[R] Revolutions blog: March Roundup

[David M Smith]

I write about R every weekday at the Revolutions blog:
 http://blog.revolution-computing.com
and every month I post a summary of articles from the previous month
of particular interest to readers of r-help. (Sorry this week's
roundup is a little later than usual -- I've was preempted by last
week's release of REvolution R Community 3.2, and a webinar I'm giving
tomorrow on parallel computing in R.)

http://bit.ly/cvCFCE reviewed a special report in The Economist on the
"Data Deluge" and the growing importance of statistical analysis in
business. One section (http://bit.ly/brAsQm) mentioned R specifically.

http://bit.ly/8XB5W0 announced that Zack Urlocker, formerly
responsible for engineering and marketing for the open-source database
company MySQL, has joined REvolution's board of directors. This
article in InformationWeek (http://bit.ly/aeHDr3) provides more info
about Zack's background and the parallels between MySQL and R.

http://bit.ly/97Iz1B linked to an analysis using R on the official
Google Blog on search traffic related to the Winter Olympics.

http://bit.ly/9ocOva linked to the article, "You Can Predict that R
Will Succeed", published in Intelligent Enterprise.

http://bit.ly/9aCLM9 is an essay by Norman Nie, CEO of REvolution, on
how open-source software (especially R) is opening data to predictive
analytics.

http://bit.ly/cEEg0J linked to an intriguing cluster analysis and map
of eating habits  around the world.

http://bit.ly/cqqOIf reviewed Frank Harrel's rrpeort package for
clinical reporting from R via Sweave.

http://bit.ly/daLeix linked to an analysis in R of rainfall in
Australia over the past 100 years, and the impact of the 2000-2007
drought.

http://bit.ly/9eSg6m linked to Tal Galili's chart in R on the value of
vitamins and other nutritional supplements.

http://bit.ly/bWiO6d provided a detailed review of Tim O'Reilly's
thought-provoking keynote at the OSBC conference: he says open data is
now more of an issue than open source.

http://bit.ly/cJeJJw announced the webinar I'm giving April 14 on
high-performance computing in R, and how to distribute computations on
Windows HPC Server.

http://bit.ly/9S1ctA linked to an application of R for tracking
commits to a software project managed in SVN.

http://bit.ly/cOUtmI relayed the news that R 2.11.0 will be released
on April 22.

http://bit.ly/9BDhH4 linked to video of a short course on graphics
with R presented by ggplot2 author Hadley Wickham.

http://bit.ly/c1dMPB linked to an article in Information Management
about MARS analysis (from the "earth" package) in R.

http://bit.ly/9sxzbr reviewed a popular article about how R was used
to find predictors for the best pizza in New York City.

http://bit.ly/bs4hXK looked at smoothing in R, and linked to a how-to
guide to create presentation-quality smoothed charts.

http://bit.ly/d2BLTd linked to an analysis of the ideological leanings
of professions and companies, and a neat visualization of the results
in ggplot2.

Other non-R-specific posts in the past month covered: why a salad
costs more than a Big Mac in the US (http://bit.ly/copBH0),
visualizing the Pacific tsunami following the Chilean earthquake
(http://bit.ly/dzNuSA), Edward Tufte at the White House
(http://bit.ly/alPd1U), 3-D Mandelbrot sets (http://bit.ly/dAFh5w),
the results of the Future of Open Source Survey
(http://bit.ly/9TPdvT), the abuse of statistical methods in the
science literature (http://bit.ly/cQVWxP) and (on a lighter note)
Tufte vs Powerpoint vs kittens (http://bit.ly/bqfIvy).

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

If you're looking for more articles about R, you can find summaries
from previous months at http://bit.ly/dt1AZe . Join the REvolution
mailing list at http://bit.ly/bOISmy 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 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).

Kind regards to all,
# David Smith

--
David M Smith <david at revolution-computing.com>
VP of Marketing, REvolution Computing  http://blog.revolution-computing.com
Tel: +1 (650) 330-0553 x205 (Palo Alto, CA, USA)

Download REvolution R free:
www.revolution-computing.com/downloads/revolution-r.php