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We had a marvellous series of guest posts here on the blog over the past few weeks. I'd like to give a special thanks to all of our guest bloggers for contributing, with special thanks to Joe Rickert for stepping in as our acting editor for the past 3 weeks. If you were celebrating or vacationing over the holidays, here's what you missed:

• Ann Cavoukian, the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario (Canada), described the principles of Privacy by Design.
• Thomas Dinsmore reviewed the capabilities of Apache Spark for advanced analytics in Hadoop.
• Sheri Gilley created an interactive chart of R package dependencies with DeployR, rCharts, and AngularJS
• Joseph Rickert offered 15 tips for computing with Big Data in R.
• Daniel Hanson provided a step-by-step guide to download financial time data from Quandl into R, and then chart and analyze the time series using the xts package.
• Luba Gloukhov used cluster analysis in R to allocate single-malt scotch whiskies to four distinct flavour profiles (and from the comments, this is a topic a lot of are passionate about!).
• Several members of the Revolution Analytics staff offered predictions for the “Big Data Analytics” sector in 2014.
• Stephen Weller provided advice for asking questions about R to get the best help.
• Michael Helbraun described how to use Monte-Carlo simulation and Bayesian estimation to make forecasts from expert opinions.
• Max Kuhn, director of nonclinical statistics at Pfizer, gave a preview of a forthcoming update to the “caret” package, and created an awesome interactive chart showing similarities amongst the 143 statistical and machine learning models it supports. (Try dragging one of the nodes in the chart!)
• Uday Tennery reviewed the state of support and integration of R by enterprise software vendors.
• Derek Norton showed how to use the RevoScaleR package and R's “optim” function to perform large-scale maximum-likelihood optimization on out-of-memory data.
• Jay Emerson and Mike Kane (Yale University) announced a new paper on the bigmemory package, and new capabilities for integation with Boost.
• I reviewed the top R blog posts from this blog in 2013, and had some fun with optical illusions, the Fourier Transform, and forced perspective. 

Thanks once again to all of our guest bloggers, and if you'd like to contribute a guest post to the Revolutions blog in the future, let me know at [email protected]. 

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