Just a few  clicks with the new version of R Commander and Beautiful Markdown Code. (using KMggplot plugin for R Commander).

ggplot AND markdown made easy!!

Now how cool is that! Update your R Commander Package today . Now on CRAN!

This should especially be useful to people blogging! (note I cleaned up some warnings!)

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I really like two functions in ggmap package. One is geocode that converts any text charachter into basically a google maps query and returns the longitude and latitude for it.

library(ggmap)
geocode("Calgary")
geocode("Saddledome Calgary")

> geocode("Calgary")
Information from URL : http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=Calgary&sensor=false
Google Maps API Terms of Service : http://developers.google.com/maps/terms
        lon      lat
1 -114.0581 51.04532
> geocode("Saddledome Calgary")
Information from URL : http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=Saddledome+Calgary&sensor=false
Google Maps API Terms of Service : http://developers.google.com/maps/terms
        lon      lat
1 -114.0513 51.03811

the other is qmap that makes a map out of the text query. We can change the level of detail using the zoom option.

One of the options that I like is of course watercolor using parameter maptype.

qmap("Saddledome Calgary")
qmap("Saddledome Calgary",zoom=15)
qmap("Saddledome Calgary",zoom=15,maptype="watercolor")

Other useful options for spatial analysis are get_map and ggmap which get and plot the map for a query. In between of course you can add the layers for your data.

This is a relatively recent package and you can test it out how it makes spatial analysis even more easy for beginners.

See the package site ,these slides , or this article on the R Journal.

Google was built of burying the concept of information asymmetry and spreading knowledge. Yes the ads were there, but they were just a way to make money without being evil

It was just a continuation of the process that the Gutenberg press and the Internet brought about. Products like Adsense and acquisitions like Youtube, Android and Blogger proved that Google not only helped you find content it helped you create content too.

But if the old desktop Monopoly was thwarted, a new more sinister monopoly has been born. With an increasingly corrupted political system manipulated by political lobbying, search engine queries are now logged , and neatly transferred to the American Government ‘s non elected branches. Using existing loopholes in existing law, we now face a frightening future in which the novel 1984 is more likely to be a Google sponsored movie coming soon to a computer screen near you.

When you click every ad that Google shows, remember you are helping fund the NSA as well. The rise of a neo imperialism led primarily by US/ Anglo Saxon /Western   alliances shows why the Chinese and Russian governments are actually right in being skeptical about the glasnost and perestroika that American establishment offered.

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. Today, Data is Power and the biggest collector of Data has chosen to hide behind a decade long slogan, Trust Me, I am not Evil.

Dude, Seriously!

The Galactic Empire is being built on Data ……

Here is an interview with Dr Eric Siegel, founding chair of Predictive Analytics Conference and author of the recent bestseller in analytics, Predictive Analytics.

Ajay- What has been the response to your book

A quick and dirty list….

1) Revolution R – http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/products/revolution-r.php Revolution R Community is Revolution Analytics’ free distribution of the open source R programming language — enhanced for users looking for faster performance and greater stability. It’s perfect for learning R and basic analysis

2) Oracle Enterprise R http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/features-oracle-r-enterprise-498732.html

3) Tibco Enterprise Runtime for R

TERR, a key component of Spotfire Predictive Analytics, is an enterprise-grade analytic engine that TIBCO has built from the ground up to be fully compatible with the R language, leveraging our long-time expertise in the closely related S+ analytic engine. This allows customers to continue to develop in open source R, but to then integrate and deploy their R code on a commercially-supported and robust platform—without the need to rewrite their code.

Prototypes are often developed in R, but then typically re-implemented in another language for production purposes because R was not built for enterprise usage. TERR brings enterprise-class scalability and stability to the agile R-language, and enables statisticians to broadly share their analyses through TIBCO Spotfire Statistics Services or by directly embedding the TERR engine.

4) pqR -http://radfordneal.github.io/pqR/   You gotta love Radford Neal’s throwing down the gauntlets to the old sleepy heads! At JSM , Montreal the R Core member announced they have agreed to incorporate his changes, signalling a major departure in the way changes have been signaled at R.

pqR is a new version of the R interpreter. It is based on R-2.15.0, distributed by the R Core Team (at r-project.org), but improves on it in many ways, mostly ways that speed it up, but also by implementing some new features and fixing some bugs.

One notable improvement is that pqR is able to do some numeric computations in parallel with each other, and with other operations of the interpreter, on systems with multiple processors or processor cores.

5) Renjin http://www.renjin.org/ Renjin is a JVM-based interpreter for the R language for statistical computing Renjin is a new implementation of the R language and environment for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), whose goal is to enable transparent analysis of big data sets and seamless integration with other enterprise systems such as databases and application servers.

Renjin is still under development, with a target of a version “1.0” in late 2013, but in the meantime it is being used in production for a number of our client projects, and supports most CRAN packages, including some with C/Fortran dependencies.

6) Riposte (?) https://github.com/jtalbot/riposte

Riposte, a fast interpreter and JIT for R.

Justin Talbot justintalbot@gmail.com Zach Devito

We only do development on OSX and Linux. It’s unlikely that our JIT will work on Windows.

Planned work for July-December 2013. The first three bullet points are currently in progress on the library branch. Partial work will be integrated to main by the end of July.

• [x] Load the standard base R library without errors
  • This will require support for about 15 primitive and external functions
• [ ] Support all R primitive operators (~200, 50 supported as of July 2013)
  • [x] The most common 40 or so will be appear as bytecodes in the Riposte VM, primarily control flow operators and a small set of common arithmetic
  • [ ] The rest will be implemented in the Riposte core library
  • [x] Implement new .Map, .Scan, or .Fold FFI functions to allow vector fusion through primitives implemented as external calls in the core library
• [ ] Support for the 200 most common internal functions (out of ~580, 30 supported as of July 2013)

SAP , IBM Netezza already have specialized packages for R.

The question is SAS which supports interaction with R through SAS/IML, even Base R, and JMP- can it be willing to go the extra mile for customers and create SAS/R . The fact that they made their products compatible with R shows they acknowledge and respect R’s appeal ( contrary to old sleepyheads who think all SAS is good and all base R is divine)

SAS/ R can be the third major product for the SAS Institute after SAS and JMP platforms. Any takers, ladies and gentlemen?