[R] Revolutions blog: August round-up

[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.

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

RStan is a new package for Bayesian modeling with R. It's faster and
can fit more highly-correlated models than the MCMC sampler of BUGS
and JAGS: http://bit.ly/QfXsWy

Biostatistician Corey Chivers used R to animate the epidemic-like
growth of retailer Walmart in the US: http://bit.ly/QfXsFV

Forensics with R. Break-in subjects are identified from the unique
marks on tools used for forced entry: http://bit.ly/QfXuO9

An R script uses NSIDC data to visualize arctic sea-ice, now at the
lowest level since satellite observation began: http://bit.ly/QfXuOa

Community milestones: CRAN passes 4,000 packages, and the Revolutions
blog receives 2 million visits: http://bit.ly/QfXsFW

An analysis suggesting playing baseball shortens lifespans provides a
lesson on the difference between causality and association:
http://bit.ly/QfXsFY

Revolution R Enterprise receives Data Science Technology award:
http://bit.ly/QfXsFX

The Rcpp package can translate some R code to C++. Some performance
benchmarks: http://bit.ly/QfXuOb

The knitr package makes it easy to create beautiful reports with text,
graphics and code from R and display them on the Web:
http://bit.ly/QfXsG0

Jeffrey Breen's guide to getting started with R and Hadoop: http://bit.ly/QfXuOd

Ryan Rosario's talk on parallel programming in R covers explicit and
implicit parallelism, and map-reduce: http://bit.ly/QfXsFZ

US retailer Williams Sonoma benefits from GAM models in R to optimize
marketing: http://bit.ly/QfXuOc

Revolution Analytics opens office in Singapore: http://bit.ly/QfXv4u

Factoring inflation, gas/petrol prices in the US and Australia aren't
as expensive as they might seem: http://bit.ly/QfXsG4

A reference card for prediction and classification models in R:
http://bit.ly/QfXsG3

A list of the top 10 packages on CRAN by number of other packages
depending on them: http://bit.ly/QfXsG6

An analysis of traffic on R-help finds busiest/quietest parts of the
day, most prolific posters, and popular topics: http://bit.ly/QfXsG5

Year on year, surveys continue to rank R as the most popular tool for
data mining: http://bit.ly/QfXv4w

Upcoming training classes sponsored by Revolution Analytics: big data
analytics, R for Data Mining and Analytics for Marketing:
http://bit.ly/QfXsWn

Hadley Wickham provides an introduction to the Grammar of Graphics
with "ggplot2 Basics": http://bit.ly/QfXv4B

Some non-R stories in the past month included: a simulation of
supermassive black holes (http://bit.ly/QfXv4A), lip-synching on
Chatroulette (http://bit.ly/QfXsWq), a NASA music video
(http://bit.ly/QfXv4C), my bad dog (http://bit.ly/QfXsWr), and a
Korean pop hit (http://bit.ly/QfXv4D).

There are new R user groups in San Antonio, Milwaukee and Nicaragua
(http://bit.ly/QfXv4E). Meeting times for local R user groups
(http://bit.ly/eC5YQe) can be found on the updated R Community
Calendar at: http://bit.ly/bb3naW

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) 646-9523 (Palo Alto, CA, USA)
Twitter: @revodavid