Publications by David Smith
Explore New Zealand’s Tourist Industry with R and Shiny
New Zealand's Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment has just released the New Zealand Tourism Dashboard, an interactive application which allows NZ residents (and curious onlookers everywhere) to explore the economic impact of tourism in the far-flung nation. The dashboard is implemented using Shiny, and all of the graphics and analyses...
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Japans ageing population, animated with R
The US Census makes a number of its databases available to developers via the Census API. One of those databases is the International Data Base, in which the Census department provides historic demographic breakdowns (population by age and sex) for many countries, along with projections through 2050. Kyle Walker created the R package idbr (curren...
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R-based data maps in PowerBI
One of benefit of integrating R with PowerBI is access to rich array of data visulizations not present in the standard PowerBI loadout. R is practically unlimited in the types of graphics it can create (although the amount of programming required can vary from a few lines using an existing R package, to large custom functions for truly bespoke g...
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Data Science Virtual Machine updated with Microsoft R Server
Microsoft has updated the Data Science Virtual Machine, a data science toolkit-in-a-box that you can easily spin up on the Microsoft Azure cloud service. The virtual machine now comes pre-configured with Microsoft R Server Developer Edition (upgraded from Microsoft R Open), Anaconda Python, Jupyter notebooks for Python and R, Visual Studio Comm...
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Over 16 years of R Project history
The first official release of R, R version 1.0.0 was released on February 29, 2000. The anniversary was marked on Twitter by Thomas Lumley, a member of R Core Group: 20 leading statisicians and computer scientists (and 4 alums) from around the world without whom the R Project would not exist. That makes it 16 years — sixteen! — that the R l...
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Computerworld’s 10-step tutorial for creating interactive election maps with R
With the US election season in full swing, you can hardly browse a newspaper website without seeing some kind of map showing election or polling results, like this one from the New York Times. With election data (usually) accessible online, and a wealth of mapping tools available in the R language, you can fairly easily make similar maps yourse...
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In case you missed it: February 2016 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from February of particular interest to R users. A tutorial on presenting interactive versions of R maps in PowerBI. An animation of Japan's population pyramid through 2050 based on US Census Bureau demographic projections. Interactive visualizations of multivariate data in R with the threejs pac...
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R Tools for Visual Studio preview now available
It's official! R Tools for Visual Studio, until now only available as a private preview, is now in public preview and available to everyone as a free, open-source download. RTVS is an add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio, which adds R language development capabilities to the popular Windows-based IDE. If you don't already have Visual Studio, you c...
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R 3.2.4 released
The R Core Group announced yesterday the release of R 3.2.4, the final update in the R 3.2.x series. (R 3.3.0 is scheduled for release on April 14.) This update, codenamed “Very Secure Dishes”, makes a few minor improvements and bug fixes, including long vector support for the smooth function, some improvements in package installation, an...
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SQL Server 2016 launch showcases R
Microsoft officially launched SQL Server 2016 at the Data Driven event in New York City last week, and R featured prominently. One of the highlights from Joseph Sirosh's keynote was a demonstration of the World Wide Telescope, an online tool that allows budding astronomers (and professionals!) to explore the visible universe using imagery from...
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