[R] Revolutions blog: December 2015 roundup

[David Smith]

Since 2008, Microsoft (formerly Revolution Analytics) 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.

Some recent news: Revolution R is now Microsoft R: 
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/01/microsoft-r-open.html

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

A look back at accomplishments for the R Project and community in 2015:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/rs-year-in-review.html

Segmented regression with the "segmented" package, applied to long-distance running records:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/using-segmented-regression-to-analyse-world-record-running-times.html 

Creating multi-tab reports in R with knitr and jQuery UI:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/reports-r-jquery.html

New version 2.0 update to ggplot2 adds extensibility and many improvements:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/gggplot-version-2-new-features.html

A circle diagram of translations of "Merry Christmas":
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/all-i-want-for-christmas.html

Upcoming R events and conferences, and sponsorship for R user groups:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/looking-forward-to-2016.html

How to embed images in R help pages:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/embedding-images-in-r-package-help-pages.html

An Azure ML Studio fraud detection template relies heavily on R components:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/fraud-detection-with-r-and-azure.html

R is the fastest-growing language on Stackoverflow, as shown in a subway-style rank chart from ggplot2:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/r-is-the-fastest-growing-language-on-stackoverflow.html

Buzzfeed is using R for some (serious!) data journalism:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/buzzfeed-uses-r-for-data-journalism.html

A tutorial on using SQL Server R Services to analyze a billion taxi rides:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/sql-rre-tutorial.html

Some suggestions on how to cryptographically store secrets in R code:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/securely-storing-your-secrets-in-r-code.html

Some tips and trade-offs to consider when reading large data files with the RevoScaleR package:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/trade-offs-to-consider-when-reading-a-large-dataset-into-r-using-the-revoscaler-package.html

A brief summary of improvements in R 3.2.3: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/r-323-released.html

Implementing Wald's sequential analysis test in R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/walds-graphical-sequential-inspection-procedure.html

Using the gtrendsR package to download and chart Google Trends data:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/download-and-plot-google-trends-data-with-r.html

Distributed data structures in R with the ddR package:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/fun-with-ddr-using-distributed-data-structures-in-r.html

Using the leaflet package to create an interactive, photo-annotated map of GPS data from a hike:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/document-hikes-with-interactive-leaftlets-and-r.html

Microsoft Azure's Data Science Virtual Machine includes R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/microsoft-data-science.html

Feature selection when modeling wide data sets with genetic algorithms using the caret package:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/caret-genetic.html

Tips on setting up a virtual machine with RStudio in Azure:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/setting-up-an-azure-resource-manager-virtual-machine-with-rstudio.html

Querying recursive CTEs (common table expressions) in a database with the sqldf package:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/exploring-recursive-ctes-with-sqldf.html

General interest stories (not related to R) in the past month included: your Macbook charger has more CPU than the
original Macintosh (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/because-its-friday-smart-charger.html), how 5 particles
can jam a hopper (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/because-its-friday-hopper-jams.html), and a film based on
the NASA photo archive (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/apollo-film.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.

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