Since 2008, Microsoft (formerly 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 month of February: Public policy researchers use R to predict neighbourhoods in US cities subject to gentrification: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/forecasting-gentrification.html The ggraph package provides a grammar-of-graphics framework for visualizing directed and undirected graphs: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/ggraph-ggplot-for-graphs.html Facebook has open-sourced the "prophet" package they use for forecasting time series at scale: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/facebook-prophet.html A preview of features coming soon to R Tools for Visual Studio 1.0: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/preview-r-tools-for-visual-studio-10.html On the differences between using Excel and R for data analysis: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/the-difference-between-r-and-excel.html A data scientist suggests a "Gloom Index" for identifying the most depressing songs by the band Radiohead: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/finding-radioheads-most-depressing-song-with-r.html Catterplots is a package that replaces scatterplot points with cats. Tufte would not approve: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/catterplots-plots-with-cats.html A collection of tips on using Microsoft R Server from the support team: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/six-articles-on-using-r-with-sql-server.html A summary of the many improvements slated for R 3.4.0: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/preview-r-340.html R code using the RevoScaleR package to classify a large database of galaxy images in SQL Server: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/sql-server-galaxy.html A review of four deep learning packages for R: MXNet, darch, deepnet and h2o: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/deep-learning-in-r.html An update on more than a dozen projects and community initiatives funded by R Consortium grants: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/update-on-r-consortium-projects.html R has overtaken SAS for Statistics job listings on indeed.com: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/job-trends-for-r-and-python.html ModernDive is a free online textbook on Statistics and data science: using R: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/moderndive.html A solution (with R code) for modeling customer churn in the retail industry using SQL Server R Services: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/retail-applications-with-microsoft-r.html The superheat package provides enhanced heatmap graphics for R: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/superheat-supercharged-heatmaps-for-r.html The fst package provides a new serialization format for R data focused on performance: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/fst-fast-serialization-of-r-data-frames.html Thomas Dinsmore reflects on major events in the R Project and for Microsoft in 2016: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/the-year-in-r.html And some general interest stories (not necassarily related to R): * A big drain http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/because-its-friday-looking-down-the-glory-hole.html * 'Vous' vs 'tu' http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/because-its-friday-et-tu.html * A remembrance of the late Hans Rosling http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/because-its-friday-remembering-hans-rosling.html * Ten Meter Tower, a short film http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/because-its-friday-jump.html 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: ?http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com