Examples

Earlier this month we blogged about Harvard Professors Gary King and Stuart Shieber providing advice to graduate students about open access, dissertations, and journal publishing. We also mentioned some of the great initiatives that facilitate open access publishing in the statistics community, like the Journal of Statistical Software (JSS), The R Journal and arxiv.org. The …

For reasons beyond my understanding, the user 2013 committee didn’t register a domain name for the website, and the official address of the conference is: http://161.67.142.97/congresos/useR-2013/. Not only is this impossible to remember for humans, but it won’t show up in search engines. So I decided to help them out and invest 8 euro to …

Last years UseR 2012 conference in Nashville had an interesting discussion session titled “What other languages should R users know about?“. General consensus was that multilingualism is inevitable in modern computing, and panel members presented various languages that complement R in different ways. Some of the usual suspects included SQL, python, and of course C++, …

This week version 0.8.3 of RAppArmor appeared on CRAN. RAppAmor is a package to dynamically enforce security policies and hardware restrictions in R on Linux systems. It currently supports Ubuntu 12.04+, Debian 7 and OpenSuse 12.1+. The readme page has more info, and helpful video tutorials to get you started. One important change in the …

Harvard Professors Gary King and Stuart Shieber provide advice to graduate students about open access, dissertations, and journal publishing. They explain how freely available publications are essential to the scientific community, but also benefit your own career. King suggests a clever way of dealing with publisher copyright agreements to prevent locking up your work behind …

I wanted to play a bit Julia, the new language for technical computing, but no binaries were available yet for current versions of Ubuntu. So I decided to try and build them myself by backporting the julia 1.2.0 source package available in Sid and Raring. On Quantal, the packages were building out of the box. …

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Ajay Ohri from decisionstats.com earlier this week. Ajay is a great interviewer and writer and has extensive knowledge and experience on how R fits into the BI tool kit. His book R for Business Analytics (Springer, 2012) is a good read for anyone in industry looking to …

Security and R One of the more challenging aspects of OpenCPU is security in R (or lack thereof). This is actually one of the reasons OpenCPU runs on Linux only at this point; other operating systems simply lack superpowers to implement open computing. (Maybe one exception is BSD, for which I lack superpowers). Security is …

OpenCPU will be presented at useR 2012 in Nashville! Have a look at the abstract and the conference program. In the presentation we will introduce 3 inter-related projects which build on R: OpenCPU An open source framework for web development with R. Ohmage An open source system for large scale participatory sensing using mobile phones. …

R functions as APIs In our first post we demonstrated how to publish an R function to OpenCPU, so that it comes an API that can be called remotely. In a subsequent post we showed the advantages of putting the function in a package: it gets a permanent URI and one can include ‘apps’ in …