Happy New Year, R users! I write about R every weekday at the Revolutions blog: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com and every month I post a summary of articles from the previous month of particular interest to readers of r-help. In case you missed them, here are some articles related to R from the month of December: A Facebook employee created a beautiful visualization of social connections around the world, which made a lot of news on the Web: http://bit.ly/dVidpC . The creator, Paul Butler, explained how he did it using R: http://bit.ly/h9l3Rt With sponsorship from Revolution Analytics, the R/Finance conference in Chicago is offering travel grants to students: http://bit.ly/dPHX2Q New Scientists' San Francisco Bureau Chief gave a presentation on Data Driven Journalism. The video includes several examples using R: http://bit.ly/icHtW4 Jeromy Anglim has published a series of tutorials on creating PDF reports with tables and graphics using Sweave: http://bit.ly/gozqqR TDWI interviews Revolution Analytics' CEO Norman Nie: http://bit.ly/hItitN Amanda Cox gives a video presentation about the data visualization process at the the New York Times (which often involves R): http://bit.ly/hCT8V8 An overview of the updates in R 2.12.1: http://bit.ly/fmS7Cu I presented a webinar on what Revolution R Enterprise adds to R; a replay and slides are available for download: http://bit.ly/fC21GG A guide on choosing colour scales for charts with RColorBrewer: http://bit.ly/eQyHOv If you have a key for the Google Prediction API, you can train and score models in R with the googlepredictionapi package: http://bit.ly/eQNC3r The ACM is giving courses on Machine Learning and Data Mining with R in the San Francisco area: http://bit.ly/fKEp4F There's a new package for accessing Infochimps from R. Drew Conway showed an example of using it to measure programming language popularity based on mentions on Twitter: http://bit.ly/er6M8H Two engineers explain how they use Hadoop and R to find the best hotel for visitors to the Orbitz travel website: http://bit.ly/exYO7a The December 20 issue of Forbes magazine lists R on p128 as a name you need to know in 2011: http://bit.ly/fkoMTG R user Diego Valle demonstrates citizen data journalism, by looking into anomalies in government data on homicides in Mexico: http://bit.ly/fHiOkA Barry Rowlingson used R to estimate the location of a nearby earthquake, and came within 50km of the official epicenter: http://bit.ly/fzwxRa Facebook's "data team" has published an analysis of status updates, using the ggplot2 package for R: http://bit.ly/gBFLJU A Bing engineer lists his favourite R packages to support social search analysis: http://bit.ly/dNJRZg We recapped the top stories on the Revolutions blog in 2011: http://bit.ly/f4xV0d Other non-R-related stories in the past month included: Hans Rosling's Gapminder featured in the Economist (http://bit.ly/dIERnO), visualizing race in the US (http://bit.ly/dKYJKi), why it always seems like you're in the slowest queue at the supermarket (http://bit.ly/fY1pi3), and the complete BBC documentary "The Joy of Stats" available for streaming on YouTube (http://bit.ly/hptfl1). On a lighter note, we also had: a unique way of communicating 4th Amendment rights to TSA scanners in the US (http://bit.ly/fuI9Js), musical mashups (http://bit.ly/hwibcU), the dangers of dating a statistician (http://bit.ly/hHwi5t), Christmas carols on iPads (http://bit.ly/dScauf), and an analemma for 2010 (http://bit.ly/f6JCx2). The R Community Calendar has also been updated at: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/calendar.html If you're looking for more articles about R, you can find summaries from previous months at http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/roundups/. Join the Revolution mailing list at http://revolutionanalytics.com/newsletter to be alerted to new articles on a monthly basis. As always, thanks for the comments and please keep sending suggestions to me at david at revolutionanalytics.com . Don't forget you can also follow the blog using an RSS reader like Google Reader, or by following me on Twitter (I'm @revodavid). Cheers, # David -- David M Smith <david at revolutionanalytics.com> VP of Marketing, Revolution Analytics Tel: +1 (650) 646-9523 (Palo Alto, CA, USA) Free webinar on portfolio optimization in R: bit.ly/portfolio-webinar