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 October: Sponsorships for local R user groups from Revolution Analytics are now open to applicants worldwide: http://bit.ly/SL40B4 During the landfall of Hurricane Sandy in the US, several R-based apps used public weather and social media data to document its impact, like this timeline of power outages: http://bit.ly/SL3YJn, and this impact forecast: http://bit.ly/SL3YJo Technology media site TechCrunch published this list of "trendy open-source techs for Big Data, including R: http://bit.ly/SL40B3 A summary of the new features in R 2.15.2: http://bit.ly/SL40B5 Steve Yun from insurance company Allstate gave a presentation at the Strata conference, and compared SAS, Hadoop, R and Revolution R for fitting Poisson models with 150 million rows of data: http://bit.ly/SL3YJp R was mentioned in many talks at the Strata conference, including these by Booz Allen Hamilton, Zillow, and Metamarkets: http://bit.ly/SL3YJr I gave a new webinar presentation on data science, big data and R (slides and replay available): http://bit.ly/SL3YJq According to a new Gartner report, companies will spend $232B on "big data" over the next 5 years: http://bit.ly/SL40B6 A time-series boxplot of DW-NOMINATE scores show how the US Republican Party has drifted to the right since 1975: http://bit.ly/SL40B8 TIBCO launches a proprietary run-time version of the R language engine, and Teradata's new Big Data appliance integrates R: http://bit.ly/SL40B7 A report on a speech from Coursera's cofounder (Coursera has a course on R): http://bit.ly/SL3YJs The stargazer package creates regression tables in LaTeX suitable for inclusion in many journals: http://bit.ly/SL3YJt A recent Bay Area R user group meeting featured talks on mapping, election prediction, distributed R, conjoint analysis and more (slides available): http://bit.ly/SL3YJu An analysis of GitHub and StackOverflow data places R in the top tier of popular languages: http://bit.ly/SL40B9 You can use the new Themes feature in ggplot2 to make your charts look like those in the Economist, Excel or even the web-comic XKCD: http://bit.ly/SL3YJv The RHadoop project improves the simplicity and performance of integrating R and Hadoop with version 2.0 of the rmr package: http://bit.ly/SL40Ba Jeffrey Breen shares some slides with useful tips on accessing data from various sources with R: http://bit.ly/SL40Bb You can now use a 3-D printer to render physical versions of surfaces created with R's persp function: http://bit.ly/SL3YJw Some non-R stories in the past month included: a Gangnam-style Halloween light show (http://bit.ly/SL40Bf), dividing the world into seven equal parts (http://bit.ly/SL40Bg), a continuous version of Conway's Life (http://bit.ly/SL3YJz), 43 big-data experts on Twitter (http://bit.ly/SL40Be), and a time-lapse view of Southern Hemisphere stars: http://bit.ly/SL3YJy There are new R user groups in Stockholm, Taipei, Thailand, Marburg, Luxembourg, Pozna?, New Delhi and Madrid: http://bit.ly/SL3YJx . 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