In case you missed them, here are some articles from December of particular interest to R users.

A Facebook employee created a beautiful visualization of social connections around the world, which made a lot of news on the Web. The creator, Paul Butler, explained how he did it using R.

With sponsorship from Revolution Analytics, the R/Finance conference in Chicago is offering travel grants to students.

New Scientists' San Francisco Bureau Chief gave a presentation on Data Driven Journalism. The video includes several examples using R.

Jeromy Anglim has published a series of tutorials on creating PDF reports with tables and graphics using Sweave.

TDWI interviews Revolution Analytics' CEO Norman Nie.

Amanda Cox gives a video presentation about the data visualization process at the the New York Times (which often involves R).

An overview of the updates in R 2.12.1.

I presented a webinar on what Revolution R Enterprise adds to R; a replay and slides are available for download.

A guide on choosing colour scales for charts with RColorBrewer.

If you have a key for the Google Prediction API, you can train and score models in R with the googlepredictionapi package.

The ACM is giving courses on Machine Learning and Data Mining with R in the San Francisco area.

There's a new package for accessing Infochimps from R. Drew Conway showed an example of using it to measure programming language popularity based on mentions on Twitter.

Two engineers explain how they use Hadoop and R to find the best hotel for visitors to the Orbitz travel website.

The December 20 issue of Forbes magazine lists R on p128 as a name you need to know in 2011.

R user Diego Valle demonstrates citizen data journalism, by looking into anomalies in government data on homicides in Mexico.

Barry Rowlingson used R to estimate the location of a nearby earthquake, and came within 50km of the official epicenter.

Facebook's “data team” has published an analysis of status updates, using the ggplot2 package for R.

A Bing engineer lists his favourite R packages to support social search analysis.

We recapped the top stories on the Revolutions blog in 2011.

Other non-R-related stories in the past month included: Hans Rosling's Gapminder featured in the Economist, visualizing race in the US, why it always seems like you're in the slowest queue at the supermarket, and the complete BBC documentary “The Joy of Stats” available for streaming on YouTube.

On a lighter note, we also had: a unique way of communicating 4th Amendment rights to TSA scanners in the US, musical mashups, the dangers of dating a statistician, Christmas carols on iPads, and an analemma for 2010. 

The R Community Calendar has also been updated.

As always, thanks for the comments and please send any suggestions to me at [email protected]. Don't forget you can follow the blog using an RSS reader like Google Reader, or by following me on Twitter (I'm @revodavid). You can find roundups of previous months here.