Revolution Newsletters: Issue 32 - September / October 2012

Welcome to the September/October edition of the Revolution Newsletter! In this double issue, we bring you the latest news about R from Revolution Analytics and around the Web. You'll find 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, David Smith, VP Marketing and Community david@revolutionanalytics.com Twitter:@revodavid

	New R Courses Announced
Two new courses presented by Bob Muenchen (author of R for SAS and SPSS Users) are now available for registration. Dec 3 & Dec 5: Introduction to R for SAS/SPSS/Stata Users is ideal for R beginners with experience in other software. Dec 7: Managing Data with R focuses on how to access and prepare data with R. Both courses are online, meaning you can participate from your own desk! Click on the links above to register.

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!

X+1 migrates to Revolution R Enterprise. Learn how this leading digital marketing technology company used data from client websites, mobile apps, call centres and email to deploy its Predictive Optimization Engine in real time in our new Customer Case Study.

R in Action: At last month's DataWeek conference in San Francisco, Revolution Analytics hosted a panel discussion on applications of R in production. You can read how companies like eBay, Intuit and Minted rely on R in this summary from moderator David Smith.

Population Health Management with RevoScaleR: Cerner president Douglas McNair evaluates Revolution R Enterprise's Big Data performance with a regression analysis of cohorts of Type 2 diabetics.

Visit us for a chance to win a Kindle Fire HD! We'll be at the following events in October: Strata/Hadoop World (New York, Oct 23-25); Teradata Partners Conference (Washington DC, Oct 21-25); and IBM Information on Demand (Las Vegas, Oct 21-25). If you're attending, drop by our booth (or make an appointment) for a demonstration of Revolution R Enterprise 6 and a chance to win a Kindle Fire HD.

Sponsorships for local R User Groups: We're proud to have sponsored more than 40 local R user groups worldwide in 2012, and applications for 2013 funding are now open. If you run a local user group, or are thinking about starting one, visit our R User Group Sponsorship page for details.

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.

Revolution Analytics' Luba Gloukhov shows how to use the plotGoogleMaps package to create an interactive video map charting the sources of popular music.

Forbes blogger Naomi Robbins gives several examples of creating effective charts with R. Want to make your R charts stand out with custom typefaces? Winston Chang's extrafont package can help.

If you're doing Bayesian data analysis with R, you should check out the new RStan package for its speed and multilevel modeling capabilities.

RStan is a new package for Bayesian modeling with R. It's faster and can fit more highly-correlated models than the MCMC sampler of BUGS and JAGS.

For when you need more speed, the Rcpp package can translate simple R code to C++.

Upcoming Events Every month, we highlight some upcoming events from the R Community Calendar.

October 9: The Bay Area R Group meets at eBay HQ for a series of lightning talks.
October 10: The Dublin R User Group features talks and package demonstrations. (The group will also meet on October 13 for a study group.)
October 11: R user group meetings in Barcelona (on maps an survival analysis), Raleigh/Durham (R programming bootcamp) and Toronto (for R users in the financial industry).
October 16: The Toronto R Matlab Users group hosts an on-line webinar on Hadoop and R for Parallel Processing.
October 17: R user group meetings in Sydney ("Reflections on Regression Analysis"), Singapore (on loyalty program data analysis), and Houston (on the Health of Houston Survey).
October 18: The Austin UserRs Group meets at Infochimps to discuss report building and text mining with R; and the Raleigh-Durham group hosts another R Programming Bootcamp.
October 20: The Dallas R User Group talks about speeding up R for Genetics.
October 24: The Seattle R User Group discusses literate programming with R.
October 26: The Greater Toronto R User's Group welcomes R Core member Duncan Murdoch to talk about reproducible research with R.
October 30: Connecticut R Users Group features a presentation on the ExploringData package.
November 1: The Philadelphia R UseR Group has a presentation on "Disasters, Elections and R".

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.