Revolution Analytics staff and guests 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: R hits a new milestone with 6,000 CRAN packages, and R 3.1.2 released: http://bit.ly/1xDbIzZ Revolution Analytics announces Revolution R Open, a supported and enhanced downstream distribution of R: http://bit.ly/1xDbKrn . (I'll be presenting a webinar on this topic on Wednesday November 12: http://bit.ly/1xDbKro ) Some benchmarks on the performance improvements that come from linking Revolution R Open with the Intel Math Kernel Libraries: http://bit.ly/1xDbIzX Now available: the Reproducible R Toolkit: a package ("checkpoint") and a server containing archived CRAN packages to make it easy to reproduce the results of R code that uses packages: http://bit.ly/1xDbIzW Revolution Analytics has released DeployR Open, a new open-source framework for integrating R into other applications: http://bit.ly/1xDbIzY The new MRAN website mran.revolutionanalytics.com provides a dependency graph for every R package on CRAN: http://bit.ly/1xDbIQc A new package miniCRAN makes it easy to create a local package repository with a subset of CRAN packages: http://bit.ly/1xDbIQe The ACM held an unconference near San Francisco, and featured a comparison of principal components analysis in R and Python: http://bit.ly/1xDbIQd The author of the survival package, Dr Terry Therneau, on the state of Type III tests in R: http://bit.ly/1xDbKrp Using R to create a "fashion fingerprint" to visualize colours in a fashion collection: http://bit.ly/1xDbIQg The new "Rocker" project provides easy-to-use Docker containers (similar to virtual machines) including R: http://bit.ly/1xDbIQf HP releases "Distributed R", an R package to integrate with the HP Vertica database: http://bit.ly/1xDbKrt Some tips on controlling R resource usage when deployed in a production environment: http://bit.ly/1xDbIQi An exhortation to explore complex (and even not-so-complex) statistical problems with simulation: http://bit.ly/1xDbIQh Presentations from R user groups on image analysis, data mapping and data journalism: http://bit.ly/1xDbIQj The Fantasy Football Analytics blog suggests 14 reasons why R is better than Excel for data analysis: http://bit.ly/1xDbKrs An overview of the Tweedie distribution, which judging from citations is becoming more widely used: http://bit.ly/1xDbKru A look at the GLDEX package and the Generalized Lambda Distribution to model financial returns: http://bit.ly/1xDbKrv In a video interview, RStudio's Joe Cheng discusses how the design of the R language supports the implementation of domain-specific languages: http://bit.ly/1xDbIQm Slides from the webinar "R and Data Science", presented by Joseph Rickert: http://bit.ly/1xDbKry An article in the New York Times contrasts Bayesian and Frequentist statistics: http://bit.ly/1xDbKrx General interest stories (not related to R) in the past month included: a Halloween prank (http://bit.ly/1xDbIQn), teaching robots to walk with a genetic algorithm (http://bit.ly/1xDbKrw), if dogs and cats kept diaries (http://bit.ly/1xDbIQo), the "bookbook" (http://bit.ly/1xDbIQp), and the direction techniques of David Fincher (http://bit.ly/1xDbIQq). 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/. You can receive daily blog posts via email using services like blogtrottr.com, or join the Revolution Analytics 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 or via Twitter (I'm @revodavid). Cheers, # David -- David M Smith <david at revolutionanalytics.com> Chief Community Officer, Revolution Analytics http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com Tel: +1 (650) 646-9523 (Chicago IL, USA) Twitter: @revodavid -- Revolution R Plus <http://revolutionanalytics.com/plus> Subscribe to Technical Support & Indemnification for R