That's because nobody learns how to do statistics and/or those who do are not really interested in it.
I taught statistics to biology students. Most them treated the statistics (and programming) courses like chores. Out of 300-ish students per year we had one or two that didn't leave uni mostly clueless about statistics.
FWIW, universities are pitching statistics the same way as every other subject, i.e. not at all. They operate under a delusion that students are deaperately interested in everything and grateful for the privilege of being taught by a prestigious institution. That may have been the case 100 years ago, but it hasn't been for decades now.
For me, stats was something I had to re-learn years after graduating, after I realized their importance (not just practical, but also epistemological). During university years, whatever interest I might have had, got extinguished the second the TA started talking about those f-in urns filled with colored balls.
I did my Abitur [1] in 2005, back then that used to be high school material.
When I was teaching statistics we had to cut more and more content from the courses in favor of getting people up to speed on content that they should have known from school.
I called them f-in, because they got really boring at that point. For me, every time high school curriculum touched on probability theory or statistics, it'd be urn o'clock. But then, come statistics at my university applied CS studies, there they were again. More advanced materials, but same mental model, as if it was something natural, or interesting, to people.
Also, calling them "urns". There are exactly two common usages of the word "urn" in Polish - the box you put your votes into during elections, and the vase for storing ashes of cremated people.
And you didn't have the mental capacity to abstract from the colored balls to whatever application domain you were interested in? Does everything have to come pre-digested for students so they don't have to do their own thinking?
I had, and still have. The problem is, most people are exposed to this stuff way before they have even a single application domain they're even remotely interested in.
It's really the same problem as with math in school in general ("whatever is this even useful for?") - most people don't like doing abstract, self-contained puzzles with no apparent utility, but being high-stakes (you're being graded on it).
> It's really the same problem as with math in school in general ("whatever is this even useful for?")
That argument is a strawman whenever it comes up because it applies to every subject. High jump? Napoleon wars? Molar weight of helium? English literature in the 19th century? What is any of that ever "useful" for? To understand the world which you live in. What a lack of education leads to is blatently obvious with the current U.S. administration. It's not about each school lesson directly translating into monetary value in a later job, neither w.r.t colored balls nor with knowing how the american civil war started.
> They operate under a delusion that students are desperately interested in everything
In the US, students are the paying customers. The consequence for not learning everything is lowered skills available for the job market (engineering) or life (philosophy?).
To me it is preferable that students who do not understand are not rated highly by the university (=do not get top marks), but “forcing” the students to learn statistics? That doesn’t make much sense.
Also, there’s nothing wrong with learning something after uni. Every skill I use in my job was developed post-degree. Really.
Only on paper. In many cases - I'd risk betting in vast majority of cases - the actual paying customers are parents.
> The consequence for not learning everything is lowered skills available for the job market (engineering) or life (philosophy?).
The ability to perceive and comprehend this kind of consequences is something that develops early in adulthood; some people get it in school, but others (again, I'd bet majority) only half-way through university or even later.
On paper, you have students who're paying for education. In reality, their parents are paying an expected fee for an expected stage of life of their kids.
Somewhat relevant anecdote: we had a small CUDA competition (10-ish years ago). Some embrassingly parallel CV algorithm.
I tried to be smart and cache intermediate results that were shared by multiple kernels.
When the results were published I was stumped to see that others were orders of magnitude faster then me.
Turns out they didn't bother with caching at all. The overhead of recalculating everything a thousand times was tiny compared to the overhead of doing roundtrips through RAM.
I assume it's the same thing here. By compiling into MegaKernels, layer boundaries are squashed. There likely will be _more_ calculations and less shared intermediate results. But overall it's still a win due to less memory roundtrips.
There has to be a sweet spot, especially for convolution networks. No idea if the MegaKernel takes this into account.
(a) it "feels" like you are doing work. Without you the LLM would not even start.
(b) it is very close to how texts are generated without LLMs. Be it in academia, with the PI guiding the process of grad students, or in industry, with managers asking for documentation. In both cases the superior takes (some) credit for the work that is in large parts by others.
At least in academia, if PI takes credit for student's work and does not list them as co-author, it's considered widely unethical. The rules there are simple - someone contributed to the text, they get onto the author list.
If we had same same rule for blogs - "this post is authored by fho and ChatGPT" - then I'd be completely satisfied, as this would be sufficient AI disclosure.
As for industry, I think the rules are very different place-by-place. In some places the authorship does not even come up - the slide deck/document can contain copies from random internet sites, or some previous version of the doc, and the reference will only be present if there is a need (say to lend an authority)
I'm only joking a little. Funny thing, surnames aren't actually that old for Europeans. Most of history there'd be maybe two people with the same name. They solved it back then very much the same way we solve it now.
Funnily enough, my "full id" (full name, city, profession plus year) isn't unique to me unless you add a date of birth.
Maybe it's not unique with a date of birth either, but statistically it should be.
It's a regional thing, but roughly translates to "John Smith, programmer from NY, born 1995"
Serial Number = was supposed to be what order the things were made in (e.g. the number of the serial order), but this is often obfuscated or often repeats [1].
In cars, make would be like Ford. Model would be like Focus, serial number would be VIN (vehicle identification number - in cars, those are generally unique!).
Ford Focus + VIN, basically.
There is a theoretical concept of a unique identifier for everything... including people from ISO under ISO 8000.. combining a natural location identifier (eNLI)[2] and an ISO8601 timestamp - to represent "where and when a thing is considered to be born" - a point in time and space the thing is considered to come into existence.
I think the idea is called "natural person identifier" for humans.
This ID has to be assigned but I think you can see the idea at least.
I suppose this doesn't include make/manufacturer but realistically that isn't needed for uniqueness in this scheme, only as descriptive metadata for things that have one.
[1] This is related to the fact that if serial numbers were truly serial, one could estimate the rate and quantity of production which is considered sensitive information by most manufacturers. This relates to "the German tank problem" - during WWII the allies were able to accurately estimate the production of German tanks by analyzing the serial numbers off captured tanks.
I wonder if the alternative to wood is just... wood.
Anecdotal, but I've been to Finnland last year and I couldn't help but see a correlation between (a) big swaths of land are covered in trees and (b) a lot of housing is build with wood.
It's honestly somewhat impressive to see huge structural elements build from what is basically a single glue-up.
So I assume that it's not actually about "wood stronger than steel", but more about (local) availability and/or logistics.
Same. It's usually very good at generating greenfield projects from scratch, but once you get going you have to manually provide all context to get good results.
Problem being that electric water heating is a lot more expensive in e.g. Germany where gas prices are lower than electricity prices per kWh delivered. (~12 vs. 39 eurocent per kWh)
So blindly converting a gas water heater to electric will roughly quadruple your water heating cost.
Only a problem when you're limiting yourself to resistive heating. Heat pumps can heat water, not just air, and are several times more efficient than resistive.
I've got a heat pump, and I'm in Germany.
Also, if you're in Germany, you can get a balcony PV system from half the supermarkets a few hundred euros, and those are designed to be installed DIY without needing an electrician. Limited power, sure, but way cheaper than €0.39/kWh delivered:
Your first link seems to be 349€ for 800Wp including microinverter. German utility-scale PV has a capacity factor averaging about 12% IIRC, but presumably a balcony system will be lower because it isn't optimally angled for the sun, say 8%. Then that's about 64W, which is 560 kWh per year. 349€ over 10 years would be 35€ per year, about 0.06€/kWh.
64 watts is about 40–50 liters per day of hot water heated resistively, presumably closer to 150 liters per day with a heat pump. But it seems like the heat pump is only saving you the 700€ for two more such balcony systems, assuming you have the space. Moreover, you don't need a microinverter for a resistive heater.
Oh indeed, balcony systems are small and limited — the constraints that led to them are: (1) DIY-safe, (2) useful for rented apartments (limited window or balcony fencing space, may not be allowed to fix something to an exterior wall).
I'm not sure if you're allowed to just resistively dump an off-grid PV system into a resistive heating system, but I guess if you did, you could indeed save on the cost of the inverter.
efficiency of no MPPT is around 10 percent lower then with MPPT system so no issue. 2000 watt is maybe max what you can have on balcony - physical size, and 2000 watt inverters are like 20 $. well connecting anything to grid is/should issue, offgrid noone cares.
You might be able to hang an additional balcony system out a non-balcony window or something, or just keep it inside the window. Less insolation, but maybe not so much less that it's unprofitable.
I believe that even in Germany you can connect a low-voltage solar panel to a battery or heating element without any licensing approvals beyond CE. Low-voltage wiring poses much less risk of electrical shock and is consequently exempt from most safety regulations.
We actually do have a Balkonkraftwerk im Garten :-)
Now that the sun is out for longer periods each day we are "wasting" energy to the grid a lot. I don't really see how to capture that energy though.
1. Buying a battery quickly shifts the break even points to decades. Without a battery I estimate 3-4 years.
2. I would love to heat water, but renting a place limits my options a lot. I was looking at electrical boilers to supplement the gas heater. But we are limited on space for small heaters below the sink and big heaters in the main water path. (Also we can't change the plumbing for legal reasons.)
3. The next best thing is some imaginary insulated water heating kettle that I can control to only use exactly the excess energy. No idea if such a thing exists.
You probably thought of this already but we mostly do load shifting. If you have moderate PV output (like with balcony solar) that can probably use up most of your production.
Consider running the dishwasher (if you have one) or washing machine / dryer (if you don't dry that in the sun directly) during the day.
Granted, we work from home _a lot_ and also have an EV so it's a lot easier to do load shifting for us, but just shifting the dishwasher and washing machine to 'sunlight hours' already made a pretty decent difference.
Yeah, we do that. Given that most home appliances use more than 800W (even in Eco modes) we often use more than our production.
E.g. our washing machine uses 1000W over a prolonged period of time which would be perfect to run on a sunny day. But it does so by switching the 2000W heating element so it averages to 1000W ...
So we repeatedly export 800W (without any form of reimbursement) and import the missing 1200W back.
And that is the case for all of our appliances. (I have a sensor to monitor that)
Don't know if more modern machines are better in this regard, our machines are about 5 years old now.
edit: I don't want to sound bitter about it. The Balkonkraftwerk works perfectly fine to power our base energy load.
my PV system is paid after 6 years of use. if i use current prices for energy. last two years market/spot prices were even higher than that. so in reality it was paid even sooner.
and pv system does not disappear as soon as it is paid, it continues to work. so i have next 4-10 years remaining of lifetime of a inverter.
so for next 4-10 years i am having 100% REALLY REALLY FREE hot water, again for 80% of time... etc vis original comment.
when inverter ends its life in next 4-10 years then i will buy new one, without changing panels. so payback time will be even quicker.
calculations/models of biggest engineers, experts, etc. do not involve thinking about using pv system after it is paid... ( not insult, just exposing state of things )
Yes, but ... A PV system is not accessible to many. We have a small 800W system in our garden, but for many the price or just getting permissions from their landlords makes a PV system unfeasible.
Also, if you are heating with solar you could heat water directly. But that path is also only available to house owners.
PV + heatpump maybe. PV + resistive heater yes. solar thermal is not worth price wise. solar thermal can be feasible only for big installations as is in stralsund, leipzig... - megawatts.
solar PV is order of magnitude cheaper in small systems (per actual provided output per year, not just rated wattage)
AND because hot water energy needs are much higher than for example tv, notebook etc, so after your hot water is heated, you can charge your devices with it, you can not do that with solar thermal. so if people size their systems for winter sunny day, they will have excess in summer so you can use that for other things like bikes, lawnmowers ...
of course there is ratio of people living in blocks of flats / townhouses and people living in family houses / rural, so every situation is unique. so townhouses should be connected to central heating network and heating network provider should chase efficiencies of scale, that is better, faster, cheaper for everyone ( europe / germany context ) if urban density does not allow otherwise.
similar situation with electric cars, a lot of people is crying that there are not enough chargers for them, those are "city" people, but in reality most people live in rural setting or family houses
and in germany every house already has more than enough electrical capacity to charge from outlet, you can charge car from 2.5kW which is same wattage as most electric kettles. yes it charges over night (10 hours) only 100 km but every house can do that already. faster charger can be bought. of course situation in cities is quite different, you can not just put extension cord from window. which is feasible in rural setting / family houses. even in berlin roughly 50 % of people do not live in townhouses / high rises.
which is higher latitude than 99.99999999% of USA or 80% of canada population
then it will work even in USA too.
Again read my first post, it is NOT about reaching 100% offgrid which is expensive, and nonsensical for most people
it is about reaching 100% offgrid for 80 % of time and 10-99% offgrid 20 % of time. Which is so cheap in europe that youre generating totally free energy after 6-7 years PV system paid for itself.
That's because nobody learns how to do statistics and/or those who do are not really interested in it.
I taught statistics to biology students. Most them treated the statistics (and programming) courses like chores. Out of 300-ish students per year we had one or two that didn't leave uni mostly clueless about statistics.
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