Happy new year! For more than 6 years, Revolution Analytics staff and guests have written 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 December 2014: R was featured in recent articles in Nature News and Mashable: http://bit.ly/1KptKxB A recap of the 6th Spanish R Users Conference: http://bit.ly/1KptNcz R was the recipient of a 2014 "Bossie" award for best open-source big data tools: http://bit.ly/1KptNcy A fractal Christmas tree created with R: http://bit.ly/1KptKxA You can use the rgl package to explore a 3-D shapefile of the comet Churyumov?Gerasimenko (no sign of Philae, though): http://bit.ly/1KptKNO Using R to solve a probability problem about assigning tasks to people on randomly-selected days: http://bit.ly/1KptNcA Looking at how the Queen's Christmas speech has evolved over 50 years: http://bit.ly/1KptNcB A list of useful statistical resources from 2014 (many related to R), from Jeff Leek: http://bit.ly/1KptKNP Revolution Analytics is offering cash sponsorships for local R user groups for its 2015 program: http://bit.ly/1KptNcE The new leadership of the R Foundation: http://bit.ly/1KptKNQ How to make interactive 2-D and 3-D R plots with Plotly: http://bit.ly/1KptNcF Useful examples of cartography with complex survey data from the swmap project: http://bit.ly/1KptKNR The ASA publishes new guidelines on undergraduate Statistics programs: http://bit.ly/1KptNcG Revolution R Open 8.0.1 is now available for download, based on R 3.1.2: http://bit.ly/1KptKNS The latest O'Reilly survey of data scientists indicates prevalent use of R, surprisingly low use of Python stats libraries: http://bit.ly/1KptNcJ Quandl now publishing new commercial data sources accessible from R: http://bit.ly/1KptNcK A graph-based method of clustering CRAN packages into "communities" like "statistical learning": http://bit.ly/1KptNcL A webinar on sports analytics with R and Storm: http://bit.ly/1KptKNT Cindy Brewer, who created the palettes behind the RColorBrewer package, is profiled in Wired magazine: http://bit.ly/1KptKNU Highlights from some recent local R user group presentations on D3 visualizations, Slidify, ggplot2, data.table and more: http://bit.ly/1KptKNW The 25 most-referenced R packages, according to the PageRank algorithm: http://bit.ly/1KptKNY General interest stories (not related to R) in the past month included: spirally optical illusions (http://bit.ly/1KptNt0), a short film exploring the Solar System (http://bit.ly/1KptKNX), and the top big-data analytics companies (http://bit.ly/1KptNt1). 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