R help - Apr 2018 - Revolutions blog roundup: March 2018

Since 2008, Microsoft 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 March:

The "reticulate" package provides an interface between R and Python:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/03/reticulate.html

BotRNot, a Shiny application that uses a generalized boosting model to identify
bots on Twitter:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/03/twitter-bot-or-not.html

Using the Computer Vision API from R to generate captions for images:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/03/computer-vision-api.html

The 20 most prolific package maintainers on CRAN:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/03/the-most-prolific-package-maintainers-on-cran.html

The first in a series of monthly roundups of links on AI, ML and Data Science
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/03/aimlds-roundup-march-2018.html

A guide to using R with Docker via the Rocker project:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/03/r-and-docker.html

R 3.4.4 is released:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/03/r-344-released.html

R rises to 12th place in the semiannual Redmonk language rankings:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/03/redmonk-jan-2018.html

The OutliersO3 compares various methods for detecting outliers:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/03/outliers.html

Concepts about data in R explained to Excel users:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/03/r-data-concepts-for-excel-users.html

A proposal for improving the process of selecting Bayesian priors:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/03/bayesian-egg.html

And some general interest stories (not necessarily related to R):

* Open Source Software, explained using Lego
 
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/03/because-its-friday-open-source-in-lego.html

* An impressive arithmetic performance on Countdown 
 
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/03/because-its-friday-countdown-952.html

* Citizens in Melbourne email trees
 
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/03/because-its-friday-email-a-tree.html

* A good listen on foreign policy: the Bombshell podcast
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/03/because-its-friday-bombshell.html

* Dancing with the neighbours:
 
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/03/because-its-friday-meet-the-neighbors.html

* Free Azure credits for students, without needing a credit card:
 
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/03/free-azure-credits-for-students.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