Revolution Newsletters: Issue 25 - February 2012
Welcome to the February edition of the Revolution Newsletter, now in its third year! Every month, we bring you the latest news about R from Revolution Analytics and around the Web. We include tips and tricks on using R, events of interest to the R community, and information about products and initiatives from the team at Revolution Analytics. This newsletter is for you, so let us know what you think — send us feedback at my email address below. If you find this newsletter valuable, forward it to your friends. And if you've received this newsletter from a friend, you can subscribe here to get your own copy each month. Enjoy! Your editor, |
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Revolution News
Every month, we bring you the latest news about Revolution's products and events in this section. Follow us on Twitter at @RevolutionR for up-to-the-minute news and updates from Revolution Analytics!
Revolution R Enterprise now supporting Red Hat 6. The latest update is now available to all subscribers, and expands platform support to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6 and Microsoft Windows. If you are a current subscriber and haven't received your update notification, please contact Revolution Analytics support.
Congratulations to the winners of the Applications of R in Business contest! Shannon Terry & Ben Ogorek of Nationwide Insurance generously donated their $10,000 grand prize for their direct-marketing forecasting system to the Mid-Ohio Foodbank, and Jeffrey Breen of the Atmosphere Research Group was the $5,000 runner-up for his airline consumer sentiment application. Five other applications received honorable mention awards. Learn more about these applications at ReadWriteHack, in SiliconAngle, and the Revolution Analytics press release.
Michigan State University scales up research with Revolution R Enterprise. With the high-performance distributed computing capabilities of Revolution R Enterprise 5, MSU is running 4x more jobs on its state-of-the-art Statistician Computing Cluster, and cutting the running time of some big analyses by a factor of 10 or more. Learn how in this article at ReadWriteWeb or in the Revolution Analytics case study.
See you at Strata Santa Clara, Feb 28 - Mar 1. Revolution Analytics is proud to sponsor the premier conference on big data and data science, and we invite all R users (and the R-curious!) to visit us in the exhibition hall. And don't miss the Revolution team members in the program: Joe Rickert delivers the workshop Introduction to R for Data Mining on Feb 28, and Antonio Piccolboni presents "RHadoop, R meets Hadoop" on Feb 29.
Predictive Analytics World San Francisco, March 4-10. We're also proud to be a Silver Sponsor of PAW, a major conference devoted to strengthening the business impact of business analytics. Don't miss the workshop by R package author Max Kuhn, R for Predictive Modeling on March 4, and David Smith will review the Applications of R Business contest at the useR meeting on March 5. See you there!
Revolution Analytics Winter Webinar Series continues. "A Backstage Tour of Gggplot2 with Hadley Wickham" was our most popular webinar ever; if you missed it, a replay is now available. Don't miss our upcoming free webinars: an introduction to Revolution R (Feb 22); high-performance analytics with Revolution R and Netezza (Feb 29); R for Finance with Dr. Sanjiv Das; Impactful Models with James Taylor (Mar 14); and Actuarial Analytics with Deloitte Consulting's James Guszcza (Mar 28).
Who are the top 20 influencers in Big Data? Forbes' blog lists Revolution Analytics' David Smith at the #2 spot.
R News, Tips and Tricks from the Revolutions blog
The Revolutions blog brings you daily news and tips about R, statistics and open source. Here are some highlights from Revolutions from the past month.
Funding grants to support local R user groups can are available by applying for 2012 R user group sponsorships from Revolution Analytics.
The R language jumped from 25 to 19 in the annual TIOBE ranking of programming language popularity.
The New York Times used R to illustrate a print-edition feature about wealth distribution in the USA.
An R script visualizes your Facebook friends as a social network graph.
The pre-conference tutorials at the UseR! 2012 conference in Nashville, TN on June 12 have been announced.
Hardcopies of Patrick Burns' very useful R reference guides "S Poetry" and "The R Inferno" are also available for purchase.
Upcoming Events
Every month, we highlight some upcoming events from R Community Calendar.
- Feb 13: The Twin Cities R User Group meets.
- Feb 14: The Melbourne R User Group has a presentation on Quantitative Neuroimaging with R.
- Feb 16: The Triangle Analysts Social Meetup gathers in Raleigh; the New York group has a session on Applications of R in Forensic Science; and the Bay Area R User Group learns how eBay uses R in Big-Data environments.
- Feb 18: The Dallas R User Group investigates R and Business Intelligence with an overview of Pentaho.
- Feb 20: The Amsterdam R User Group features talks on visualization and web integration with R.
- Feb 21: The Denver R User Group has an introduction to at Bayesian Statistics in R.
- Feb 22: The new Cleveland R User Group has an informal planning get-together.
- Feb 23: The new Austin R User Group has tips on data management techniques in R.
- Feb 27: The Adelaide R User Group features a presentation by Paul Birch.
- Feb 29: Members of the Seattle R User Group share tips for making awesome plots with R.
- Mar 2-4: Data hackers of all stripes can help charities at the Washington DC Data Without Borders Datadive.
- Mar 5: The Bay Area R User Group meets at Predictive Analytics World in San Francisco.
- Mar 7: The Singapore R User Group has a session on Package Management in R.
- Mar 10: The ACM presents in San Jose, CA the course An introduction to R for software developers and data analysts.
There are also new local R user groups in Brussels (Belgium) and Cambridge (UK). Please let us know if we're missing your R user group. If you're interested in starting a local R user group in your area, Revolution Analytics offers sponsorships for both new and established groups—and has published some tips for starting a new R user group.