
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy

Blogroll
- 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
- distributed solar and matching location to need
- The Keeling Curve: its history History of the Keeling Curve and Charles David Keeling
- Brian McGill's Dynamic Ecology blog Quantitative biology with pithy insights regarding applications of statistical methods
- Thaddeus Stevens quotes As I get older, I admire this guy more and more
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION,
- Healthy Home Healthy Planet
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
- Flettner Rotor Bruce Yeany introduces the Flettner Rotor and related science
- Team Andrew Weinberg Walking September 8th for the Jimmy Fund!
- Quotes by Nikola Tesla Quotes by Nikola Tesla, including some of others he greatly liked.
- Brendon Brewer on Overfitting Important and insightful presentation by Brendon Brewer on overfitting
- Peter Congdon's Bayesian statistical modeling Peter Congdon’s collection of links pertaining to his several books on Bayesian modeling
- Fear and Loathing in Data Science Cory Lesmeister’s savage journey to the heart of Big Data
- American Statistical Association
- Giant vertical monopolies for energy have stopped making sense
- GeoEnergy Math Prof Paul Pukite’s Web site devoted to energy derived from geological and geophysical processes and categorized according to its originating source.
- Mrooijer's Numbers R 4Us
- Mertonian norms
- Gabriel's staircase
- 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.
- 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/
- 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/
- ggplot2 and ggfortify Plotting State Space Time Series with ggplot2 and ggfortify
- Survey Methodology, Prof Ron Fricker http://faculty.nps.edu/rdfricke/
- Earth Family Beta MIchael Osborne’s blog on Science and the like
- 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.”
- All about Sankey diagrams
- South Shore Recycling Cooperative Materials management, technical assistance and networking, town advocacy, public outreach
- Ted Dunning
- BioPython A collection of Python tools for quantitative Biology
- Nadler Strategy, LLC, on sustainability Thinking about business, efficient and effective management, and business value
- 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
- Beautiful Weeds of New York City
- "Perpetual Ocean" from NASA GSFC
- London Review of Books
- The Mermaid's Tale A conversation about biological complexity and evolution, and the societal aspects of science
- Leadership lessons from Lao Tzu
- Awkward Botany
- 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.
- SASB Sustainability Accounting Standards Board
- Los Alamos Center for Bayesian Methods
- Label Noise
- 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.
- Number Cruncher Politics
- Dollars per BBL: Energy in Transition
- "Talking Politics" podcast David Runciman, Helen Thompson
- Earle Wilson
- Harvard's Project Implicit
climate change
- David Appell's early climate science
- History of discovering Global Warming From the American Institute of Physics.
- 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.
- Thriving on Low Carbon
- The Sunlight Economy
- Climate Communication Hassol, Somerville, Melillo, and Hussin site communicating climate to the public
- 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.
- 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.
- Risk and Well-Being
- "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.)
- Reanalyses.org
- Simple models of climate change
- Mrooijer's Global Temperature Explorer
- Sir David King David King’s perspective on climate, and the next thousands of years for humanity
- Tell Utilities Solar Won't Be Killed Barry Goldwater, Jr’s campaign to push for solar expansion against monopolistic utilities, as a Republican
- 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
- The Green Plate Effect Eli Rabett’s “The Green Plate Effect”
- 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
- Eli on the spectroscopic basis of atmospheric radiation physical chemistry
- "Getting to the Energy Future We Want," Dr Steven Chu
- 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.
- Spectra Energy exposed
- Warming slowdown discussion
- An open letter to Steve Levitt
- James Powell on sampling the climate consensus
- Earth System Models
- “The Irrelevance of Saturation: Why Carbon Dioxide Matters'' (Bart Levenson)
- Climate at a glance Current state of the climate, from NOAA
- Climate Change Denying Organizations
- Climate model projections versus observations
- SolarLove
- RealClimate
- “Ways to [try to] slow the Solar Century''
- Skeptical Science
- "A field guide to the climate clowns"
- Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature
- 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
- "Lessons of the Little Ice Age" (Farber) From Dan Farber, at LEGAL PLANET
- 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
- The Carbon Cycle The Carbon Cycle, monitored by The Carbon Project
- 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%.
- Sea Change Boston
- Dessler's 6 minute Greenhouse Effect video
- Solar Gardens Community Power
- Wally Broecker on climate realism
- "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.
- Ice and Snow
- Simple box models and climate forcing IMO one of Tamino’s best posts illustrating climate forcing using simple box models
- Nick Bower's "Scared Scientists"
Archives
Jan Galkowski
Category Archives: statistics
What is the Tukey loss function?
Originally from Statistical Odds and Ends, there is a nicely brief summary of the Tukey Loss Function. I’d love to see what this does in various kinds of regression. It may be possible to set up some kind of iterative … Continue reading
Posted in loss functions, optimization, statistics
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a song in praise of data scientist Rebekah Jones
I linked to Rebekah Jones‘ keynote address at the August 2020 Data Science Conference on COVID-19 sponsored by the National Institute for Statistical Science. Below is a song in tribute to her, wishing her well. (h/t Bill McKibben) We’re doing … Continue reading
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Mathematical Society, American Statistical Association, Boston Ethical Society, children as political casualties, Data for Good, data science, geographic, geographic information systems, International Society for Bayesian Statistics, journalism, mathematics, New England Statistical Society, pandemic, Rebekah Jones, Risky Talk, science, Significance, statistical ecology, statistics, the problem of evil, whistleblowing, ``The tide is risin'/And so are we''
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Rationalists, wearing square hats, Think, in square rooms, Looking at the floor, Looking at the ceiling. They confine themselves To right-angled triangles. If they tried rhomboids, Cones, waving lines, ellipses– As, for example, the ellipse of the half- moon– Rationalists … Continue reading
Posted in statistics
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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
“There’s mourning in America”
“We are Republicans and we want Trump defeated.” And the Orange Mango apparently hates this advert. And that’s why it’s here. The Lincoln Project apparently introduced this advert on Twitter with the explanatory text: Since you are awake and trolling … Continue reading
Posted in statistics
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“Seasonality of COVID-19, Other Coronaviruses, and Influenza” (from Radford Neal’s blog)
Thorough review with documentation and technical criticism of claims of COVID-19 seasonality or its lack. Whichever way this comes down, the links are well worth the visit! Will the incidence of COVID-19 decrease in the summer? There is reason to … Continue reading
Simplistic and Dangerous Models
Nice to see Generalized Additive Models used.
“Lockdown WORKS”
Tamino favors LASSO LOESS and piecewise linear models. I favor splines, especially penalized smoothing splines via the R package pspline, using generalized cross validation to set the smoothing parameter. Tamino looks for breaks in the piecewise linear case to check … Continue reading
What happens when time sampling density of a series matches its growth
This is the newly updated map of COVID-19 cases in the United States, updated, presumably, because of the new emphasis upon testing: How do we know this is the recent of recent testing? Look at the map of active cases: … Continue reading
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Statistical Association, anti-intellectualism, anti-science, climate denial, corruption, data science, data visualization, Donald Trump, dump Trump, epidemiology, experimental science, exponential growth, forecasting, Kalman filter, model-free forecasting, nonlinear systems, open data, penalized spline regression, population dynamics, sampling algorithms, statistical ecology, statistical models, statistical regression, statistical series, statistics, sustainability, the right to know, the stack of lies
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“Code for causal inference: Interested in astronomical applications”
via Code for causal inference: Interested in astronomical applications From Professor Ewan Cameron at his Another Astrostatistics Blog.
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Statistical Association, astronomy, astrostatistics, causal inference, causation, counterfactuals, epidemiology, experimental design, experimental science, multivariate statistics, prediction, propensity scoring, quantitative biology, quantitative ecology, reproducible research, rhetorical mathematics, rhetorical science, rhetorical statistics, science, statistical ecology, statistical models, statistical regression, statistics
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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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There’s Big Data, Tiny Data, and now Dead Data
You’ve heard of Big Data. You may have heard of Tiny Data. But now, presented in the Harvard Data Science Review, Professor Steve Stigler presents Dead Data See: S. M. Stigler, “Data have a limited shelf life”, Harvard Data Science … Continue reading
Posted in big data, dead data, statistics, tiny data
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“Tensors in Algebraic Statistics” (Elizabeth Gross)
Professor Elizabeth Gross. Some notes: Segre variety, about (These will be updated as I make progress through the talk.)
Posted in statistics, tensors
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Review of “No … increase of Carbon sequestration from the greening Earth”
(As promised.) Introduction and Abstract This is a review, re-presentation, and report on the August 2019 article, Y. Zhang, C. Song, L. E. Band, G. Sun, (2019), “No proportional increase of terrestrial gross Carbon sequestration from the greening Earth“, Journal … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, afforestation, agriculture, agroecology, algal blooms, American Statistical Association, argoecology, being carbon dioxide, biology, Botany, bridge to somewhere, carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide sequestration, chemistry, citizen science, clear air capture of carbon dioxide, climate, climate data, climate disruption, climate economics, climate mitigation, di-nitrogen oxide, ecocapitalism, ecological disruption, Ecological Society of America, ecomodernism, ecopragmatism, environment, evidence, food, forests, fossil fuels, geophysics, Glen Peters, Global Carbon Project, greenhouse gases, James Hansen, John Holdren, p-value, phytoplankton, pollution, population biology, quantitative biology, resource producitivity, scholarship, science education, significance test, statistics, Steven Chu, sustainability, sustainable landscaping, wishful environmentalism
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“Bayesian replication analysis” (by John Kruschke)
“… the ability to express [hypotheses] as distributions over parameters …” Bayesian estimation supersedes the t-test: (Also by Professor Kruschke.)
“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
A response to a post on RealClimate
(Updated 2342 EDT, 28 June 2019.) This is a response to a post on RealClimate which primarily concerned economist Ross McKitrick’s op-ed in the Financial Post condemning the geophysical community for disregarding Roger Pielke, Jr’s arguments. Pielke, in that link, … Continue reading
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Meteorological Association, American Statistical Association, AMETSOC, Bayesian, climate change, ecology, Ecology Action, environment, evidence, experimental design, Frequentist, global warming, Hyper Anthropocene, machine learning, model comparison, model-free forecasting, multivariate statistics, science, science denier, statistical series, statistics, time series
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Cumulants and the Cornish-Fisher Expansion
“Consider the following.” (Bill Nye the Science Guy) There are random variables drawn from the same kind of probability distribution, but with different parameters for each. In this example, I’ll consider random variables , that is, each drawn from a … Continue reading
What’s good for each subgroup can be bad for the group: Simpson’s
Why? Simpson’s “paradox” or observation … There’s actually nothing odd about this. While interpretation depends upon the semantics of individual measurements, it should be expected that, at times, improving things for the overall group will mean as a matter of … Continue reading
Posted in abstraction, statistics
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California Marine Debris Prevention: Banning Plastic Bags is Not Enough
NOAA has a full page of videos on marine debris and how to prevent it. The state of California has a 2018 plan on preventing marine debris. Here are some highlights. There is a good deal more in the report, … Continue reading
Posted in American Statistical Association, Life Cycle Assessment, life cycle sustainability analysis, policy metrics, public welfare, shop, shorelines, solid waste, solid waste management, South Shore Recycling Cooperative, spatial statistics, statistical series, statistics, supply chains, sustainability, the right to know, wishful environmentalism
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Five Thirty Eight podcast: `Can Statistics solve gerrymandering?`
Great podcast, featuring Professor and geometer Moon Duchin, Nate Silver, and Galen Druke. If the link doesn’t work, listen from here or below: Professor Duchin has written extensively on this: M. Duchin, B. E. Tenner, “Discrete geometry for electoral geography”, … 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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Repeating Bullshit
Yeah, how much was it? And was it different? I mean, not based on how Curry or Tisdale feel, but by the numbers.
A look at an electricity consumption series using SNCDs for clustering
(Slightly amended with code and data link, 12th January 2019.) Prediction of electrical load demand or, in other words, electrical energy consumption is important for the proper operation of electrical grids, at all scales. RTOs and ISOs forecast demand based … Continue reading
Posted in American Statistical Association, consumption, data streams, decentralized electric power generation, dendrogram, divergence measures, efficiency, electricity, electricity markets, energy efficiency, energy utilities, ensembles, evidence, forecasting, grid defection, hierarchical clustering, hydrology, ILSR, information theoretic statistics, local self reliance, Massachusetts, microgrids, NCD, normalized compression divergence, numerical software, open data, prediction, rate of return regulation, Sankey diagram, SNCD, statistical dependence, statistical series, statistics, sustainability, symmetric normalized compression divergence, time series
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Series, symmetrized Normalized Compressed Divergences and their logit transforms
(Major update on 11th January 2019. Minor update on 16th January 2019.) On comparing things The idea of a calculating a distance between series for various purposes has received scholarly attention for quite some time. The most common application is … Continue reading
Posted in Akaike Information Criterion, bridge to somewhere, computation, content-free inference, data science, descriptive statistics, divergence measures, engineering, George Sughihara, information theoretic statistics, likelihood-free, machine learning, mathematics, model comparison, model-free forecasting, multivariate statistics, non-mechanistic modeling, non-parametric statistics, numerical algorithms, statistics, theoretical physics, thermodynamics, time series
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Why Americans and Britons work such long hours
Why Americans and Britons work such long hours.
Posted in business, economics, labor, statistics
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667-per-cm.net, the Podcast: Episode 2, or Probability is Real.
This is the second installment of the Podcast here, hopefully with better sound quality.
Posted in probability, random walks, statistics
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