Publications by David Smith
New R User Group in Cambridge, UK
Yet another new local R user group has launched this month, this time in Cambridge, UK. Cambridge RUG was created by data analyst Andrew Caines to promote the use of R in the Cambridge area. The group aims to encourage people try the R language, act as an advice centre to help people get where they want to with R and host an annual gathering...
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Analytic applications are built by data scientists
Ventana Research analyst David Menninger was on the judging panel for the Applications of R in Business contest. In a post on the Ventana research blog, he offers his perspectives on the contest, noting that R, as a statistical package, includes many algorithms for predictive analytics, including regression, clustering, classification, text mini...
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R Chart featured in Facebook IPO
Page 7 of Facebook's 213-page S-1 filing for their record-breaking IPO includes the following chart, under the headline: “Our Mission: To make the world more open and connected”. This chart was created using the R language and Hadoop by Facebook intern Paul Butler. (Thanks to the blog IOER Tools for first noticing the inclusion of the chart...
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New R User Groups in Austin, Adelaide
It's awesome to see so many local R user groups kicking off in 2011! Yet another is the Austin R User Group in Austin, Texas. They've already held their first informal get-together, and the first formal meeting on February 23 will be devoted to data management techniques in R. Props to Sandy Donlon for organizing the group! And I'm so pleased to...
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Forbes: Top 20 influencers in Big Data
Haydn Shaughnessy at The Forbes blog provides a list of the “Top 20 Influencers in Big Data“, and I'm humbled to report that yours truly is listed there at #2. It's an instantaneous ranking based on the social-media tracking tool Traakr, but it's still great to be listed alongside writers for SiliconAngle, GigaOM, and KDNuggets (and even Ma...
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Accelerating analytics at MSU with Revolution R Enterprise
Erik Sigur, Information Technologist for the Department of Statistics and Probability at Michigan State University, writes at ReadWriteWeb about using Revolution R Enterprise to provide high-performance computation in R to the researchers in his department: Our search for a more effective version of R ultimately brought us to a product called R...
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The anatomy of a Twitter conversation, visualized with R
If you're a Twitter user like me, you're probably familiar with the way that conversations can easily by tracked by following the #hashtag that participants include in the tweets to label the topic. But what causes some topics to take off, and others to die on the vine? Does the use of retweets (copying another users tweet to your own followers) ...
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What are the most popular bike routes in London?
James Cheshire, R user and lecturer at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, created this map of the most trafficked cycle routes in London: Click to enlarge, it's a gorgeous chart. The bicycle traffic data comes from London's public cycle-hire facility, which currently is only available in central London (which is why you don't see much...
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Revolution R update adds Red Hat 6 support
The Dev Team at Revolution Analytics recently released an update to the Revolution R 5 family. Version 5.0.1 adds compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 for all editions (Community, Academic and Enterprise). This expands the platform support to Red Hat 5, Red Hat 6 and Microsoft Windows. For Revolution R Enterprise customers and users of...
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Slides and replay for "A backstage tour of ggplot2"
Many thanks to Hadley Wickham for his informative and entertaining webinar yesterday, “A backstage tour of ggplot2”. Thanks also to everyone who submitted questions — with more than 800 attendees live on the line we had many more questions than we had time to answer. For more ggplot2 information, Hadley kindly provided the following resourc...
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