Since 2008, Microsoft (formerly Revolution Analytics) staff and guests have written about R 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 January: Josh Katz and Peter Aldhous used R to analyze the content and presentation of the most recent State of the Union speech from the US president: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/trump-sotu.html Slides for my presentation "Speeding up R with Parallel Processing in the Cloud", with applications of the doAzureParallel and sparklyr packages: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/r-parallel-cloud.html An example of using the doAzureParallel package to speed up a statistical simulation: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/doazureparallel-simulations.html 5 lines of R code to create a list of US Representatives from a Wikipedia table: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/scraping-with-5-lines-r.html A package to visualize routes from activities recorded with a Strava device: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/strava-visualization.html The call for papers and registration is now open for useR!2018 in Brisbane: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/user2018-reg-open.html Microsoft R Open 3.4.3 is now available: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/microsoft-r-open-343-now-available.html A simple command-line tool to launch a cluster in Azure for use with sparklyr: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/azure-sparklyr-aztk.html A review of cloud-based tools for building intelligent applications with R: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/r-cloud-tools.html A guide to implementing deep neural networks from scratch in R: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/neural-networks-r6.html R leaps to its highest position -- 8th -- in the TIOBE language rankings: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/tiobe-2017.html A field guide to the ecosystem surrounding R: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/a-field-guide-to-the-r-ecosystem.html Using the Rcpp package to parallelize an association rules problem: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/parallelize-rcpp.html Various R tricks used at Etsy to speed up an A/B testing system: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/r-faster-case-study.html Some useful advice from Jenny Bryan on setting up a reproducible R workflow: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/bryan-workflow.html And some general interest stories (not necessarily related to R): * A Japanese artist makes "paintings" with Excel: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/because-its-friday-excel-painter.html * A presentation on why companies' stated principles and values actually matter: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/because-its-friday-principles-and-values.html * Some impressive formation acrobatics with kites: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/kite-ballet.html * A new Harry Potter chapter, written with a predictive text algorithm: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/because-its-friday-harry-potter-was-the-time-to-come.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> Developer Advocate, Microsoft Cloud & Enterprise Tel: +1 (312) 9205766 (Chicago IL, USA) Twitter: @revodavid | Blog: ?http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com