Publications by David Smith
Visualizing Katrina’s strongest winds, with R
Here's a new picture of the devastation wrought by Katrina in 2005. This image shows the maximum wind speeds of the hurricane, not at any particular point of time, but over the duration of the entire storm: The data come from NOAA's H*Wind project, which makes windspeed data from sensors on the ground and floating in the ocean available to the p...
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The stats of Australian Rules Football
Australian Rules Football (AFL) isn't what Americans know as football. Nor is it what Europeans know as football (and the rest of the world calls soccer). Nor is it rugby. Here's what AFL looks like: As a unique game in its own right, it deserves its own kind of data analysis, and the blog MAFL online has it covered. The most recent post looks a...
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Foodborne Chicago finds dodgy restaurants with tweets, and R
If, like me, you've ever had a sandwich from a dubious deli and then been laid up for days afterwards, you know that food poisoning is no trifling matter. In the past, local authorities would only ever learn of such public health issues if they get reported to the authorities by the victim (or the victim's doctor). But that misses the many cases ...
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Revolution Newsletter: August 2013
The most recent edition of the Revolution Newsletter is now available. In case you missed it, the news section is below, and you can read the full August edition (with highlights from this blog and community events) online. You can subscribe to the Revolution Newsletter to get it monthly via email. What is R? Has anyone ever asked you, �...
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The financial meltdown, to a trance beat
With the FMS Symphony by csv soundsystem you can listen to the Global Financial Crisis as you watch interest rates plunge while the Treasury floods the market with emergency funds. The source data for the chart and music comes from daily emails (like this one) sent by the US Treasury summarizing the cash spending and borrowing of the Federal ...
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Demand for R jobs on the rise, ctd
Earlier this month, we looked at the trends in the job prospects for data analysts with expertise in R and SAS, by looking at the number of job postings that mention each software package. Because R's single-letter name makes it hard to search for, and because SAS is used for many other things besides data analysis, I coupled the search with the ...
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New Webinar: High Performance Predictive Analytics in R and Hadoop
This coming Tuesday, August 27, our US Chief Scientist Mario Inchosa will reveal some details of the forthcoming in-Hadoop predictive analytics capabilities of Revolution R Enterprise 7, due for release later this year. Here's the abtract of his webinar, High Performance Predictive Analytics in R and Hadoop: Hadoop is rapidly being adopted as a...
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Revolution Analytics: Top Innovator for Data Visualization
We're proud that Revolution R Enterprise recently received the award for Top Innovator for Data Visualization from DataWeek. The R language has long been at the forefront of data visualization, and is the graphical engine behind many of the unique data visualizations you often see on the web and in print, including in the New York Times, at Flowi...
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In-Hadoop R-based Analytics coming to Cloudera
Revolution Analytics has teamed up with Cloudera to bring the scalable data manipulation and statistical modeling algorithms of Revolution R Enteprise to the massively-parallel computing environments of CDH3 and CDH4 Hadoop clusters. As ZDNet reports: Specifically, the upcoming version 7.0 of the Revolution R Enterpise distribution and its Scal...
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Tutorial: Parallel programming with foreach
Exegetic Analytics extols the wonders of foreach package for iterative operations that go beyond the standard “for” loop in R. For example, here's a neat (if not optimally efficient) construct using filters to calculate the primes less than 100: foreach(n = 1:100, .combine = c) %:% when (isPrime(n)) %do% n The open-source team at Revolutio...
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