Farming equipment manufacturer John Deere uses R, and in yesterday's webinar their manager of forecast analytics, Derek Hoffman, explained what they use it for: In the presentation, Derek gave a spirited argument of why R is critical for John Deere's operations: from forecasting demand for equipment, to forecasting crop yields (... [Read more...]

As the clean-up continues on the eastern seaboard, I wanted to follow up on Monday's post on tracking Hurricane Sandy with Open Data with a couple of other R-based data applications spawned by the storm. Josef Fruehwald created an R script to tap into local weather sensors to keep track ... [Read more...]

The O'Reilly Strata conferences are always great fun to attend, and this latest installment in New York City is no exception. This one is super-busy though; the conference has been sold out for weeks -- and not just marketing-sold-out, it's fire-department-sold out. It's non-stop conversations and presentations, and it's tough ... [Read more...]

The chart below comes by way of the is.R blog and shows the average ideology of the members of the United State House of Representatives within the Republican (red) and Democratic (blue) parties. (Other parties are shown in green.) The chart is shown as a time series, from the ... [Read more...]

The Maker Movement has led to the production of open-source 3-D printers and other manufacturing machines that allow hobbyists to design, create and produce real-world objects affordably. Now R user Ian Walker, in a post at the Psychological Statistics blog, shows how to use the R language to transform 3-D ... [Read more...]

I had a great time yesterday moderating the "R in Action" panel discussion at the DataWeek conference in San Francisco. Each of the panelists represented a company that is actively using R and/or Revolution R Enterprise. Here (from memory, since I couldn't take notes) are some the things they ... [Read more...]

Today's guest post comes from Revolution Analytics data scientist Luba Gloukhov — ed. As a big fan of R’s ever-expanding geospatial plotting capabilities, I jumped at the chance create a map using The Million Song Dataset (MSD). For each of the 10,000 songs in the million song subset containing non-missing latitudes & ... [Read more...]

Today's guest post comes to us from Andrew Winterman, Data Designer at data visualization company Persiscopic. He shares with us the process of using the R language and other tools to create an interactive data application for a client — ed. The Hewlett Foundation contacted us a few months ago because ... [Read more...]

The social crowdfunding site Kickstarter announced today that it has enabled, via community contributions, $50M in funding in 2012 for new indie games. The second largest category of funding was for independent films. The blog post announcing the news includes analysis (using R, natch) of the breakdown in categories and funding ... [Read more...]

You've probably heard (or seen in TV shows) how the unique pattern of rifling in a gunbarrel generates forensic evidence: microscopic scoring on the bullets left at the scene of the crime can be linked to the shooter by matching the marks to the firearm. What you might not know ... [Read more...]

RealClimate.org used the R language and data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center to create this chart showing the extent of Arctic sea-ice in each year since satellite observations began in 1978, and the current extent of ice coverage (in red). Even though there are several weeks of ... [Read more...]

If you live in the US, you've probably visited a Williams Sonoma store for gourmet food or quality cookware for the kitchen. And if you've shopped at Pottery Barn or West Elm stores for furniture, those chains are part of the Williams Sonoma stable as well. All three brands have ... [Read more...]

Biostatistician and R user Matt Cooper noticed recently that the price he pays for petrol (gasoline) at the pump in Perth, Australia was about the same as he was paying four years ago. Nonetheless, inflation has marched on over the years, so does that mean petrol is effectively cheaper now ... [Read more...]

The Environmental Performance Index (EPI) ranks countries on performance indicators for environmental public health and ecosystem vitality. Yale University hosts the EPI website, which was used to present the 2012 EPI Rankings to world leaders at the 2012 World Economic Forum at Davos. The Country Profiles section of the website allowed members ... [Read more...]

The June 2012 issue of the R Journal, the peer-reviewed open-journal about R packages and applications of R, is now available. This issue includes articles about: Efficiently calling C functions from R without the need for wrapper code Using clusters of Macs running Apple Xgrid for parallel distributed processing with R ... [Read more...]

At a talk I saw at the useR!2012 conference last month, Googler Karl Millar estimated that there are at least 200 active R users at Google, plus another 300+ occasional users participating in Google's internal R support list. But what are all these Google employees doing with R? A post from the ... [Read more...]

The biggest prize in UK soccer, the Premier League Championship, is decided by a points system. Unlike most sports competitions, there's no final round or playoff series: once the regular round of games is complete, the team that has accumulated the most points (three for a win, and one for ... [Read more...]

Wanting to start a family the natural way? For a healthy 45-year-old woman, you may be in for a five-year wait. That's the conclusion of Richie Cotton, a UK-based data scientist, who discovered when he and his girlfriend wanted to start a family that statistics on how long it takes ... [Read more...]

Last week, Joe Rickert used R and four years of US Census data to create an image plot of the relative probabilities of being born on a given day of the year: Chris Mulligan also tackled this problem with R, but this time using 20 years of Census data from 1969 to 1988. ... [Read more...]

We're definitely in the age of Big Data: today, there are many more sources of data readily available to us to analyze than there were even a couple of years ago. But what about extracting useful information from novel data streams that are often noisy and minutely transactional ... aye, there's ... [Read more...]