Month: January 2016
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Causal Diagrams
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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 carbonLike 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 be used? And why are they powerful? How about looking at methane adoption, also advertised…
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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 (NN) algorithm relies on the principle that objects similar in the input space are also…
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Massachusetts Solar Suburbs (a Google group)
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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 carbonI 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 experiences, compare notes, and work together to advance adoption of solar energy in the suburbs…
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Life cycle analysis of emissions from various forms of energy converted to electricity
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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 carbonThere 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, I decided to dig into this a bit. (See also.) The discussion only considers a…
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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, winning 99.8% of games against the current best programs. The program has yet to play…
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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 computing and programming, I was drawn to Professor Minsky’s ideas in articles like his “Steps…
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Generating supports for classification rules in black box regression models
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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 boxesInspired 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 interpretability of “black box regression models” for, say, the binary logistic regression problem, could be…
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On friction and the duplicity
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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(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 course not. The refutation. And the practice is called cherry picking.
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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 already in an emergency. Climate change. Climate disruption. Welcome to the world we have created.…
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Hottest Year on Record
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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 BerkeleyReposting 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 that obtaining the warming result, as the BEST project discovered, is a non-trivial business. But,…
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“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 as ‘nemos’. The original had marine biologists in raptures over its faithfulness to the science.…
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After the Decade of Dithering, the Deadly Twenties
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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 seriesIn 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 know whether that is a good idea or not. Surely, something like that appears to…
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Hunt and Anderson discuss climate change
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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 carbon50% 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 of supply chains, and cross-sectional exposure. But, anyway, we’ll see soon enough. Remember exponential growth: