[R] Revolutions blog: June 2016 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.

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

A preview of the tutorials presented at the useR! 2016 conference:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/the-user-2016-tutorials.html

A "advanced beginner's" guide to R published by ComputerWorld includes guides on data wrangling, visualization, and data
APIs: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/computerworlds-advanced-beginners-guide-to-r.html

Microsoft R Server now runs on Apache Spark:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/apache-spark-integrated-with-mrs-for-hadoop.html

Recordings of talks at the useR! 2016 are now available to watch and download, with thanks to Microsoft's livestreaming
of the conference: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/livestreaming-of-user-2016-conference.html

You can download on-screen actor data for films and TV using R via Amazon's X-ray service:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/amazon-x-ray-data-provides-insight-into-movie-characters.html

A review of new Bayesian statistics packages for R, with a focus on Stan:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/r-stan-bayesian-stats.html

A short summary of the fixes in R 3.3.1, released on June 21:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/r-331-now-available.html

A chart of global internet speeds, created using R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/exploring-global-internet-performance-data-using-r.html

New features in the forecast package, updated to version 7:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/updates-to-the-forecast-package-for-r.html

This year's Data Journalism Awards Data Visualization of the Year was created with R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/data-journalism-awards-data-visualization-of-the-year-2016.html

The 150+ R packages presented during useR! 2016:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/the-r-packages-of-user-2016.html

Using GitHub avatars and the Microsoft Face API to estimate gender ratios of programmers by language used (R, C++ and
others): http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/programmers-gender.html

Using the Data Science Virtual Machine and Microsoft R Server to analyze data from 600 million taxi rides:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/taxi2.html

R is once again the top-ranked software in the KDnuggets annual poll:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/r-holds-top-ranking-in-kdnuggets-software-poll.html

A tutorial on making interactive data maps and charts with R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/mapping-in-r.html

News from the R Consortium: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/r-news.html

Max Kuhn (author of the caret package) on Bayesian optimization of machine learning models in R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/bayesian-optimization-of-machine-learning-models.html

Ross Ihaka recounts the history of the R project in an interview for the University of Auckland alumni magazine:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/ross-ihaka-on-the-history-of-the-r-project.html

An R animation shows the ebb and flow of a recent Delaware River flood:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/visualizing-a-flood-with-r.html

A look at comparing statistical models with the caret package:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/using-caret-to-compare-models.html

The mscsweblm4r package provides an R interface to several Microsoft Cognitive Services APIs for text analysis:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/microsoft-cognitive-services.html

General interest stories (not related to R) in the past month included: a screenplay by a robot
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/because-its-friday-a-robot-writes-a-movie.html), parenting tips
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/because-its-friday-how-to-get-a-baby-to-sleep.html), contrasts of DNA and
ethnicity (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/because-its-friday-the-dna-journey.html), and some new favourite
songs (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/because-its-friday-late-to-the-party-music.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