Publications by David Smith
Thursday Dec 11: Webinar on sports analytics with R and Storm
A quick heads-up that this Thursday (December 11), Allen Day from MapR and Bill Jacobs from Revolution Analytics will be live presenting a new webinar, Batter Up! Advanced Sports Analytics with R and Storm. The analysis will be of baseball data, but the webinar will be of interest to anyone interested in doing large-scale statistical analysis wi...
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O’Reilly Data Scientist Salary and Tools Survey, November 2014
The O'Reilly Data Scientist Survey for 2014 is out, with fresh data on the salaries and tools used by data scientists. Jon King has a summary of the results, but not much has changed since last year: median income is down very slightly ($100k in 2013 vs $98k in 2014), and the most popular analysis tools (excluding operating systems) remain — in...
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In case you missed it: November 2014 Roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from November of particular interest to R users. Reviews of some of the R-related presentations (by John Chambers, Trevor Hastie and others) at the H20 World conference. An R/Shiny app for making egg-nog. An author's look at how R was used to create many of the beautiful graphics in the book “...
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Revolution R Open 8.0.1 now available
We've just made the latest update to Revolution R Open, the enhanced distribution of open-source R, available for download from MRAN. The main feature of this release is an upgrade to the R 3.1.2 engine, and support for MacOS Yosemite. (You can read about all the changes in the NEWS file.) To support reproducibility, Revolution R Open works with ...
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Cartography with complex survey data
Visualizing complex survey data is something of an art. If the data has been collected and aggregated to geographic units (say, counties or states), a choropleth is one option. But if the data aren't so neatly arranged, making visual sense often requires some form of smoothing to represent it on a map. R, of course, has a number of features and...
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New leadership of the R Foundation
The R Foundation, the Austria-based non-profit founded in 2003 to oversee the R Project, recently held leadership elections and added some new members. The new R Foundation Board is: Co-Presidents: Duncan Murdoch, Martyn PlummerSecretary General: Martin MächlerTreasurer: Kurt HornikMembers at large: John Chambers, Brian Ripley, Dirk Ed...
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A list of awesome statistics resources in 2014
Johns Hopkins Biostatistics Professor (and presenter of Data Analysis at Coursera) Jeff Leek has published his list of awesome things other people did in 2014. It's well worth following the links in his 38 entries, where you'll find a wealth of useful resources in teaching, statistics, data science, and data visualization. Many of the entries are...
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The evolution of the Queen’s Christmas speech
Every year since her inauguration in 1952, Queen Elizabeth II has delivered a Christmas Broadcast to her subjects. Dominic Nyhuis used R to analyze the transcripts of the speeches, and found some interesting trends in speech length and words used. Here, for example, are word clouds of the speeches from the first half (1962-1976) and second half ...
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Explore a comet with R’s "rgl" package
Last month, the Philae lander touched down on comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko. In the process, the lander and the orbiting Rosetta probe captured detailed data on the geometry of the comet, which the ESA published as a shape file. You can use the rgl package to visualize and explore such shape files quite simply as follows: Then you can manipulate...
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R wins a 2014 Bossie Award
I missed this when it was announced back on September 29, but R won a 2014 Bossie Award for best open-source big-data tools from InfoWorld (see entry number 5): A specialized computer language for statistical analysis, R continues to evolve to meet new challenges. Since displacing lisp-stat in the early 2000s, R is the de-facto statistical proce...
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