Publications by David Smith
Prediction in the cloud: turbulent
While Microsoft rolled out its Technical Computing Initiative — promising new tools for distributed parallel computing on large data sets in the cloud — with much fanfare earlier this week, Google made a rather more understated response. In a post to the developer-focused Google Code Blog, they quietly announced two new, but potentially dis...
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Calling all T-shirt designers
Got design skills as well as R skills? The organizers of the useR! 2010 conference are looking for a design to be used on the conference T-shirts. Mango Solutions (who are sponsoring the T-shirt) will select the winner, but personally I’d give extra points for designs that use R itself — it’s been done before!R-statistics blog: useR-2010 is...
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Tip of the day: Keep the console active in R Productivity Environment
Jared Lander on Twitter asks:When I alt-tab into [Revolution] R Enterprise how do I make the #rstats [R] console the active window by default. Now it goes to solution explorer.Revolution’s crack Support engineer Stephen Weller offers this solution:The best way to do this is to right-click on the R-Console window and make it a ‘Tabbed Documen...
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R 2.11.1 scheduled for May 31
As announced by the R Core Team, the next update to R will be 2.11.1 to be released on May 31. Despite being a minor-minor version increment, this release is expected to sport at least one new feature: BIC (in package stats4) will work with multiple fitted models, like AIC does. There will also be some improvements to the installation process, a...
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Because it’s Friday: Ash
I lived for 10 years within sight (on a clear day, anyway) of Mount St. Helens, and had seen and heard a lot about the devastation caused by the eruption and pyroclastic flow 30 years ago. But I’d heard relatively little about the effects of the ash cloud settling on land. I was surprised to learn about the effect it had on the city of Spokane:...
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Webinar: R analytics and Business Intelligence dashboards
On Wednesday next week, Revolution will be hosting a joint webinar with open-source Business Intelligence software maker Jaspersoft and open-source Business Intelligence services company OpenBI. Together, we’ll be talking about making BI dashboards even more powerful by integrating custom visualizations and advanced predictive models from R. If...
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German Tanks, Statistical Intelligence
In World War II, the Allies had a problem: German tanks were often captured, but how many more did the Nazis have in reserve? Allied intelligence estimated around 1400 Panther tanks were being produced a month: a formidable arsenal, and perhaps an insurmountable one given the much smaller numbers being captured or destroyed. But those captured ta...
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How to map your Twitter social network
Ever wondered which Twitterers you and a friend share? Using R and the twitteR package, there’s an easy way to find out. Cornelius Puschmann hacked together some R code to do just that for the Humanities and Technology Camp and it seems to work pretty well. Just replace ‘coffee001’ with the your Twitter username, ‘mypassword’ with your...
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Because it’s Friday: The dating equation
According to internet lore, there’s a mathematical equation that governs the lower bound for the socially acceptable age of a potential dating partner: half your age plus 7, or, in mathematical terms, if x is your age then the lower bound is f(x) = x/2 + 7.Seems simple, right? if you’re 20, then the minimum socially acceptable age for a date ...
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R 2.11.1 released
It’s official: R 2.11.1 is out. Source code and binaries for Windows and MacOS are available at the master CRAN mirror, and will be available for download from your local mirror soon.As anticipated, this is an update release focussing mainly on bugfixes and with just one new feature. According to R core team member Peter Dalgaard one fix in par...
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