Publications by David Smith
Designing real-world 3-D objects with R
The Maker Movement has led to the production of open-source 3-D printers and other manufacturing machines that allow hobbyists to design, create and produce real-world objects affordably. Now R user Ian Walker, in a post at the Psychological Statistics blog, shows how to use the R language to transform 3-D surfaces into real-world physical objec...
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R 2.15.2 scheduled for October 26
The next minor update to R — version 2.15.2 “Trick or Treat” — will be released on October 26, R-core member Peter Dalgaard announced today. You can find the planned updates in the current NEWS file (scroll down to the section 'CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.15.1 patched'; the changes at the top of the file are planned for the next major release)...
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Tips on accessing data from various sources with R
Jeffrey Breen (the man behind the Twitter airline sentiment analysis example) recently posted a collection of slides with some great tips for accessing data from R. “Tapping the Data Deluge” includes information on: Using the XLConnect package to read data from Excel spreadsheets Using the foreign package to read SPSS, SAS, Stata and dBase d...
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Improving the integration between R and Hadoop: rmr 2.0 released
The RHadoop project, the open-source project supported by Revolution Analytics to integrate R and Hadoop, continues to evolve. Now available is version 2 of the rmr package, which makes it possible for R programmers to write map-reduce tasks in the R language, and have them run within the Hadoop cluster. This update is the “simplest and fastest...
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Style your R charts like the Economist, Tableau … or XKCD
As we noted last month, the new Themes feature in ggplot2 helps you customize the design of R charts to your liking. Now, R user Jeffrey Arnold has built on this feature to create standardized themes to make R graphics looks like those from major publications and other software systems. You can use his ggthemes package to make your charts look li...
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In case you missed it: September 2012 Roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from September of particular interest to R users. You can now browse the R-devel sources and changelogs at GitHub. R is used to create a 3-D animation of the Antarctic ice cap. At the DataWeek SF conference, R users from eBay, Intuit, Minted and other companies describe how R is used in production...
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R User Group Sponsorship: Applications open for 2013
Here at Revolution Analytics, we're proud to have been a part of fostering local user groups for R users around the world. Last year we sponsored more than 40 groups, with representation from every continent around the world. And we're thrilled to see the continued growth in user groups: this time last year there about 50 R user groups; now, ther...
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R amongst most popular languages, according to GitHub/StackOverflow data
Data Scientist Drew Conway tackles the problem of deciding which programming languages are the most popular in an interesting way: by comparing the number of projects tagged in GitHub with each language, and the number of questions in StackOverflow about the language. The former is a measure of how often a language is used (though, mainly for ope...
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Revolution Newsletter: September/October 2012
The most recent edition of the Revolution Newsletter is out. The news section is below, and you can read the full September/October edition (with highlights from this blog and community events) online. You can subscribe to the Revolution Newsletter to get it monthly via email. New R Courses Announced: Two new courses presented by Bob Mue...
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Nine lightning talks on R
At Tuesday's Bay Area R User Group meetup, nine speakers gave five-minute talks on various aspects of R. Revolution Analytics' Luba Gloukhov was one of the presenters, and also provides the summary of the talks below. Links to the slides are included where available for you to check out. Ariel Faigon: Chrestomathy with RAriel walked us through...
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