
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy

Blogroll
- Earth Family Beta MIchael Osborne’s blog on Science and the like
- Ives and Dakos techniques for regime changes in series
- 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.”
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
- Bob Altemeyer on authoritarianism (via Dan Satterfield) The science behind the GOP civil war
- GeoEnergy Math Prof Paul Pukite’s Web site devoted to energy derived from geological and geophysical processes and categorized according to its originating source.
- Mrooijer's Numbers R 4Us
- The Keeling Curve: its history History of the Keeling Curve and Charles David Keeling
- Healthy Home Healthy Planet
- Pat's blog While it is described as “The mathematical (and other) thoughts of a (now retired) math teacher”, this is false humility, as it chronicles the present and past life and times of mathematicians in their context. Recommended.
- Survey Methodology, Prof Ron Fricker http://faculty.nps.edu/rdfricke/
- Gavin Simpson
- 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.
- Earle Wilson
- BioPython A collection of Python tools for quantitative Biology
- Karl Broman
- Team Andrew Weinberg Walking September 8th for the Jimmy Fund!
- All about models
- 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.
- Earth Family Alpha Michael Osborne’s blog (former Executive at Austin Energy, now Chairman of the Electric Utility Commission for Austin, Texas)
- Slice Sampling
- Gabriel's staircase
- Los Alamos Center for Bayesian Methods
- Dollars per BBL: Energy in Transition
- Giant vertical monopolies for energy have stopped making sense
- 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.
- Fear and Loathing in Data Science Cory Lesmeister’s savage journey to the heart of Big Data
- Label Noise
- Dr James Spall's SPSA
- American Statistical Association
- All about Sankey diagrams
- The Mermaid's Tale A conversation about biological complexity and evolution, and the societal aspects of science
- "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.
- 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/
- Comprehensive Guide to Bayes Rule
- "Consider a Flat Pond" Invited talk introducing systems thinking, by Jan Galkowski, at First Parish in Needham, UU, via Zoom
- Leadership lessons from Lao Tzu
- The Plastic Pick-Up: Discovering new sources of marine plastic pollution
- Subsidies for wind and solar versus subsidies for fossil fuels
- 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/
- All about ENSO, and lunar tides (Paul Pukite) Historically, ENSO has been explained in terms of winds. But recently — and Dr Paul Pukite has insisted upon this for a long time — the oscillation of ENSO has been explained as a large-scale slosh due to lunar tidal forcing.
- 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”
- James' Empty Blog
- John Cook's reasons to use Bayesian inference
- The Alliance for Securing Democracy dashboard
- 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/.
- Nadler Strategy, LLC, on sustainability Thinking about business, efficient and effective management, and business value
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION,
- John Kruschke's "Dong Bayesian data analysis" blog Expanding and enhancing John’s book of same title (now in second edition!)
- Logistic curves in market disruption From DollarsPerBBL, about logistic or S-curves as models of product take-up rather than exponentials, with notes on EVs
climate change
- 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.
- MIT's Climate Primer
- "Climate science is setttled enough"
- weather blocking patterns
- Ice and Snow
- Bloomberg interactive graph on “What's warming the world''
- Climate model projections versus observations
- CLIMATE ADAM Previously from the Science news staff at the podcast of Nature (“Nature Podcast”), the journal, now on YouTube, encouraging climate action through climate comedy.
- The Green Plate Effect Eli Rabett’s “The Green Plate Effect”
- RealClimate
- `The unchained goddess' 1958 Bell Telephone Science Hour broadcast regarding, among other things, climate change.
- The HUMAN-caused greenhouse effect, in under 5 minutes, by Bill Nye
- 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.
- Mrooijer's Global Temperature Explorer
- Klaus Lackner (ASU), Silicon Kingdom Holdings (SKH) Capturing CO2 from air at scale
- `Who to believe on climate change': Simple checks By Bart Verheggen
- SolarLove
- "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.
- Simple models of climate change
- And Then There's Physics
- Tell Utilities Solar Won't Be Killed Barry Goldwater, Jr’s campaign to push for solar expansion against monopolistic utilities, as a Republican
- History of discovering Global Warming From the American Institute of Physics.
- Social Cost of Carbon
- David Appell's early climate science
- Warming slowdown discussion
- Simple box models and climate forcing IMO one of Tamino’s best posts illustrating climate forcing using simple box models
- Updating the Climate Science: What path is the real world following? From Professors Makiko Sato & James Hansen of Columbia University
- Professor Robert Strom's compendium of resources on climate change Truly excellent
- An open letter to Steve Levitt
- The Scientific Case for Modern Human-caused Global Warming
- Documenting the Climate Deniarati at work
- 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
- The Sunlight Economy
- "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.)
- Climate impacts on retail and supply chains
- "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.
- Exxon-Mobil statement on UNFCCC COP21
- "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.
- Non-linear feedbacks in climate (discussion of Bloch-Johnson, Pierrehumbert, Abbot paper) Discussion of http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/2015GL064240/abstract
- Climate Communication Hassol, Somerville, Melillo, and Hussin site communicating climate to the public
- Climate at a glance Current state of the climate, from NOAA
- Ellenbogen: There is no Such Thing as Wind Turbine Syndrome
- “Ways to [try to] slow the Solar Century''
- On Thomas Edison and Solar Electric Power
- Tamino's Open Mind Open Mind: A statistical look at climate, its science, and at science denial
- Energy payback period for solar panels Considering everything, how long do solar panels have to operate to offset the energy used to produce them?
- "Lessons of the Little Ice Age" (Farber) From Dan Farber, at LEGAL PLANET
- "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.
- Paul Beckwith Professor Beckwith is, in my book, one of the most insightful and analytical observers on climate I know. I highly recommend his blog, and his other informational products.
- Dessler's 6 minute Greenhouse Effect video
Archives
Jan Galkowski
Category Archives: information theoretic statistics
Complexity vs Simplicity in Geophysics
Really interesting mechanistic reductionism illustrating what it means to explain phenomena scientifically. It’s all about the maths.
Posted in abstraction, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Meteorological Association, American Statistical Association, Azimuth Project, complex systems, control theory, differential equations, dynamical systems, eigenanalysis, information theoretic statistics, mathematics, Mathematics and Climate Research Network, mechanistic models, nonlinear systems, Paul Pukite, spectra, spectral methods, spectroscopy, theoretical physics, wave equations, WHT
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Procrustes tangent distance is better than SNCD
I’ve written two posts here on using a Symmetrized Normalized Compression Divergence or SNCD for comparing time series. One introduced the SNCD and described its relationship to compression distance, and the other applied the SNCD to clustering days at a … Continue reading
Posted in data science, dependent data, descriptive statistics, divergence measures, hydrology, Ian Dryden, information theoretic statistics, J.T.Kent, Kanti Mardia, non-parametric statistics, normalized compression divergence, quantitative ecology, R statistical programming language, spatial statistics, statistical series, time series
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A look at an electricity consumption series using SNCDs for clustering
(Slightly amended with code and data link, 12th January 2019.) Prediction of electrical load demand or, in other words, electrical energy consumption is important for the proper operation of electrical grids, at all scales. RTOs and ISOs forecast demand based … Continue reading
Posted in American Statistical Association, consumption, data streams, decentralized electric power generation, dendrogram, divergence measures, efficiency, electricity, electricity markets, energy efficiency, energy utilities, ensembles, evidence, forecasting, grid defection, hierarchical clustering, hydrology, ILSR, information theoretic statistics, local self reliance, Massachusetts, microgrids, NCD, normalized compression divergence, numerical software, open data, prediction, rate of return regulation, Sankey diagram, SNCD, statistical dependence, statistical series, statistics, sustainability, symmetric normalized compression divergence, time series
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Series, symmetrized Normalized Compressed Divergences and their logit transforms
(Major update on 11th January 2019. Minor update on 16th January 2019.) On comparing things The idea of a calculating a distance between series for various purposes has received scholarly attention for quite some time. The most common application is … Continue reading
Posted in Akaike Information Criterion, bridge to somewhere, computation, content-free inference, data science, descriptive statistics, divergence measures, engineering, George Sughihara, information theoretic statistics, likelihood-free, machine learning, mathematics, model comparison, model-free forecasting, multivariate statistics, non-mechanistic modeling, non-parametric statistics, numerical algorithms, statistics, theoretical physics, thermodynamics, time series
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The Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma, and the paradoxical power of random linear operators. Part 1.
Updated, 2018-12-04 I’ll be discussing the ramifications of: William B. Johnson and Joram Lindenstrauss, “Extensions of Lipschitz mappings into a Hilbert space, Contemporary Mathematics, 26:189–206, 1984. for several posts here. Some introduction and links to proofs and explications will be … Continue reading
Posted in clustering, data science, dimension reduction, information theoretic statistics, Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma, k-NN, Locality Sensitive Hashing, mathematics, maths, multivariate statistics, non-parametric model, numerical algorithms, numerical linear algebra, point pattern analysis, random projections, recommender systems, science, stochastic algorithms, stochastics, subspace projection methods
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Why smooth?
I’ve encountered a number of blog posts this week which seem not to understand the Bias-Variance Tradeoff in regard to Mean-Squared-Error. These arose in connection with smoothing splines, which I was studying in connection with multivariate adaptive regression splines, that … Continue reading
Posted in Akaike Information Criterion, American Statistical Association, Antarctica, carbon dioxide, climate change, denial, global warming, information theoretic statistics, likelihood-free, multivariate adaptive regression splines, non-parametric model, science denier, smoothing, splines, statistical dependence
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Polls, Political Forecasting, and the Plight of Five Thirty Eight
On 17th October 2016 AT 7:30 p.m., Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com wrote about how, as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s polling numbers got better, it was more difficult for FiveThirtyEight‘s models to justify increasing her probability of winning, although … Continue reading
Posted in abstraction, American Statistical Association, anemic data, citizen science, citizenship, civilization, economics, education, forecasting, information theoretic statistics, mathematics, maths, politics, prediction markets, sociology, the right to know, theoretical physics, thermodynamics
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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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Six cases of models
The previous post included an attempt to explain land surface temperatures as estimated by the BEST project using a dynamic linear model including regressions on both quarterly CO2 concentrations and ocean heat content. The idea was to check the explanatory … Continue reading
Posted in AMETSOC, anemic data, Anthropocene, astrophysics, Bayesian, Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, BEST, carbon dioxide, climate, climate change, climate data, climate disruption, climate models, dlm package, dynamic linear models, dynamical systems, environment, fossil fuels, geophysics, Giovanni Petris, global warming, greenhouse gases, Hyper Anthropocene, information theoretic statistics, maths, maximum likelihood, meteorology, model comparison, numerical software, Patrizia Campagnoli, Rauch-Tung-Striebel, Sonia Petrone, state-space models, stochastic algorithms, stochastic search, SVD, 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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Gavin Simpson updates his temperature analysis
See the very interesting discussion at his blog, From the bottom of the heap. It would be nice to see some information theoretic measures on these results, though.
Posted in AMETSOC, Anthropocene, astrophysics, Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, carbon dioxide, changepoint detection, climate, climate change, climate data, climate disruption, climate models, ecology, environment, evidence, Gavin Simpson, Generalize Additive Models, geophysics, global warming, HadCRUT4, hiatus, Hyper Anthropocene, information theoretic statistics, Kalman filter, maths, meteorology, numerical analysis, R, rationality, reasonableness, splines, time series
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HadCRUT4 and GISTEMP series filtered and estimated with simple RTS model
Happy Vernal Equinox! This post has been updated today with some of the equations which correspond to the models. An assessment of whether or not there was a meaningful slowdown or “hiatus” in global warming, was recently discussed by Tamino … Continue reading
Posted in AMETSOC, anemic data, Bayesian, boosting, bridge to somewhere, cat1, changepoint detection, climate, climate change, climate data, climate disruption, climate models, complex systems, computation, data science, dynamical systems, geophysics, George Sughihara, global warming, hiatus, information theoretic statistics, machine learning, maths, meteorology, MIchael Mann, multivariate statistics, physics, prediction, Principles of Planetary Climate, rationality, reasonableness, regime shifts, sea level rise, time series
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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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dynamic linear model applied to sea-level-rise anomalies
I spent much of the data working up a function for level+trend dynamic linear modeling based upon the dlm package by Petris, Petrone, and Campagnoli, while trying some calculations and code for regime shift detection. One of the test cases … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian, citizen science, climate change, climate data, climate disruption, dynamic linear models, floods, forecasting, Frequentist, global warming, icesheets, information theoretic statistics, Kalman filter, meteorology, open data, sea level rise, state-space models, statistics, time series
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Southern New England Meteorology Conference, 24th October 2015
I attending the 2015 edition of the Southern New England Meteorology Conference in Milton, MA, near the Blue Hill, and its Blue Hill Climatological Observatory, of which I am a member as we as of the American Meteorological Society. I … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropocene, capricious gods, climate, Dan Satterfield, dynamical systems, ensembles, ENSO, environment, floods, forecasting, geophysics, Hyper Anthropocene, information theoretic statistics, mesh models, meteorology, model comparison, NCAR, NOAA, nor'easters, oceanography, probability, science, spatial statistics, state-space models, statistics, stochastic algorithms, stochastic search, stochastics, time series
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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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“Cauchy Distribution: Evil or Angel?” (from Xian)
Cauchy Distribution: Evil or Angel?. From Professor Christian Robert.
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
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
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“… making a big assumption …”
“That’s making a big assumption.” (This post is a follow-on from an earlier one.) In the colloquial, the phrase means basing an argument on a precondition which is unusual or atypical or offends common sense. When applied to scientific hypotheses, … Continue reading

