Publications by David Smith
Remembering on 11/11
Today is Veterans Day in the US, and Remembrance Day or Armistice Day elsewhere in the world. Whatever you know this day as, it's a day for remembering the sacrifices of those who served. Drew Conway has commemorated the day in a touching yet saddening way, by visualizing with R the sparse distribution of funds to support the many homeless vetera...
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Update: Forbes wants your R stories by Nov 17
I mentioned recently that Forbes is seeking stories about R for a forthcoming issue. Well, the story will now be in the December issue (bumped up from the January issue), so be sure to get your post your stories about R to the Mean Business blog by November 17. Forbes: Names You Need to Know in 2011: R Data Analysis Software Related To lea...
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New R User Group in Cincinnati / Dayton
The latest local R user group to join the fold is CinDay RUG, serving the Cincinnati/Dayton area in Ohio. The group was founded by Stu Rodgers, who decided to set it up after posting a query on LinkedIn and finding several other R users in the area. Even if you think there's not enough likeminded folks in your area to support an R user group, it...
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Because it’s Friday: Asteroids
A huge mass of rock hurtling in from space could really make a mess of your weekend plans. So it's comforting to know that the world's astronomers are out there keeping an eye for any potential earth-grazers. See their discoveries over the past 30 years in this beautifully-designed animation: Earth crossers are in red; earth approachers are in y...
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Loops in R: Think different
Especially for programmers that come to R from other languages, R sometimes gets dinged about the speed of its for loops. But a lot of the time, where you might have needed an iterative loop in another language to solve a specific task, you don't need a for loop in R at all. Often, there's a pre-build function to accomplish the specific task at...
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Data Science meets Humanities
There's an interesting article in the NYT today about the emerging discipline of “digital humanities“: extracting digital data from historical archives to answer questions from the Arts and Humanities. From the article: Members of a new generation of digitally savvy humanists argue it is time to stop looking for inspiration in the next polit...
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Wanted: R hackers for Revolution
Revolution Analytics is growing, and we're looking for some skilled R Hackers to work in our pre-Sales team. A big part of our task is showing companies how R is such a great tool for modern data analysis (especially compared to those older tools with 3- or 4-letter acronyms). So if you have a knack for applying R to new problems and data sets (e...
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Competitive Data Science: An Update
A quick reminder that two competitions based around data analysis, both very suited to R, are currently underway. First, there's still plenty of time to enter the competition to predict popular R packages, announced by the The Dataists and hosted at Kaggle. According to organizer Drew Conway, the competition has already received 114 entries from...
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Airport security: science vs backlash
The United States has recently introduced millimeter wave and backscatter x-ray scanners to the security screening process in many airports, prompting a backlash in some quarters. Much of the opposition is centered around the invasion of privacy: the scanners generate an image of the traveller's naked body. There are also health concerns, at lea...
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Access the InfoChimps API from R
InfoChimps.com is mainly known as a clearinghouse for finding large data sets, for free or for sale. But they have also released (in beta, at least) an API that lets you find some pretty useful information on-demand. Normally, you'd have you use RESTful calls to access the API, but now Drew Conway has created an R package (and released gist sour...
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