R Weekly 2017 Issue 8

Highlight

R in the Real World

The Steep Slide of NFL Draft Salaries

coffee

Insights

R in Organizations

Tutorials

Introduction to ggraph: Edges

Videos and Podcasts

Resources

New Packages and Tools

  • nytimes - R client for New York Times’ article search API

  • hrbrthemes - 🔏 Opinionated, typographic-centric ggplot2 themes and theme components

hrbrthemes

New Releases

  • MODIStsp 1.3.1 - Automatic download and preprocessing of MODIS Land Products time series

  • mlr 2.10 - Machine Learning for R

  • RcppTOML 0.1.1 - Rcpp bindings for TOML

  • littler 0.3.2 - littler is the first command-line interface for R and predates Rscript.

  • ggalt 0.4.0 - Extra Coordinate Systems, ‘Geoms’, Statistical Transformations, Scales and Fonts for ‘ggplot2’

Call for Participation

  • Apply to attend rOpenSci unconf 2017! - For a fourth year running, rOpenSci is excited to announce another unconference in 2017 with a new venue in ☀ Downtown LA. We’re organizing this event to bring together scientists, developers, and open data enthusiasts from academia, industry, government, and non-profit to get together for a few days and hack on various projects.

R Project Updates

Updates from R Core:

  • R CMD check --as-cran now NOTEs if the package does not register its native routines or does not declare its intentions on (native) symbol search. (This will become a WARNING in due course.)

  • Those who use proxies should check that their settings are compatible (see ?download.file: the most commonly used forms work for both methods "internal" and "libcurl").

  • One can now choose from alternative matrix product implementations via options(matprod = ). The "internal" implementation is not optimized for speed but consistent in precision with other summations in R (uses long double accumulators). "blas" calls BLAS directly for best speed, yet usually with undefined behavior for inputs with NaN/Inf.

  • (Unix-alike) The default method for download.file() and url() now always chooses "libcurl" except for file:// URLs. There will be small changes in the format and wording of messages, and those who use proxies should check that their settings are compatible (see ?download.file: the most commonly used forms work for both methods "internal" and "libcurl").

  • Three changes when redirection of a http:// URL to a https:// URL is encountered.

  • (Unix-alike) For http:// URLs and the default method ("auto"), download.file() switches to method = "libcurl" if a redirection to a https:// URL is encountered.

  • For url() with method "default" and an explicit open argument, if opening fails because of redirection to an https:// URL then method = "libcurl" is tried.

Upcoming Events

  • R/Finance 2017 May 19 and 20, 2017
    From the inaugural conference in 2009, the annual R/Finance conference in Chicago has become the primary meeting for academics and practioners interested in using R in Finance.

  • useR! 2017 July 4, 2017
    The annual useR! conference is the main meeting of the international R user and developer community.

More past events at R conferences & meetups.

Quotes of the Week