[R] Revolutions Blog: June Roundup

[David Smith]

I write 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.

So, in case you missed them, here are some articles related to R from
the month of June:

http://bit.ly/9gNq5J noted that the program for the annual R user
conference, useR! 2010, has been announced. (I and the rest of the
Revolution team are looking forward to seeing all the R folks there:
http://bit.ly/c1J1tL )

http://bit.ly/at3RvE linked to a new page on inside-R.org describing
"What is R?".

http://bit.ly/aSeES1 examined the performance benefits of linking R to
multithreaded math libraries like Atlas or (in the case of Revolution
R) the Intel MKL libraries. Nathan VanHoudnos follows up
(http://bit.ly/csGLBh) with his experiences using doSMP on an 8-core
machine.

http://bit.ly/b5ot3F linked to slides and a replay the joint webinar
from Revolution, Jaspersoft and OpenBI, "Supercharging business
analytics with R".

http://bit.ly/b85lFf took a look at the use of R for political
science, and how it was used to predict the outcome of the recent UK
election.

http://bit.ly/cCpNDb posted tips on how to connect Revolution R to
MySQL on Windows.

http://bit.ly/9zVSOn posted a review of the "Making Data Work"
conference about big data, which featured several examples from R.

http://bit.ly/bVxhbg noted the Guardian's use of R to represent online
data usage, but Barry Rowlingson notices something odd about the chart
(and not just that it's inappropriately a Normal distribution).

http://bit.ly/9E7ppl has guest blogger Joseph Rickert sharing his
experiences of learning R -- is it really difficult to learn?

http://bit.ly/9YM0tF links to an analysis of crime data in Mexico by
Diego Valle, with some fascinating ggplot2-based charts.

http://bit.ly/9Q8dv3 noted that the Rmetrics foundation has a new blog
and a new book about financial analysis with R.

http://bit.ly/aUo4XH brings guest blogger Joseph Rickert's review of
the 2010 Workshop on Modern Massive Data Sets.

http://bit.ly/ahUQfR looks at an application of R to analyze the
results of competitive Nordic skiing.

http://bit.ly/9HVZ3O linked to some resources from the New York R User
Group on how to debug in R.

http://bit.ly/9pYZfM has guest blogger Joseph Rickert share his
thoughts on why you should learn R, in the most-visited post in the
blog's history.

http://bit.ly/crOKaf shows how to download EPA data into R to
visualize the extent of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

http://bit.ly/c51ovI links to a handy function on StackOverflow to
help manage memory in an R session.

http://bit.ly/aFaN2g notes that the June 2010 edition of the R Journal
is available for download.

Revolution's CEO Norman Nie has been busy in the media spreading the
word about R and Revolution, with interviews at CNET
(http://bit.ly/ag487t), LinuxInsider (http://bit.ly/9mKbVk) and live
on cable TV with the Fox Business Network (http://bit.ly/bp5YJm).

There are new R user groups in Atlanta (http://bit.ly/aVo1cI), Sydney
(http://bit.ly/cdsfqr), South Asia (http://bit.ly/cdsfqr) and Kassel,
Germany (http://bit.ly/bUOiGJ).

Other non-R-related stories in the past month included how to make a
YouTube video look like an old VHS tape (http://bit.ly/dfFv6i), the
scale of the disastrous Deepwater Horizon project
(http://bit.ly/c008Oq) and (on a lighter note) the sex lives of
insects (http://bit.ly/dcvHHi).

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

If you're looking for more articles about R, you can find summaries
from previous months at http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/roundups/.
Join the Revolution mailing list at
http://revolutionanalytics.com/newsletter to be alerted to new
articles on a monthly basis.

As always, thanks for the comments and please keep sending suggestions
to me at david at revolutionanalytics.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,
# David

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