Publications by David Smith
UseR 2010 and commercial applications of R
Preparations are well underway for the annual R user conference useR! 2010, to be held at NIST (about 25 miles outside of Washington, DC) July 20-23. This meeting is a true user conference: almost all of the presentations at the conference are contributed by ordinary R users. So, to continue the success of previous years the conference committe...
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How to make a heat map in R
FlowingData has just posted a nice step-by-step tutorial on how to make a heat-map in R, like this one on attributes of NBA scorers: If you want to take the concept a step further with time-series data, you can also create calendar heat-maps in R. For example, you can track the level of activity in a forum, or the pace of iPhone app sales.Flowing...
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Because it’s Friday: The Internet is Made of Cats
Here’s a fascinating video that looks at the exponential growth of broadband technology and network-based models … uh … who am I kidding? This video has nothing to do with R, statistics, or open-source. It’s about cats. But it’s funny. And it’s Friday.(Some slightly NSFW language, but it’s in a strong British accent so you might not...
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Web Development with R (video)
Jeroen Ooms’ BARUG talk on Web Development with R is now available (with thanks again to Drew Conway):If you want to try the web based apps Jeroen demos in the video yourself, you can find links at Jeroen’s homepage (along with the slides for his talk). Click on the links for stockplot, lme4, and gpplot2. vcasmo: Web Development with R Re...
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User Group news: DC and Philly
There’s a new local R User Group starting up in Philadelphia. Alex McClung and Jeremy Leipzig have set up a website for the Philly UseR Group to get things started, so if you’re in the area join up and tell them what you’d like from the group.Also, the DC UseR Group is seeing renewed activity after a hiatus since its first meeting last year...
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Robert Gentleman joins REvolution’s board of directors
We’re so excited here at REvolution Computing to announce that Robert Gentleman has joined our board of directors. Robert is one of the two originators of the R Project: a research project between Robert and Ross Ihaka in 1996 was the genesis of the R language. (Both Robert and Ross were profiled in an article in the New York Times about R las...
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Mapping the Massachusetts election upset with R
The blog Offensive Politics has done some in-depth analysis of the recent Senate special-election upset in Massachusetts, comparing the results of victorious Republican candidate Scott Brown to those of the unsuccessful Republican Presidential candidate John McCain in 2008. It’s pretty clear that Brown out-performed expectations with Democratic...
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What programmers should know about Statistics
Reader KW pointed me to this rant essay from Ruby on Rails enfant terrible Zed Shaw on what computer programmers don’t know about statistical analysis, but should. (Spoiler alert: a lot, apparently.) Perhaps surprisingly, building complex software systems often involves a lot of simulation, experimentation, and measurement for which statistical...
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How to combine Google maps and data in R
Every good artist needs a canvas, and when it comes to displaying geographic data placing those data in context — on a map — makes all the difference. A new package for R from Markus Loecher, RgoogleMaps, allows you to download a street or satellite map from Google simply by specifying the bounding latitude/longitude coordinates. (You need to...
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Introduction to R webinar today, slides available
Just a quick reminder that I’ll be hosting an introductory webinar about R today, The R Project: Data Analysis and Statistical Graphics for the Enterprise. It’s at 9AM Pacific, so you might still have time to register for the live session at the link below.Otherwise, if you did catch the live session, you can pick up the slides at the link b...
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