Publications by David Smith
New R User Group in Cologne, Germany
The latest local R user group to join the fold is the Köln R User Group, now the sixth R user group in Germany. Their first group meeting will be on July 6, with presentations on ANOVA, ggplot2 graphics in Deducer, and writing R code with Emacs's Org-mode. If you're in the Cologne area, this would be a great group to get involved with. MeetUp: ...
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Google BigQuery and the Github Data Challenge
Github has made data on its code repositories, developer updates, forks etc. from the public GitHub timeline available for analysis, and is offering prizes for the most interesting visualization of the data. Sounds like a great challenge for R programmers! The R language is currently the 26th most popular on GitHub (up from #29 in December), and ...
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Yes, you need more than just R for Big Data Analytics
Douglas Merrill, former CIO/VP of Engineering at Google, writes in Forbes about using the R language for data analysis: Most folks with math-oriented graduate degrees will have written something in R, a non-commercial option for your big data analysis. So, great graduates from great graduate schools know great tools. His post is titled 'R Is...
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Big Data Analytics with R and Hadoop
The open-source RHadoop project makes it easier to extract data from Hadoop for analysis with R, and to run R within the nodes of the Hadoop cluster — essentially, to transform Hadoop into a massively-parallel statistical computing cluster based on R. In yesterday's webinar (the replay of which is embedded below), Data scientist and RHadoop p...
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R, now a major programming language, sees a 127% growth in book sales
O'Reilly Radar tracks technology adoption via its annual “State of the Computer Book Market” report. In the latest report of 2011 book sales (amongst all publishers), books about R show a 127% increase in 2011 over 2010: As a language specifically for data analysis, R isn't in the same league in raw sales as general-purpose languages like C+...
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A sociologist converts from Stata to R
Ph.D candidate in sociology Ethan Fosse just switched from Stata to doing 100% of his analysis with R. His reasons? If you want to do Bayesian analysis or graph modeled coefficients (or work with complex data structures more generally), then R is much easier than Stata due to the object-oriented programming environment. It's unbelievably liberat...
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Thursday: Tweet-chat on Multiple Sclerosis research
The story about the great work that SUNY Buffalo has been doing to find a cure for Multiple Sclerosis with Revolution R Enterprise and IBM Netezza has generated a lot of attention, with stories in Forbes, InformationWeek and eWeek (amongst others). To continue the discussion, IBM has put together a panel for a “Tweet Chat” on Thursday (May ...
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R and Foursquare’s recommendation engine
Foursquare, the mobile location-sharing app (of which I'm a big fan), has an excellent recommondation system. Based on your recent checkins, places your friends found popular, and even the time of day, Foursquare Explore will recommend a great place for a sushi lunch, or the best place to buy new shoes. This presentation from Foursquare engineer...
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See R integrated with QlikView, Jaspersoft, Excel, and mobile apps
In yesterday's webinar, Revolution Analytics CTO David Champagne demonstrated how to integrate statistical graphics and analytic computations created using R software with a variety of third-party applications. In each case Revolution R Enterprise Server is running as a compute server to the client application, with R scripts launched on each use...
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In case you missed it: April 2012 Roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from April of particular interest to R users. Information Age published a feature article on R, describing how new graduates are driving adoption of R in industry. Bob Muenchen has updated his list of R package equivalents to SAS and SPSS procedures. A history of Data Science, including Bill Cleve...
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