Since 2008, Microsoft (formerly Revolution Analytics) staff and guests have written about R every weekday at the Revolutions blog: blog.revolutionanalytics.com and every month I post a summary of articles from the previous month of particular interest to readers of r-help. Some recent news: Revolution R is now Microsoft R: blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/01/microsoft-r-open.html And in case you missed them, here are some articles related to R from the month of December: A look back at accomplishments for the R Project and community in 2015: blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/rs-year-in-review.html Segmented regression with the "segmented" package, applied to long-distance running records: blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/using-segmented-regression-to-analyse-world-record-running-times.html Creating multi-tab reports in R with knitr and jQuery UI: blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/reports-r-jquery.html New version 2.0 update to ggplot2 adds extensibility and many improvements: blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/gggplot-version-2-new-features.html A circle diagram of translations of "Merry Christmas": blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/all-i-want-for-christmas.html Upcoming R events and conferences, and sponsorship for R user groups: blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/looking-forward-to-2016.html How to embed images in R help pages: blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/embedding-images-in-r-package-help-pages.html An Azure ML Studio fraud detection template relies heavily on R components: blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/fraud-detection-with-r-and-azure.html R is the fastest-growing language on Stackoverflow, as shown in a subway-style rank chart from ggplot2: blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/r-is-the-fastest-growing-language-on-stackoverflow.html Buzzfeed is using R for some (serious!) data journalism: blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/buzzfeed-uses-r-for-data-journalism.html A tutorial on using SQL Server R Services to analyze a billion taxi rides: blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/sql-rre-tutorial.html Some suggestions on how to cryptographically store secrets in R code: blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/securely-storing-your-secrets-in-r-code.html Some tips and trade-offs to consider when reading large data files with the RevoScaleR package: blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/trade-offs-to-consider-when-reading-a-large-dataset-into-r-using-the-revoscaler-package.html A brief summary of improvements in R 3.2.3: blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/r-323-released.html Implementing Wald's sequential analysis test in R: blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/walds-graphical-sequential-inspection-procedure.html Using the gtrendsR package to download and chart Google Trends data: blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/download-and-plot-google-trends-data-with-r.html Distributed data structures in R with the ddR package: blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/fun-with-ddr-using-distributed-data-structures-in-r.html Using the leaflet package to create an interactive, photo-annotated map of GPS data from a hike: blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/document-hikes-with-interactive-leaftlets-and-r.html Microsoft Azure's Data Science Virtual Machine includes R: blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/microsoft-data-science.html Feature selection when modeling wide data sets with genetic algorithms using the caret package: blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/caret-genetic.html Tips on setting up a virtual machine with RStudio in Azure: blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/setting-up-an-azure-resource-manager-virtual-machine-with-rstudio.html Querying recursive CTEs (common table expressions) in a database with the sqldf package: blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/exploring-recursive-ctes-with-sqldf.html General interest stories (not related to R) in the past month included: your Macbook charger has more CPU than the original Macintosh (blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/because-its-friday-smart-charger.html), how 5 particles can jam a hopper (blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/because-its-friday-hopper-jams.html), and a film based on the NASA photo archive (blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/apollo-film.html). Meeting times for local R user groups (blog.revolutionanalytics.com/local-r-groups.html) can be found on the updated R Community Calendar at: blog.revolutionanalytics.com/calendar.html If you're looking for more articles about R, you can find summaries from previous months at blog.revolutionanalytics.com/roundups. You can receive daily blog posts via email using services like blogtrottr.com. As always, thanks for the comments and please keep sending suggestions to me at davidsmi at microsoft.com or via Twitter (I'm @revodavid). Cheers, # David -- David M Smith <davidsmi at microsoft.com> R Community Lead, Microsoft? Tel: +1 (312) 9205766 (Chicago IL, USA) Twitter: @revodavid | Blog: ?blog.revolutionanalytics.com