
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy

Blogroll
- Giant vertical monopolies for energy have stopped making sense
- 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
- Gavin Simpson
- Label Noise
- 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.
- Charlie Kufs' "Stats With Cats" blog “You took Statistics 101. Now what?”
- All about Sankey diagrams
- John Kruschke's "Dong Bayesian data analysis" blog Expanding and enhancing John’s book of same title (now in second edition!)
- 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”
- Beautiful Weeds of New York City
- Subsidies for wind and solar versus subsidies for fossil fuels
- The Alliance for Securing Democracy dashboard
- 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.
- Musings on Quantitative Paleoecology Quantitative methods and palaeoenvironments.
- James' Empty Blog
- Survey Methodology, Prof Ron Fricker http://faculty.nps.edu/rdfricke/
- distributed solar and matching location to need
- "Talking Politics" podcast David Runciman, Helen Thompson
- Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation
- 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
- The Keeling Curve: its history History of the Keeling Curve and Charles David Keeling
- 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
- London Review of Books
- 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/.
- 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.
- Harvard's Project Implicit
- Earth Family Alpha Michael Osborne’s blog (former Executive at Austin Energy, now Chairman of the Electric Utility Commission for Austin, Texas)
- American Statistical Association
- Nadler Strategy, LLC, on sustainability Thinking about business, efficient and effective management, and business value
- Fear and Loathing in Data Science Cory Lesmeister’s savage journey to the heart of Big Data
- Peter Congdon's Bayesian statistical modeling Peter Congdon’s collection of links pertaining to his several books on Bayesian modeling
- Ted Dunning
- Tony Seba Solar energy, electric vehicle, energy storage, and business disruption professor and visionary
- Healthy Home Healthy Planet
- All about models
- International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA)
- Los Alamos Center for Bayesian Methods
- 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.”
- "Perpetual Ocean" from NASA GSFC
- Comprehensive Guide to Bayes Rule
- Professor David Draper
- SASB Sustainability Accounting Standards Board
- Ives and Dakos techniques for regime changes in series
- Mark Berliner's video lecture "Bayesian mechanistic-statistical modeling with examples in geophysical settings"
- BioPython A collection of Python tools for quantitative Biology
- Dominic Cummings blog Chief advisor to the PM, United Kingdom
- 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/
- Brian McGill's Dynamic Ecology blog Quantitative biology with pithy insights regarding applications of statistical methods
climate change
- Climate Communication Hassol, Somerville, Melillo, and Hussin site communicating climate to the public
- 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.
- "Climate science is setttled enough"
- Professor Robert Strom's compendium of resources on climate change Truly excellent
- Équiterre Equiterre helps build a social movement by encouraging individuals, organizations and governments to make ecological and equitable choices, in a spirit of solidarity.
- RealClimate
- 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
- Ice and Snow
- Mrooijer's Global Temperature Explorer
- Sea Change Boston
- Skeptical Science
- Simple box models and climate forcing IMO one of Tamino’s best posts illustrating climate forcing using simple box models
- Klaus Lackner (ASU), Silicon Kingdom Holdings (SKH) Capturing CO2 from air at scale
- Warming slowdown discussion
- "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 Irrelevance of Saturation: Why Carbon Dioxide Matters'' (Bart Levenson)
- Ray Pierrehumbert's site related to "Principles of Planetary Climate" THE book on climate science
- Eli on the spectroscopic basis of atmospheric radiation physical chemistry
- Rabett Run Incisive analysis of climate science versus deliberate distraction
- "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.
- 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 unchained goddess' 1958 Bell Telephone Science Hour broadcast regarding, among other things, climate change.
- MIT's Climate Primer
- Climate at a glance Current state of the climate, from NOAA
- Climate Change Reports By John and Mel Harte
- "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.
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- "Lessons of the Little Ice Age" (Farber) From Dan Farber, at LEGAL PLANET
- All Models Are Wrong Dr Tamsin Edwards blog about uncertainty in science, and climate science
- ATTP summarizes all that stuff about Committed Warming from AND THEN THERE’S PHYSICS
- Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature
- "A field guide to the climate clowns"
- The Scientific Case for Modern Human-caused Global Warming
- Interview with Wally Broecker Interview with Wally Broecker
- Solar Gardens Community Power
- Risk and Well-Being
- 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.
- World Weather Attribution
- "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.
- 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.
- Ricky Rood's “What would happen to climate if we (suddenly) stopped emitting GHGs today?
- Updating the Climate Science: What path is the real world following? From Professors Makiko Sato & James Hansen of Columbia University
- Simple models of 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.
- Bloomberg interactive graph on “What's warming the world''
- Tuft's Professor Kenneth Lang on the physical chemistry of the Greenhouse Effect
- James Hansen and granddaughter Sophie on moving forward with progress on climate
- 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.
- Wind sled Wind sled: A zero carbon way of exploring ice sheets
- 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%.
Archives
Jan Galkowski
Category Archives: sampling
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
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COVID-19 statistics, a caveat : Sources of data matter
There are a number of sources of COVID-19-related demographics, cases, deaths, numbers testing positive, numbers recovered, and numbers testing negative available. Many of these are not consistent with one another. One could hope at least rates would be consistent, but … Continue reading
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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“Ten Fatal Flaws in Data Analysis” (Charles Kufs)
Professor Kufs has a fun book, Stats with Cats, and a blog. He also has a blog post tiled “Ten Fatal Flaws in Data Analysis” which, in general, I like. But the presentation has some shortcomings, too, which I note … Continue reading
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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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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Senn’s `… never having to say you are certain’ guest post from Mayo’s blog
via S. Senn: Being a statistician means never having to say you are certain (Guest Post) See also: E. Cai’s blog post “Applied Statistics Lesson of the Day – The Matched Pairs Experimental Design”, from February 2014 A. Deaton, N. … Continue reading
Posted in abstraction, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Statistical Association, cancer research, data science, ecology, experimental design, generalized linear mixed models, generalized linear models, Mathematics and Climate Research Network, medicine, sampling, statistics, the right to know
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Eli on “Tom [Karl]’s trick and experimental design“
A very fine post at Eli’s blog for students of statistics, meteorology, and climate (like myself) titled: Tom’s trick and experimental design Excerpt: This and the graph from Menne at the top shows that Karl’s trick is working. Although we … Continue reading
Posted in American Meteorological Association, American Statistical Association, AMETSOC, anomaly detection, climate, climate change, climate data, data science, evidence, experimental design, generalized linear mixed models, GISTEMP, GLMMs, global warming, model comparison, model-free forecasting, reblog, sampling, sampling networks
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“Bigger Isn’t Always Better When It Comes to Data”: Barry Nussbaum
The President’s Corner in the May 2017 issue of Amstat News, the monthly newsletter of the American Statistical Association (“ASA”), features the interesting exposition by environmental statistician and President of the ASA, Barry Nussbaum, called “Bigger isn’t always better when … Continue reading
David Spiegelhalter on `how to spot a dodgy statistic’
In this political season, it’s useful to brush up on rhetorical skills, particularly ones involving numbers and statistics, or what John Allen Paulos called numeracy. Professor David Spiegelhalter has written a guide to some of these tricks. Read the whole … Continue reading
Posted in abstraction, anemic data, Bayes, Bayesian, chance, citizenship, civilization, corruption, Daniel Kahneman, disingenuity, Donald Trump, education, games of chance, ignorance, maths, moral leadership, obfuscating data, open data, perceptions, politics, rationality, reason, reasonableness, rhetoric, risk, sampling, science, sociology, statistics, 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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“Catching long tail distribution” (Ted Dunning)
One of the best presentations on what can happen if someone takes a naive approach to network data. It also highlights what is, to my mind, the greatly underappreciated t-distribution, which is typically only used in connection with frequentist Student … Continue reading
Going down to the Southern Ocean, by Earle Wilson (on the Scripps R/V Roger Revelle)
(Click on picture to see a larger image, and use your browser Back button to return to reading.) Getting steady data from the Earth’s oceans demands commitment and not a little courage. I could never do what these oceanographers do, … Continue reading
Posted in Alison M Macdonald, anemic data, Antarctica, climate data, complex systems, Earle Wilson, Emily Shuckburgh, engineering, environment, fluid dynamics, geophysics, marine biology, NOAA, oceanic eddies, oceanography, open data, Principles of Planetary Climate, sampling, science, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, thermohaline circulation, waves, WHOI, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
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Ah, Hypergeometric!
(“Ah, Hypergeometric!” To be said with the same resignation and acceptance as in “I’ll burn my books–Ah, Mephistopheles!” from Faust.)😉 Dr John Cook, eminent all ’round statistician (with a specialty in biostatistics) and statistical consultant, took up a comment I … Continue reading

