RWeekly.org Podcast Live Feed About All Draft Submit Night

Issue 19

Hello and welcome to the new issue of R Weekly!

Highlight

Digested by R Weekly Members

News & Blog Posts

Tutorials

Quick wordclouds from PubMed abstracts – using PMID lists in R

R in the Real World

Song Lyrics Across the United States

Hillary Clinton and her strategy to speak

The Simpsons by the Data

When Trump visits... tweets from his trip to Mexico

Berlin-Marathon 2016

R in Organization

Resources

New Releases

  • sparklyr 0.4 - R interface for Apache Spark, now on CRAN.

  • plotly 4.0 - Create interactive web graphics via the open source JavaScript graphing library plotly.js.

  • RcppAnnoy 0.0.8 - Annoy is a small, fast, and lightweight library for approximate nearest neighbours.

  • RcppCNPy 0.2.6 - RcppCNPy provides R with read and write access to NumPy files.

  • gcbd 0.2.6 - The gcbd proposes a benchmarking framework for LAPACK and BLAS operations and records result in local database.

  • sjmisc 2.0.0 - Tagged NA values and labelled data.

New Packages & Tools

  • fundManageR - an investment management toolkit for R.

  • BiclustGUI - This GUI will you enable to quickly try out a wide arrange of biclustering algorithms and produce some helpfull graphs in order to explore your data.

  • tensorflow - Using TensorFlow with R.

R Project Updates

Updates from R Core.

  • source() gets new optional arguments, notably exprs; this is made use of in the new utility function withAutoprint().

  • print.factor() no longer sets the class of the factor to NULL, which would violate a basic constraint of an S4 object.

  • There was an exception for the native Solaris C++ compiler to the dropping (in R 3.3.0) of legacy C++ headers from headers such as R.h and Rmath.h - this has now been removed. That compiler has strict C++98 compliance hence does not include extensions in its (non-legacy) C++ headers: some packages will need to request C++11 or replace non-C++98 calls such as lgamma: see §1.6.4 of Writing R Extensions.

  • sys.source() gets a new toplevel.env argument. This argument is useful for frameworks running package tests.

  • c()’s argument use.names is documented now, as belonging to the (C internal) default method. In “parallel”, argument recursive is also moved from the generic to the default method, such that the formal argument list of base generic c() is just (...).

  • If available, the POSIX 2008 system call utimensat will be used by setFileTime() and file.copy(). This may result in slightly more accurate file times.

  • Sys.setFileTime() and file.copy(copy.date = TRUE) will set timestamps with fractions of seconds on platforms/filesystems which support this.

  • If available, the POSIX 2008 system call utimensat will be used by setFileTime() and file.copy(). This may result in slightly more accurate file times.

  • The online documentation for package methods is extensively rewritten. The goals are to simplify documentation for basic use, to note old features not recommended and to correct out-of-date information.

  • Calls to setMethod() no longer print a message when creating a generic function in those cases where that is natural: S3 generics and primitives.

  • Use options(deparse.max.lines=) to limit the number of lines recorded in .Traceback and other deparsing activities.

  • abbreviate() gains an option named = TRUE.

  • Installation support for readline emulations based on editline (aka libedit) is deprecated.

  • Convenience function hasName() has been added; it is intended to replace the common idiom !is.null(x$name) without the usually unintended partial name matching.

  • split(<very_long>, *) now works with long vectors.

  • The license check enabled by options(checkPackageLicense = TRUE) is now done when the package’s namespace is first loaded.

  • citation() supports inst/CITATION files from package source trees, with lib.loc pointing to the directory containing the package.

  • (Windows only) Function setInternet2() is defunct.

  • (Windows only) file.info() now returns file timestamps including fractions of seconds; it has done so on other systems since R 2.14.0.

Upcoming Events

  • eRum 2016 Poznan, Poland 12 October - 14 October
    European R users meeting (eRum) is an international conference that aims at integrating users of the R language. eRum 2016 will be a good chance to exchange experiences, broaden knowledge on R and collaborate.

Quote of the Week