Publications by David Smith
What makes a hockey Hall-of-Famer?
At the JSM conference last week, I stopped by a great poster by Steve Salaga and Brian Mills, graduate students at University of Michigan's Department of Sport Management. The guys were clearly hockey fans, and had channelled their enthusiasm for a sport into an interesting statistical analysis of game and player data from the NHL. One analysis, ...
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What do you want to see at useR 2012?
This year's useR! conference at Warwick University is less than a week away, but planning is already underway for useR! 2012, to be held at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. If you're planning to attend, conference organizer Frank Harrell is looking for your input: The 2012 R User Conference – useR! 2012 – will be held in Nashville Tennes...
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A 60-second survey for R users
I'm doing a little research to validate estimates of the size of the R user community. If you're an R user, please take a minute to complete this three-question survey on R usage at your organization. Thanks in advance. Revolution Analytics: R user base survey Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on the...
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In case you missed it: July Roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from July of particular interest to R users. A simulation in R finds the value (or disadvantage) or drawing an X, J, Q or Z in Scrabble. How to display high-quality graphics on the web using SVG output from R. A review of Paul Murrell's talk about raster image support in R. You can find other R us...
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FastCompany on telling stories with data
An article in FastCompany today profiles two websites that excel in telling engaging stories with data: the FlowingData and OkTrends blogs. Both sites often use R for data analysis and data visualization, and have been featured here on this blog. FlowingData regularly posts guides on how to use R to recreate many of its featured visualizations wi...
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Revolution Newsletter: August 2011
The most recent edition of the Revolution Newsletter is out. The news section is below, and you read the full August edition (with highlights from this blog and community events) online. You can subscribe to the Revolution Newsletter to get it monthly via email. Free 30-minute introduction to Revolution R Enterprise. On Wednesday August 24, au...
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Live from useR!
The Revolution Analytics team is at the R user conference useR! at Warwick University this week. We'll bring you the updates from the conference with the latest from the R community as we go, but as we're on UK time blogging will be at unusual hours for the next few days. Things are off to a great start, with lots of people here already for the...
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Using Emacs as a front-end for R
Back when I was a grad student, I was a devoted Emacs user. I basically used it like an operating system: it wasn't just my text editor, but also my mail reader, my Web browser, my news reader, and so much more. (I once even asked our sysadmin to change my default shell to /usr/bin/emacs. He refused.) So when I started doing development in the ...
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The R Ecosystem
I gave my talk to the useR! 2011 conference this morning: The R Ecosystem. The goal of the talk was to show R in context: that the combination of the R project and its leadership, the R userbase, and the companies supporting and using R makes for a thriving ecosystem and is indicative of an extremely successful open source project. I also summari...
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Brian Ripley on The R Development Process
R Core member Professor Brian Ripley from Oxford University gave the first keynote presentation of useR! 2011 today, and gave some insights into what goes on behind the scenes to create two updates to R (plus several patches) every year. He began with some facts about the history of R (noting that if they'd known R would take off like it has, th...
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