[R] Revolutions blog: April 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 April:

Lukasz Piwek recreates classic graphs from Tufte's 'The Visual Display of Quantitative Information' in R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/tufte-style-graphics-in-r.html

A preview of upcoming R conferences in Europe:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/r-conferences-europe-2016.html

Andrie de Vries updates the data on R package growth on CRAN,
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/cran-package-growth.html and finds a segmented regression model with
break-points in 2007 and 2011 fits the data well:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/a-segmented-model-of-cran-package-growth.html

A Microsoft data scientist compares R, Microsoft R Open and Microsoft R Server:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/data-scientist-perspective.html

A webinar on data visualization with Microsoft R Open, presented by Naomi and Joyce Robbins:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/webinar-april-28-effective-graphs.html

Microsoft R Open 3.2.4 now available for Windows, Mac and Linux:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/mro-324-available.html

A preview of R/Finance 2016, May 20-21 in Chicago:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/get-ready-for-rfinance-2016.html

Julia Silge releases a CRAN package with the text of Jane Austin's novels, and uses the syuzhet package to map 
sentiment in the narratives: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/pride-and-prejudice-and-z-scores.html

Modeling tips paid to taxi drivers in NYC with Microsoft R Server running on HDInsight Hadoop:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/mrs-nyc-taxi.html

A webinar recording (with slides) shows how to scale Microsoft R Server to very large data sets on HDInsight with Apache
Spark: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/scalable-ds-platform.html

News on recent grants to community projects by the R Consortium (proposals for the next round are due July 10):
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/get-involved-with-the-r-consortium.html

The Microsoft Data Science Virtual Machine, which packages many data science tools including R, is now available as a
Linux VM: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/microsoft-ds-vm-linux.html

Buzzfeed used R to visualize the activity of surveillance aircraft used by the US government:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/the-fbis-aerial-surveillance-program-visualized-with-r.html

Using Azure ML and R to predict the quality of wine:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/predicting-wine-quality.html

A review of the book 'Graphical Data Analysis with R' by Antony Unwin:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/graphical-data-analysis-with-r.html

Montgomery County, MD opened its traffic violation data, and Srini Kumar used SQL Server and R to visualize it:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/an-analysis-of-traffic-violation-data-with-sql-server-and-r.html

80% of Airbnb's data scientists use R, and share methods and tools via an internal R package:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/airbnb-uses-r.html 

Microsoft sponsors a competition using R to evaluate a treatment for brain injury and infer vision from brain waves:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/connected-brains.html

General interest stories (not related to R) in the past month included stories about: the new Thunderbirds
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/thunderbirds-are-go.html), Australian abbreviations
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/abbreviated-discource.html), anamorphic illusions
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/witness-brusspup-illusions.html), the jet streams of Earth and Jupiter
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/because-its-friday-jet-stream.html), and never-seen YouTube videos
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/petit-tube.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