[R] Revolutions blog: January Roundup

[David M Smith]

I write about R every weekday at the Revolutions blog:
  http://blog.revolution-computing.com
and every month I post a summary of articles from the previous month
of particular interest to readers of r-help.

http://bit.ly/a4iVi5 linked to slides and video from a 30-minute
"Introduction to R" talk I gave on January 28, with links to many
useful R resources.

http://bit.ly/cfhrO1 brought news that R's creators Robert Gentleman
and Ross Ihaka have jointly won the inaugural Statistical Computing
and Graphics Award from the ASA.

http://bit.ly/6CVPcz welcomed Robert Gentleman to REvolution
Computing's board of directors.

http://bit.ly/5g6Sxu announced the print availability of the new book
from O'Reilly, R in a Nutshell. It has a harpy eagle on the cover.

http://bit.ly/5RfnJG showed how to use calendar heatmaps to analyze
traffic on a FriendFeed group.

http://bit.ly/7agloZ showed that the number of R packages is growing
exponentially. The evidence comes from a paper in the first edition of
the R Journal, updated with more recent data here:
http://bit.ly/749Kfn

http://bit.ly/504UEz showed R being used to evaluate biases in survey questions.

http://bit.ly/d5ZMcv linked to slides and video from talks by Jeff
Horner and Jeroen Ooms on "R-Powered Web Apps".

http://bit.ly/7pHzLY linked to slides from the New York R User Group
"R Rosetta Stone" meeting, with tips on coming to R from SAS, Matlab,
SQL, Clojure or Python.

http://bit.ly/51BBO0 linked to Bob Muenchen's table of equivalent R
packages to modules in SAS and SPSS.

http://bit.ly/colWqf linked to a review of new features in version
0.85 of the ggplot2 package.

http://bit.ly/7XC5Nh called for presenters at the useR! 2010
conference, and announced a commercial applications track.

http://bit.ly/5GwPRx linked to a step-by-step tutorial on how to make
a heat map with R.

http://bit.ly/8GKgab looked at two analyses of a surprise upset in a
US Senate election done with R (one done on 64-bit Windows with the
REvolution R Enterprise build).

http://bit.ly/9CF0Rb gave some examples from the new RgoogleMaps
package of combining satellite maps with data in R.

http://bit.ly/bSmZRD showed off a very creative use of ggplot2 to
illustrate the history of colors in a box of Crayola crayons.

Several new local R user groups are starting up: Seattle, USA
(http://bit.ly/9pat0Z), Philadelphia (http://bit.ly/4ATi22), and
Washington, DC (http://bit.ly/4ATi22).

Other non-R-specific posts in the past month covered data
visualizations in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal
(http://bit.ly/7I3QVh), what programmers ought to know about
Statistics (http://bit.ly/9JZeEV) and (on a lighter note) visualizing
gravity wells (http://bit.ly/bn7fxz).

The R Community Calendar has also been updated at:
http://blog.revolution-computing.com/calendar.html

If you're looking for more articles about R, you can find summaries
from previous months at http://bit.ly/dt1AZe . Join the monthly
REvolution mailing list at http://bit.ly/bOISmy to be informed of
articles in the future.

As always, thanks for the comments and please keep sending suggestions
to me at david at revolution-computing.com . Don't forget you can also
follow the blog using an RSS reader like Google Reader, or by
following me on Twitter (I'm @revodavid).

--
David M Smith <david at revolution-computing.com>
VP of Marketing, REvolution Computing  http://blog.revolution-computing.com
Tel: +1 (650) 330-0553 x205 (Palo Alto, CA, USA)

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