[R] Revolutions blog: November 2017 roundup

[David Smith (CLOUD AI)]

Since 2008, Microsoft (formerly Revolution Analytics) staff and guests have
written about R 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 November:

R 3.4.3 "Kite Eating Tree" has been released:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/r-343-released.html

Several approaches for generating a "Secret Santa" list with R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/how-to-generate-a-secret-santa-list-with-r.html

The "RevoScaleR" package from Microsoft R Server has now been ported to Python:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/revoscalepy.html

The call for papers for the R/Finance 2018 conference in Chicago is now open:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/rfinance-2018.html

Give thanks to the volunteers behind R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/happy-thanksgiving.html

Advice for R user groups from the organizer of R-Ladies Chicago:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/r-ladies-chicago-part-1.html

Use containers to build R clusters for parallel workloads in Azure with the
doAzureParallel package:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/doazureparallel-containers.html 

A collection of R scripts for interesting visualizations that fit into a
280-character Tweet:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/charts-in-280-chars.html

R is featured in a StackOverflow case study at the Microsoft Connect conference:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/connect-highlights.html

The City of Chicago uses R to forecast water quality and issue beach safety
alerts: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/chicago-water.html

A collection of best practices for sharing data in spreadsheets, from a paper by
Karl Broman and Kara Woo:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/good-practices-spreadsheets.html

The MRAN website has been updated with faster package search and other
improvements:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/an-update-for-mran.html

The curl package has been updated to use the built-in winSSL library on Windows:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/curl-updated.html

Beginner, intermediate and advanced on-line learning plans for developing AI
applications on Azure:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/azure-learning-plans.html

A recap of the EARL (Effective Applications of the R Language) conference in
Boston: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/recap-earl-boston-2017.html

Giora Simchoni uses R to calculate the expected payout from a slot machine:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/slot-machine-edge.html  

An introductory R tutorial by Jesse Sadler focuses on the analysis of historical
documents: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/r-excel-history.html

A new RStudio cheat sheet "Working with Strings":
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/strings-in-r.html

An overview of generating distributions in R via simulated gaming dice:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/role-playing-with-probabilities.html

An analysis of StackOverflow survey data ranks R and Python among the most-liked
and least-disliked languages:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/r-is-the-least-disliked-programming-language.html

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

* Siri transcribes a trombone player:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/because-its-friday-trombone.html

* A collection of short videos of interesting chemical reactions:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/because-its-friday-chemical-reactions.html

* An animation shows the impact of a rogue drone on Gatwick airport:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/how-a-drone-impacted-flight-paths.html  

* An AI sythesizes novel images of furniture, animals, and celebrities:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/because-its-friday-fake-celebrities.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