
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy

Blogroll
- NCAR AtmosNews
- Busting Myths About Heat Pumps Heat pumps are perhaps the most efficient heating and cooling systems available. Recent literature distributed by utilities hawking natural gas and other sources use performance figures from heat pumps as they were available 15 years ago. See today’s.
- Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation
- Mrooijer's Numbers R 4Us
- Gabriel's staircase
- Charlie Kufs' "Stats With Cats" blog “You took Statistics 101. Now what?”
- Subsidies for wind and solar versus subsidies for fossil fuels
- Awkward Botany
- Carl Safina's blog One of the wisest on Earth
- International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA)
- Ives and Dakos techniques for regime changes in series
- Darren Wilkinson's introduction to ABC Darren Wilkinson’s introduction to approximate Bayesian computation (“ABC”). See also his post about summary statistics for ABC https://darrenjw.wordpress.com/2013/09/01/summary-stats-for-abc/
- AP Statistics: Sampling, by Michael Porinchak Twin City Schools
- London Review of Books
- Healthy Home Healthy Planet
- Survey Methodology, Prof Ron Fricker http://faculty.nps.edu/rdfricke/
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
- Fear and Loathing in Data Science Cory Lesmeister’s savage journey to the heart of Big Data
- Bob Altemeyer on authoritarianism (via Dan Satterfield) The science behind the GOP civil war
- South Shore Recycling Cooperative Materials management, technical assistance and networking, town advocacy, public outreach
- "Perpetual Ocean" from NASA GSFC
- Gavin Simpson
- What If
- In Monte Carlo We Trust The statistics blog of Matt Asher, actually called the “Probability and Statistics Blog”, but his subtitle is much more appealing. Asher has a Manifesto at http://www.statisticsblog.com/manifesto/.
- Earth Family Alpha Michael Osborne’s blog (former Executive at Austin Energy, now Chairman of the Electric Utility Commission for Austin, Texas)
- Tony Seba Solar energy, electric vehicle, energy storage, and business disruption professor and visionary
- John Kruschke's "Dong Bayesian data analysis" blog Expanding and enhancing John’s book of same title (now in second edition!)
- The Plastic Pick-Up: Discovering new sources of marine plastic pollution
- James' Empty Blog
- distributed solar and matching location to need
- Mark Berliner's video lecture "Bayesian mechanistic-statistical modeling with examples in geophysical settings"
- Earth Family Beta MIchael Osborne’s blog on Science and the like
- Dominic Cummings blog Chief advisor to the PM, United Kingdom
- Leadership lessons from Lao Tzu
- Why It’s So Freaking Hard To Make A Good COVID-19 Model Five Thirty Eight’s take on why pandemic modeling is so difficult
- The Alliance for Securing Democracy dashboard
- "Impacts of Green New Deal energy plans on grid stability, costs, jobs, health, and climate in 143 countries" (Jacobson, Delucchi, Cameron, et al) Global warming, air pollution, and energy insecurity are three of the greatest problems facing humanity. To address these problems, we develop Green New Deal energy roadmaps for 143 countries.
- Label Noise
- "Talking Politics" podcast David Runciman, Helen Thompson
- Dollars per BBL: Energy in Transition
- Risk and Well-Being
- Musings on Quantitative Paleoecology Quantitative methods and palaeoenvironments.
- Peter Congdon's Bayesian statistical modeling Peter Congdon’s collection of links pertaining to his several books on Bayesian modeling
- Simon Wood's must-read paper on dynamic modeling of complex systems I highlighted Professor Wood’s paper in https://hypergeometric.wordpress.com/2014/12/26/struggling-with-problems-already-attacked/
- Number Cruncher Politics
- Earle Wilson
- Flettner Rotor Bruce Yeany introduces the Flettner Rotor and related science
- Mike Bloomberg, 2020 He can get progress on climate done, has the means and experts to counter the Trump and Republican digital disinformation machine, and has the experience, knowledge, and depth of experience to achieve and unify.
- Hermann Scheer Hermann Scheer was a visionary, a major guy, who thought deep thoughts about energy, and its implications for humanity’s relationship with physical reality
- Higgs from AIR describing NAO and EA Stephanie Higgs from AIR Worldwide gives a nice description of NAO and EA in the context of discussing “The Geographic Impact of Climate Signals on European Winter Storms”
climate change
- “The Irrelevance of Saturation: Why Carbon Dioxide Matters'' (Bart Levenson)
- The Green Plate Effect Eli Rabett’s “The Green Plate Effect”
- The Scientific Case for Modern Human-caused Global Warming
- Anti—Anti-#ClimateEmergency Whether to declare a climate emergency is debatable. But some critics have gone way overboard.
- The Sunlight Economy
- Skeptical Science
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- Reanalyses.org
- Dessler's 6 minute Greenhouse Effect video
- World Weather Attribution
- Ellenbogen: There is no Such Thing as Wind Turbine Syndrome
- AIP's history of global warming science: impacts The American Institute of Physics has a fine history of the science of climate change. This link summarizes the history of impacts of climate change.
- `The unchained goddess' 1958 Bell Telephone Science Hour broadcast regarding, among other things, climate change.
- “The discovery of global warming'' (American Institute of Physics)
- Spectra Energy exposed
- "Betting strategies on fluctuations in the transient response of greenhouse warming" By Risbey, Lewandowsky, Hunter, Monselesan: Betting against climate change on durations of 15+ years is no longer a rational proposition.
- ATTP summarizes all that stuff about Committed Warming from AND THEN THERE’S PHYSICS
- Professor Robert Strom's compendium of resources on climate change Truly excellent
- Agendaists Eli Rabett’s coining of a phrase
- James Powell on sampling the climate consensus
- Climate Change Denying Organizations
- Simple models of climate change
- Documenting the Climate Deniarati at work
- The HUMAN-caused greenhouse effect, in under 5 minutes, by Bill Nye
- Energy payback period for solar panels Considering everything, how long do solar panels have to operate to offset the energy used to produce them?
- Risk and Well-Being
- HotWhopper: It's excellent. Global warming and climate change. Eavesdropping on the deniosphere, its weird pseudo-science and crazy conspiracy whoppers.
- "When Did Global Warming Stop" Doc Snow’s treatment of the denier claim that there’s been no warming for the most recent N years. (See http://hubpages.com/@doc-snow for more on him.)
- US$165/tonne CO2: Sweden Sweden has a Carbon Dioxide tax of US$165 per tonne at present. CO2 tax was imposed in 1991. GDP has grown 60%.
- The Keeling Curve The first, and one of the best programs for creating a spatially significant long term time series of atmospheric concentrations of CO2. Started amongst great obstacles by one, smart determined guy, Charles David Keeling.
- Warming slowdown discussion
- History of discovering Global Warming From the American Institute of Physics.
- SolarLove
- An open letter to Steve Levitt
- RealClimate
- Transitioning to fully renewable energy Professor Saul Griffiths talks to transitioning the customer journey, from a dependency upon fossil fuels to an electrified future
- MIT's Climate Primer
- Steve Easterbrook's excellent climate blog: See his "The Internet: Saving Civilization or Trashing the Planet?" for example Heavy on data and computation, Easterbrook is a CS prof at UToronto, but is clearly familiar with climate science. I like his “The Internet: Saving Civilization or Trashing the Planet” very much.
- Eli on the spectroscopic basis of atmospheric radiation physical chemistry
- Isaac Held's blog In the spirit of Ray Pierrehumbert’s “big ideas come from small models” in his textbook, PRINCIPLES OF PLANETARY CLIMATE, Dr Held presents quantitative essays regarding one feature or another of the Earth’s climate and weather system.
- Exxon-Mobil statement on UNFCCC COP21
- Mathematics and Climate Research Network The Mathematics and Climate Research Network (MCRN) engages mathematicians to collaborating on the cryosphere, conceptual model validation, data assimilation, the electric grid, food systems, nonsmooth systems, paleoclimate, resilience, tipping points.
- Ice and Snow
- Climate Change: A health emergency … New England Journal of Medicine Caren G. Solomon, M.D., M.P.H., and Regina C. LaRocque, M.D., M.P.H., January 17, 2019 N Engl J Med 2019; 380:209-211 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1817067
- David Appell's early climate science
- Sea Change Boston
- The great Michael Osborne's latest opinions Michael Osborne is a genius operative and champion of solar energy. I have learned never to disregard ANYTHING he says. He is mentor of Karl Ragabo, and the genius instigator of the Texas renewable energy miracle.
- Ray Pierrehumbert's site related to "Principles of Planetary Climate" THE book on climate science
- Non-linear feedbacks in climate (discussion of Bloch-Johnson, Pierrehumbert, Abbot paper) Discussion of http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/2015GL064240/abstract
- The beach boondoggle Prof Rob Young on how owners of beach property are socializing their risks at costs to all of us, not the least being it seems coastal damage is less than it actually is
Archives
Jan Galkowski
Category Archives: Bayes
Oldie and Goodie: `Testing a point Null Hypothesis: The irreconcilability of p-values and evidence’
A blog post by Professor Christian Robert mentioned a paper by Professors James Berger and Tom Sellke, which I downloaded several years back but never got around to reading. J. O. Berger, T. M. Sellke, “Testing a point Null Hypothesis: … Continue reading
Posted in American Statistical Association, Bayes, Bayesian, p-value
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cdetools package for R: Dalmasso, et al [updated]
Just hit the “arXiv streets”: N. Dalmasso, T. Pospisil, A. B. Lee, R. Izbicki, P. E. Freeman, A. I. Malz, “Conditional Density Estimation Tools in Python and R with applications to photometric redshifts and likelihood-free cosmological inference”, arXiv.org > astro-ph … Continue reading
perceptions of likelihood
That’s from this Github repository, maintained by Zoni Nation, having this description. The original data are from a study by Sherman Kent at the U.S. CIA, and is quoted in at least once outside source discussing the problem. In addition … Continue reading
Merry Newtonmas tomorrow! On finding the area of the Batman Shape using Monte Carlo integration
It’s Newtonmas 2017 tomorrow! What better way to celebrate than talk about integration! The Batman Shape (sometimes called the Batman Curve, somewhat erroneously, I think) looks like this: You can find details about it at Wolfram MathWorld, including its area … Continue reading
Posted in Bayes, Calculus, Markov Chain Monte Carlo
Tagged Batman Curve, Batman Shape, James Schloss, Monte Carlo integration, slice sampling
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David Spiegelhalter on `how to spot a dodgy statistic’
In this political season, it’s useful to brush up on rhetorical skills, particularly ones involving numbers and statistics, or what John Allen Paulos called numeracy. Professor David Spiegelhalter has written a guide to some of these tricks. Read the whole … Continue reading
Posted in abstraction, anemic data, Bayes, Bayesian, chance, citizenship, civilization, corruption, Daniel Kahneman, disingenuity, Donald Trump, education, games of chance, ignorance, maths, moral leadership, obfuscating data, open data, perceptions, politics, rationality, reason, reasonableness, rhetoric, risk, sampling, science, sociology, statistics, the right to know
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Newt Gingrich and Van Jones. Right on.
It’s the thing. And it addresses how media and people forget about the actual statistics, and focus on the White Hot Bright Light. A study by Gelman, Fagan, and Kiss A study by Freyer A counterpoint to the Freyer study … Continue reading
Posted in American Statistical Association, Bayes, Bayesian, citizen science, criminal justice, Daniel Kahneman, ethics, evidence, fear uncertainty and doubt, humanism, Lives Matter, logistic regression, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, MCMC, organizational failures, population biology, rationality, reasonableness, risk, statistics, Susan Jacoby, the right to know
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On Smart Data
One of the things I find surprising, if not astonishing, is that in the rush to embrace Big Data, a lot of learning and statistical technique has been left apparently discarded along the way. I’m hardly the first to point … Continue reading
Posted in Akaike Information Criterion, Bayes, Bayesian, Bayesian inversion, big data, bigmemory package for R, changepoint detection, data science, data streams, dlm package, dynamic generalized linear models, dynamic linear models, dynamical systems, Generalize Additive Models, generalized linear models, information theoretic statistics, Kalman filter, linear algebra, logistic regression, machine learning, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, maximum likelihood, MCMC, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, multivariate statistics, numerical analysis, numerical software, numerics, quantitative biology, quantitative ecology, rationality, reasonableness, sampling, smart data, state-space models, statistical dependence, statistics, the right to know, time series
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Cory Lesmeister’s treatment of Simson’s Paradox (at “Fear and Loathing in Data Science”)
(Updated 2016-05-08, to provide reference for plateaus of ML functions in vicinity of MLE.) Simpson’s Paradox is one of those phenomena of data which really give Statistics a substance and a role, beyond the roles it inherits from, say, theoretical … Continue reading
Posted in Akaike Information Criterion, approximate Bayesian computation, Bayes, Bayesian, evidence, Frequentist, games of chance, information theoretic statistics, Kalman filter, likelihood-free, mathematics, maths, maximum likelihood, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, probabilistic programming, rationality, Rauch-Tung-Striebel, Simpson's Paradox, state-space models, statistical dependence, statistics, stochastics
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“Lucky d20” (by Tamino, with my reblogging comments)
Careful consideration to really basic things like this is, for me, incredibly refreshing, and helps with the self-discipline needed to deal with real-world problems, those often being messy and having distracting entanglements. A couple of thoughts: I think the mechanism … Continue reading
p-values and hypothesis tests: the Bayesian(s) rule
The American Statistical Association of which I am a longtime member issued an important statement today which will hopefully move statistical practice in engineering and especially in the sciences away from the misleading practice of using p-values and hypothesis tests. … Continue reading
Posted in approximate Bayesian computation, arXiv, Bayes, Bayesian, Bayesian inversion, bollocks, Christian Robert, climate, complex systems, data science, Frequentist, information theoretic statistics, likelihood-free, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, MCMC, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, population biology, rationality, reasonableness, science, scientific publishing, statistical dependence, statistics, stochastics, Student t distribution
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high dimension Metropolis-Hastings algorithms
If attempting to simulate from a multivariate standard normal distribution in a large dimension, when starting from the mode of the target, i.e., its mean γ, leaving the mode γis extremely unlikely, given the huge drop between the value of the density at the mode γ and at likely realisations Continue reading
Posted in Bayes, Bayesian, Bayesian inversion, boosting, chance, Christian Robert, computation, ensembles, Gibbs Sampling, James Spall, Jerome Friedman, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, mathematics, maths, MCMC, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, multivariate statistics, numerical software, numerics, optimization, reasonableness, Robert Schapire, SPSA, state-space models, statistics, stochastic algorithms, stochastic search, stochastics, Yoav Freund
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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
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R and “big data”
On 2nd November 2015, Wes McKinney, the developer of the highly useful Python pandas module (and other things, including books), wrote an amusing blog post, “The problem with the data science language wars“. I by no means disagree with him. … Continue reading
On differential localization of tumors using relative concentrations of ctDNA. Part 2.
Part 1 of this series introduced the idea of ctDNA and its use for detecting cancers or their resurgence, and proposed a scheme whereby relative concentrations of ctDNA at two or more sites after controlled disturbance might be used to … Continue reading
Deep Recurrent Learning Networks
(Also known to statisticians as deep exponential families.) Large scale deep learning Four easy lessons on Deep Learning from Google
Posted in Bayes, Bayesian, neural networks, optimization
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Comprehensive and compact tutorial on Petris’ DLM package in R; with an update about Helske’s KFAS
A blogger named Lalas produced on Quantitative Thoughts a very comprehensive and compact tutorial on the R package dlm by Petris. I use dlm a lot. Unfortunately, Lalas does not give details on how the SVD is used. They do … Continue reading
Posted in Bayes, Bayesian, dynamic linear models, dynamical systems, forecasting, Kalman filter, mathematics, maths, multivariate statistics, numerical software, open source scientific software, prediction, R, Rauch-Tung-Striebel, state-space models, statistics, stochastic algorithms, SVD, time series
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“Cauchy Distribution: Evil or Angel?” (from Xian)
Cauchy Distribution: Evil or Angel?. From Professor Christian Robert.
“… the most patronizing start to an answer I have ever received …”
Professor Christian Robert tries to help out a student of MCMC on Cross Validated and earns the comment that his help had “the most patronizing start to an answer I have ever received“. I learned a new term: primitivus petitor.
“A vignette on Metropolis” (Christian Robert)
This is a very welcome addition by a master of Bayesian computation, providing a great, brief answer for many of my colleagues who ask, “What’s this MCMC thing about anyway?”
“Unbiased Bayes for Big Data: Path of partial posteriors” (Christian Robert)
Unbiased Bayes for Big Data: Path of partial posteriors.
Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods and logistic regression
This post could also be subtitled “Residual deviance isn’t the whole story.” My favorite book on logistic regression is by Dr Joseph Hilbe, Logistic Regression Models, CRC Press, 2009, Chapman & Hill. It is a solidly frequentist text, but its … Continue reading
Posted in Bayes, Bayesian, logistic regression, MCMC, notes, R, statistics, stochastic algorithms, stochastic search
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Bayesian change-point analysis for global temperatures, 1850-2010
Professor Peter Congdon reports on two Bayesian models for global temperature shifts in his textbook, Applied Bayesian Modelling, as “Example 6.12: Global temperatures, 1850-2010”, on pages 252-253. A direct link is available online. The first is apparently original with Congdon, … Continue reading
“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
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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
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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
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 Alan Turing
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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
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