
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy

Blogroll
- Dr James Spall's SPSA
- Gabriel's staircase
- Risk and Well-Being
- 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/
- Dominic Cummings blog Chief advisor to the PM, United Kingdom
- Karl Broman
- Beautiful Weeds of New York City
- All about models
- The Mermaid's Tale A conversation about biological complexity and evolution, and the societal aspects of science
- Earth Family Alpha Michael Osborne’s blog (former Executive at Austin Energy, now Chairman of the Electric Utility Commission for Austin, Texas)
- Subsidies for wind and solar versus subsidies for fossil fuels
- AP Statistics: Sampling, by Michael Porinchak Twin City Schools
- Dollars per BBL: Energy in Transition
- 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.
- Survey Methodology, Prof Ron Fricker http://faculty.nps.edu/rdfricke/
- 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/
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 Keeling Curve: its history History of the Keeling Curve and Charles David Keeling
- SASB Sustainability Accounting Standards Board
- Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation
- Quotes by Nikola Tesla Quotes by Nikola Tesla, including some of others he greatly liked.
- BioPython A collection of Python tools for quantitative Biology
- OOI Data Nuggets OOI Ocean Data Lab: The Data Nuggets
- 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”
- Number Cruncher Politics
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION,
- distributed solar and matching location to need
- Carl Safina's blog One of the wisest on Earth
- 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
- Gavin Simpson
- London Review of Books
- James' Empty Blog
- Leadership lessons from Lao Tzu
- 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.
- Healthy Home Healthy Planet
- International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA)
- Label Noise
- American Statistical Association
- John Kruschke's "Dong Bayesian data analysis" blog Expanding and enhancing John’s book of same title (now in second edition!)
- Harvard's Project Implicit
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
- Fear and Loathing in Data Science Cory Lesmeister’s savage journey to the heart of Big Data
- John Cook's reasons to use Bayesian inference
- 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
- All about Sankey diagrams
- 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
- Ives and Dakos techniques for regime changes in series
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
climate change
- Klaus Lackner (ASU), Silicon Kingdom Holdings (SKH) Capturing CO2 from air at scale
- "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.
- History of discovering Global Warming From the American Institute of Physics.
- Mrooijer's Global Temperature Explorer
- An open letter to Steve Levitt
- “The Irrelevance of Saturation: Why Carbon Dioxide Matters'' (Bart Levenson)
- Tuft's Professor Kenneth Lang on the physical chemistry of the Greenhouse Effect
- 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
- Climate impacts on retail and supply chains
- James Powell on sampling the climate consensus
- 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.
- MIT's Climate Primer
- "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.
- SOLAR PRODUCTION at Westwood Statistical Studios Generation charts for our home in Westwood, MA
- Social Cost of Carbon
- 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.
- Wally Broecker on climate realism
- Spectra Energy exposed
- The Sunlight Economy
- The beach boondoggle Prof Rob Young on how owners of beach property are socializing their risks at costs to all of us, not the least being it seems coastal damage is less than it actually is
- Warming slowdown discussion
- `Who to believe on climate change': Simple checks By Bart Verheggen
- David Appell's early climate science
- On Thomas Edison and Solar Electric Power
- Grid parity map for Solar PV in United States
- "Climate science is setttled enough"
- "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.
- “The discovery of global warming'' (American Institute of Physics)
- The Green Plate Effect Eli Rabett’s “The Green Plate Effect”
- "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
- The Carbon Cycle The Carbon Cycle, monitored by The Carbon Project
- Tamino's Open Mind Open Mind: A statistical look at climate, its science, and at science denial
- The HUMAN-caused greenhouse effect, in under 5 minutes, by Bill Nye
- The Scientific Case for Modern Human-caused Global Warming
- 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
- Thriving on Low Carbon
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- James Hansen and granddaughter Sophie on moving forward with progress on climate
- 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
- And Then There's Physics
- 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.
- Risk and Well-Being
- HotWhopper: It's excellent. Global warming and climate change. Eavesdropping on the deniosphere, its weird pseudo-science and crazy conspiracy whoppers.
- Energy payback period for solar panels Considering everything, how long do solar panels have to operate to offset the energy used to produce them?
- Climate at a glance Current state of the climate, from NOAA
- Climate Change Denying Organizations
- Ricky Rood's “What would happen to climate if we (suddenly) stopped emitting GHGs today?
- Nick Bower's "Scared Scientists"
- Ellenbogen: There is no Such Thing as Wind Turbine Syndrome
- SolarLove
Archives
Jan Galkowski
Category Archives: R
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
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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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On odds of storms, and extreme precipitation
People talk about “thousand year storms”. Rather than being a storm having a recurrence time of once in a thousand years, these are storms which have a 0.001 chance per year of occurring. Storms aren’t the only weather events of … Continue reading
Posted in American Meteorological Association, American Statistical Association, AMETSOC, catastrophe modeling, climate disruption, climate economics, climate education, ecopragmatism, evidence, extreme events, extreme value distribution, flooding, floods, games of chance, global warming, global weirding, insurance, meteorological models, meteorology, R, R statistical programming language, real estate values, risk, Risky Business, riverine flooding, science, Significance
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Macros in R
via Macros in R See also: The gtools package of R which enables these. There’s a description and motivation beginninng on page 11 of an (old: 2001) R News issue. They have been around a long time, but I haven’t … Continue reading
Posted in macros, R, R statistical programming language
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On bag bans and sampling plans
Plastic bag bans are all the rage. It’s not the purpose of this post to take a position on the matter. Before you do, however, I’d recommend checking out this: and especially this: (Note: My lovely wife, Claire, presents this … Continue reading
Posted in bag bans, citizen data, citizen science, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Ecology Action, evidence, Google, Google Earth, Google Maps, goverance, lifestyle changes, microplastics, municipal solid waste, oceans, open data, planning, plastics, politics, pollution, public health, quantitative ecology, R, R statistical programming language, reasonableness, recycling, rhetorical statistics, sampling, sampling networks, statistics, surveys, sustainability
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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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Rushing the +2 degree Celsius boundary
I made a comment on Google+ pertaining to a report of a recent NOAA finding. Enjoy. But remember that COP21 boundary is equivalent to 450 ppm CO2.
Posted in adaptation, AMETSOC, Anthropocene, atmosphere, Bill Nye, bridge to nowhere, carbon dioxide, Carbon Tax, Carbon Worshipers, citizenship, civilization, clean disruption, climate, climate disruption, COP21, corporate litigation on damage from fossil fuel emissions, differential equations, disruption, distributed generation, Donald Trump, ecology, El Nina, El Nino, energy, energy reduction, engineering, environment, environmental law, Epcot, explosive methane, forecasting, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuels, geophysics, global warming, greenhouse gases, greenwashing, Hyper Anthropocene, investment in wind and solar energy, IPCC, local generation, Mark Jacobson, Martyn Plummer, microgrids, Miguel Altieri, philosophy, physical materialism, R, resiliency, Ricky Rood, risk, Sankey diagram
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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
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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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
STUFF IN PROGRESS
It’s a good time to reconnoiter and review the things I have in progress and are planned, both as a teaser, and as a promise. I am currently working the following technical projects, entirely on my personal time outside of … Continue reading
Posted in numerical analysis, planning, R, rationality, reasonableness, state-space models, statistics
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Comprehensive and compact tutorial on Petris’ DLM package in R; with an update about Helske’s KFAS
A blogger named Lalas produced on Quantitative Thoughts a very comprehensive and compact tutorial on the R package dlm by Petris. I use dlm a lot. Unfortunately, Lalas does not give details on how the SVD is used. They do … Continue reading
Posted in Bayes, Bayesian, dynamic linear models, dynamical systems, forecasting, Kalman filter, mathematics, maths, multivariate statistics, numerical software, open source scientific software, prediction, R, Rauch-Tung-Striebel, state-space models, statistics, stochastic algorithms, SVD, time series
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Earth Day, my hope
Posted in carbon dioxide, Carl Sagan, Charles Darwin, citizen science, citizenship, civilization, clean disruption, climate, climate change, climate education, compassion, conservation, Darwin Day, demand-side solutions, ecology, economics, education, efficiency, energy reduction, environment, ethics, forecasting, fossil fuel divestment, geophysics, history, humanism, investing, investment in wind and solar energy, IPCC, mathematics, maths, meteorology, NCAR, NOAA, oceanography, open data, open source scientific software, physics, politics, population biology, Principles of Planetary Climate, privacy, probit regression, R, rationality, Ray Pierrehumbert, reasonableness, reproducible research, risk, science, science education, scientific publishing, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, sociology, the right to know, Unitarian Universalism, UU Humanists, WHOI, wind power
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We are trying. And the bitterest result is to have so-called colleagues align themselves with the Koch brothers
I attended a 350.org meeting tonight. One group A group presenting there called “Fighting Against Natural Gas” applauded themselves for assailing Senator Whitehouse of Rhode Island for his supportive position on natural gas pipelines. Now, I am no friend of … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropocene, astrophysics, Boston Ethical Society, bridge to nowhere, carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide sequestration, Carbon Tax, chemistry, citizenship, climate, climate change, climate education, consumption, decentralized electric power generation, demand-side solutions, ecology, economics, energy reduction, engineering, forecasting, fossil fuel divestment, investment in wind and solar energy, IPCC, JAGS, meteorology, methane, model comparison, NASA, natural gas, NCAR, Neill deGrasse Tyson, oceanography, open data, physics, politics, population biology, Principles of Planetary Climate, Python 3, R, rationality, reasonableness, reproducible research, risk, science, science education, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
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Dynamic Linear Models package, dlmodeler
I’m checking out the dlmodeler package in R for a work project. It is accompanied by textbooks, G. Petris, S. Petrone, P. Campagnoli, Dynamic Linear Models with R, Springer, 2009 and J. Durbin, S. J. Koopman, Time Series Analysis by … Continue reading
Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods and logistic regression
This post could also be subtitled “Residual deviance isn’t the whole story.” My favorite book on logistic regression is by Dr Joseph Hilbe, Logistic Regression Models, CRC Press, 2009, Chapman & Hill. It is a solidly frequentist text, but its … Continue reading
Posted in Bayes, Bayesian, logistic regression, MCMC, notes, R, statistics, stochastic algorithms, stochastic search
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R vs Python: Practical Data Analysis
R vs Python: Practical Data Analysis (Nonlinear Regression).
Posted in Bayes, Bayesian, biology, climate change, ecology, environment, Python 3, R, statistics, Wordpress
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The designers of our climate
The blog … And Then There’s Physics wades deeply into the recent Monckton-Soon-Legates-Briggs paper. And, they conclude, what it is saying is that, conditional upon no feedbacks, equilibrium climate sensitivity (“ECS”) needs to be small. Except that they don’t say … Continue reading
Posted in astrophysics, bridge to nowhere, carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide capture, carbon dioxide sequestration, Carbon Tax, Carl Sagan, citizenship, civilization, climate, climate change, climate education, differential equations, ecology, economics, engineering, environment, ethics, forecasting, fossil fuel divestment, geoengineering, geophysics, humanism, IPCC, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, meteorology, methane, NASA, NCAR, Neill deGrasse Tyson, NOAA, oceanography, open data, open source scientific software, physics, politics, population biology, Principles of Planetary Climate, probabilistic programming, R, rationality, reasonableness, reproducible research, risk, science, science education, scientific publishing, sociology, solar power, statistics, testing, the right to know
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On nested equivalence classes of climate models, ordered by computational complexity
I’m digging into the internals of ABC, for professional and scientific reasons. I’ve linked a great tutorial elsewhere, and argued that this framework, advanced by Wood, and Wilkinson (Robert), and Wilkinson (Darren), and Hartig and colleagues, and Robert and colleagues, … Continue reading
Posted in approximate Bayesian computation, Bayes, Bayesian, biology, ecology, environment, forecasting, geophysics, IPCC, mathematics, maths, MCMC, meteorology, NCAR, NOAA, oceanography, optimization, population biology, Principles of Planetary Climate, probabilistic programming, R, science, stochastic algorithms, stochastic search
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illustrating particle filters and Bayesian fusion using successive location estimates on the unit circle
Introduction Modern treatments of Bayesian integration to obtain posterior densities often use some form of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (“MCMC”), typically Gibbs sampling. Gibbs works well with many Bayesian hierarchical models. The standard problem-solving situation with these is that a … 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

