Publications by David Smith
Program for useR! 2010 announced
The program of invited lectures, contributed talks and posters for this year’s annual R user conference useR! 2010 is now available, and it looks to be another excellent event. (Revolution Analytics is a sponsor of useR! 2010.) Of note this year is an increasing focus on commercial applications of R, with no less than three multi-talk sessi...
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Reminder: Supercharging BI with R webinar tomorrow
If you haven’t done so already, it’s not too late to register for tomorrow’s 1-hour webinar, Supercharge BI and Dashboards with Predictive Analytics. I’ll be one of the presenters, talking about R and its applications for business intelligence. The topics and speakers will be: Introduction: Analytics and BI (Steve Miller, OpenBI) How BI C...
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Supercharging business analytics with R
Really pleased with how our webinar today, Supercharge BI and Dashboards with Predictive Analytics, turned out. Steve Miller from OpenBI gave a great introduction to the motivations and need for predictive analytics. Andrew Lampitt from Jaspersoft was next up, with an overview of the Jaspersoft system for BI reports and dashboards. My section fo...
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Political Science with R
As a discipline, Political Science — the analysis of the theory and practice and politics — has been around for quite a while. (Our own CEO here at Revolution Analytics, Norman Nie, has been a leading academic and author in the field for over 40 years.) But it’s only in recent years that a deluge of data about politics has erupted: detai...
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Making Data Work online conference
O’Reilly is hosting a conference on June 9 on the topic of the analysis of large data sets. The title of the conference is Making Data Work: Ever since Hal Varian proclaimed that data analysis is the sexy career for the coming decade, people have been talking about data. And big data. And even bigger data. This online conference, Making Data W...
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Connecting Revolution R to MySQL on Windows
My colleague Saar Golde was having some troubles connecting Revolution R to MySQL on Windows (64-bit). Turned out the problem was the lack of an environment variable. He documented the instructions for fixing the problem on Windows 7, below. Thanks, Saar!The Problem:A client is about to send me a couple of large MySQL tables, so I needed to insta...
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Because it’s Friday: Stochastic degradation
When you upload a video to YouTube, they don’t store a perfect digital copy of your media file. The video is actually re-encoded into the MPEG-4 video format. This saves space on YouTube’s servers, but also introduces some random degradation to the video (as a result of the lossy compression process).So what happens if you then save that conv...
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What is R?
Probably the question I get asked the most about R is, “What is R”? It’s can be a hard question to answer, because R is so many things. It’s data analysis software. It’s an environment for data analysis. It’s a language. It’s an open-source project. It’s a community. The Wikipedia page for R does a great job of describing the deta...
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Norman Nie talks R and statistics with CNET’s Dave Rosenberg
Revolution’s CEO Norman Nie recently gave an interview to CNET’s Dave Rosenberg, who blogs on disrupting the software market. Among the topics covered: What is R (Nie: “R is the most powerful statistical computing language on the planet”), what is predictive analytics (“statistical modeling by another name”) and plans for Revolution R...
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Thoughts on Making Data Work
I really enjoyed all four talks at today’s online conference, Making Data Work. (Disclosure: Revolution sponsored this conference.) I thought the four speakers together gave a great overview of issues related to the processing, analysis, and visualization of big data.Mike Driscoll started off with a useful categorization for data size. “Small...
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