Publications by David Smith
Because it’s Friday: Analytics of an Engagement
The always-interesting R blogger and political scientist Drew Conway — and self-styled luckiest man on earth — just announced some very happy news: he just got engaged to his future wife! Congratulations, Drew! (Drew proposed the traditional way, on a lovely European vacation. But if he’d just held off a couple of days he could have propose...
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New StackOverflow site for Statistics
Since launching StackOverflow.com as a Q&A forum for programmers, the StackExchange network is now launching about three new sites a week on topics as specialized as cooking, jobs, and many many more. There’s a well-defined, community-oriented process for setting up a new site: first it must be proposed, and then enough potential users must com...
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New R User Group in Slovenia
The new R User Group in Ljubljana, Slovenia is giving the Sydney group a run for the money when it comes to the best user group name. It’s called Anonymous Rcoholics — great name! You can join the group at the link below. Discussions are in English and Slovene.Google Groups: Anonymous Rcoholics Related To leave a comment for the author,...
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Reminder: Launch Party for Inside-R.org tonight
If you’re in the DC area (attending useR!2010, perhaps) this evening, Revolution Analytics (in conjunction with the DC Area R User Group) is hosting a party to celebrate the launch of Inside-R.org at the Crowne Plaza in Rockville at 8PM. Come along for drinks and food, mingle with other R users, hear about the new community site for R, and ente...
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Inside-R.org, a new community site for R
As recently as a couple of years ago, finding information about R in the Web was hard. Other than the canonical content and mailing list archives at the official R project site, www.r-project.org, there wasn’t too much else dedicated to R on the web — and what was there was hard to find on Google without the help of sites like Rseek.org. Fas...
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UseR! 2010 day 1
Just a couple of quick notes about the first day of talks at useR! 2010. It’s been a jam-packed schedule — so many good talks to see and people to meet, I just wish I had more time for it all!One stand-out for me so far has been Frank Harrell’s keynote lecture Information Allergy, on the dangers of misusing statistics in Medicine, was amazi...
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Plaudits for R
I just discovered that R core member Paul Murrell has been maintain a list of plaudits for R: newspaper articles, book reviews, remarks on mailing lists and blogs, and even gratitudes from individual R users. He’s collected dozens of entries since 2001 — great materials here if you ever need more evidence of the awesomeness of R. Paul Murre...
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New R User Group in Melbourne
Data mining analyst Yuval Marom has just started a new user group for users of R in Melbourne (the one in Australia). He says:The group is open to people with all levels of experience with R, including complete beginners and complete experts, and people from all industries – private, government, and academic. The main purpose of the group is...
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Snapshots from useR! 2010
I’ve still got more to write from days 2 and 3 of useR! 2010, but in the meantime here are a few snapshots from my camera roll. (Click on the images for larger versions.) Jeroen Ooms (left) chats with other useRs in the main hallway at NIST. Karim Chine demonstrates his Electric-R portal for R on Amazon’s EC2 cloud. Andrew Lampitt talks a...
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Taking R to Eleven
R, the open-source statistical software system, is certainly a hot topic these days. It’s been the subject of increasing media interest over the last year or so, and the user community is expanding rapidly: there are now about 40 R user groups around the world, and last week’s worldwide R User Conference was the most successful ever. So why ...
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