[R] Revolutions Blog: April 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.

By the way, you might have noticed that we've changed our name to
Revolution Analytics from Revolution Computing. You can read about the
motivation for the change, and our plans for new products around R, by
downloading the document at:
http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/roadmap . Also, if you'd like to
learn more about Revolution and our products I'll be giving a public
webinar on May 20, details here: http://bit.ly/cQgXxn

Anyway, here are the highlights from the blog from last month:

http://bit.ly/dwIvSb announced the availability of Revolution R
Community 3.2 (based on R 2.10.1), now 100% open source, and including
a new doMC package for parallel computing on Windows.

http://bit.ly/d53tvn announced that Revolution R Enterprise is now
available free of charge to everyone in the academic community.

http://bit.ly/b5puKD announced inside-R.org, a new community site for
R sponsored by Revolution Analytics.

On April 1, http://bit.ly/aCYrGU showed how R is used to combat the
growing zombie menace.

http://bit.ly/axLy18 reviewed A Practical Guide to Geostatistical
Mapping, a free book on mapping and spatial data analysis with R.

http://bit.ly/aoxwbn noted an early report of running R on a jailbroken iPhone.

http://bit.ly/axdWPO linked to a video of Dirk Eddelbuettel's
presentation on calling C++ from R with Rcpp and Rinside.

http://bit.ly/aWpctN linked to slides from my recent High-Performance
Analytics webinar, with examples of using "foreach" for parallel
programming on clusters (specifically, Microsoft HPC Server).

http://bit.ly/9W4vXd reported how Benetech uses R to analyze complex
political and human-rights issues. The same post also recaps a talk by
"R in a Nutshell" author Joe Adler on measuring performance of R
idioms.

http://bit.ly/9Ux3DT recounted a storm on the blogosphere that erupted
when a SAS consultant took issue with R being called "the next big
thing".

http://bit.ly/bWlrmf noted that StackOverflow now includes over 1000 R
questions, and links to a post on optimizing the performance of R for
reading and writing text files.

http://bit.ly/9fmIb3 shares an anecdote from Red Monk analyst Steve
O'Grady on why he decided to learn R.

http://bit.ly/bfeQSC noted the release of R 2.11.0 and highlighted
some of the improvements.

http://bit.ly/9Y2zC8 linked to a review of the R/Finance 2010
conference by Steve Miller, and shared slides from my own talk there
about Revolution's forthcoming big-data library.

http://bit.ly/9rpkD2 linked to an interview with Revolution's CEO
Norman Nie. Part 2 of the interview is here: http://bit.ly/dnPfJC

http://bit.ly/9LXsWU linked to a how-to guide for linking a Web
application to R with Rapache.

Several new R user groups launched in the US in the past month,
including Chicago (http://bit.ly/9TB9dV), Dallas
(http://bit.ly/96AQNA) and San Diego (http://bit.ly/9dCEwh).

Other non-R-related stories in the past month included an analysis of
Chatroulette (http://bit.ly/a4mkEL), the legality of statistical
sampling (http://bit.ly/9mDfN9), teaching conditional probability
(http://bit.ly/dusi61), and (on a lighter note) fonts and ink use
(http://bit.ly/MSlPi) and vacuous infographics (http://bit.ly/aGhqhW).

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).

--
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)