
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy

Blogroll
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- Thaddeus Stevens quotes As I get older, I admire this guy more and more
- Earth Family Alpha Michael Osborne’s blog (former Executive at Austin Energy, now Chairman of the Electric Utility Commission for Austin, Texas)
- The Plastic Pick-Up: Discovering new sources of marine plastic pollution
- All about Sankey diagrams
- 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
- Professor David Draper
- Rasmus Bååth's Research Blog Bayesian statistics and data analysis
- 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
- Harvard's Project Implicit
- Beautiful Weeds of New York City
- Dr James Spall's SPSA
- "Talking Politics" podcast David Runciman, Helen Thompson
- James' Empty Blog
- OOI Data Nuggets OOI Ocean Data Lab: The Data Nuggets
- Mertonian norms
- Survey Methodology, Prof Ron Fricker http://faculty.nps.edu/rdfricke/
- Earle Wilson
- Charlie Kufs' "Stats With Cats" blog “You took Statistics 101. Now what?”
- BioPython A collection of Python tools for quantitative Biology
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
- "Perpetual Ocean" from NASA GSFC
- 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.
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
- 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/
- Ted Dunning
- What If
- "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.
- 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
- Gabriel's staircase
- Flettner Rotor Bruce Yeany introduces the Flettner Rotor and related science
- 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
- Mrooijer's Numbers R 4Us
- 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.”
- Label Noise
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION,
- Tony Seba Solar energy, electric vehicle, energy storage, and business disruption professor and visionary
- GeoEnergy Math Prof Paul Pukite’s Web site devoted to energy derived from geological and geophysical processes and categorized according to its originating source.
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION, reviews Reviews of Cathy O’Neil’s new book
- Team Andrew Weinberg Walking September 8th for the Jimmy Fund!
- 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.
- Dominic Cummings blog Chief advisor to the PM, United Kingdom
- London Review of Books
- Musings on Quantitative Paleoecology Quantitative methods and palaeoenvironments.
- Los Alamos Center for Bayesian Methods
- distributed solar and matching location to need
- "Consider a Flat Pond" Invited talk introducing systems thinking, by Jan Galkowski, at First Parish in Needham, UU, via Zoom
- Giant vertical monopolies for energy have stopped making sense
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.
- 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
- Wally Broecker on climate realism
- Ellenbogen: There is no Such Thing as Wind Turbine Syndrome
- Reanalyses.org
- Bloomberg interactive graph on “What's warming the world''
- SolarLove
- Transitioning to fully renewable energy Professor Saul Griffiths talks to transitioning the customer journey, from a dependency upon fossil fuels to an electrified future
- Climate Change Denying Organizations
- "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.
- "Climate science is setttled enough"
- `The unchained goddess' 1958 Bell Telephone Science Hour broadcast regarding, among other things, climate change.
- 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.
- And Then There's Physics
- David Appell's early climate science
- Nick Bower's "Scared Scientists"
- 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.
- Rabett Run Incisive analysis of climate science versus deliberate distraction
- "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
- On Thomas Edison and Solar Electric Power
- Exxon-Mobil statement on UNFCCC COP21
- HotWhopper: It's excellent. Global warming and climate change. Eavesdropping on the deniosphere, its weird pseudo-science and crazy conspiracy whoppers.
- The Green Plate Effect Eli Rabett’s “The Green Plate Effect”
- Documenting the Climate Deniarati at work
- "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.
- “Ways to [try to] slow the Solar Century''
- Interview with Wally Broecker Interview with Wally Broecker
- World Weather Attribution
- 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?
- Skeptical Science
- Climate Communication Hassol, Somerville, Melillo, and Hussin site communicating climate to the public
- Dessler's 6 minute Greenhouse Effect video
- Agendaists Eli Rabett’s coining of a phrase
- "Lessons of the Little Ice Age" (Farber) From Dan Farber, at LEGAL PLANET
- The Sunlight Economy
- Professor Robert Strom's compendium of resources on climate change Truly excellent
- weather blocking patterns
- “The discovery of global warming'' (American Institute of Physics)
- MIT's Climate Primer
- 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
- James Powell on sampling the climate consensus
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- "A field guide to the climate clowns"
- 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 Irrelevance of Saturation: Why Carbon Dioxide Matters'' (Bart Levenson)
- 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.
- Climate at a glance Current state of the climate, from NOAA
- "Getting to the Energy Future We Want," Dr Steven Chu
Archives
Jan Galkowski
Category Archives: Monte Carlo Statistical Methods
Phase Plane plots of COVID-19 deaths with uncertainties
I. Introduction. It’s time to fulfill the promise made in “Phase plane plots of COVID-19 deaths“, a blog post from 2nd May 2020, and produce the same with uncertainty clouds about the functional trajectories(*). To begin, here are some assumptions … Continue reading
Posted in American Statistical Association, Andrew Harvey, anomaly detection, count data regression, COVID-19, dependent data, dlm package, Durbin and Koopman, dynamic linear models, epidemiology, filtering, forecasting, Kalman filter, LaTeX, model-free forecasting, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, numerical algorithms, numerical linear algebra, population biology, population dynamics, prediction, R, R statistical programming language, regression, statistical learning, stochastic algorithms
Tagged prediction intervals
Leave a comment
Calculating Derivatives from Random Forests
(Comment on prediction intervals for random forests, and links to a paper.) (Edits to repair smudges, 2020-06-28, about 0945 EDT. Closing comment, 2020-06-30, 1450 EDT.) There are lots of ways of learning about mathematical constructs, even about actual machines. One … Continue reading
Posted in bridge to somewhere, Calculus, dependent data, dynamic generalized linear models, dynamical systems, ensemble methods, ensemble models, filtering, forecasting, hierarchical clustering, linear regression, model-free forecasting, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, non-mechanistic modeling, non-parametric model, non-parametric statistics, numerical algorithms, prediction, R statistical programming language, random forests, regression, sampling, splines, statistical learning, statistical series, statistics, time derivatives, time series
Leave a comment
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
1 Comment
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
Leave a comment
A quick note on modeling operational risk from count data
The blog statcompute recently featured a proposal encouraging the use of ordinal models for difficult risk regressions involving count data. This is actually a second installment of a two-part post on this problem, the first dealing with flexibility in count … Continue reading
Posted in American Statistical Association, Bayesian, Bayesian computational methods, count data regression, dichotomising continuous variables, dynamic generalized linear models, Frank Harrell, Frequentist, Generalize Additive Models, generalized linear mixed models, generalized linear models, GLMMs, GLMs, John Kruschke, maximum likelihood, model comparison, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, multivariate statistics, nonlinear, numerical software, numerics, premature categorization, probit regression, statistical regression, statistics
Tagged dichotomising continuous variables, dichotomizing continuous variables, premature categorization, splines
Leave a comment
Repaired R code for Markov spatial simulation of hurricane tracks from historical trajectories
(Slight update, 28th June 2020.) I’m currently studying random walk and diffusion processes and their connections with random fields. I’m interested in this because at the core of dynamic linear models, Kalman filters, and state-space methods there is a random … Continue reading
Posted in American Meteorological Association, American Statistical Association, AMETSOC, Arthur Charpentier, atmosphere, diffusion, diffusion processes, dynamic linear models, dynamical systems, environment, geophysics, hurricanes, Kalman filter, Kerry Emanuel, Lévy flights, Lorenz, Markov chain random fields, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, MCMC, mesh models, meteorological models, meteorology, model-free forecasting, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, numerical analysis, numerical software, oceanography, open data, open source scientific software, physics, random walk processes, random walks, science, spatial statistics, state-space models, statistical dependence, statistics, stochastic algorithms, stochastics, time series
1 Comment
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
Leave a comment
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
Leave a comment
“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
Leave a comment
“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
Leave a comment
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
Leave a comment

