
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy

Blogroll
- American Statistical Association
- James' Empty Blog
- Musings on Quantitative Paleoecology Quantitative methods and palaeoenvironments.
- "Talking Politics" podcast David Runciman, Helen Thompson
- Comprehensive Guide to Bayes Rule
- GeoEnergy Math Prof Paul Pukite’s Web site devoted to energy derived from geological and geophysical processes and categorized according to its originating source.
- Label Noise
- Mark Berliner's video lecture "Bayesian mechanistic-statistical modeling with examples in geophysical settings"
- Bob Altemeyer on authoritarianism (via Dan Satterfield) The science behind the GOP civil war
- Mertonian norms
- Peter Congdon's Bayesian statistical modeling Peter Congdon’s collection of links pertaining to his several books on Bayesian modeling
- "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.
- Harvard's Project Implicit
- Earth Family Alpha Michael Osborne’s blog (former Executive at Austin Energy, now Chairman of the Electric Utility Commission for Austin, Texas)
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION,
- Los Alamos Center for Bayesian Methods
- Carl Safina's blog One of the wisest on Earth
- The Keeling Curve: its history History of the Keeling Curve and Charles David Keeling
- Tim Harford's “More or Less'' Tim Harford explains – and sometimes debunks – the numbers and statistics used in political debate, the news and everyday life
- All about Sankey diagrams
- AP Statistics: Sampling, by Michael Porinchak Twin City Schools
- distributed solar and matching location to need
- Number Cruncher Politics
- Slice Sampling
- "The Expert"
- Survey Methodology, Prof Ron Fricker http://faculty.nps.edu/rdfricke/
- Gabriel's staircase
- South Shore Recycling Cooperative Materials management, technical assistance and networking, town advocacy, public outreach
- Dr James Spall's SPSA
- Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard on how businesses can help our collective environmental mess Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard set the standard for how a business can mitigate the ravages of capitalism on earth’s environment. At 81 years old, he’s just getting started.
- The Mermaid's Tale A conversation about biological complexity and evolution, and the societal aspects of science
- Awkward Botany
- Healthy Home Healthy Planet
- SASB Sustainability Accounting Standards Board
- John Cook's reasons to use Bayesian inference
- BioPython A collection of Python tools for quantitative Biology
- NCAR AtmosNews
- 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
- OOI Data Nuggets OOI Ocean Data Lab: The Data Nuggets
- John Kruschke's "Dong Bayesian data analysis" blog Expanding and enhancing John’s book of same title (now in second edition!)
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
- Lenny Smith's CHAOS: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION This is a PDF version of Lenny Smith’s book of the same title, also available from Amazon.com
- Prediction vs Forecasting: Knaub “Unfortunately, ‘prediction,’ such as used in model-based survey estimation, is a term that is often subsumed under the term ‘forecasting,’ but here we show why it is important not to confuse these two terms.”
- Gavin Simpson
- Thaddeus Stevens quotes As I get older, I admire this guy more and more
- Brian McGill's Dynamic Ecology blog Quantitative biology with pithy insights regarding applications of statistical methods
- 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
- Dollars per BBL: Energy in Transition
- Karl Broman
- Dominic Cummings blog Chief advisor to the PM, United Kingdom
climate change
- Climate Communication Hassol, Somerville, Melillo, and Hussin site communicating climate to the public
- HotWhopper: It's excellent. Global warming and climate change. Eavesdropping on the deniosphere, its weird pseudo-science and crazy conspiracy whoppers.
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- Thriving on Low Carbon
- Non-linear feedbacks in climate (discussion of Bloch-Johnson, Pierrehumbert, Abbot paper) Discussion of http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/2015GL064240/abstract
- Simple models of climate change
- Rabett Run Incisive analysis of climate science versus deliberate distraction
- Climate Change Denying Organizations
- Ray Pierrehumbert's site related to "Principles of Planetary Climate" THE book on climate science
- Documenting the Climate Deniarati at work
- Nick Bower's "Scared Scientists"
- Professor Robert Strom's compendium of resources on climate change Truly excellent
- 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.
- James Hansen and granddaughter Sophie on moving forward with progress on climate
- Andy Zucker's "Climate Change and Psychology"
- 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%.
- "Warming Slowdown?" (part 2 of 2) The idea of a global warming slowdown or hiatus is critically examined, emphasizing the literature, the datasets, and means and methods for telling such. The second part.
- The HUMAN-caused greenhouse effect, in under 5 minutes, by Bill Nye
- James Powell on sampling the climate consensus
- Climate change: Evidence and causes A project of the UK Royal Society: (1) Answers to key questions, (2) evidence and causes, and (3) a short guide to climate science
- All Models Are Wrong Dr Tamsin Edwards blog about uncertainty in science, and climate science
- "Warming Slowdown?" (part 1 of 2) The idea of a global warming slowdown or hiatus is critically examined, emphasizing the literature, the datasets, and means and methods for telling such. In two parts.
- Wally Broecker on climate realism
- "A field guide to the climate clowns"
- Climate model projections versus observations
- 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.
- The net average effect of a warming climate is increased aridity (Professor Steven Sherwood)
- Skeptical Science
- Interview with Wally Broecker Interview with Wally Broecker
- Tell Utilities Solar Won't Be Killed Barry Goldwater, Jr’s campaign to push for solar expansion against monopolistic utilities, as a Republican
- Risk and Well-Being
- `Who to believe on climate change': Simple checks By Bart Verheggen
- An open letter to Steve Levitt
- Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature
- Warming slowdown discussion
- Social Cost of Carbon
- Transitioning to fully renewable energy Professor Saul Griffiths talks to transitioning the customer journey, from a dependency upon fossil fuels to an electrified future
- And Then There's Physics
- David Appell's early climate science
- Tuft's Professor Kenneth Lang on the physical chemistry of the Greenhouse Effect
- Energy payback period for solar panels Considering everything, how long do solar panels have to operate to offset the energy used to produce them?
- Eli on the spectroscopic basis of atmospheric radiation physical chemistry
- Climate impacts on retail and supply chains
- Model state level energy policy for New Englad Bob Massie’s proposed energy policy for Massachusetts, an admirable model for energy policy anywhere in New England
- Spectra Energy exposed
- 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.
- Anti—Anti-#ClimateEmergency Whether to declare a climate emergency is debatable. But some critics have gone way overboard.
- NOAA Annual Greenhouse Gas Index report The annual assessment by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the radiative forcing from constituent atmospheric greenhouse gases
- weather blocking patterns
- Simple box models and climate forcing IMO one of Tamino’s best posts illustrating climate forcing using simple box models
Archives
Jan Galkowski
Category Archives: Gibbs Sampling
Reanalysis of business visits from deployments of a mobile phone app
Updated, 20th October 2020 This reports a reanalysis of data from the deployment of a mobile phone app, as reported in: M. Yauck, L.-P. Rivest, G. Rothman, “Capture-recapture methods for data on the activation of applications on mobile phones“, Journal … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian computational methods, biology, capture-mark-recapture, capture-recapture, Christian Robert, count data regression, cumulants, diffusion, diffusion processes, Ecological Society of America, ecology, epidemiology, experimental science, field research, Gibbs Sampling, Internet measurement, Jean-Michel Marin, linear regression, mark-recapture, mathematics, maximum likelihood, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, multilist methods, multivariate statistics, non-mechanistic modeling, non-parametric statistics, numerics, open source scientific software, Pierre-Simon Laplace, population biology, population dynamics, quantitative biology, quantitative ecology, R, R statistical programming language, sampling, sampling algorithms, segmented package in R, statistical ecology, statistical models, statistical regression, statistical series, statistics, stepwise approximation, stochastic algorithms, surveys, V. M. R. Muggeo
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Sampling: Rejection, Reservoir, and Slice
An article by Suilou Huang for catatrophe modeler AIR-WorldWide of Boston about rejection sampling in CAT modeling got me thinking about pulling together some notes about sampling algorithms of various kinds. There are, of course, books written about this subject, … Continue reading
Posted in accept-reject methods, American Statistical Association, Bayesian computational methods, catastrophe modeling, data science, diffusion processes, empirical likelihood, Gibbs Sampling, insurance, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, mathematics, Mathematics and Climate Research Network, maths, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, multivariate statistics, numerical algorithms, numerical analysis, numerical software, numerics, percolation theory, Python 3 programming language, R statistical programming language, Radford Neal, sampling, slice sampling, spatial statistics, statistics, stochastic algorithms, stochastic search
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“Grid shading by simulated annealing” [Martyn Plummer]
Source: Grid shading by simulated annealing (or what I did on my holidays), aka “fun with GCHQ job adverts”, by Martyn Plummer, developer of JAGS. Excerpt: I wanted to solve the puzzle but did not want to sit down with … Continue reading
Posted in approximate Bayesian computation, Bayesian, Bayesian inversion, Boltzmann, BUGS, Christian Robert, Gibbs Sampling, JAGS, likelihood-free, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, Martyn Plummer, mathematics, maths, MCMC, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, optimization, probabilistic programming, SPSA, stochastic algorithms, stochastic search
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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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“The Bayesian Second Law of Thermodynamics” (Sean Carroll, and collaborators)
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2015/08/11/the-bayesian-second-law-of-thermodynamics/ See also.
Posted in approximate Bayesian computation, Bayesian, bifurcations, Boltzmann, capricious gods, dynamical systems, ensembles, games of chance, Gibbs Sampling, information theoretic statistics, Josiah Willard Gibbs, mathematics, maths, physics, probability, rationality, reasonableness, science, statistics, stochastic algorithms, stochastics, thermodynamics, Wordpress
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“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?”
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
example of Bayesian inversion
This is based upon my solution of Exercise 2.3, page 18, R. Christensen, W. Johnson, A. Branscum, T. E. Hanson, Bayesian Ideas and Data Analysis, Chapman & Hall, 2011. The purpose is to show how information latent in a set … Continue reading
Bayesian deconvolution of stick lengths
Consider trying to determine the length of a straight stick. Instead of the measurement errors being clustered about zero, suppose the errors are known to be always positive, that is, no measurement ever underestimates the length of the stick. Such … Continue reading
The dp-means algorithm of Kulis and Jordan in R and Python
dp-means algorithm. Think k-means but with the number of clusters calculated. By John Myles White, in R. (Github link off that page.) By Scott Hendrickson, in Python. (Github link off that page.)
Posted in Bayesian, Gibbs Sampling, JAGS, mathematics, maths, R, statistics, stochastic algorithms, stochastic search
Tagged dp-means
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Blind Bayesian recovery of components of residential solid waste tonnage from totals data
This is a sketch of how maths and statistics can do something called blind source separation, meaning to estimate the components of data given only their totals. Here, I use Bayesian techniques for the purpose, sometimes called Bayesian inversion, using … Continue reading
“The joy and martyrdom of trying to be a Bayesian”
Bayesians have all been there. Some of us don’t depend upon producing publications to assure our pay, so we less have the pressure of pleasing peer reviewers. Nonetheless, it’s all reacting to “What the hell are you doing? I don’t … Continue reading
How fast is JAGS?
How fast is JAGS?.
The zero-crossings trick for JAGS: Finding roots stochastically
BUGS has a “zeros trick” (Lund, Jackson, Best, Thomas, Spiegelhalter, 2013, pages 204-206; see also an online illustration) for specifying a new distribution which is not in the standard set. The idea is to couple an invented-for-the-moment Poisson density to … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian, BUGS, education, forecasting, Gibbs Sampling, JAGS, mathematics, MCMC, probabilistic programming, R, statistics, stochastic search
Tagged error-in-variables problem, optimization, zeros trick
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HadCRUT4 version “HadCRUT.4.2.0.0” available as .RData R workspace or image
I’m happy to announce that I have made available the HadCRUT4 observational ensemble data as an .RData image for use with R. These were downloaded from the MetOffice Hadley Observations Web site. Detailed documentation is available on this page, with the … Continue reading

