Publications by David Smith
R and AOL in NYC
R and the NYC R User Group get brief mentions in this article about AOL's offices in New York City. The NYC UseRs meet at AOL and (ironically) the next meeting on Dec 9 is on the topic of R at Google. New York Observer: Bringing Some Sizzle to the Dial-Up King (via) Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment...
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How to make beautiful bubble charts with R
Nathan Yau has just published at FlowingData a step-by-step guide on making bubble charts in R. It's actually pretty simple: read in data, sqrt-transform the “bubble” variable (to scale the bubbles by area, not radius), and use the symbols function to plot. It's the last step, though, that really ups the presentation quality: read R's PDF fil...
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R preferred by Kaggle competitors
Kaggle, the predictive-analytics competition site, has analyzed the preferences of the 2,500 data scientists who participate in its competitions, and R was the most-preferred software of the competitors at 22.5%. The next-nearest alternative was Matlab, at 16%. On a related note, the premier of the Australian state of New South Wales has just lau...
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John Chambers on R and Multilingualism
John Chambers, one of the creators of R's predecessor S and a current member of the R Core Group, gave a seminar at Stanford last week titled “R, other languages and object-oriented programming”. Unfortunately, I was away for the Thanksgiving break and couldn't make it myself, but John has kindly made his slides (PDF) available for download. ...
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The Joy of Visualizations
This is a clip from the forthcoming BBC4 program, The Joy of Stats: The clip shows Hans Rosling (who we've profiled here before), plotting life expectancy versus income for various countries, and animating over time. The clip amply demonstrates that with the right presentation and story, even the simplest of scatterplots can be a joy to behold. ...
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What’s Next for Revolution R and Hadoop?
It's been a busy fall season for the team at Revolution Analytics. Over the past few months, we've announced major product enhancements for Revolution R — RevoScaleR, for tackling big data sets, and RevoDeployR, for embedding Revolution R into wider applications. We've continued to add to our growing customer base at an aggressive rate and we...
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How to create PDF reports with R
Sweave is a literate programming system included with R. It makes it possible to create a PDF document containing not just text, but also tables and charts generated from R. The process is automated, so once you've created an Sweave document (which includes both LaTeX text markup and R commands), you can create the formatted text and insert the t...
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R 101 at TDWI
Last month TDWI's James Powell interviewed Revolution CEO Norman Nie and published the interview as “R 101“. The article answers some of the basic questions about R, such as: What is R? Why is R well-suited for predictive analytics? Why is R superior? How easy is it to learn R? Where is R headed? … and much more. Read the full article...
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Data Visualization Practices at the New York Times
Amanda Cox of the New York Times' graphics department recently gave a great presentation to the New Media Days conference in Copenhagen and described how the Times uses data visualizations to reveal patterns, provide context, describe relationships, and even create a sense of wonder about the world. In the video, Amanda demonstrates several of th...
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Because it’s Friday: The 4th Amendment X-ray T-shirt
Here's a clever way to express your objection to the obtrusiveness of the new backscatter X-ray scanners at airports: A T-shirt with the text of the 4th Amendment printed in metallic ink: Also available in underwear format. Cargo Collective: 4th Amendment Wear Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on the...
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