
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy

Blogroll
- South Shore Recycling Cooperative Materials management, technical assistance and networking, town advocacy, public outreach
- AP Statistics: Sampling, by Michael Porinchak Twin City Schools
- Label Noise
- Fear and Loathing in Data Science Cory Lesmeister’s savage journey to the heart of Big Data
- GeoEnergy Math Prof Paul Pukite’s Web site devoted to energy derived from geological and geophysical processes and categorized according to its originating source.
- Tony Seba Solar energy, electric vehicle, energy storage, and business disruption professor and visionary
- "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.
- American Statistical Association
- Leadership lessons from Lao Tzu
- Brendon Brewer on Overfitting Important and insightful presentation by Brendon Brewer on overfitting
- Slice Sampling
- Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation
- 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
- All about Sankey diagrams
- Number Cruncher Politics
- OOI Data Nuggets OOI Ocean Data Lab: The Data Nuggets
- Comprehensive Guide to Bayes Rule
- 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
- "Perpetual Ocean" from NASA GSFC
- Beautiful Weeds of New York City
- All about models
- The Keeling Curve: its history History of the Keeling Curve and Charles David Keeling
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
- Gavin Simpson
- 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.
- Giant vertical monopolies for energy have stopped making sense
- distributed solar and matching location to need
- Flettner Rotor Bruce Yeany introduces the Flettner Rotor and related science
- "The Expert"
- John Cook's reasons to use Bayesian inference
- Bob Altemeyer on authoritarianism (via Dan Satterfield) The science behind the GOP civil war
- 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.
- The Alliance for Securing Democracy dashboard
- Nadler Strategy, LLC, on sustainability Thinking about business, efficient and effective management, and business value
- Awkward Botany
- Healthy Home Healthy Planet
- 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
- International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA)
- Survey Methodology, Prof Ron Fricker http://faculty.nps.edu/rdfricke/
- James' Empty Blog
- Professor David Draper
- Dominic Cummings blog Chief advisor to the PM, United Kingdom
- Musings on Quantitative Paleoecology Quantitative methods and palaeoenvironments.
- Brian McGill's Dynamic Ecology blog Quantitative biology with pithy insights regarding applications of statistical methods
- Charlie Kufs' "Stats With Cats" blog “You took Statistics 101. Now what?”
- Quotes by Nikola Tesla Quotes by Nikola Tesla, including some of others he greatly liked.
- Mertonian norms
- Carl Safina's blog One of the wisest on Earth
- 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”
- 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.
climate change
- 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.
- 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?
- `Who to believe on climate change': Simple checks By Bart Verheggen
- MIT's Climate Primer
- And Then There's Physics
- "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.
- Non-linear feedbacks in climate (discussion of Bloch-Johnson, Pierrehumbert, Abbot paper) Discussion of http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/2015GL064240/abstract
- James Hansen and granddaughter Sophie on moving forward with progress on climate
- "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.)
- The net average effect of a warming climate is increased aridity (Professor Steven Sherwood)
- "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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Sea Change Boston
- Mrooijer's Global Temperature Explorer
- Bloomberg interactive graph on “What's warming the world''
- “The discovery of global warming'' (American Institute of Physics)
- "Lessons of the Little Ice Age" (Farber) From Dan Farber, at LEGAL PLANET
- Spectra Energy exposed
- Exxon-Mobil statement on UNFCCC COP21
- SolarLove
- Skeptical Science
- Équiterre Equiterre helps build a social movement by encouraging individuals, organizations and governments to make ecological and equitable choices, in a spirit of solidarity.
- Klaus Lackner (ASU), Silicon Kingdom Holdings (SKH) Capturing CO2 from air at scale
- Earth System Models
- 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
- Eli on the spectroscopic basis of atmospheric radiation physical chemistry
- "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.
- `The unchained goddess' 1958 Bell Telephone Science Hour broadcast regarding, among other things, climate change.
- 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%.
- Risk and Well-Being
- Tamino's Open Mind Open Mind: A statistical look at climate, its science, and at science denial
- Ray Pierrehumbert's site related to "Principles of Planetary Climate" THE book on climate science
- The Carbon Cycle The Carbon Cycle, monitored by The Carbon Project
- Andy Zucker's "Climate Change and Psychology"
- RealClimate
- Climate Change Reports By John and Mel Harte
- Simple models of climate change
- Reanalyses.org
- Anti—Anti-#ClimateEmergency Whether to declare a climate emergency is debatable. But some critics have gone way overboard.
- Updating the Climate Science: What path is the real world following? From Professors Makiko Sato & James Hansen of Columbia University
- Solar Gardens Community Power
- 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
- David Appell's early climate science
- Climate Change Denying Organizations
- “Ways to [try to] slow the Solar Century''
- World Weather Attribution
- Grid parity map for Solar PV in United States
- Transitioning to fully renewable energy Professor Saul Griffiths talks to transitioning the customer journey, from a dependency upon fossil fuels to an electrified future
Archives
Jan Galkowski
Category Archives: numerics
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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Numbers, feelings, and imagination
“But numbers don’t make noises. They don’t have colours. You can’t taste them or touch them. They don’t smell of anything. They don’t have feelings. They don’t make you feel. And they make for pretty boring stories.” That’s from here, … Continue reading
Posted in mathematics, maths, numbers, numerics, oceanography
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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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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
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Fast means, fast moments (originally devised 1984)
(Updated 4th December 2018.) There are many devices available for making numerical calculations fast. Modern datasets and computational problems apply stylized architectures, and use approaches to problems including special algorithms for just calculating dominant eigenvectors or using non-classical statistical mechanisms … Continue reading
When linear systems can’t be solved by linear means
Linear systems of equations and their solution form the cornerstone of much Engineering and Science. Linear algebra is a paragon of Mathematics in the sense that its theory is what mathematicians try to emulate when they develop theory for many … Continue reading
“All models are wrong. Some models are useful.” — George Box
(Image courtesy of the Damien Garcia.) As a statistician and quant, I’ve thought hard about that oft-cited Boxism. I’m not sure I agree. It’s not that there is such a thing as a perfect model, or correct model, whatever in … Continue reading
Posted in abstraction, American Association for the Advancement of Science, astronomy, astrophysics, mathematics, model-free forecasting, numerics, perceptions, physical materialism, physics, rationality, reason, reasonableness, science, spatial statistics, splines, statistics, the right to know, theoretical physics, time series
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“Holy crap – an actual book!”
You’ll find links to Cathy O’Neil’s important book in the Blogroll here, as well as a link to reviews of it. I have not read it yet. While I have pre-ordered it, it’s not available. I have read the reviews, … Continue reading
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, Buckminster Fuller, business, citizen science, citizenship, civilization, complex systems, confirmation bias, data science, data streams, deep recurrent neural networks, denial, economics, education, engineering, ethics, evidence, Internet, investing, life purpose, machine learning, mathematical publishing, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, moral leadership, multivariate statistics, numerical software, numerics, obfuscating data, organizational failures, politics, population biology, prediction, prediction markets, privacy, quantitative biology, quantitative ecology, rationality, reason, reasonableness, rhetoric, risk, Schnabel census, smart data, sociology, statistical dependence, statistics, the right to be and act stupid, the right to know, the value of financial assets, transparency, UU Humanists
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Bayesian blocks via PELT in R
Notice of Update I have made some changes to the Bayesian Blocks code linked from here, on 24th November 2021. Also I note the coming and going of a “BayesianBlocks” package on CRAN which contained an optinterval function also based upon … Continue reading
Posted in American Statistical Association, AMETSOC, anomaly detection, astrophysics, Cauchy distribution, changepoint detection, engineering, geophysics, multivariate statistics, numerical analysis, numerical software, numerics, oceanography, population biology, population dynamics, Python 3, quantitative biology, quantitative ecology, R, Scargle, spatial statistics, square wave approximation, statistics, stepwise approximation, time series, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
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data.table
R provides a helpful data structure called the “data frame” that gives the user an intuitive way to organize, view, and access data. Many of the functions that you would us… Source: Intro to The data.table Package
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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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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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

