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 April: The rxExecBy function (in Microsoft R Server) deploys "embarassingly parallel" problems to remote compute services: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/rxexecby.html An interesting population map, reminiscent of a Joy Division album cover, shows Europe's population density using just 14 lines of R code: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/where-europe-lives.html Financial startup dv01 uses R to bring greater transparency to consumer lending: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/dv01-uses-r.html Reproducibility with knitr: how to use the "checkpoint" package with the "Knit" feature in RStudio: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/using-checkpoint-with-knitr-and-rstudio.html A summary of the improvements in R 3.4.0: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/r-340-now-available.html Slides from my recent talk, "Reproducible Data Science with R": http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/reproducible-data-science-with-r.html SQL Server 2017 will support both R and Python for in-database computation: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/sql-2017-python.html New features in Microsoft R Server 9.1, now available: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/microsoft-r-server-91-now-available.html A sentiment analysis of Warren Buffett's letters to shareholders: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/warren-buffet-sentiment.html A workshop on Artificial Intelligence, featuring Microsoft R, is being held by Microsoft in Seattle on May 9: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/ai-workshop-seattle.html The interactive website Seeing Theory demonstrates statistical principles via simulation: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/seeing-theory.html Ben Marwick reports on R topics at the 2017 Society of American Archaeology meeting: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/r-is-for-archaeology.html The checkpoint package adds new features for managing package versions in service of reproducibility: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/checkpoint-new-features.html There were several R-related announcement at the online Data Amp event on April 19. A replay is now available. http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/data-amp-april-19.html The vtreat package helps statisticians prepare real-world data for analysis: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/vtreat.html Ma?lle Salmon used R to create a collage of R users participating in the #rstats hashtag on Twitter: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/the-faces-of-r-analyzed-with-r.html Microsoft R Open 3.3.3 (based on R 3.3.3) is now available: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/microsoft-r-open-333-now-available.html A link between rational functions and OLS regression: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/fitting-rational-functions-with-lm.html Use the sqlrutils package in Microsoft R Client to publish R functions as stored procedures in SQL Server: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/sqlrutils.html Ranking of the most popular languages for Data Scientists/Engineers, from the StackOverflow Developer Survey: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/stackoverflow-developer-survey.html Slides and code from the tutorial "Using R for Scalable Data Analytics: Single Machines to Spark Clusters": http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/tutorial-scaling-r.html And some general interest stories (not necessarily related to R): * A Turing Machine, implemented in PowerPoint: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/because-its-friday-powerpoint-punchcards.html * Secrets of the lines of the London Underground: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/because-its-friday-secrets-of-the-london-underground.html * Reddit's "r/place" communal art experiment: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/because-its-friday-art-collective.html * How "Elite: Dangerous" simulated an entire galaxy for a video game: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/because-its-friday-universe-time-lapse.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