[R] Revolutions blog: June 2017 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 June:

R 3.4.1 "Single Candle" has been released:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/r-341-single-candle-released.html

The Scientific Computing Coordinator at the FDA explains how R is used at
the FDA and by sponsors for clinical trial submissions:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/r-fda.html

Several useful tips related to including images in Rmarkdown documents:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/rmarkdown-tricks.html

A review of one of R's best features -- its community:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/r-community.html

It's now possible to include interactive visualizations (such as those
created with plotly and htmlwidgets) in Power BI reports:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/interactive-r-visuals-in-power-bi.html

The Azure Data Science Virtual Machine for Windows now supports GPU-based
computations with Microsoft R, Tensorflow, and other included software:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/dsvm-update.html

The 2017 Burtch Works survey of data science software popularity shows R
leading, Python gaining, and SAS declining:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/burtch-works-survey-2017.html

A video presentation by Ali Zaidi on using the sparklyr package with
Microsoft R Server:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/sparklyr-r-server.html

The EARL conference in San Francisco featured applications of R at Pandora,
Pfizer, Amgen, Hitachi, and many other companies:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/applications-earl-sf-2017.html

A demo of real-time predictions from a model created with Microsoft R, at a
rate of one million predictions per second:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/real-time-predictions.html

The R Epidemics Consortium is a coalition of researchers developing
epidemiology resources for R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/r-epidemics-consortium.html

Syberia is a on open-source framework for orchestrating R scripts in
production:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/syberia.html

A from-the-basics guide to accessing open APIs from R, from Locke Data:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/interfacing-with-apis.html

Highlights of talks from useR!2017 (recordings will be available in late
July):
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/user2017-schedule.html

The doAzureParallel package provides a backend to "foreach" that spins up a
parallel-processing cluster on Azure incorporating low-cost low-priority
VMs:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/doazureparallel-updated.html

A tutorial on creating dot-density maps in R, an alternative to
choropleths:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/how-to-create-dot-density-maps-in-r.html

A free 13-page e-book on using Power BI with R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/power-bi-free-e-book.html

Python edges out R for the first time in the 2017 KDnuggets poll of data
science software usage:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/python-and-r-top-2017-kdnuggets-rankings.html

The miner package encourages kids to learn to program in R while
manipulating the world of Minecraft with R functions:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/teach-kids-about-r-with-minecraft.html

And some general interest stories (not necessarily related to R):

* A NOAA visualization of 15 years of earthquakes around the globe:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/because-its-friday-shake-that-globe.html

* The first Mario World level, created in augmented reality:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/because-its-friday-mario-in-the-park.html

* The "official" ANSI specifications for a dry martini:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/because-its-friday-dry-martini-specifications.html

* A comparison of urban metro systems, as mapped and to scale:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/subway-maps-to-scale.html

* A disappearing dots illusion:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/because-its-friday-disappearing-dots.html

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