Publications by David Smith
Bike sharing in 100 cities
Many cities around the world have bike sharing programs: pick up a bike at a docking station, ride it across town and drop it off at another session, and just pay for the time you use. (Even Albacete, the Spanish college down hosting last month's UseR conference, had one.) Most of these systems provide open data feeds of bike availability, and th...
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What is R? A new video on the history, community and applications of R
We meet a lot of R users on our travels, and something we often hear from them is that while they're doing amazing things with R (incredible data visualizations, statistical analysis, and data science applications), their supervisors or peers may not know that the R language is involved, or that others could benefit from using it. It would be gre...
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Tips for speeding up R with byte compilation
A byte-compiler for R code — which can improve the execution performance of R functions — was introduced in R 2.13.0, and was automatically applied to the bundled packages in R 2.14.0. Drew Dimmery provides some good advice for identifying targets amongst your own R functions for compilation: I have some function that will be repeatedly e...
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Butler Analytics: Real Analysts use R
In an overview of several predictive analytics platforms (including SPSS, Oracle and SAS), Butler Analytics offers this 4.5/5 star review of Revolution R Enterprise: Real analysts use R – well it sounds a bit macho, but actually there is some truth in it. R is the most widely used, and arguably the most powerful analysis software on the planet...
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Demand for R jobs on the rise, while SAS jobs decline
Job-tracking site indeed.com shows the rate at which certain terms appear in job advertisements. As you can see from the chart below, demand for R language skills is on the rise, while the number of SAS-related job postings peaked in late 2010 and has been declining steadily since early 2012. I included the word “statistics” in the search ...
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Explore smartphone market share with Nanocubes
Back in May, Twitter's Miguel Rios created some beautiful data visualizations to show that with enough (i.e. billions) of geotagged tweets, you can reveal the geography of where people live, work and commute. Now, a new interactive visualization of 210 million geotagged tweets by AT&T Research Labs reveals the market share of iPhone, Android and ...
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How to choose a new business location with R
This guest post is by Rodolfo Vanzini. Rodolfo is senior partner at eXponential.it — an asset management consultancy based in Italy — and advises clients on investment management issues. He taught at the University of Siena and is an analytics professional. With an economist education and a financial markets expertise four years ago I though...
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Disrupting the Traditional Analytics Ecosystem
This guest post is by Punit Kulkarni. Punit is the Director of Marketing at Symphony Analytics and a marketing technology enthusiast. He has helped Fortune 500 retailers and brands in building their customer loyalty programs, direct marketing and business analytics. As a trusted co-marketing partner of Revolution Analytics, Symphony Analytics is ...
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In case you missed it: July 2013 Roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from July of particular interest to R users: A new 90-second, creative commons video helps R enthusiasts share the history, community and applications of R. Analyst group Butler Analytics reviews 10 predictive analytics platforms, and says that “real analysts use R”. An excellent example of Si...
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A beginner’s video introduction to R, from Google
If you're an absolute beginner to the R language, this Intro to R video series from Google Developers is a great place to get started. Just download R for your system, start the playlist below, and follow along with the on-screen examples. (The video uses the MacOS X version of R, but you should be able to follow along just fine on Windows as w...
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