In case you missed it: October Roundup

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

The creator of the ggplot2 package, Hadley Wickham, shares details on some forthcoming big-data graphics functions (based on research sponsored by Revolution Analytics).

A list of several dozen free data sources that can easily be imported into R.

Bob Muenchen gave a presentation "Introduction to R for SAS and SPSS Users"; the slides include many useful resources for new R programmers.

Submissions have been posted for the "Applications of R in Business" contest, and your comments will be taken into consideration by the judges.

How to make a Hallowe'en card with R graphics.

An overview of the new features in R 2.14.0.

The Systematic Investor blog shows how to implement an "average correlation" criterion for optimizing portfolios in R. 

The Quantum Forest blog includes several worked examples of random-effects modeling with R.

The New York Times "Bits" blog published an article on Big Data that mentioned R, MapReduce and NoSQL.

An article in Forbes includes the quote, "Anyone planning to work with Big Data ought to learn Hadoop and R".

High-schoolers celebrate World Statistics Day with R.

I posted slides from my presentation "100% R and More" on the features Revolution R Enterprise adds to open source R.

A profile of quantitative developer and author of "R Cookbook", Paul Teetor.

A report from the ACM Data Mining Camp includes several applications of R.

A list of the "Top 50 Statistics Blogs" includes several that post content related to R.

Antonio Piccolboni gave a presentation to the Bay Area R User Group demonstrating that it's much easer to do K-means clustering in Hadoop with help from R.

R user Yanh Zhan offers seven good reasons to like R.

Joseph Rickert reflects on a presentation by Brad Efron on Bayesian Inference.

Slides are available for the presentation "Backtesting FINRA's Limit Up/Down Rules", where R was used to investigate the 2010 "Flash Crash" of the stock market.

Two NYC-based R users have organized "DataDive" events for data scientists to apply their skills to help non-profit and charity organizations.

Oracle has announced a "Big Data Appliance" that incorporates open source R.

Other non-R-related stories in the past month included: statisticians in Glamour magazine, reviews of the book "A Million Random Digits", the good/evil nature of Big Data, an even worse use of pie charts than usual, a Rubik's Cube solving robot, and a gravity-defying Slinky.

There is a new R user group in Dublin. Meeting times for these groups can be found on the updated R Community Calendar.

As always, thanks for the comments and please send any suggestions to me at david@revolutionanalytics.com. 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.