Publications by David Smith
NYT uses R to forecast Senate elections
Nate Silver's departure to relaunch FiveThirtyEight.com left a bit of a hole at the New York Times, which The Upshot — the new data journalism practice at the Times — seeks to fill. And they've gotten off to a great start with the new Senate forecasting model, called Leo. Leo was created by Amanda Cox (longtime graphics editor at the NYT) and...
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A world map of R user activity
R easily has more than two million users around the world, but where is R activity the most concentrated? That's the question that the team of R users at Rapporter seeks to answer, by combining data about locations of R Foundation members, package authors, package downloaders, and user group members into a single, country-wide “R usage score”...
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Registration now open for useR! 2014 in LA
Join hundreds of other R users from around the world at the annual worldwide R user conference useR! 2014, to be held June 30 – July 3 at the UCLA campus in Los Angeles. Registration is now open for attendees. Advance registration for the conference is just $375 — and even less for academics ($250) and students ($125). Register by May 10 to...
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Playing Threes and 2048 with R
I'll say it again: the 2048 game is horribly addictive. Luckily for my productivity, though, I've been playing a lot less of it since I finally managed to complete the game's main goal: combine and double-up like-numbered tiles until you create the ultimate 2048 tile: My strategy? Play the game like Tetris. Only move tiles down, left, and right ...
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AdviseR: Technical Support for Open Source R
For more than 7 years, Revolution Analytics has provided expert technical support to users of the R language, as part of their annual subscription to Revolution R Enterprise (RRE). Now, all users of open source R can get the same expert technical support with our new AdviseR program, for just $795 per year. (That's in US dollars; the program is a...
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Fast Company explains why R is good for business
In a new article for FastCoLabs, journalist Tina Amirtha has published a follow-up article to last month's piece on R's impact on open science. In her latest article, the focus is on how R is used at companies and displacing legacy statistics software like SAS: SAS is no match for the open-source language that pioneering data scientists use in ...
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In case you missed it: April 2014 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from April of particular interest to R users: Registration is now open for the useR! 2014 R conference in Los Angeles. A new Kaggle competition challenges R users to predict which shoppers will become repeat buyers. Data on R usage around the world, presented as an interative map. The New Y...
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R for Cats: a feline-oriented R tutorial for beginners
Looking for a fun and useful intro to R for first-timers, with bonus cat pictures? Look no further than R for Cats, from Scott Chamberlain of ROpenSci. In addition to very helpful tips on R syntax, data structures, and an excellent list of dos and don'ts, it also shows you how to do this with R: Check it out: R for cats and cat lovers Related...
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Because it’s Friday: the worst place to be stung by a bee
Ever wondered where on your body is the most painful place to be stung by a bee? Me either, but Michael Smith from Cornell's Department of Neurobiology and Behavior was eager enough to find out that he stung himself 25 to find out which location was the most painful. (Thanks BR for the tip.) The experimental design and the data analysis was co...
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Facebook teaches you exploratory data analysis with R
Facebook is a company that deals with a lot of data — more than 500 terabytes a day — and R is widely used at Facebook to visualize and analyze that data. Applications of R at Facebook include user behaviour, content trends, human resources and even graphics for the IPO prospectus. Now, four R users at Facebook (Moira Burke, Chris Saden, De...
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