[R] Revolutions Blog: May Roundup

David Smith
Fri, 03 Jun 2011 17:04:20 -0000

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 May:

A review of "R Cookbook", a new how-to book for R programmers:
http://bit.ly/j4e9Lg

A detailed example of using the RevoScaleR package to analyze a large
airline data set: http://bit.ly/laTNrt

A new guide for R beginners, "How to Learn R", provides links to R
resources, blogs and courses: http://bit.ly/knQr5q

Antonio Piccolboni compares 7 language interfaces to Hadoop, with a
focus on the R interface, Rhipe: http://bit.ly/lNWZka

Airline route charts make for a fun game of "guess the airline":
http://bit.ly/k1bwe8 . FlowingData shows how it's done in R:
http://bit.ly/kgkrTT

Jeffrey Breen provides some useful slides on accessing databases from
R with direct interfaces to MySQL and Oracle, or via ODBC/JDBC:
http://bit.ly/maB1Br

Registration is open for the R/Rmetrics Workshop and Summer School on
Computational Finance in Switzerland: http://bit.ly/iTH6gT

Hadley Wickham proves an "essential vocabulary" for R: the 300
functions you need to know: http://bit.ly/jCmLIB

A profile of the director of the Bioconductor project, Martin Morgan:
http://bit.ly/kl7KsC

You can get daily R tips on Twitter by following @RLangTip: http://bit.ly/lM5CUc

Using the Data Science Toolkit to parse locations to create maps in R:
http://bit.ly/mggH0n

Hadley Wickham is teaching an advanced R programming course:
http://bit.ly/kj3ggD (and made his materials available online at
http://bit.ly/jdQ4gg)

The forthcoming KinectR package will let you capture body-tracking
motion data from the Kinect sensor in R:  http://bit.ly/itcgBL

A KDnuggets poll suggests R is used in 1 in 4 implemented data
analysis projects: http://bit.ly/jyl5JO

The presentations from the R/Finance 2011 conference are available for
download: http://bit.ly/ladtNY

Bryan Lewis has created a video on how to to SVD decompositions on
very large matrices in R, and applying the technique to the Netflix
Prize data: http://bit.ly/kvOrYg

Other non-R-related stories in the past month included: a feature
article on Edward Tufte (http://bit.ly/lAAdO3), the connection between
Data Science and Business Intelligence (http://bit.ly/lXdMqF), mapping
how news of bin Laden's death propagated through Twitter
(http://bit.ly/k93mSG), why to use the term "data scientist" instead
of "statistician" (http://bit.ly/iOIbqP), a review of the Data
Scientist Summit conference (http://bit.ly/k7Wvwc), a competition to
model dark matter (http://bit.ly/iIFIx9), how the "Age of Data" has
changed the software business (http://bit.ly/lygmwW), a mesmerizing
yet startlingly simple pendulum video (http://bit.ly/jtCmLX), and a
humorous, factually detailed take difference between "England" and
"the UK" (http://bit.ly/lNSlJV).

There are new R user groups (http://bit.ly/eC5YQe) in Turin and
Belgrade (http://bit.ly/mkvrkO). Meeting times for these groups can be
found on the updated R Community Calendar at: http://bit.ly/bb3naW .

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? http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com
Tel: +1 (650) 646-9523 (Palo Alto, CA, USA)