[R] Revolutions blog: April 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 April:

The rxExecBy function (in Microsoft R Server) deploys "embarassingly
parallel" problems to remote compute services:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/rxexecby.html

An interesting population map, reminiscent of a Joy Division album
cover, shows Europe's population density using just 14 lines of R
code:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/where-europe-lives.html

Financial startup dv01 uses R to bring greater transparency to
consumer lending:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/dv01-uses-r.html

Reproducibility with knitr: how to use the "checkpoint" package with
the "Knit" feature in RStudio:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/using-checkpoint-with-knitr-and-rstudio.html

A summary of the improvements in R 3.4.0:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/r-340-now-available.html

Slides from my recent talk, "Reproducible Data Science with R":
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/reproducible-data-science-with-r.html

SQL Server 2017 will support both R and Python for in-database computation:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/sql-2017-python.html

New features in Microsoft R Server 9.1, now available:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/microsoft-r-server-91-now-available.html

A sentiment analysis of Warren Buffett's letters to shareholders:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/warren-buffet-sentiment.html

A workshop on Artificial Intelligence, featuring Microsoft R, is being
held by Microsoft in Seattle on May 9:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/ai-workshop-seattle.html

The interactive website Seeing Theory demonstrates statistical
principles via simulation:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/seeing-theory.html

Ben Marwick reports on R topics at the 2017 Society of American
Archaeology meeting:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/r-is-for-archaeology.html

The checkpoint package adds new features for managing package versions
in service of reproducibility:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/checkpoint-new-features.html

There were several R-related announcement at the online Data Amp event
on April 19. A replay is now available.
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/data-amp-april-19.html

The vtreat package helps statisticians prepare real-world data for
analysis: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/vtreat.html

Maëlle Salmon used R to create a collage of R users participating in
the #rstats hashtag on Twitter:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/the-faces-of-r-analyzed-with-r.html

Microsoft R Open 3.3.3 (based on R 3.3.3) is now available:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/microsoft-r-open-333-now-available.html

A link between rational functions and OLS regression:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/fitting-rational-functions-with-lm.html

Use the sqlrutils package in Microsoft R Client to publish R functions
as stored procedures in SQL Server:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/sqlrutils.html

Ranking of the most popular languages for Data Scientists/Engineers,
from the StackOverflow Developer Survey:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/stackoverflow-developer-survey.html

Slides and code from the tutorial "Using R for Scalable Data
Analytics: Single Machines to Spark Clusters":
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/tutorial-scaling-r.html

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

* A Turing Machine, implemented in PowerPoint:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/because-its-friday-powerpoint-punchcards.html

* Secrets of the lines of the London Underground:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/because-its-friday-secrets-of-the-london-underground.html

* Reddit's "r/place" communal art experiment:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/04/because-its-friday-art-collective.html

* How "Elite: Dangerous" simulated an entire galaxy for a video game:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/because-its-friday-universe-time-lapse.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