Publications by David Smith
Calculating the house edge of a slot machine, with R
Modern slot machines (fruit machine, pokies, or whatever those electronic gambling devices are called in your part of the world) are designed to be addictive. They're also usually quite complicated, with a bunch of features that affect the payout of a spin: multiple symbols with different pay scales, wildcards, scatter symbols, free spins, jackpo...
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Updated curl package provides additional security for R on Windows
There are many R packages that connect to the internet, whether it's to import data (readr), install packages from Github (devtools), connect with cloud services (AzureML), or many other web-connected tasks. There's one R package in particular that provides the underlying connection between R and the Web: curl, by Jeroen Ooms, who is also the new...
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An update for MRAN
MRAN, the Microsoft R Application Network has been migrated to a new high-performance, high-availability server, and we've taken the opportunity to make a few upgrades along the way. You shouldn't notice any breaking changes (of course if you do, please let us know), but you should notice faster performance for the MRAN site and for the checkpoin...
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The City of Chicago uses R to issue beach safety alerts
Among the many interesting talks I saw a the Domino Data Science Pop-Up in Chicago earlier this week was the presentation by Gene Lynes and Nick Lucius from the City of Chicago. The City of Chicago Tech Plan encourages smart communities and open government, and as part of that initiative the city has undertaken dozens of open-source, open-data pr...
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Highlights from the Connect(); conference
Connect();, the annual Microsoft developer conference, is wrapping up now in New York. The conference was the venue for a number of major announcements and talks. Here are some highlights related to data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence: There have been several updates to Azure Machine Learning, including the ability to dep...
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R charts in a Tweet
Twitter recently doubled the maximum length of a tweet to 280 characters, and while all users now have access to longer tweets, few have taken advantage of the opportunity. Bob Rudis used the rtweet package to analyze tweets sent with the #rstats hashtag since 280-char tweets were introduced, and most still kept below the old 280-character limit....
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Learnings from 5 months of R-Ladies Chicago (Part 1)
by Angela Li, founder and organizer of R-Ladies Chicago. This article also appears on Angela's personal blog. It’s been a few months since I launched R-Ladies Chicago, so I thought I’d sit down and write up some things that I’ve learned in the course of organizing this wonderful community. Looking back, there are a few things I wish someone...
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Happy Thanksgiving!
Today is Thanksgiving Day here in the US, so we're taking the rest of the week off to enjoy the time with family. Even if you don't celebrate Thanksgiving, today is still an excellent day to give thanks to the volunteers who have contributed to the R project and its ecosystem. In particular, give thanks to the R Core Group, whose tireless dedica...
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R/Finance 2018, Chicago June 1-2
The tenth annual R/Finance conference will be held in Chicago, June 1-2 2018. This is a fantastic conference for anyone working with R in the finance industry, or doing research around R in finance in the academic sector. This community-led, single-track conference always features a program of interesting talks in a convival atmosphere. If you'd ...
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How to generate a Secret Santa list with R
Several recent blog posts have explored the Secret Santa problem and provided solutions in R. This post provides a roundup of various solutions and how they are implemented in R. If you wanted to set up a “Secret Santa” gift exchange at the office, you could put everyone's name into a hat and have each participant draw a name at random. The...
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