Publications by David Smith
R’s role in science breakthrough: reproducibility of psychology studies
The scientific process has been going through a welcome period of introspection recently, with a focus on understanding just how reliable the results of scientific studies are. We're not talking here about scientific fraud, but how the scientific process itself and the focus on p-values (which not even statisticians can easily explain) as the cri...
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Avoid overlapping labels in ggplot2 charts
If you've ever created a scatterplot with text labels using the text function in R, or the geom_text function in the ggplot2 package, you've probably found that the text labels can easily overlap, rendering some of them unreadable. Now, thanks to the new extensibility capabilities of the ggplot2 package, R user Kamil Slowikowski has created an ...
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Revolution R renamed Microsoft R, available free to developers and students
In the nine months since Microsoft acquired Revolution Analytics, there have been a steady stream of updates to Revolution R Open and Revolution R Enterprise (not to mention integration of R with SQL Server, PowerBI, Azure and Cortana Analytics). Now, we have yet more updates to announce along with fresh new names. Revolution R Open is now Micros...
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R coming to Visual Studio
You might have missed one significant bit of news tucked into yesterday's Microsoft R announcement: R is coming to Visual Studio: R Tools for Visual Studio (RTVS) follows the model of Python Tools for Visual Studio: it's an open-source plug-in to Visual Studio that makes it a complete IDE for R, with syntax-aware editing, a command-line REPL, ...
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In case you missed it: December 2015 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from December of particular interest to R users. A look back at accomplishments of the R Project and community in 2015. Segmented regression with the “segmented” package, applied to long-distance running records. Creating multi-tab reports in R with knitr and jQuery UI. New version 2.0 update...
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Microsoft R Open 3.2.3 now available
Microsoft R Open 3.2.3, the performance-enhanced distribution of R 3.2.3, is now available for download from mran.microsoft.com. This is the latest (and first of many to come!) update to Revolution R Open under its new name. In addition to the improvements in R 3.2.3, this update to MRO brings support for Mac OS X “El Capitan” and Red Hat E...
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Upcoming Microsoft R Webinars
A quick heads-up that I'll be presenting a live webinar on Thursday January 28, Introduction to Microsoft R Open. If you know anyone that should get to know R and/or Microsoft R Open, send 'em along. Here's the abstract: Data Science is a strategic initiative for most companies today, who seek to understand the wealth of data now available to th...
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American Community Survey analyzed with R
The American Community Survey, conducted by the US Census Bureau, collects data from around 3.5 million households each year in order to estimate various demographic statistics of the US population, including appliances installed in the home, languages spoken, work experience and much more (here's the complete data dictionary). The data science c...
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In-depth analysis of Twitter activity and sentiment, with R
Astronomer and budding data scientist Julia Silge has been using R for less than a year, but based on the posts using R on her blog has already become very proficient at using R to analyze some interesting data sets. She has posted detailed analyses of water consumption data and health care indicators from the Utah Open Data Catalog, religious ...
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New Yorkers, municipal bikes, and the weather
Like many modern cities, New York offers a public pick-up/drop-off bicycle service (called Citi Bikes). Subscribing City Bike members can grab a bike from almost 500 stations scattered around the city, hop on and ride to their destination, and drop the bike at a nearby station. (Visitors to the city can also purchase day passes.) The City Bike p...
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