[R] Revolutions blog: January 2018 roundup

[David Smith (CDA)]

Since 2008, Microsoft (formerly Revolution Analytics) staff and guests have
written about R 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 January:

Josh Katz and Peter Aldhous used R to analyze the content and presentation of
the most recent State of the Union speech from the US president:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/trump-sotu.html

Slides for my presentation "Speeding up R with Parallel Processing in the
Cloud", with applications of the doAzureParallel and sparklyr packages:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/r-parallel-cloud.html

An example of using the doAzureParallel package to speed up a statistical
simulation:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/doazureparallel-simulations.html

5 lines of R code to create a list of US Representatives from a Wikipedia table:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/scraping-with-5-lines-r.html

A package to visualize routes from activities recorded with a Strava device:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/strava-visualization.html

The call for papers and registration is now open for useR!2018 in Brisbane:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/user2018-reg-open.html

Microsoft R Open 3.4.3 is now available:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/microsoft-r-open-343-now-available.html

A simple command-line tool to launch a cluster in Azure for use with sparklyr:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/azure-sparklyr-aztk.html

A review of cloud-based tools for building intelligent applications with R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/r-cloud-tools.html

A guide to implementing deep neural networks from scratch in R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/neural-networks-r6.html

R leaps to its highest position -- 8th -- in the TIOBE language rankings:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/tiobe-2017.html

A field guide to the ecosystem surrounding R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/a-field-guide-to-the-r-ecosystem.html

Using the Rcpp package to parallelize an association rules problem:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/parallelize-rcpp.html

Various R tricks used at Etsy to speed up an A/B testing system:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/r-faster-case-study.html

Some useful advice from Jenny Bryan on setting up a reproducible R workflow:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/bryan-workflow.html

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

* A Japanese artist makes "paintings" with Excel:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/because-its-friday-excel-painter.html

* A presentation on why companies' stated principles and values actually matter:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/because-its-friday-principles-and-values.html 

* Some impressive formation acrobatics with kites:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/kite-ballet.html 

* A new Harry Potter chapter, written with a predictive text algorithm:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/01/because-its-friday-harry-potter-was-the-time-to-come.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>
Developer Advocate, Microsoft Cloud & Enterprise 
Tel: +1 (312) 9205766 (Chicago IL, USA)
Twitter: @revodavid | Blog:  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com