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 March: A tutorial and comparison of the SparkR, sparklyr, rsparkling, and RevoScaleR packages for using R with Spark: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/tutorial-scaling-r.html An analysis of Scrabble games between AI players: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/scrabblr.html The doAzureParallel package, a backend to "foreach" for parallel computations on Azure-based clusters: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/doazureparallel.html The UK government project to automate reporting of official statistics with R: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/uk-statistics.html Data science languages R and Python rank highly in the latest Redmond popularity rankings: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/redmonk-jan-2017.html FiveThirtyEight used R to find clusters of similar subreddits: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/comparing-subreddits.html RTVS 1.0, which provides R support to Visual Studio, is now available: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/announcing-r-tools-10-for-visual-studio-2015.html The mrsdeploy package (part of Microsoft R Server) facilitates publishing an R function as a web service on Azure: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/running-your-r-code-azure.html The Call for Papers for the EARL conferences in London and San Francisco closes on April 14: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/give-a-talk-about-an-application-of-r-at-earl.html Alteryx Designer has been integrated with Microsoft R: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/alteryx-integrates-with-microsoft-r.html StitchFix, the personal styling service, uses R and Python as part of their data science process: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/data-science-at-stitchfix.html A review of "Testing R Code", by Richie Cotton: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/review-testing-r-code.html On the connection between AUC and the Mann-Whitney U-Statistic: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/auc-meets-u-stat.html An overview of neural networks and R packages to train them: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/neural-networks-r.html Performance benchmarks of rxNeuralNetwork (in the MicrosoftML package): http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/benchmarking-rxneuralnet.html Updates to the Data Science Virtual Machine for Linux: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/dsvm-linux-updates.html A timelapse of the founding of cities since 3500BC: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/the-rise-of-civilization-visualized-with-r.html A set of R scripts and sample data to predict employee attrition: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/employee-retention.html R 3.3.3 is now available: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/r-333-now-available.html The htmlwidgets gallery provides indexes interactive web-based charts for R: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/htmlwidgets-gallery.html R-based analyses to predict the length of a hospital stay: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/hospital-length-of-stay.html Scholarships to encourage diversity at useR!2017: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/diversity-scholarships.html And some general interest stories (not necessarily related to R): * Simulating the galaxy http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/because-its-friday-universe-time-lapse.html * A poor showing at Crufts http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/because-its-friday-run-ollie-run.html * Why some memes survive better than others http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/because-its-friday-memes.html * A digital clock made in Life: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/because-its-friday-timelife.html * A tongue-in-cheek guide to reading sheet music: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/because-its-friday-how-to-read-music.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