[R] Revolutions blog: August 2017 roundup

[David Smith]

Since 2008, Microsoft (formerly 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 August:

Using the featurizeText function in the MicrosoftML package to extract
ngrams from unstructured text:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/text-featurization-microsoftml.html

A joyplot visualizes the probabilities associated with prases like
"highly likely" and "little chance" by a sample of 46 Redditors:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/probably-more-probably-than-probable.html

Two examples of creating 3-D animations in R: a stereo cube, and the
Charleston in motion capture data:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/3-d-animations-with-r.html

A tutorial on creating thematic maps in R, from ComputerWorld:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/maps-in-r.html

Some tips on using R to query data in Power BI:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/query-editor-tips.html

Using the Rcpp package to calculate a membership matrix for fuzzy
k-means clustering:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/kmeans-r-rcpp.html

A reimagining of Minard's chart of Napoleon's march on Russia:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/recreating-minard.html

Rankings of gender roles for men and women in film, from an analysis
of scripts using the tidytext package:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/gender-roles-in-film-direction.html

Several talks at the upcoming Ignite conference feature R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/data-track-ignite.html

Norm Matloff's keynote at UseR!2017 discussed various obstacles to
performance in parallel programming:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/obstacles-to-performance-in-parallel-programming.html

Peter Dalgaard marks the 20th anniversary of the formation of the R
Core Group:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/20-years-of-the-r-core-group.html

Using the rxFeaturize function in the MicrosoftML package to find
images similar to a reference image:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/image-featurizer.html

Buzzfeed used R to identify possible spy planes in Flightradar24 data:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/buzzfeed-plane-tracking.html

Timo Grossenbacher offers a helpful workflow for implementing
reproducible data analysis in R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/reproducibility-a-cautionary-tale.html

A preview of version 0.10.0 of the dplyrXdf package, featuring support
for the tidyeval framework on out-of-memory Xdf data files:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/dplyrxdf-0100-beta-prerelease.html

A tutorial on using CNTK via the keras package for forecasting:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/keras-and-cntk.html

Neils Berglund explains how to use the sqlrutils package to publish an
R function as a SQL Server stored procedure:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/tutorial-sqlrutils.html

Tomas Kalibera's presentation at UseR!2017 includes useful guidance on
getting the most out of R's byte compiler:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/take-advantage-compiler.html

The kadinsky package makes accidental aRt, deliberately:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/kandinsky.html

Angus Taylor's UseR!2017 presentation uses MXNET to categorize product
reviews on Amazon:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/text-categorization-deep-learning.html

Various solutions (with data and Microsoft R code) from the energy,
retail and shipping industries:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/gallery-solutions.html

Talks on new database interfaces from UseR!2017: Jim Hester on the
ODBC package, and Kirill Müller on the DBI package:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/a-modern-database-interface-for-r.html

And some general interest stories (not necessarily related to R):

* Pictures and video from the recent total solar eclipse in the US:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/because-its-friday-eclipse.html  

* A generic blockbuster movie trailer:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/because-its-friday-movie-trailer.html

* The Shepard tone, an auditory illusion used in several movies:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/because-its-friday-the-shepard-tone.html

* People Are Awesome, 2016-2107:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/because-its-friday-people-remain-awesome.html

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, Microsoft AI & Research  
Tel: +1 (312) 9205766 (Chicago IL, USA)
Twitter: @revodavid | Blog:  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com