[R] Revolutions Blog: December Roundup

[David Smith]

Happy New Year, R users! 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.

In case you missed them, here are some articles related to R from the
month of December:

A Facebook employee created a beautiful visualization of social
connections around the world, which made a lot of news on the Web:
http://bit.ly/dVidpC . The creator, Paul Butler, explained how he did
it using R: http://bit.ly/h9l3Rt

With sponsorship from Revolution Analytics, the R/Finance conference
in Chicago is offering travel grants to students: http://bit.ly/dPHX2Q

New Scientists' San Francisco Bureau Chief gave a presentation on Data
Driven Journalism. The video includes several examples using R:
http://bit.ly/icHtW4

Jeromy Anglim has published a series of tutorials on creating PDF
reports with tables and graphics using Sweave: http://bit.ly/gozqqR

TDWI interviews Revolution Analytics' CEO Norman Nie: http://bit.ly/hItitN

Amanda Cox gives a video presentation about the data visualization
process at the the New York Times (which often involves R):
http://bit.ly/hCT8V8

An overview of the updates in R 2.12.1: http://bit.ly/fmS7Cu

I presented a webinar on what Revolution R Enterprise adds to R; a
replay and slides are available for download: http://bit.ly/fC21GG

A guide on choosing colour scales for charts with RColorBrewer:
http://bit.ly/eQyHOv

If you have a key for the Google Prediction API, you can train and
score models in R with the googlepredictionapi package:
http://bit.ly/eQNC3r

The ACM is giving courses on Machine Learning and Data Mining with R
in the San Francisco area: http://bit.ly/fKEp4F

There's a new package for accessing Infochimps from R. Drew Conway
showed an example of using it to measure programming language
popularity based on mentions on Twitter: http://bit.ly/er6M8H

Two engineers explain how they use Hadoop and R to find the best hotel
for visitors to the Orbitz travel website: http://bit.ly/exYO7a

The December 20 issue of Forbes magazine lists R on p128 as a name you
need to know in 2011: http://bit.ly/fkoMTG

R user Diego Valle demonstrates citizen data journalism, by looking
into anomalies in government data on homicides in Mexico:
http://bit.ly/fHiOkA

Barry Rowlingson used R to estimate the location of a nearby
earthquake, and came within 50km of the official epicenter:
http://bit.ly/fzwxRa

Facebook's "data team" has published an analysis of status updates,
using the ggplot2 package for R: http://bit.ly/gBFLJU

A Bing engineer lists his favourite R packages to support social
search analysis: http://bit.ly/dNJRZg

We recapped the top stories on the Revolutions blog in 2011:
http://bit.ly/f4xV0d

Other non-R-related stories in the past month included: Hans Rosling's
Gapminder featured in the Economist (http://bit.ly/dIERnO),
visualizing race in the US (http://bit.ly/dKYJKi),  why it always
seems like you're in the slowest queue at the supermarket
(http://bit.ly/fY1pi3), and the complete BBC documentary "The Joy of
Stats" available for streaming on YouTube (http://bit.ly/hptfl1).

On a lighter note, we also had: a unique way of communicating 4th
Amendment rights to TSA scanners in the US (http://bit.ly/fuI9Js),
musical mashups (http://bit.ly/hwibcU), the dangers of dating a
statistician (http://bit.ly/hHwi5t), Christmas carols on iPads
(http://bit.ly/dScauf), and an analemma for 2010
(http://bit.ly/f6JCx2).

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
Tel: +1 (650) 646-9523 (Palo Alto, CA, USA)
Free webinar on portfolio optimization in R: bit.ly/portfolio-webinar