[R] Revolutions blog roundup: April 2015

[David Smith]

Since 2008, Revolution Analytics 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 April:

Joseph Rickert reviews the inaugural New York City R User Conference, featuring Andrew Gelman: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/the-ny-r-conference.html

Engineer Vineet Abraham compares performance benchmarks for R and Revolution R Open on OS X and Ubuntu: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/benchmarks-of-rro-on-osx-and-ubuntu.html

R was featured in the keynotes for the BUILD developer's conference: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/see-r-in-action-at-the-build-conference.html

Mark Malter created a Shiny application to explore baseball statistics: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/situational-baseball-analyzing-runs-potential-statistics.html

A curated list of the best packages, add-ons and resources for R according to Qin Wenfeng: 
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/awesome-r-a-curated-list-of-the-best-add-ons-for-r.html

An analysis of paintings from British museums reveals an increasing use of the colour blue over the last two centuries: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/paintings-getting-blue.html

Journalists are increasingly referencing source research via DOIs, and packages from rOpenSci allow R users to access that research programmatically: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/the-new-science-journalism-and-open-science.html

Microsoft is hiring programmers to work on R-related projects: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/microsoft-hiring-engineers-for-r-projects.html

Some examples of visualizing the results of hierarchical clustering with a heat map: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/r-for-more-powerful-clustering.html

The Financial Times published an interactive data visualization based on R to explore European unemployment statistics: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/financial-times-tracks-unemployment-with-r.html

Announcing R 3.2.0: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/r-320-released.html

Recent R user group meetings have covered Shiny, SparkR, htmlwidgets, and dynamic pricing models: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/r-user-group-meetings-this-week-in-the-bay-area-and-around-the-world.html

A story about teaching R to archaeologists in Myanmar, and coping with package installation in a low-bandwidth environment with the miniCRAN package: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/r-in-myanmar.html

RPowerLabs allows electrical engineers to experiment on virtual power distribution systems: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/rpowerlabs-electric-power-system-virtual-laboratories-online.html

Two high-performance packages from RStudio for reading data into R: readr (for text data) and readxl (for Excel data): http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/new-packages-for-reading-data-into-r-fast.html

A list of the top 25 R user groups in the world by membership: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/where-are-the-r-users.html

A guide to association rules and market basket analysis in R: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/association-rules-and-market-basket-analysis-with-r.html

The choroplethrZip package allows R users to create data maps from US zip codes: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/exploring-san-francisco-with-choropleth.html

Revolution Analytics is now a subsidiary of Microsoft: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/revolution-analytics-microsoft.html

DeployR 7.4, a web-services framework for integrating R code to other applications, is now available for download: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/deployr-74-released.html

Coarse-grained parallel computing with R on servers and Hadoop with rxExec in Revolution R Enterprise: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/coarse-grain-parallelism-with-foreach-and-rxexec.html

Revolution R Open 8.0.2 was released (and 8.0.3 is now available, too): http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/a-minor-update-revolution-r-open-802.html

General interest stories (not related to R) in the past month included: a video travelling at the speed of light (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/because-its-friday-slow-light.html), a snowy music video (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/because-its-friday-boy-and-bear-in-the-snow.html), and visualizing the baseline in a Marvin Gaye classic (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/because-its-friday-all-about-that-bassline.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 david at revolutionanalytics.com or via Twitter (I'm @revodavid).

Cheers,
# David

--
David M Smith <davidsmi at microsoft.com>
Principal Program Manager, Microsoft  
Tel: +1 (312) 9205766 (Chicago IL, USA)
Twitter: @revodavid
Blog:  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com