In case you missed it: January 2018 roundup

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

Josh Katz and Peter Aldhous used R to analyze the content and presentation of the most recent State of the Union speech from the US president.

Slides for my presentation "Speeding up R with Parallel Processing in the Cloud", with applications of the doAzureParallel and sparklyr packages.

An example of using the doAzureParallel package to speed up a statistical simulation.

5 lines of R code to create a list of US Representatives from a Wikipedia table.

A package to visualize routes from activities recorded with the Strava app.

The call for papers and registration is now open for useR!2018 in Brisbane.

Microsoft R Open 3.4.3 is now available.

A simple command-line tool to launch a cluster in Azure for use with sparklyr.

A review of cloud-based tools for building intelligent applications with R.

A guide to implementing deep neural networks from scratch in R.

R leaps to its highest position — 8th — in the TIOBE language rankings.

A field guide to the ecosystem surrounding R.

Using the Rcpp package to parallelize an association rules problem.

Various R tricks used at Etsy to speed up an A/B testing system.

Some useful advice from Jenny Bryan on setting up a reproducible R workflow.

And some general interest stories (not necessarily related to R):

• A Japanese artist makes "paintings" with Excel
• A presentation on why companies' stated principles and values actually matter
• Some impressive formation acrobatics with kites
• A new Harry Potter chapter, written with a predictive text algorithm

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