In case you missed them, here are some articles from last month of particular interest to R users. This post looked at a climate change controversy involving the weather in Darwin, Australia and a review of the source data using R. This post showed how to access global weather data from the US National Centers for Environment Prediction using...
Blog Archives
Bay Area User Group: R-Powered Web Apps
For those in the San Francisco area, tomorrow night's Bay Area R User Group meeting -- to be held at Twitter's HQ -- is a must-see. The theme is "R-Powered Web Apps" and features guest speakers Jeroen Ooms and Jeff Horner. (Disclosure: REvolution Computing is sponsoring Jeroen's appearance at this event.) We've featured Jeroen's awesome web-based applications using R...
Because it’s Friday: Gravity Wells
It's a little strange to see a web comic come up with such interesting visualizations, but xkcd has followed up on their movie timelines charts with this illustration of the gravitational attraction of the various bodies in the solar system. The gravitational force at the surface of the planet or moon determines how high you'd need to jump in...
R’s exponential package growth, ctd.
Reader SK has collected the most recent data on R's package growth, through the latest 2.10 release. The three most recent releases fall slightly below the exponential growth line, which isn't altogether surprising (that's a lot of growth to sustain!). Another interesting thing to look at would be the combined rate of new packages submitted to CRAN and packages...
Survey question biases and crowdsourcing
It's common knowledge that the way you ask a question in a survey can bias the results you get. (It's been a staple of political pollsters since the dawn of time.) But Aaron Shaw from Dolores Labs has used an interesting technique to demonstrate that bias: crowdsourcing. He asked the same question of crowdsourced respondents assigned randomly to one...
The number of R packages is growing exponentially
The second issue of the R Journal is out now, and in addition to a bevy of contributed articles and some news from the R Core Group on the new help system introduced in R 2.10, there's an invited section called, intriguingly, "The Future of R". In that section John Fox provides an exhaustively researched and insightful review of...
Analyzing a FriendFeed group with Ruby and R
FriendFeed is a social media service, where groups of people can post interesting information from the Web, and "like" or comment posts from others. Statistical Bioinformatician Neil Saunders is a member of the "Life Scientists" group, and has posted an analysis of the group's activity in 2009 to his blog. He used Ruby and the FriendFeed API to extract...
O’Reilly’s R is a Harpy Eagle
Today marks the hardcopy availability of the first book dedicated to R from O'Reilly, R in a Nutshell. In the familiar O'Reilly style, the cover is adorned with an illustration of an animal, in this case a harpy eagle: The book is written by Joe Adler, a data analyst and the author of Baseball Hacks. In contrast to the...
Because it’s Friday: The inner life of a cell
Happy New Year, everyone. In celebration of the New Year, enjoy this celebration of the workings of life from Harvard University. More at the link below: 3 Quarks Daily: The inner life of the cell
R/Finance 2010, April 16-17 in Chicago
Today is the last day to submit abstracts for the R/Finance 2010 conference to be held in Chicago on April 16-17. If you're not planning on speaking, but are interested in applications of R in Finance, be sure to add this to your calendar -- last year's conference was an outstanding event. Here's some more information about the conference...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
