Publications by David Smith
New R User Groups in Europe
It's great to see the growth in R user groups around the world, and now there are three new ones in western Europe: In Amsterdam, a new R user group has just formed, called amst-R-dam. They are just scheduling their first meeting now (vote here for a date) which will be in the next 3-4 weeks; In Geneva, the GenevaR user group will have their fir...
1051 sym
R overtakes SAS and Matlab in programming language popularity
Tiobe Software ranks the popularity of programming languages based on references in search engines. While the methodology might be debated in terms of the absolute rankings it produces, it is quite interesting to see how the rankings fluctuate over time: Tiobe has produced a monthly report of rankings based on this methodology since 2001. In the...
1334 sym
Where should you publish that next paper?
Like many academics, Arthur Charpentier thinks a lot about publishing papers in journals. Specifically, we wondered if there was a way to figure out which journal was the best place to publish his next paper and have it accepted: I was wondering if there were clusters of journals, i.e. journals that publish almost the same kind of articles (so...
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OkCupid: Finding your Valentine with R
Free dating site OkCupid (which was recently acquired by match.com) collects a lot of data. With over 3 million members, many of whom have provided extensive information about their personal details including preferences, lifestyle, sexuality and hobbies via their dating profiles, they have a wealth of information upon which to identify trends ab...
2219 sym
R 2.12.2 scheduled for February 25
The next release of R is scheduled for release February 25, and R 2.12.2 will likely be the final bug-fix release of the 2.12 series before R 2.13 is released in April. According to the NEWS file in the latest daily build, 2.12.2 will improve complex-arithmetic support on some rare platforms that don't support complex types in C99, and upgrades...
1124 sym R (6779 sym/1 pcs)
The Egyptian Revolution, in tweets
Twitter played a significant role in the recent uprising in Egypt, with protesters communicating via tweets marked with the #25bahman hastag (February 14 in the arabic calendar) to plan and rally for the demonstration. Michael Bommarito downloaded all such tweets and plotted their frequency over time using R's ggplot2 library: Not surprisingly, ...
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Take the ggplot2 user survey
The author of the ggplot2 graphics package for R, Hadley Wickham, is looking for feedback from ggplot2 users. If you've used ggplot2, fill out his short survey at the link below. WuFoo: ggplot2 survey Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: Revolutions. R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail up...
594 sym
Student travel grants for useR! 2011
For students planning to attend the annual worldwide R user conference, useR! 2011, travel grants are available to help defray the cost of attending the conference in the UK. CRISM is offering bursaries for accommodation and conference fees, and Revolution Analytics is offering $1,000 travel grants. Applications for funding, which must be accompa...
910 sym
Some R Package Updates
Packages for R are being added and updated so frequently now that it's tough to keep up with them all (the @CRANberriesFeed Twitter feed helps, though). But here are a couple of recent package updates that caught my eye: The Rcpp package for seamless integration between R and C++ has been updated. While most of the changes are under the hood, ...
1099 sym
New R User Groups in Canada, India
Three new local R user groups have just been added to the directory: In Québec, the group Plein-R is affilliated with the department of Forestry, Geography and Geomatics at Laval University. Although the group's website is in French, group organizer Etienne Racine says, “Our group is bilingual. Our meetings are in a mix of French and Englis...
1512 sym