search, stochastics, support of black boxes | Leave a comment

On friction and the duplicity

(Hat tip to Peter Sinclair at Climate Denial Crock of the Week.) Has Senator Cruz called Dr Carl Mears (video) of Remote Sensing Systems, the maker and interpreter of the sensor Senator Cruz used for his Spencer-Christy-Curry carnival? No. Of … Continue reading

Posted in AMETSOC, anemic data, Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, BEST, climate, climate change, climate data, climate disruption, confirmation bias, corruption, denial, disingenuity, ecology, evidence, fear uncertainty and doubt, geophysics, global warming, greenhouse gases, hiatus, Hyper Anthropocene, ignorance, meteorology, model comparison, NCAR, NOAA, obfuscating data, oceanography, physics, rationality, reasonableness, statistics, time series | Leave a comment

“Causal feedbacks in climate change”

Today I was reviewing and re-reading the nonlinear time series technical literature I have, seeking ideas on how to go about using the statistical ensemble learning technique called “boosting” with them. (See the very nice book, R. E. Schapire, Y. … Continue reading

Posted in Anthropocene, boosting, Carbon Cycle, carbon dioxide, Carbon Worshipers, cat1, climate, climate change, climate data, climate disruption, complex systems, convergent cross-mapping, denial, differential equations, diffusion processes, dynamical systems, ecology, Egbert van Nes, empirical likelihood, ensembles, environment, Ethan Deyle, Floris Takens, forecasting, fossil fuels, geophysics, George Sughihara, global warming, greenhouse gases, Hao Ye, machine learning, Maren Scheffer, mathematics, maths, meteorology, physics, rationality, reasonableness, science, state-space models, Takens embedding theorem, time series, Timothy Lenton, Victor Brovkin | 2 Comments

Social implications of our silly experiment with Earth

Climate is changing. Climate change is threatening to human elites. Climate solutions are “fetishizing the billionaire class”. And on the risks and damage from neoliberalism. Exponential growth, meaning keeping the permitting of new homes in the suburbs, is lethal. We’re … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, Anthropocene, Bill Gates, bridge to nowhere, carbon dioxide, civilization, climate change, environment, ethics, exponential growth, global warming, Hyper Anthropocene, ignorance, James Hansen, rationality, reasonableness, zero carbon | Leave a comment

Hottest Year on Record

Reposting from Tamino’s blog. And there still are intelligent people out there, including statistician colleagues, who don’t buy the facts of warming. Generally speaking, they have a look at a few time series and get quickly skeptical, failing to realize … Continue reading

Posted in AMETSOC, Anthropocene, Berkeley, Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, BEST, BLUE, carbon dioxide, climate, climate change, climate data, climate disruption, climate education, climate zombies, environment, evidence, geophysics, global warming, Hyper Anthropocene, James Hansen, kriging, meteorology, NCAR, NOAA, physics, Principles of Planetary Climate, rationality, reasonableness, Richard Muller, Robert Rohde, science, science education, Tamino, the right to know, time series, University of California Berkeley | Leave a comment

“Finding Dory”

From the scientific journal Nature, a preview: “Finding Dory”, movie Director: Andrew Stanton Opens 17 June 2016 Digital-animation giant Pixar releases the much-anticipated follow-up to its 2003 “Finding Nemo”, a film so successful that clownfish are now often referred to … Continue reading

Posted in biology, compassion, Disney, ecology, Epcot, marine biology, Pixar, population biology, science, science education, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Spaceship Earth, Walt Disney Company, WHOI, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution | Leave a comment

After the Decade of Dithering, the Deadly Twenties

In a recent post, after reviewing the extreme Arctic warming event of late 2015, Professor John Baez quotes an earlier interview with Dr Gregory Benford, who is arguing for a geoengineering effort to restore the frozen Arctic. I do not … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, AMOC, Arctic, chance, changepoint detection, climate, climate change, climate disruption, critical slowing down, ecology, engineering, geoengineering, global warming, greenhouse gases, Hyper Anthropocene, ignorance, James Hansen, MIchael Mann, mitigation, oceanography, physics, politics, rationality, reasonableness, regime shifts, science, science education, state-space models, statistics, the right to know, thermohaline circulation, time series | Leave a comment

Hunt and Anderson discuss climate change

50% of the emissions come from the richest 1% of people on the planet. Actually, I disagree with them a bit … I suspect Western societies are much more fragile than Hunt & Anderson and most people think, in terms … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, Anthropocene, carbon dioxide, Carbon Worshipers, civilization, climate disruption, COP21, demand-side solutions, denial, destructive economic development, ecology, environment, exponential growth, extended supply chains, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuels, geoengineering, global warming, greenhouse gases, Hyper Anthropocene, rationality, reasonableness, Sankey diagram, zero carbon | Leave a comment