Publications by David Smith
R 3.4.3 released
R 3.4.3 has been released, as announced by the R Core team today. As of this writing, only the source distribution (for those that build R themselves) is available, but binaries for Windows, Mac and Linux should appear on your local CRAN mirror within the next day or so. This is primarily a bug-fix release. It fixes an issue with incorrect time z...
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A case study in messy data analysis: the Australian same-sex marriage survey
Last month the Australian people signaled their approval of legalizing same-sex marriage by a 62%:38% margin in a national survey. (On a personal note, I was elated and relieved by the result: my husband and I have discussed eventually retiring to Australia, and with this decision our marriage would be recognized there.) While fears of a surprise...
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AI School: Microsoft R and SQL Server ML Services
If you'd like to learn how you use R to develop AI applications, the Microsoft AI School now features a learning path focused on Microsoft R and SQL Server ML Services. This learning path includes eight modules, each comprising detailed tutorials and examples: Doing Data Analysis using R Analyzing Big Data with Microsoft R Server Introduction to...
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On the biases in data
Whether we're developing statistical models, training machine learning recognizers, or developing AI systems, we start with data. And while the suitability of that data set is, lamentably, sometimes measured by its size, it's always important to reflect on where those data come from. Data are not neutral: the data we choose to use has profound im...
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The British Ecological Society’s Guide to Reproducible Science
The British Ecological Society has published a new volume in their Guides to Better Science series: A Guide to Reproducible Code in Ecology and Evolution (pdf). The introduction, by , describes its scope: A Guide to Reproducible Code covers all the basic tools and information you will need to start making your code more reproducible. We focus on...
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In case you missed it: November 2017 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from November of particular interest to R users. R 3.4.3 “Kite Eating Tree” has been released. Several approaches for generating a “Secret Santa” list with R. The “RevoScaleR” package from Microsoft R Server has now been ported to Python. The call for papers for the R/Finance 2018 confer...
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Personal note on joining the Microsoft Cloud Advocates team
A quick personal note: today is my first day as a member of the Cloud Developer Advocates team at Microsoft! I'll still be blogging and events related to R, and supporting the R community, but now I'll be doing it as a member of a team dedicated to community outreach. As a bit of background, when I joined Microsoft back in 2015 via the acquisit...
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A chart of Bechdel Test scores
A movie is said to satisfy the Bechdel Test if it satisfies the following three criteria: The movie has at least two named female characters … who have a conversation with each other … about something other than a man The website BechdelTest.com scores movies accordingly, granting one point for each of the criteria above for a maximum of...
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R in the Windows Subsystem for Linux
R has been available for Windows since the very beginning, but if you have a Windows machine and want to use R within a Linux ecosystem, that's easy to do with the new Fall Creator's Update (version 1709). If you need access to the gcc toolchain for building R packages, or simply prefer the bash environment, it's easy to get things up and running...
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ASA Police Data Challenge student visualization contest winners
The winners of the American Statistical Association Police Data Challenge have been announced. The ASA teamed up with the Police Data Initiative, which provides open data from local law enforcement agencies in the US, to create a competition for high school and college students to analyze crime data from Baltimore, Seattle and Cincinnati. In thi...
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