[R] Revolutions blog: June 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 June:

The R Consortium, a trade group dedicated to the support and growth of the R Community, has launched with the R Foundation, Microsoft, RStudio and others as founding members: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/r-consortium.html

A detailed FAQ for fitting Generalized Linear Models in R: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/generalized-linear-mixed-models-the-faq.html

My presentation on Microsoft’s embrace of R, both in supporting the open-source R community, and connecting R with Microsoft platforms: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/r-at-microsoft.html

Packages for analyzing the RStudio CRAN logs, used to calculate the top 100 R packages by downloads: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/working-with-the-rstudio-cran-logs.html

Counting the number of packages on CRAN by platform: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/how-many-packages-are-there-really-on-cran.html

Getting data into and out of R applications with DeployR: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/deployr-data-io.html

A review of the various options for using R with Hadoop: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/using-hadoop-with-r-it-depends.html

Using R to search for CRAN packages by topic area: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/fishing-for-packages-in-cran.html

R code to draw the Archimedes Spiral: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/inspired-by-mathematics-drawing-the-archimedes-spiral.html

A controversial caution about using only pairwise-complete observations when calculating correlation/covariance matrices in R: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/pairwise-complete-correlation-considered-dangerous.html

You can use the RBlpapi package to access Bloomberg data with R: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/connect-r-to-bloomberg.html

SparkR, a package to use the Spark distributed-computing framework from R, is now part of the Apache Spark project: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/sparkr-announcement.html

An interactive map locates the 160+ R user groups around the world: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/r-user-groups-are-everywhere.html

R has 64-bit objects, but there are constraints having only 32-bit integers: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/r-in-a-64-bit-world.html

R is sometimes called a quirky language, but I argue that these design decisions have directly led to many innovations in statistical computing: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/why-has-r-been-so-successful.html

R and BioConductor were featured in “BUILD” (Microsoft’s developer conference in San Francisco), shown being called on-stage from a mobile app: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/r-build-keynote.html

A review of some of the presentations at R/Finance 2015 in Chicago: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/r-finance-2015.html

Using the rpud package to calculate distance matrices the GPU in R: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/computing-with-gpus-in-r.html

A tutorial on using Azure as a data source for R: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/using-azure-as-an-r-datasource-part-2-pulling-data-from-mysqlmariadb.html

A comparison of several high-performance computing approaches in R: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/a-comparison-of-high-performance-computing-techniques-in-r.html

General interest stories (not related to R) in the past month included: planning A/B tests (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/why-does-planning-something-as-simple-as-an-ab-test-always-end-up-feeling-so-complicated.html), a critique of US state flags (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/because-its-friday-bad-flags.html), a new type of bearing (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/because-its-friday-rethinking-bearings.html), a warning about drop bears (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/because-its-friday-beware-the-drop-bears.html), and a visual comparison of the Game of Thrones books and TV series (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/because-its-friday-the-adaptation-of-game-of-thrones.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
Twitter: @revodavid
Blog:  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com
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