[R] Revolutions blog: September roundup

[David M Smith]

I write about R every weekday at the Revolutions blog:
http://blog.revolution-computing.com .

In case you missed them, here are some articles from last month of
particular interest to R users.

http://bit.ly/WYAnM shows how to create a URL for a Google Spreadsheet
so you can read the data directly from the cloud in R with read.csv.

http://bit.ly/FuUNw reported on Google's use of R to predict economic
statistics from search activity.

http://bit.ly/10UbHc showed how to use the New York Times' API to mine
articles for word frequency data.

http://bit.ly/VKqSh discussed the similarities between Grand Central
Dispatch for Snow Leopard and parallel processing with foreach.

http://bit.ly/lRbAX announced a new R user group in Madison, Wisconsin.

http://bit.ly/2Ms5nM noted the popular blog flowingdata.com uses R as
the tool of choice for graphics (with touchups by Illustrator).

http://bit.ly/BIU9V remarked on the "Flash Mob" which has populated
stackoverflow.com with useful answers for many R questions.

http://bit.ly/2cysLh reviews Jeroen Ooms' web-based financial plotting
tool built on R.

http://bit.ly/TcfD1 linked to a script in R for 7 common machine
learning techniques. (And

http://bit.ly/YInMs touched on the distinctions between machine
learning and statistics.)

http://bit.ly/XgBoR linked to an analysis done in R of the
demographics of readers of Hacker News.

http://bit.ly/Eec5z noted that TechCruch Trends is using R for its
analysis of startup activity.

http://bit.ly/akFNd gave tips for adding error bars to barplots with ggplot2.

http://bit.ly/xxBNm showed how to present hierarchical clustering
models as a circular cladogram.

http://bit.ly/iteac gave some tips for getting started with bootstrapping in R.

http://bit.ly/2no2C showed how R is used to analyze milk yields.

http://bit.ly/VC7LE linked to a comprehensive reference to R for Matlab users.

http://bit.ly/1CqP6n gave a practical demonstration of ggplot2's
"grammar of graphics" concept.

http://bit.ly/tP3Ci is a pictorial story of how one user converted a
workflow based on Perl, Stata and Matlab to one solely based on R.

http://bit.ly/OY2CR reviewed some of the airline performance posters
from this year's Data Expo at the JSM.

Other non-R-specific stories in the last month covered stochastic
psychics (http://bit.ly/BIU9V), identifying individuals in "anonymous"
data (http://bit.ly/ho0Df), an apology for Turing
(http://bit.ly/QqW29), the Mythbusters' statistical philosophy
(http://bit.ly/f8Nia), the Bulgarian lottery coincidence
(http://bit.ly/Y1gaU), keyboards for pirates (http://bit.ly/t1C7a),
the Netflix prize (http://bit.ly/eS1nb), and which line to choose at
the supermarket (http://bit.ly/nHJkQ).

(I've provided short URLs above because many mailers break the long
direct URLs.)

The R Community Calendar has also been updated at:
http://blog.revolution-computing.com/calendar.html

September was the highest-traffic month yet for the Revolutions blog.
The Bulgarian Lottery article was quoted in the Wall Street Journal,
and the machine learning post was very popular on Hacker News. As
always, thanks for the comments and please keep sending suggestions to
me at david at revolution-computing.com .

Don't forget you can also follow the blog using an RSS reader like
Google Reader, or by following me on Twitter (I'm @revodavid).

Cheers to all,
# David Smith
--
David M Smith <david at revolution-computing.com>
Director of Community, REvolution Computing www.revolution-computing.com
Tel: +1 (206) 577-4778 x3203 (San Francisco, USA)

Check out our upcoming events schedule at www.revolution-computing.com/events