
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy

Blogroll
- Bob Altemeyer on authoritarianism (via Dan Satterfield) The science behind the GOP civil war
- Nadler Strategy, LLC, on sustainability Thinking about business, efficient and effective management, and business value
- All about models
- Awkward Botany
- Slice Sampling
- 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/
- "Talking Politics" podcast David Runciman, Helen Thompson
- "Perpetual Ocean" from NASA GSFC
- John Cook's reasons to use Bayesian inference
- 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
- John Kruschke's "Dong Bayesian data analysis" blog Expanding and enhancing John’s book of same title (now in second edition!)
- Comprehensive Guide to Bayes Rule
- 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
- Brendon Brewer on Overfitting Important and insightful presentation by Brendon Brewer on overfitting
- "The Expert"
- Tony Seba Solar energy, electric vehicle, energy storage, and business disruption professor and visionary
- 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.
- GeoEnergy Math Prof Paul Pukite’s Web site devoted to energy derived from geological and geophysical processes and categorized according to its originating source.
- Mark Berliner's video lecture "Bayesian mechanistic-statistical modeling with examples in geophysical settings"
- Earth Family Beta MIchael Osborne’s blog on Science and the like
- James' Empty Blog
- 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.
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION, reviews Reviews of Cathy O’Neil’s new book
- Charlie Kufs' "Stats With Cats" blog “You took Statistics 101. Now what?”
- 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
- Giant vertical monopolies for energy have stopped making sense
- 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.
- 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.
- distributed solar and matching location to need
- Leadership lessons from Lao Tzu
- Dr James Spall's SPSA
- Beautiful Weeds of New York City
- 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.
- OOI Data Nuggets OOI Ocean Data Lab: The Data Nuggets
- All about Sankey diagrams
- Earle Wilson
- London Review of Books
- Earth Family Alpha Michael Osborne’s blog (former Executive at Austin Energy, now Chairman of the Electric Utility Commission for Austin, Texas)
- Los Alamos Center for Bayesian Methods
- Survey Methodology, Prof Ron Fricker http://faculty.nps.edu/rdfricke/
- Karl Broman
- The Alliance for Securing Democracy dashboard
- Thaddeus Stevens quotes As I get older, I admire this guy more and more
- Rasmus Bååth's Research Blog Bayesian statistics and data analysis
- The Mermaid's Tale A conversation about biological complexity and evolution, and the societal aspects of 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
- Risk and Well-Being
- The Keeling Curve: its history History of the Keeling Curve and Charles David Keeling
- American Statistical Association
climate change
- `The unchained goddess' 1958 Bell Telephone Science Hour broadcast regarding, among other things, climate change.
- "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.
- Skeptical Science
- Bloomberg interactive graph on “What's warming the world''
- Tamino's Open Mind Open Mind: A statistical look at climate, its science, and at science denial
- The Sunlight Economy
- Dessler's 6 minute Greenhouse Effect video
- SolarLove
- Sea Change Boston
- Earth System Models
- On Thomas Edison and Solar Electric Power
- Klaus Lackner (ASU), Silicon Kingdom Holdings (SKH) Capturing CO2 from air at scale
- Risk and Well-Being
- “Ways to [try to] slow the Solar Century''
- Simple box models and climate forcing IMO one of Tamino’s best posts illustrating climate forcing using simple box models
- 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.
- Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature
- The Green Plate Effect Eli Rabett’s “The Green Plate Effect”
- 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.
- Ray Pierrehumbert's site related to "Principles of Planetary Climate" THE book on climate science
- Spectra Energy exposed
- Social Cost of Carbon
- Nick Bower's "Scared Scientists"
- Anti—Anti-#ClimateEmergency Whether to declare a climate emergency is debatable. But some critics have gone way overboard.
- Interview with Wally Broecker Interview with Wally Broecker
- Tell Utilities Solar Won't Be Killed Barry Goldwater, Jr’s campaign to push for solar expansion against monopolistic utilities, as a Republican
- "Lessons of the Little Ice Age" (Farber) From Dan Farber, at LEGAL PLANET
- The Scientific Case for Modern Human-caused Global Warming
- Warming slowdown discussion
- Exxon-Mobil statement on UNFCCC COP21
- Ricky Rood's “What would happen to climate if we (suddenly) stopped emitting GHGs today?
- HotWhopper: It's excellent. Global warming and climate change. Eavesdropping on the deniosphere, its weird pseudo-science and crazy conspiracy whoppers.
- Climate Communication Hassol, Somerville, Melillo, and Hussin site communicating climate to the public
- "Climate science is setttled enough"
- Eli on the spectroscopic basis of atmospheric radiation physical chemistry
- Solar Gardens Community Power
- Agendaists Eli Rabett’s coining of a phrase
- 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.
- Climate impacts on retail and supply chains
- The Carbon Cycle The Carbon Cycle, monitored by The Carbon Project
- Climate Change Reports By John and Mel Harte
- History of discovering Global Warming From the American Institute of Physics.
- Wind sled Wind sled: A zero carbon way of exploring ice sheets
- Mrooijer's Global Temperature Explorer
- Équiterre Equiterre helps build a social movement by encouraging individuals, organizations and governments to make ecological and equitable choices, in a spirit of solidarity.
- Climate model projections versus observations
- "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 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.
- Andy Zucker's "Climate Change and Psychology"
- Climate Change Denying Organizations
Archives
Jan Galkowski
Category Archives: stochastic algorithms
“Unbiased Bayes for Big Data: Path of partial posteriors” (Christian Robert)
Unbiased Bayes for Big Data: Path of partial posteriors.
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
3 Comments
Bayesian change-point analysis for global temperatures, 1850-2010
Professor Peter Congdon reports on two Bayesian models for global temperature shifts in his textbook, Applied Bayesian Modelling, as “Example 6.12: Global temperatures, 1850-2010”, on pages 252-253. A direct link is available online. The first is apparently original with Congdon, … Continue reading
Christian Robert on the amazing Gibbs sampler
Professor Christian Robert remarks on the amazing Gibbs sampler. Implicitly he’s also underscoring the power of properly done Bayesian computational analysis. For here we have a problem with a posterior distribution having two strong modes, so a point estimate, like … Continue reading
Christian Robert on Alan Turing
Alan Turing Institute. See Professor Robert’s earlier post on Turing, too.
Posted in Bayes, Bayesian, citizenship, education, ethics, history, humanism, mathematics, maths, politics, rationality, reasonableness, statistics, stochastic algorithms, stochastic search, the right to know, Wordpress
Tagged Alan Turing
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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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“[W]e want to model the process as we would simulate it.”
Professor Darren Wilkinson offers a pithy insight on how to go about constructing statistical models, notably hierarchical ones: “… we want to model the process as we would simulate it ….” This appears in his blog post One-way ANOVA with … Continue reading
Posted in approximate Bayesian computation, Bayes, Bayesian, biology, ecology, engineering, forecasting, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, model comparison, optimization, population biology, probabilistic programming, rationality, reasonableness, risk, science, science education, sociology, statistics, stochastic algorithms
Tagged ANOVA
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struggling with problems already partly solved by others
Climate modelers and models see as their frontier the problem of dealing with spontaneous dynamics in systems such as atmosphere or ocean which are not directly forced by boundary conditions such as radiative forcing due to increased greenhouse gas (“GHG”) … Continue reading
Posted in approximate Bayesian computation, Bayes, Bayesian, biology, climate, climate education, differential equations, ecology, engineering, environment, geophysics, IPCC, mathematics, mathematics education, meteorology, model comparison, NCAR, NOAA, oceanography, physics, population biology, probabilistic programming, rationality, reasonableness, risk, science, science education, statistics, 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 inference works even in a chaotic or deterministic world
Professor John Geweke, in a Comment on an article by Professor Mark Berliner a bit back (1992), shows how Bayesian inference continues to be a means for expressing subjective uncertainty even in a scheme where there are no stochastics but … Continue reading
Understanding mechanisms in climate over short periods and in local regions
This is interesting, because it shows how any particular observational history of Earth is one election of a large number of possible futures. This is exactly the same point made by Slava Kharin in his 2008 tutorial lecture “Statistical concepts … Continue reading
Posted in carbon dioxide, climate, climate education, differential equations, ecology, energy, environment, forecasting, geophysics, IPCC, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, meteorology, NCAR, NOAA, oceanography, physics, rationality, reasonableness, science, statistics, stochastic algorithms
2 Comments
“Can we trust climate models?”
J. C. Hargreaves, J. D. Annan, “Can we trust climate models?”, WIREs Climate Change 2014, 5:435–440. doi: 10.1002/wcc.288. See also D. A. Stainforth, T. Aina, C. Christensen, M. Collins, N. Faull, D. J. Frame, J. A. Kettleborough, S. Knight, 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
Brendon Brewer on “Hard Integrals”
Hard Integrals.
Posted in Bayesian, mathematics, maths, statistics, stochastic algorithms
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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
singingbanana does “The Lorenz Machine”
On the power of mathematics, and why 55:45 versus 50:50 matters.
Posted in Bayesian, engineering, mathematics, maths, rationality, reasonableness, risk, stochastic algorithms, stochastic search
Tagged code breaking
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“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?.
Comment on “Timescales for detecting a significant acceleration in sea level rise” by Haigh, et al
Amended, 1st May 2014. The lead author, Dr Ivan Haigh, and I have had a very friendly discussion this paper and its context in detail. Now that I understand the context, and especially the atrocious maths of the Houston, Dean, … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian, climate, forecasting, geophysics, mathematics, maths, meteorology, physics, rationality, science, statistics, stochastic algorithms
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Comment on “How urban anonymity disappears when all data is tracked”, an article in the NY Times
The New York Times has an article titled “How urban anonymity disappears when all data is tracked” by Quentin Hardy which appears in its “Bits” section. I just posted a comment on that article, which is reproduced below: I hope … Continue reading
JAGS for finding Highs and Lows in a week of Wikipedia accesses
I’ve been learning how to use JAGS for Bayesian hierarchical modeling, moved by the great teaching of John Kruschke, Peter Congdon, Andrew Gelman, and many others. So, I went on to solve a problem with JAGS (“Just Another Gibbs Sampler”). … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian, Internet, statistics, stochastic algorithms
Tagged stats.grok.se, Wikipedia
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postdoc position in Bayesian Climate Uncertainty Modeling
Climate Uncertainty Quantification Postdoc Where You Will Work Located in northern New Mexico, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security. LANL enhances national security by ensuring the safety … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian, climate, environment, geophysics, mathematics, maths, meteorology, physics, statistics, stochastic algorithms
Tagged climate uncertainty, postdoc, statistics
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Correlation, causation, and coupled pairs of differential equations
An aspect of paleoclimate evidence to which Professor Jennifer Francis alludes in her recent report on Arctic amplification is the close mutual modeling which Earth surface temperature and carbon dioxide concentration exhibit during the recent geologic past. Since relative timings … Continue reading
Bayesian Bootstrap
I’m studying the Bayesian bootstrap in the context of finite population sampling for an application where I need to estimate multinomial proportions. While I have used the frequentist bootstrap a lot, it has bothered me that it can never, of … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian, mathematics, maths, statistics, stochastic algorithms
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“Double Plus Big Data”
Big Data. All the rage. Why? Apart from distributed software folks strutting their stuff, something which is likely to be fleeting, especially when quantum computing comes around, what does it buy anyone? I can see four possibilities, which I consider … Continue reading
“Bayes’ theorem in the 21st century”
Professor Bradley Efron wrote a piece on “Bayes’ theorem in the 21st century” in Science for 7th June 2013 which, as always, offers his measured approach to the frequentist-Bayesian controversy (see B. Efron, “A 250 year argument: Belief, behavior, and the … Continue reading

