
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy

Blogroll
- Earth Family Alpha Michael Osborne’s blog (former Executive at Austin Energy, now Chairman of the Electric Utility Commission for Austin, Texas)
- Flettner Rotor Bruce Yeany introduces the Flettner Rotor and related science
- John Kruschke's "Dong Bayesian data analysis" blog Expanding and enhancing John’s book of same title (now in second edition!)
- Number Cruncher Politics
- Nadler Strategy, LLC, on sustainability Thinking about business, efficient and effective management, and business value
- 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
- Dr James Spall's SPSA
- Rasmus Bååth's Research Blog Bayesian statistics and data analysis
- Subsidies for wind and solar versus subsidies for fossil fuels
- South Shore Recycling Cooperative Materials management, technical assistance and networking, town advocacy, public outreach
- Thaddeus Stevens quotes As I get older, I admire this guy more and more
- Earth Family Beta MIchael Osborne’s blog on Science and the like
- 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.
- Slice Sampling
- 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
- London Review of Books
- 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.
- GeoEnergy Math Prof Paul Pukite’s Web site devoted to energy derived from geological and geophysical processes and categorized according to its originating source.
- Quotes by Nikola Tesla Quotes by Nikola Tesla, including some of others he greatly liked.
- Survey Methodology, Prof Ron Fricker http://faculty.nps.edu/rdfricke/
- Mertonian norms
- AP Statistics: Sampling, by Michael Porinchak Twin City Schools
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
- 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”
- Tony Seba Solar energy, electric vehicle, energy storage, and business disruption professor and visionary
- "Perpetual Ocean" from NASA GSFC
- Ted Dunning
- Healthy Home Healthy Planet
- 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
- Leadership lessons from Lao Tzu
- John Cook's reasons to use Bayesian inference
- "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.
- Musings on Quantitative Paleoecology Quantitative methods and palaeoenvironments.
- The Mermaid's Tale A conversation about biological complexity and evolution, and the societal aspects of science
- ggplot2 and ggfortify Plotting State Space Time Series with ggplot2 and ggfortify
- "The Expert"
- 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.”
- Comprehensive Guide to Bayes Rule
- Why "naive Bayes" is not Bayesian Explains why the so-called “naive Bayes” classifier is not Bayesian. The setup is okay, but estimating probabilities by doing relative frequencies instead of using Dirichlet conjugate priors or integration strays from The Path.
- Brendon Brewer on Overfitting Important and insightful presentation by Brendon Brewer on overfitting
- Bob Altemeyer on authoritarianism (via Dan Satterfield) The science behind the GOP civil war
- International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA)
- Carl Safina's blog One of the wisest on Earth
- Risk and Well-Being
- 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.
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
- Gavin Simpson
- distributed solar and matching location to need
- Beautiful Weeds of New York City
- Earle Wilson
climate change
- 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.
- Climate model projections versus observations
- Dessler's 6 minute Greenhouse Effect video
- 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.
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- Anti—Anti-#ClimateEmergency Whether to declare a climate emergency is debatable. But some critics have gone way overboard.
- History of discovering Global Warming From the American Institute of Physics.
- 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.
- Agendaists Eli Rabett’s coining of a phrase
- Rabett Run Incisive analysis of climate science versus deliberate distraction
- "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.
- And Then There's Physics
- All Models Are Wrong Dr Tamsin Edwards blog about uncertainty in science, and climate science
- "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.
- 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.
- "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.
- Nick Bower's "Scared Scientists"
- Reanalyses.org
- Updating the Climate Science: What path is the real world following? From Professors Makiko Sato & James Hansen of Columbia University
- “The Irrelevance of Saturation: Why Carbon Dioxide Matters'' (Bart Levenson)
- Climate Change Reports By John and Mel Harte
- SOLAR PRODUCTION at Westwood Statistical Studios Generation charts for our home in Westwood, MA
- `The unchained goddess' 1958 Bell Telephone Science Hour broadcast regarding, among other things, climate change.
- World Weather Attribution
- 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%.
- Climate at a glance Current state of the climate, from NOAA
- Sir David King David King’s perspective on climate, and the next thousands of years for humanity
- MIT's Climate Primer
- Eli on the spectroscopic basis of atmospheric radiation physical chemistry
- 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.
- "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.)
- `Who to believe on climate change': Simple checks By Bart Verheggen
- Tuft's Professor Kenneth Lang on the physical chemistry of the Greenhouse Effect
- Klaus Lackner (ASU), Silicon Kingdom Holdings (SKH) Capturing CO2 from air at scale
- James Powell on sampling the climate consensus
- David Appell's early climate science
- Grid parity map for Solar PV in United States
- Exxon-Mobil statement on UNFCCC COP21
- "Mighty Microgrids" Webinar This is a Webinar on YouTube about Microgrids from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), featuring New York State and Minnesota
- Energy payback period for solar panels Considering everything, how long do solar panels have to operate to offset the energy used to produce them?
- Sea Change Boston
- weather blocking patterns
- Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature
- ATTP summarizes all that stuff about Committed Warming from AND THEN THERE’S PHYSICS
- SolarLove
- 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.
- Transitioning to fully renewable energy Professor Saul Griffiths talks to transitioning the customer journey, from a dependency upon fossil fuels to an electrified future
- Solar Gardens Community Power
- Skeptical Science
- Social Cost of Carbon
Archives
Jan Galkowski
Category Archives: Markov Chain Monte Carlo
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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Less evidence for a global warming hiatus, and urging more use of Bayesian model averaging in climate science
(This post has been significantly updated midday 15th February 2018.) I’ve written about the supposed global warming hiatus of 2001-2014 before: “‘Overestimated global warming over the past 20 years’ (Fyfe, Gillett, Zwiers, 2013)”, 28 August 2013 “Warming Slowdown?”, Azimuth, Part … Continue reading
Posted in American Statistical Association, Andrew Parnell, anomaly detection, Anthropocene, Bayesian, Bayesian model averaging, Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, BEST, climate change, David Spiegelhalter, dependent data, Dublin, GISTEMP, global warming, Grant Foster, HadCRUT4, hiatus, Hyper Anthropocene, JAGS, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, Martyn Plummer, Mathematics and Climate Research Network, MCMC, model-free forecasting, Niamh Cahill, Significance, statistics, Stefan Rahmstorf, Tamino
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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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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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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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“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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