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 August: RStan is a new package for Bayesian modeling with R. It's faster and can fit more highly-correlated models than the MCMC sampler of BUGS and JAGS: http://bit.ly/QfXsWy Biostatistician Corey Chivers used R to animate the epidemic-like growth of retailer Walmart in the US: http://bit.ly/QfXsFV Forensics with R. Break-in subjects are identified from the unique marks on tools used for forced entry: http://bit.ly/QfXuO9 An R script uses NSIDC data to visualize arctic sea-ice, now at the lowest level since satellite observation began: http://bit.ly/QfXuOa Community milestones: CRAN passes 4,000 packages, and the Revolutions blog receives 2 million visits: http://bit.ly/QfXsFW An analysis suggesting playing baseball shortens lifespans provides a lesson on the difference between causality and association: http://bit.ly/QfXsFY Revolution R Enterprise receives Data Science Technology award: http://bit.ly/QfXsFX The Rcpp package can translate some R code to C++. Some performance benchmarks: http://bit.ly/QfXuOb The knitr package makes it easy to create beautiful reports with text, graphics and code from R and display them on the Web: http://bit.ly/QfXsG0 Jeffrey Breen's guide to getting started with R and Hadoop: http://bit.ly/QfXuOd Ryan Rosario's talk on parallel programming in R covers explicit and implicit parallelism, and map-reduce: http://bit.ly/QfXsFZ US retailer Williams Sonoma benefits from GAM models in R to optimize marketing: http://bit.ly/QfXuOc Revolution Analytics opens office in Singapore: http://bit.ly/QfXv4u Factoring inflation, gas/petrol prices in the US and Australia aren't as expensive as they might seem: http://bit.ly/QfXsG4 A reference card for prediction and classification models in R: http://bit.ly/QfXsG3 A list of the top 10 packages on CRAN by number of other packages depending on them: http://bit.ly/QfXsG6 An analysis of traffic on R-help finds busiest/quietest parts of the day, most prolific posters, and popular topics: http://bit.ly/QfXsG5 Year on year, surveys continue to rank R as the most popular tool for data mining: http://bit.ly/QfXv4w Upcoming training classes sponsored by Revolution Analytics: big data analytics, R for Data Mining and Analytics for Marketing: http://bit.ly/QfXsWn Hadley Wickham provides an introduction to the Grammar of Graphics with "ggplot2 Basics": http://bit.ly/QfXv4B Some non-R stories in the past month included: a simulation of supermassive black holes (http://bit.ly/QfXv4A), lip-synching on Chatroulette (http://bit.ly/QfXsWq), a NASA music video (http://bit.ly/QfXv4C), my bad dog (http://bit.ly/QfXsWr), and a Korean pop hit (http://bit.ly/QfXv4D). There are new R user groups in San Antonio, Milwaukee and Nicaragua (http://bit.ly/QfXv4E). Meeting times for local R user groups (http://bit.ly/eC5YQe) 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) Twitter: @revodavid