[R] Revolutions Blog: Jan/Feb Roundup

[David Smith]

I write about R every weekday at the Revolutions blog:
 http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com
and every month (usually) I post a summary of articles from the
previous month of particular interest to readers of r-help. I somehow
missed this past January, though, so here are selected highlights from
January and February:

Abstracts for presentations, posters and lightning talks for useR!
2011 are due by April 1: http://bit.ly/g7iwo7

Revolution Analytics is now offering annual sponsorship grants for
local R user groups worldwide: http://bit.ly/gQQC49

Several finalists in of the Mozilla Open Data Competition used R to
visualize behaviours of Firefox users: http://bit.ly/h8KRkH

A profile of prolific R contributor, Dirk Eddelbuettel:
http://bit.ly/eHDg9t . (Suggest other R contributors to profile here:
http://bit.ly/edec9G )

R has overtaken SAS and Matlab in programming language popularity,
according to the Tiobe Index: http://bit.ly/fR6gEF

Revolution R Enterprise 4.2 is now available to subscribers, and for
free download to academics: http://bit.ly/hUKYsJ

Dating site OkCupid describes how data analysis in R contributes to
their controversial relationships blog: http://bit.ly/gEStc5

A summary of the changes in R 2.12.2, which was released on February
25: http://bit.ly/eMgIYh

Christian Gunning offers some tips on setting up a
parallel-programming cluster for R with OpenSSH and the doSNOW
package: http://bit.ly/f12b73

Issue 2 of the R Journal has been published, with articles on GPU
processing, text data analysis, solving differential equations, and
more: http://bit.ly/dXJNUh

The new googleVis package makes it easy to create GapMinder-style
animated charts from data in R: http://bit.ly/grpwMr

Noting the one-year anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, Peter Aldhous
used R to create an animation of all earthquakes over the past year
from USGS data: http://bit.ly/fgyjmu

A new tutorial series, sab-R-metrics, teaches R through the analysis
of baseball statistics: http://bit.ly/eDv6B8

CRANberriesFeed is a new Twitter feed announcing new packages for R:
http://bit.ly/gAWvKa

The replay and slides are now available for the webinar "Portfolio
design, optimization and stability analysis" presented by Diethelm
Würtz of the Rmetrics Association: http://bit.ly/dG4fI0

A question on StackOverflow provides some great suggestions for
managing memory usage in an R session: http://bit.ly/glgGSq

doSMP, an open-source package from Revolution Analytics to support
parallel processing in R on Windows, is now available on CRAN:
http://bit.ly/e0DzkZ

Other non-R-related stories in the past 2 months included a cartoon
about factor analysis (http://bit.ly/hJ4J6X), computers impersonating
humans on Jeopardy and elsewhere (http://bit.ly/fnpvdZ), and how
averages of faces don't regress to the mean (http://bit.ly/hhoWAt),
and the abuse of circles in data visualization (http://bit.ly/dW8WD0).

There are new R user groups in: Zurich, Geneva and Amsterdam
(http://bit.ly/hLRPVh Québec, Vancouver, Bangalore, and Dallas
(http://bit.ly/fJP2tc Toronto (http://bit.ly/gNMjGc Kansas City
(http://bit.ly/dMKeEc and Minneapolis/St. Paul (http://bit.ly/hgXykM).
The R Community Calendar (http://bit.ly/bb3naW) has also been updated.

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) 646-9523 (Palo Alto, CA, USA)