[R] Revolutions blog: September 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.

In case you missed them, here are some articles related to R from the month of September:

The R-Ladies meetups and the Women in R Taskforce support gender diversity in the R community:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/all-the-r-ladies.html

Highlights from the Microsoft Data Science Summit include recordings of many presentations about R, and the keynote "The
Future of Data Analysis" by Edward Tufte:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/data-science-summit-highlights.html

An R-based fraud detection model scores credit card transactions in SQL Server at a rate of 1 million records per
second: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/fraud-detection.html

The Financial Times uses R for quantitative journalism (and made some lovely animations comparing European
football teams): http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/financial-times-quantitative-journalism.html

Part 3 in a series on Deep Learning looks at combining CNNs with RNNs:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/deep-learning-part-3.html

There were many real-world applications of R presented at the EARL London conference
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/reflections-on-earl-london-2016.html, including applications of Microsoft R
at Investec, British Car Auctions and Beazley Group
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/microsoft-r-at-the-earl-conference.html.

Tips on choosing the right data science tool for a project:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/choose-the-right-tool.html

Tidyverse: a collection of packages for working with data in R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/tidyverse.html

The Linux Data Science Virtual Machine has been upgraded with new tools including Microsoft R Server:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/linux-dsvm-upgrade.html

The Pirate's Guide to R: a video and 250-page e-book to learn the R language:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/pirates-guide-to-r.html

The 2016 O'Reilly Data Science Salary Survey reveals the most-used tools are SQL (70%), R (57%) and Python (54%):
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/2016-data-science-salary-survey.html

A simple explanation of Convolutional Neural Networks:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/how-the-algorithm-behind-deep-learning-works.html

A template for building a predictive maintenance application with SQL Server R Services:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/r-services-maintenance.html

The R Consortium awarded a grant of $10,000 to The R Documentation Task Force to design and build the next generation R
documentation system: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/volunteer-to-help-improve-rs-documentation.html

Scaling R-based applications with DeployR grid nodes and slots:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/the-elements-of-scaling-r-based-applications-with-deployr.html

An R packages to extract colour palettes from satellite imagery:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/the-pallettes-of-earth.html

A guide for porting SAS programs for financial data manipulation to R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/rewriting-sas-in-r-for-finance.html

How to analyze basketball data and create animations of player movements with R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/analyzing-nba-basketball-data-with-r.html

Create a more perceptive heatmap colour scale with the viridis package:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/choose-a-good-heatmap-color-scale-with-viridis.html

General interest stories (not related to R) in the past month included: how a newspaper was printed in 1973
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/because-its-friday-typesetting-in-the-olden-days.html), illusions caused by
our poor peripheral vision (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/peripheral-illusions.html), a chart (to scale!)
about climate change
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/because-its-friday-a-big-chart-about-climate-change.html), a happier
version of the X Files Theme (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/because-its-friday-the-happy-files.html), and
a short film on the creation of the universe
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/because-its-friday-the-creation-of-the-universe-in-paint-and-salt.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