[R] Revolutions blog: November 2015 roundup

[David Smith]

Since 2008, Revolution Analytics (and now Microsoft) staff and guests have written 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 November:

You can use emojis as plotting symbols in ggplot2 charts with the emoGG package:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/emojis-in-ggplot-graphics.html

A review of local R user group activity in 2015:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/r-user-group-activity-2015.html

Giving thanks to the R Core Group: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/happy-thanksgiving.html

Some best practices for handling secret API keys in R scripts:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/how-to-store-and-use-authentication-details-with-r.html

An animated globe showing locations of Marriott and Starwood hotels using the rthreejs package:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/marriott.html

PowerBI has added support for R graphics in dashboards:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/powerbi-adds-support-for-r.html

A detailed R-based analysis of over a billion taxi rides in New York City:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/new-york-taxi-uber.html

Joseph Rickert recommends books for learning the R language and for data analysis in R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/r-recommended-reading.html

The AzureML package has been updated to allow R functions to connect with workspaces, datasets, and experiments in Azure
ML Studio: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/azureml-update.html

A simulation-based approach to explaining Simpson's Paradox:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/fun-with-simpsons-paradox-simulating-confounders.html

Two new surveys show that R continues to be the most popular language for data scientists:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/new-surveys-show-continued-popularity-of-r.html

R was featured in many presentations at this year's H2Oworld conference:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/h2o-world-2015.html

Some tips on handling packages when working with R projects: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/r-projects.html

fluent-r, a new R integration library for JVM developers: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/fluent-r.html

Online investing service Betterment uses R for modeling, analysis and reporting:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/betterment-uses-r.html

Applications of R were presented at the EARL conference by Verizon, Pfizer, Wikipedia, and many others:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/applications-of-r-at-earl-2015-boston.html

Simulating sample data reproducibly using the wakefield package:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/using-the-wakefield-package-to-easily-generate-reproducible-sample-data.html

Using the RJSONIO package to download Bitcoin exchange data:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/accessing-bitcoin-data-with-r.html

A series on using differential privacy for machine learning:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/differential-privacy-mini-series-from-win-vector.html

The R Consortium has funded its first community project, and is now accepting proposals for future projects:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/r-consortium-funds-first-community-project-accepting-proposals-for-more.html

General interest stories (not related to R) in the past month included: ball-moving contraptions in Lego
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/gbc.html), why you can't photograph propellers
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/because-its-friday-why-you-cant-take-photos-of-propellers.html), fun with
magnets (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/because-its-friday-magnets.html), and a dangerous playground
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/because-its-friday-monash-playground.html).

Meeting times for local R user groups (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/local-r-groups.html) can be found on the
updated R Community Calendar 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/. You can receive daily blog posts via email using services like
blogtrottr.com, or join the Revolution Analytics 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 davidsmi at microsoft.com or via Twitter
(I'm @revodavid).

Cheers,
# David

-- 
David M Smith <davidsmi at microsoft.com>
R Community Lead, Microsoft  
Tel: +1 (312) 9205766 (Chicago IL, USA)
Twitter: @revodavid | Blog:  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com