Here are some Wow Presentations on Design and User Interfaces and Graphics (including R)- you may have seen some before.
From Dataspora-
A Survey of R Graphics
R Graphics using GGPlot
King of all R graphics-Hadley Wickham
and a rather clever Graphics User Interface presentation
Dark Patterns to Trick People
More on Design Anti Patterns
Back to designing well
Back to Polishing your Graphics with Hadley –
To all my Jewish friends especially Adam Schwartz, June Dershewitz , Neil Raden and Tal Galili
and
i spend more time with you
than with anything or anyone else
i could leave you behind
but you climb my lap and now have turned mobile
my fingers hurt and my eyes are red
inputting my stuff on you i go on and on instead
this is crazy not just done
no sooner do I finish writing that
I find I have just begun
for what separates the pretenders from the rest
is the actions not their words that make them the best
so my friend my computer and me
together we create
so much work to be done while the haters hate
Tal G in his excellent blog piece talks of “Why R Developers should not be paid” http://www.r-statistics.com/2010/09/open-source-and-money-why-r-developers-shouldnt-be-paid/
His argument of love is not very original though it was first made by these four guys
I am going to argue that “some” R developers should be paid, while the main focus should be volunteers code. These R developers should be paid as per usage of their packages.
Let me expand.
Imagine the following conversation between Ross Ihaka, Norman Nie and Peter Dalgaard.
Norman- Hey Guys, Can you give me some code- I got this new startup.
Ross Ihaka and Peter Dalgaard- Sure dude. Here is 100,000 lines of code, 2000 packages and 2 decades of effort.
Norman- Thanks guys.
Ross Ihaka- Hey, What you gonna do with this code.
Norman- I will better it. Sell it. Finally beat Jim Goodnight and his **** Proc GLM and **** Proc Reg.
Ross- Okay, but what will you give us? Will you give us some code back of what you improve?
Norman – Uh, let me explain this open core …
Peter D- Well how about some royalty?
Norman- Sure, we will throw parties at all conferences, snacks you know at user groups.
Ross – Hmm. That does not sound fair. (walks away in a huff muttering)-He takes our code, sells it and wont share the code
Peter D- Doesnt sound fair. I am back to reading Hamlet, the great Dane, and writing the next edition of my book. I am glad I wrote a book- Ross didnt even write that.
Norman-Uh Oh. (picks his phone)- Hey David Smith, We need to write some blog articles pronto – these open source guys ,man…
———–I think that sums what has been going on in the dynamics of R recently. If Ross Ihaka and R Gentleman had adopted an open core strategy- meaning you can create packages to R but not share the original where would we all be?
At this point if he is reading this, David Smith , long suffering veteran of open source flameouts is rolling his eyes while Tal G is wondering if he will publish this on R Bloggers and if so when or something.
Lets bring in another R veteran- Hadley Wickham who wrote a book on R and also created ggplot. Thats the best quality, most often used graphics package.
In terms of economic utilty to end user- the ggplot package may be as useful if not more as the foreach package developed by Revolution Computing/Analytics.
Now http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/foreach/index.html says that foreach is licensed under http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
However lets come to open core licensing ( read it here http://alampitt.typepad.com/lampitt_or_leave_it/2008/08/open-core-licen.html ) which is where the debate is- Revolution takes code- enhances it (in my opinion) substantially with new formats XDF for better efficieny, web services API, and soon coming next year a GUI (thanks in advance , Dr Nie and guys)
and sells this advanced R code to businesses happy to pay ( they are currently paying much more to DR Goodnight and HIS guys)
Why would any sane customer buy it from Revolution- if he could download exactly the same thing from http://r-project.org
Hence the business need for Revolution Analytics to have an enhanced R- as they are using a product based software model not software as a service model.
If Revolution gives away source code of these new enhanced codes to R core team- how will R core team protect the above mentioned intelectual property- given they have 2 decades experience of giving away free code , and back and forth on just code.
Now Revolution also has a marketing budget- and thats how they sponsor some R Core events, conferences, after conference snacks.
How would people decide if they are being too generous or too stingy in their contribution (compared to the formidable generosity of SAS Institute to its employees, stakeholders and even third party analysts).
Would it not be better- IF Revolution can shift that aspect of relationship to its Research and Development budget than it’s marketing budget- come with some sort of incentive for “SOME” developers – even researchers need grants and assistantships, scholarships, make a transparent royalty formula say 17.5 % of the NEW R sales goes to R PACKAGE Developers pool, which in turn examines usage rate of packages and need/merit before allocation- that would require Revolution to evolve from a startup to a more sophisticated corporate and R Core can use this the same way as John M Chambers software award/scholarship
Dont pay all developers- it would be an insult to many of them – say Prof Harrell creator of HMisc to accept – but can Revolution expand its dev base (and prospect for future employees) by even sponsoring some R Scholarships.
And I am sure that if Revolution opens up some more code to the community- they would the rest of the world and it’s help useful. If it cant trust people like R Gentleman with some source code – well he is a board member.
——————————————————————————————–
Now to sum up some technical discussions on NeW R
1) An accepted way of benchmarking efficiencies.
2) Code review and incorporation of efficiencies.
3) Multi threading- Multi core usage are trends to be incorporated.
4) GUIs like R Commander E Plugins for other packages, and Rattle for Data Mining to have focussed (or Deducer). This may involve hiring User Interface Designers (like from Apple 😉 who will work for love AND money ( Even the Beatles charge royalty for that song)
5) More support to cloud computing initiatives like Biocep and Elastic R – or Amazon AMI for using cloud computers- note efficiency arguements dont matter if you just use a Chrome Browser and pay 2 cents a hour for an Amazon Instance. Probably R core needs more direct involvement of Google (Cloud OS makers) and Amazon as well as even Salesforce.com (for creating Force.com Apps). Note even more corporates here need to be involved as cloud computing doesnot have any free and open source infrastructure (YET)
_______________________________________________________
Debates will come and go. This is an interesting intellectual debate and someday the liitle guys will win the Revolution-
From Hugh M of Gaping Void-
http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/cat_microsoft_blue_monster_series.html
“If something goes wrong with Microsoft, I can phone Microsoft up and have it fixed. With Open Source, I have to rely on the community.”
And the community, as much as we may love it, is unpredictable. It might care about your problem and want to fix it, then again, it may not. Anyone who has ever witnessed something online go “viral”, good or bad, will know what I’m talking about.
and especially-
Source-http://gapingvoidgallery.com/
Kind of sums up why the open core licensing is all about.
Some good journals for reading on analytics-
1) JSS
present research that demonstrates the joint evolution of computational and statistical methods and techniques. Implementations can use languages such as C, C++, S, Fortran, Java, PHP, Python and Ruby or environments such as Mathematica, MATLAB, R, S-PLUS, SAS, Stata, and XLISP-STAT.
There are currently 370 articles, 23 code snippets, 86 book reviews, 4 software reviews, and 7 special volumes in archives
2) R Journal
The 
Journal
3) Pharma Programming
http://maney.co.uk/index.php/journals/pha/
Pharmaceutical Programming is the official journal of the Pharmaceutical Users Software Exchange (PhUSE), a non-profit membership society with the objective of educating programmers and their managers working in the pharmaceutical industry. Available both in print and online, Pharmaceutical Programming is an international journal with focus on programming in the regulated environment of the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry.
4) SAS Papers – User Groups
| 4569 SAS papers presented at SGF/SUGI 1996-2010. |
1343 SAS papers presented at PharmaSUG 2000-2010. |
1810 SAS papers presented at NESUG 1997-2009. |
| 1191 SAS papers presented at SESUG 1999-2009. |
463 SAS papers presented at PhUSE 2005-2009. |
787 SAS papers presented at WUSS 2003-2009. |
| 337 SAS papers presented at MWSUG 2001, 2004-2009. |
188 SAS papers presented at PNWSUG 2004-2009. |
246 SAS papers presented at SCSUG 2003-2007, 2009. |
| 221 SAS papers related to CDISC. Easy access to the CDISC Forum. |
5) http://analyticsmagazine.com/
Magazine by http://www.informs.org/
6) Data Mining Journals
Journals relevant to Data Mining
Suppose you want to customize your blog shares to add one more service (apart from Facebook, Twitter etc)
Here is an example on creating a new share service – We are creating a blog share button for Hacker News at http://news.ycombinator.com/
See screenshot below-
Navigate there – by logging onto your wordpress.com account,
left margin bottom (Settings- Sharing)
Now on Add Service-
We put Service Name as
Hacker News (or you can put it as Y Combinator)
on URL Dropdown
Put it as- Copy and Paste Exactly
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink=&t=%post_title%+&u=%post_url%
On Icon URL
Note there is no need for an Excerpt if you adding URL to Hacker News -so we can put it as blank
And now share all you want, wordpress.com hackers 😉
From the press release, here comes Oracle Open World. They really have an excellent rock concert in that as well.
.NET and Windows @ Oracle Develop and Oracle OpenWorld 2010
Oracle Develop will again feature a .NET track for Oracle developers. Oracle Develop is suited for all levels of .NET developers, from beginner to advanced. It covers introductory Oracle .NET material, new features, deep dive application tuning, and includes three hours of hands-on labs apply what you learned from the sessions.
To register, go to Oracle Develop registration site.
Oracle OpenWorld will include several sessions on using the Oracle Database on Windows and .NET.
Session schedules and locations for Windows and .NET sessions at Oracle Develop and OpenWorld are now available.
Download: 32-bit ODAC 11.2.0.1.2 for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4
With ODAC 11.2.0.1.2, developers can connect to Oracle Database versions 9.2 and higher from Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4. ODAC components support the full framework, as well as the new .NET Framework Client Profile.
- Download ODAC 11.2.0.1.2
- Oracle’s integration with Visual Studio 2010 video demo
- ODAC 11.2.0.1.2 Data Sheet
- New Features List
Statement of Direction: Oracle Database and Microsoft Entity Framework
Learn about Oracle’s beta and production plans to support Microsoft Entity Framework with Oracle Database.
Also see http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/datawarehouse/saternos-r-161569.html
for
Data Mining Using the RDOM Package
By Casimir Saternos
Some excerpts-
Open R and enter the following command.
> library(RODM)
This command loads the RODM library and as well the dependent RODBC package. The next step is to make a database connection.
> DB <- RODM_open_dbms_connection(dsn="orcl", uid="dm", pwd="dm")
Subsequent commands use the DB object (an instance of the RODBC class) to connect to the database. The DNS specified in the command is the name you used earlier for the Data Source Name during the ODBC connection configuration. You can view the actual R code being executed by the command by simply typing the function name (without parentheses).
> RODM_open_dbms_connection
And say making a Model in Oracle and R-
> numrows <- length(orange_data[,1])
> orange_data.rows <- length(orange_data[,1])
> orange_data.id <- matrix(seq(1, orange_data.rows), nrow=orange_data.rows, ncol=1, dimnames= list(NULL, c(“CASE_ID”)))
> orange_data <- cbind(orange_data.id, orange_data)
This adjustment to the data frame then needs to be propagated to the database. You can confirm the change using the sqlColumns function, as listed earlier.
> RODM_create_dbms_table(DB, "orange_data") > sqlColumns(DB, 'orange_data')$COLUMN_NAME
> glm <- RODM_create_glm_model(
database = DB,
data_table_name = “orange_data”,
case_id_column_name = “CASE_ID”,
target_column_name = “circumference”,
model_name = “GLM_MODEL”,
mining_function = “regression”)
Information about this model can then be obtained by analyzing value returned from the model and stored in the variable named glm.
> glm$model.model_settings > glm$glm.globals > $glm.coefficients
Once you have a model, you can apply the model to a new set of data. To begin, create or retrieve sample data in the same format as the training data.
> query<-('select 999 case_id, 1 tree, 120 age,
32 circumference from dual')
> orange_test<-sqlQuery(DB, query)
> RODM_create_dbms_table(DB, "orange_test")
and
Finally, the model can be applied to the new data set and the results analyzed.
results <- RODM_apply_model(database = DB, data_table_name = "orange_test", model_name = "GLM_MODEL", supplemental_cols = "circumference")
When your session is complete, you can clean up objects that were created (if you like) and you should close the database connection:
> RODM_drop_model(database=DB,'GLM_MODEL') > RODM_drop_dbms_table(DB, "orange_test") > RODM_drop_dbms_table(DB, "orange_data") > RODM_close_dbms_connection(DB)
See the full article at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/datawarehouse/saternos-r-161569.html
DECISION STATS 
