[R] Revolutions blog roundup: July 2015

[David Smith]

Since 2008, Revolution Analytics (and now Microsoft) staff and guests have written about R every weekday at the Revolutions blog:
 http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com
and every month I post a summary of articles from the previous month of particular interest to readers of r-help. 

In case you missed them, here are some articles related to R from the month of June:

An alternative to stacked bar charts with the streamgraphs package: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/streamgraphs-in-r.html

Joseph Rickert shares his process for creating the monthly new and updated packages "spotlight" feature on MRAN: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/mranspackages-spotlight.html

An analysis of StackOverflow's data API using R reveals R to be the 8th most popular language by activity on that site: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/the-most-popular-programming-languages-on-stackoverflow.html

On accumulating results in R using looping operations: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/efficient-accumulation-in-r.html

In an in-depth profile, Hadley Wickham shares his motivations for creating his many useful R packages: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/hadley-profile.html

The latest programming language rankings by IEEE Spectrum puts R in the #6 spot, rising 3 since 2014: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/ieee-2015-rankings.html
	
Revolution R Open 3.2.1 is now available, bringing multi-threaded performance and new platforms to the latest R engine: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/revolution-r-open-321-now-available.html

A look at trends of questions on StackOverflow for Python and R: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/in-celebration-of-100000-r-questions-on-stackoverflow.html 

Setting up a Linux VM on Azure, and importing data into R from MySQL and mariaDB: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/using-azure-as-an-r-datasource-part-2-pulling-data-from-mysqlmariadb-to-linux.html 

The winners of the 2015 KDD Cup, and how you can analyze the data with R in Azure ML Studio: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/kdd-cup-2015-winners-announced.html 

The chair of the local committee shares some statistics from the useR! 2015 conference: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/planning-of-and-some-stats-from-user-2015-aalborg.html 

A review of R packages for extreme value statistics: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/r-extreme-value-statistics-and-missing-data.html 

Using the igraph package to create interactive (and embeddable) network graphs from data in R: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/creating-network-graphs-using-javascript-directly-from-r.html 

Package author Ari Lamstein shares his tips for creating an email-based R course: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/5-steps-to-create-an-r-package-email-course.html 

In an EMC-sponsored competition to analyze data generated by a motorcycle racer, both winners used R: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/morecambe-missile.html 

A new visualization of the network structure of CRAN packages finds connected communities including one centered on "MASS": http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/the-network-structure-of-cran.html

Using R and A/B testing to evaluate the performance of advertising: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/ab-testing-advertisements-with-r.html 

A roundup of press generated by the announcement of the R Consortium: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/r-consortium-news-roundup.html 

My reflections on the successful 2015 useR! Conference in Denmark: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/user-2015-its-a-wrap.html 

Experiences using R Markdown and Github for teaching: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/06/get-your-r-education-going-with-github.html

Resources from the tutorial on using R with Hadoop and the RHadoop packages: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/news-from-user2015-the-rhadoop-tutorial.html 

General interest stories (not related to R) in the past month included: a short film about impossible business meetings (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/because-its-friday-seven-red-lines.html), filming the motion of guitar strings with just an iPhone (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/because-its-friday-good-vibrations.html), an anthem for R users (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/because-its-friday-doin-it-with-the-r.html), a short documentary on the mission to Pluto (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/because-its-friday.html), a review of "Statistics Done Wrong" (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/book-review-statistics-done-wrong.html), and a clever illustration of personal bias (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/07/because-its-friday-youre-biased.html).

Meeting times for local R user groups (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/local-r-groups.html) can be found on the updated R Community Calendar at: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/calendar.html

If you're looking for more articles about R, you can find summaries from previous months at http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/roundups/. You can receive daily blog posts via email using services like blogtrottr.com, or join the Revolution Analytics mailing list at http://revolutionanalytics.com/newsletter to be alerted to new articles on a monthly basis.

As always, thanks for the comments and please keep sending suggestions to me at davidsmi at microsoft.com or via Twitter (I'm @revodavid).

Cheers,
# David

-- 
David M Smith <davidsmi at microsoft.com>
R Community Lead, Revolution Analytics (a Microsoft company)  
Tel: +1 (312) 9205766 (Chicago IL, USA)
Twitter: @revodavid | Blog:  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com
We are hiring engineers for Revolution R and Azure Machine Learning: http://azuremljobs.github.io/