[R] Revolutions blog: December 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.
You can find older summaries at
http://blog.revolution-computing.com/roundups . (By the way, the blog
celebrated its first anniversary in December. Blame the celebrations
and the holidays for the lateness of this roundup.)

http://bit.ly/4FiuiA looked at a climate change controversy involving
the weather in Darwin, Australia and a review of the source data using
R.

http://bit.ly/7iJiTf showed how to access global weather data from the
US National Centers for Environment Prediction using the ncdf package
in R.

http://bit.ly/7ncrpu linked to a Chance Magazine article about group
testing ... and detecting Cylons with R.

http://bit.ly/4OuwZM suggested that compressing a file can reduce the
time required to read it into R. But a subsequent analysis
(http://bit.ly/5xbP1c) revealed that the actual cause was a mysterious
slowness in read.table the first time it's used in an R session.

http://bit.ly/69KSbd linked to two videos of talks on ggplot2 recorded
at the December New York R User Group meeting.

http://bit.ly/893sAP showed an example of animating text using R.
Merry Christmas!

http://bit.ly/6ukQO7 reviewed Jeroen Ooms' web-based charting
application based on ggplot2.

http://bit.ly/5XJ9JB linked to a story about R in The Hindu (a major
newspaper in India).

http://bit.ly/5XJ9JB noted the upcoming R/Finance 2010 conference, to
be held in Chicago in April.

http://bit.ly/6vwrae noted the Computational Topics in Finance
conference to be held in Singapore in February.

http://bit.ly/78aA1P listed the 10 must-have R packages for social
scientists, according to Drew Conway.

http://bit.ly/5gJrIb linked to a video of an R user struggling with
the "apply" family of functions finding solace in the plyr package.

http://bit.ly/7oBXgT showed how to find the R function you need with
the "sos" package.

http://bit.ly/8zm29o reviewed the R Graphical Manual, an index of R
functions by their graphical examples.

http://bit.ly/5oOJyX listed the top 5 functions (though the list
changes depending on how you define "top").

http://bit.ly/4Gllpw noted that an analyst named R and REvolution
Computing among top analytic trends for 2010.

http://bit.ly/4YwqLQ quoted MySQL's Zack Urlocker, who stated that R
is disrupting a billion-dollar market.

http://bit.ly/6CmgVS looked at the simecol package for ecological
simulations in R.

Other non-R-specific stories in the last month covered: Breast cancer
screening (http://bit.ly/7gwtN6), Microsoft's free book "The Fourth
Paradigm" (http://bit.ly/8iWRNw) and -- on a lighter note -- Microbial
art (http://bit.ly/8VY3uB), world empires in history
(http://bit.ly/5sujcH), and the view from a ringed Earth
(http://bit.ly/5N4NjB).

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

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).

Cheers to all,
# David Smith

--
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)

Download REvolution R free:
www.revolution-computing.com/downloads/revolution-r.php