Publications by David Smith
In case you missed it: November 2012 Roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from November of particular interest to R users. In the webinar “Real-Time Predictive Analytics with Big Data”, I showed how R fits into a real-time production system. R package developer Yihui Xie shares his favorite software and hardware in an interview with The Setup.Hadley Wickham created ...
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Political revolutions on Twitter, visualized with R
Twitter has become a powerful medium for organizing and communicating with factions during popular uprisings: the crisis in Egypt, the uprising in Syria, the revolution in Iran, and other conflicts all around the world. Twitter's effectiveness relies on its ability for the various factions to self-organize and to fight the information battle in s...
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Revolution Newsletter: December 2012
The most recent edition of the Revolution Newsletter is out. The news section is below, and you can read the full December edition (with highlights from this blog and community events) online. You can subscribe to the Revolution Newsletter to get it monthly via email. Tell us what you're looking for in R training. 2013 is the Internationa...
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How to select and merge R data frames with SQL
The R language provides many features in the language for selecting data from data frames: the “[” operator, logical functions, and utility functions like “subset“. But if you know SQL (the query language ubiquitous in database systems), none of this is necessary. With the sqldf package, you can just pretend that your data frame is a data...
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Coursera’s Data Analysis with R course starts Jan 22
Following on from Coursera’s popular course introducing the R language, a new course on data analysis with R starts on January 22. The simply-titled Data Analysis course will provide practically-oriented instruction on how to plan, carry out, and communicate analyses of real data sets with R. Here’s the course trailer from instructor Jeff Lee...
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R Journal Volume 4, Issue 2
The latest issue of the bi-annual, peer-reviewed journal about R, the R Journal, is now available for download. This issue includes three articles on graphics from R-core member and R Graphics author Paul Murrell. He writes about accessing individual elements of an R chart by the component names, drawing complex symbols with the polypath functio...
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Create optical illusions with R
I love optical illusions (like this and this and these), not just because they're fun, but also because they give us insights into how the brain processes sensory information. Apparently so does Kohske Takahashi, who conducts research on cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience at the University of Tokyo's Research Center for Advanced...
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24 Christmas Gifts from is.R
The is.R blog has been on a roll in December with their Advent CalendaR feature: daily tips about R to unwrap each day leading up to Christmas. If you haven't been following it, start with today's post and scroll down. Sadly there isn't a tag to collect all these great posts together, but here are a few highlights: December 4: Reading and writi...
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R version 3 scheduled for April
Ringing in the New Year, Peter Dalgaard announced yesterday on behalf of the entire R Core Team that the R language will graduate to Version 3 around April 1. This is only the third time that R has incremented its primary version number. Version 1.0.0 (released on February 29, 2000) was the first version deemed stable for production use. R moved ...
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What your choice of statistics software says about you
Sean Taylor, a PhD candidate in Information Systems at NYU’s Stern School of Business, describes the “Statistics Software Signal” and his observation that some software packages are correlated with bad science. While, I don't agree with all of his points (some fine analyses have been done with Stata, for example), I thought this was an int...
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