Revolutions

R creators win prestigious Statistical Computing and Graphics Award

The American Statistical Association recently created a new, bi-annual award to to recognize an individual or team for innovation in computing, software, or graphics that has had a great impact on statistical practice or research. The committee has just announced the winner (or in this, joint winners) of the first award: Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka, for their work in initiating the R Project for Statistical Computing.

It really can't be overstated how well-deserved this award is. No other project has made world-class software available to so many people while also by encouraging so many to participate in advancing the art and science of statistical computing through the medium of an open-source project. While many, many people have made significant contributions to the R project over the years, it's undeniable that Robert and Ross were the ones that got it all started. Congratulations, R&R!

(For more information about the history of the R project, this New York Times article from 2009 is a great resource. You can also read a profile of Ross Ihaka in the New Zealand Herald. Disclosure: Robert Gentleman recently joined the board of REvolution Computing.)

ASA Sections on Statistical Computing and Statistical Graphics: Statistical Computing and Graphics Award

Crayola crayon colors, 1949-present

Here's an example I featured in my list of 7 Awesome Things about R (awesome thing #3: graphics and data visualization). The Learning R blog features a reproduction of a graphic that recently appeared on Flowing Data. It shows the colors in a box of Crayola crayons: before 1949 there were only 8, but over the years additional colors have been added to the mix. Today, there are 120 colors, and the chart below shows the progression of colors added over time.

The amazing thing about this graph isn't just that it's reproduced in R from a hand-crafted original. The amazing thing is that this chart is completely automated: it reads the list of colors from history directly from the list of Crayola colors on Wikipedia, creates barcharts for each time period, and sorts the colors in a pleasing manner (by converting them to the HSV color space) before exporting the custom chart to a PNG file. All of this is done in less than 30 lines of R code. If Crayola introduces a new set of colors this year, then as long a someone updates the Wikipedia page, a new, up-to-date version of this graph can be created in seconds. Now that's awesome.

Learning R: ggplot2: Crayola Crayon Colours (via @gaygoygourmet)

Introduction to R webinar today, slides available

Just a quick reminder that I'll be hosting an introductory webinar about R today, The R Project: Data Analysis and Statistical Graphics for the Enterprise. It's at 9AM Pacific, so you might still have time to register for the live session at the link below.

Otherwise, if you did catch the live session, you can pick up the slides at the link below: the PDF has live links to all the resources and sites I mentioned in the talk. And if you have any comments or questions that we didn't have time to address live, please use the comments section below and I'll answer as many as I can.

And if you missed the live session, the replay will be posted in the next couple of days -- stay tuned for an announcement here on the blog. Update: The replay is available now, at the link below.

REvolution Computing: The R Project: Data Analysis and Statistical Graphics for the Enterprise

How to combine Google maps and data in R

Every good artist needs a canvas, and when it comes to displaying geographic data placing those data in context -- on a map -- makes all the difference. A new package for R from Markus Loecher, RgoogleMaps, allows you to download a street or satellite map from Google simply by specifying the bounding latitude/longitude coordinates. (You need to sign up for a free Google API key first, though.) You can then overlay data from objects in R, using tools provided to convert to the map-based coordinate system. Here's an example from the package vignette overlaying the locations of faults (provided as data in the geomapdata package) on a satellite map:

You can find the commands to create this map in R, along with other examples, in the package vignette linked below.

RgoogleMaps package: Vignette: Plotting on Google Static Maps in R (PDF) (via @DataJunkie)

What programmers should know about Statistics

Reader KW pointed me to this rant essay from Ruby on Rails enfant terrible Zed Shaw on what computer programmers don't know about statistical analysis, but should. (Spoiler alert: a lot, apparently.) Perhaps surprisingly, building complex software systems often involves a lot of simulation, experimentation, and measurement for which statistical methods would be an asset. But according to Shaw, many programmers often have no idea how many iterations to run a test for, or why an average is often meaningless if you don't also consider the variation, or how confounding factors can mess up an experiment. There's actually some good statistical advice here, illustrated with examples from R. 

Zed Shaw: Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All

Mapping the Massachusetts election upset with R

The blog Offensive Politics has done some in-depth analysis of the recent Senate special-election upset in Massachusetts, comparing the results of victorious Republican candidate Scott Brown to those of the unsuccessful Republican Presidential candidate John McCain in 2008. It's pretty clear that Brown out-performed expectations with Democratic voters, but this chart of the change in Democratic voters from 2008 to 2010 makes the contrast stark:

 

You can find more charts, and the data and R code to reproduce them, at the link below.

Update 10:56: Political scientist Boris Shor has also analyzed this election, concluding that Scott Brown is more liberal than current Senate Republican Olympia Snowe and congressional Republican challenger Dede Scozzafava (who lost her primary amongst claims she was too liberal). Incidentally, Boris relies on the big-data capabilities of REvolution R Enterprise for Windows to make these analyses possible.

Offensive Politics: Mapping MA election results

Robert Gentleman joins REvolution's board of directors

We're so excited here at REvolution Computing to announce that Robert Gentleman has joined our board of directors. Robert is one of the two originators of the R Project: a research project between Robert and Ross Ihaka in 1996 was the genesis of the R language. (Both Robert and Ross were profiled in an article in the New York Times about R last year.) Today, the R Project has grown tremendously, with estimates of more than 2 million users worldwide, thousands of volunteer contributors to R packages, and more than 20 world-leading statisticians and computer scientists leading the core development. Robert was also the leader of the BioConductor project for many years, developing cutting-edge tools in R for the analysis of genetic data. Today, Robert continues his research in genomics as a senior director in bioinformatics at Genentech. He had this to say about joining our board:

“REvolution has made important contributions to the R community and to the commercial use of R on an enterprise level,” Gentleman said. “I am eager to help Norman and the team expand the role R has in the commercial world and to help bring high-quality analytic and graphical software to many new areas of application.”

Robert's expertise in R, the R project, and open-source projects in general will be invaluable to us as we develop our plans for REvolution Computing. 

We're also pleased to announce a second new appointment to our board of directors: financial expert Donald Nickelson. You can read more about both new board members in our press release linked below. 

REvolution Computing: REvolution Computing Names Robert Gentleman and Donald Nickelson to Board

User Group news: DC and Philly

There's a new local R User Group starting up in Philadelphia. Alex McClung and Jeremy Leipzig have set up a website for the Philly UseR Group to get things started, so if you're in the area join up and tell them what you'd like from the group.

Also, the DC UseR Group is seeing renewed activity after a hiatus since its first meeting last year: a couple of new members have stepped forward to organize the group. They're looking for input on the group's direction, so why not drop in and vote?

Web Development with R (video)

Jeroen Ooms' BARUG talk on Web Development with R is now available (with thanks again to Drew Conway):

If you want to try the web based apps Jeroen demos in the video yourself, you can find links at Jeroen's homepage (along with the slides for his talk). Click on the links for stockplot, lme4, and gpplot2. 

vcasmo: Web Development with R

Because it's Friday: The Internet is Made of Cats

Here's a fascinating video that looks at the exponential growth of broadband technology and network-based models ... uh ... who am I kidding? This video has nothing to do with R, statistics, or open-source. It's about cats. But it's funny. And it's Friday.

(Some slightly NSFW language, but it's in a strong British accent so you might not even notice it.)

RatherGood: The Internet Is Made of Cats