Publications by David Smith
R on TV
Had a fun day today in a TV studio for Fox Business News, where Revolution CEO Norman Nie was giving an interview to Liz Claman at Fox Business Network. As you might expect, the interview focused a lot more on the business side than on technical capabilities of Revolution R, but there was some good discussion of the impacts of statistical analysi...
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The Deepwater Horizon, in context
The Earth is pretty big. Give or take, it’s about 36,000 feet (11km) to the height of a 747 soaring above Everest, and (in pleasing symmetry) about the same distance down the bottom of the Mariana Trench. (Nonetheless, if you shrunk the Earth down to scale, it would still be smoother than a billiard ball.) So I was surprised when I saw this inf...
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Performance benefits of linking R to multithreaded math libraries
R wasn’t originally designed as a multithreaded application — multiprocessor systems were still rare when the R Project was first conceived in the mid-90’s — and so, by default, R will only use one processor of your dual-core laptop or quad-core desktop machine when doing calculations. For calculations that take a long time, like big simu...
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New R User Group in Atlanta
There’s a new R User Group in Atlanta, GA. Well, it’s not exactly new — they’ve already had their first meeting — but due to a cock-up on my part I failed to announce it at the time. (Memo to self: don’t forget to star emails in Gmail that you have to follow up on!) There’s a Google Group where you can find info about the Atlanta R ...
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New R User Groups in Sydney, South Asia
For R users in the Southern Hemisphere on the other side of the Prime Meridian, there are two new entries in the Local R User Group Directory: Sydney and South Asia. The Sydney group wins the prize for the best group acronym ever: SURF. The Sydney Users of R Forum will have their welcome meeting on July 6 July 20, with a talk from Eugene Dubos...
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New R User Group in Kassel, Germany
There’s yet another local R user group launching this week, this time in Kassell, in central Germany. Their first meeting is on June 24. If my rusty German is holding up, looks like there will be some good discussion on editors and GUIs, how to find packages and functions, and R community resources.There’s been lots of activity in new R user ...
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Welcome guest blogger, Joseph Rickert
I’m about to head out for a two-week holiday, so I’ll be off the grid for a little while. But I have queued up some (hopefully!) interesting stories to auto-post while I’m away, so there’ll still be plenty to read every weekday as usual here on the blog. Also joining us for the next couple of weeks is guest blogger Joseph Rickert. Joseph...
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The distribution of online data usage
AT&T has recently announced it will no longer offer unlimited data plans for new iPhone users in the US, and now some carriers in the UK have followed suit. In each case, the providers claim that only a very small number of users actually use enough data to warrant an unlimited plan, and most users use relatively little and will benefit from the ...
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The impact of the drug war in Mexico
For the last couple of years, Mexico has been in the midst of an escalating drug war, with violent crime on the upswing in many areas. But tracking the impact quantitatively is difficult: in Mexico, about 85% of crimes go unreported, and corruption leads to inaccurate reporting in some districts. Diego Valle has taken on the task of visualizing a...
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Revolution Analytics: Startup to watch
Jack Germain of LinuxInsider interviewed Revolution CEO Norman Nie for his “Startup to Watch” column. Amongst the topics covered: the R language (Norman: “There are no statistical expressions that can not be written in R”), Revolution’s recent name-change and announcement of our development roadmap, and the challenges of competing with ...
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