[R] Revolutions blog: September 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 September:

The mathpix package converts images of hand-drawn equations to their LaTeX
equivalent:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/09/convert-hand-drawn-equations-to-latex-with-the-mathpix-package.html

R 3.4.2 is released:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/09/r-342-is-released.html

Applying image featurization to the problem of classifying wood knots in lumber:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/09/wood-knots.html

Microsoft ML Server 9.2, which provides operationalization for R, is released:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/09/microsoft-ml-server-92.html 

A roundup of news stories related to R from the Ignite conference:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/09/news-from-ignite.html

A tutorial on launching a Spark cluster with R on HDInsight:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/09/hdinsight-tutorial.html

A map of pirate attacks, and an ethics lesson on scraping data:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/09/pirating-pirate-data-for-pirate-day.html

A preview of ALTREP, the new vector implementation that promises to bring
performance improvements to the R engine:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/09/altrep-preview.html

The USGS used R to visualize the rainfall from hurricanes Irma
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/09/hurricane-irmas-rains-visualized-with-r.html
and Harvey
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/09/hurricane-harvey-usgs.html

Highlights of some R applications presented at the EARL London conference:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/09/recap-earl-london-2017.html

Microsoft R Open 3.4.1, featuring R 3.4.1, is now available:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/09/mro-341-now-available.html

A introduction to R data frames for SQL Server users:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/09/r-services-working-with-data-frames.html

The "newsflash" package extracts trending topics from cable news closed
captioning streams: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/09/newsflash.html

"Data Visualization for Social Science", a new online textbook with a focus on
ggplot2:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/09/data-visualization-for-social-science.html

Knime 3.4 now includes connections to Microsoft R and Azure data services:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/09/knime-azure.html

A preview of the EARL London 2017 conference:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/09/preview-of-earl-london-2017.html

"Practical Data Science for Stats", a PeerJ Preprints collections of R-related
papers:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/09/practical-data-science-for-stats.html

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

* Music by Michael Kiwanuka
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/09/because-its-friday-big-little-songs.html

* A talk on artificial intelligence and runaway reward functions:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/09/because-its-friday-blue-skies-or-skynet.html

* SpaceX's blooper reel:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/09/because-its-friday-spacex.html

* A new edX course on Artifical Intelligence development:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/09/a-new-edx-course-on-building-artificial-intelligence-applications.html

* A search for syncopation in Radiohead's "Videotape":
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/09/because-its-friday-radiohead-videotape.html

* A system for lifelike synthesis of a speaker's video and audio:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/09/friday-fake-views.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 AI & Research  
Tel: +1 (312) 9205766 (Chicago IL, USA)
Twitter: @revodavid | Blog:  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com