Earlier in the week, Yili Hong, a PhD student from Iowa State, gave an applied statistics seminar in our department about predicting transformer lifetimes. Our power system depends on having transformers up and working. Being able to predict transformer lifetimes (both individually and collectively) is useful for forecasting maintenance and installation. When looking at the data, it was clear that there are different types of transformers, and these classifications were important for making meaningful predictions. Although I didn’t understand some of the statistical techniques and bootstrapping algorithms applied, not being a statistician, I found a few things very interesting. First, there are transformers that were installed in the 1930’s still working in the United States! The old transformers have longer anticipated lifetimes than the new ones. (Their lifetimes were modeled using a Weibull distribution with beta=2 vs. beta=6. Statisticians, discuss amongst yourselves). This is incredibly depressing. We live in a world where everything is disposable. Even our necessary infrastructure.
December 6, 2008
transformers, more than meets the eye
By Laura Albert
This entry was posted on Saturday, December 6th, 2008 at 1:07 pm and posted in Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Search Punk Rock OR:
Punk Rock OR Tweets
- “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” - Martin Luther King J… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 2 hours ago
- Vaccinations are slowly getting better. twitter.com/EricTopol/stat… 15 hours ago
- A thread full of excellent advice for #phd students 👇 #PhDdevelopmentF2020 twitter.com/suhas_prameela… 18 hours ago
- My first job was at a grocery store, where I did backbreaking work for $4.45 per hour, $0.20/hr more than minimum w… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 18 hours ago
- Science y’all! 👏 twitter.com/thehill/status… 1 day ago
- This is a great thread in how, when, and to whom vaccination will make a difference #orms #COVID19 #vaccine twitter.com/chrischirp/sta… 1 day ago
Recent Comments
Tags
academia analytics art aviation blogs cheese computing conferences cooking coupons criminal justice data decision analysis disasters education elections emergencies environmentalism & natural living finance football analytics grand challenges health healthcare higher education holidays home homeland security humanitarian invited talks lightning lottery march madness math programming mip MODA newspapers Olympics optimization OR in the news pandemic PhD phd support pirates podcast and video Poisson politics probability public policy publishing queuing risk communication sabbatical science communication science fair secretary problem slidecasts social justice social networking sports star wars stochastic processes supply chains teaching teaching with technology traffic Transportation TSP twitter vampires weather werewolves women work-life balance writing zombies
Leave a Reply