[R] Revolutions blog: August 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/11YkB0 listed seven reasons of an anthropology professor
for using R.

http://bit.ly/9sbno linked to an intro of the ply package for
performing SQL-like "group by" operations on data frames.

http://bit.ly/qsgGG linked to two recently released books: Hadley
Wickham's ggplot2 book and the O'Reilly book Beautiful Data.

http://bit.ly/2hn1O6 reviewed Fredrich Leisch's 2008 tutorial on
creating packages for R.

http://bit.ly/qLn6h linked to an R-based example on Wikipedia
demonstrating pie chart failure.

http://bit.ly/uhI9M announced that the foreach package now supports
snow as a parallel backend with the release of the doSNOW package.

http://bit.ly/31vKJQ announced the "applications" category on
Revolutions, showcasing applied uses of R.

http://bit.ly/LKP4x reviewed the e-book Portfolio Analysis with R/Rmetrics.

http://bit.ly/SlKji linked to a "mathesaurus" ofidioms translated
between R, Matlab, Python, and numpy.

http://bit.ly/4DwrLP linked to an introduction to R for actuarial use.

http://bit.ly/UhJEx linked to Drew Conway's video presentation on
social network analysis in R.

http://bit.ly/4aJqyC introduced Google's coding standards for R.

http://bit.ly/15NgOl linked to an R analysis of fish imports/exports.

http://bit.ly/ZNXch accounted the formation of a DC-area user group,
and called for speakers for the inaugural meeting in October.

http://bit.ly/15uBrK gave an example of parallel-processing a data
frame in blocks with "isplit" from the iterators package.

http://bit.ly/HaRcg linked to two upcoming R courses on graphics and
data mining.

http://bit.ly/uOMGq noted some highlights of the "fortunes" package.

http://bit.ly/X1Ee4 revealed that the tech industry analysts
TechCrunch now use R to produce their reports.

http://bit.ly/3OBXuf linked to some recent news articles mention R and
REvolution R.

http://bit.ly/WCf1G was my belated review of DSC 2009 in Copenhagen.

http://bit.ly/IulEz linked to Barry Rowlingson's map of CRAN mirrors.

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

Other non-R-specific stories in the last month covered Bonnie Tyler
(http://bit.ly/3vzLHw), errors in published journal articles
(http://bit.ly/yTQwW), XML and big data (http://bit.ly/3BI6bD),
Chernoff midriffs (http://bit.ly/1kMwTj), deep space
(http://bit.ly/1e91IW), massive trees (http://bit.ly/1sW1M),  the
Neflix prizewinners (http://bit.ly/16jBxa), the translation
equilibrium game (http://bit.ly/lRjPK), career prospects for Stats
grads (http://bit.ly/yIDop), and crows (http://bit.ly/NAKJM).

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

It's been a busy month for the blog: the pie charts article was linked
by the popular lifestyle blog Lifehacker, and we've surged past 1000
RSS subscribers according to Google. (You can follow the blog with any
RSS feed reader like Google Reader.) As always, thanks for the
comments and please send any tips to me at
david at revolution-computing.com.  You can also follow me on Twitter as
@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