Planet R

New package timetools with initial version 1.1-0

2012-02-06T20:16:00+00:00

Package: timetools
Type: Package
Title: provides objects and tools to manipulate irregular unhomogeneous time data and subtime data.
Version: 1.1-0
Date: 2012-02-06
Depends: methods
Author: Vladislav Navel
Maintainer: Vladislav Navel
Description: This package is intended to manipulate irregular time series such as subtime series, series based on time intervals, etc. This package uses only POSIX* format. Main things defined in this package are the classes POSIXcti, POSIXctp, TimeIntervalDataFrame, TimeInstantDataFrame, SubtimeDataFrame, methods to switch from one class to another and the changeSupport method for TimeIntervalDataFrame.
License: GPL
LazyLoad: yes
URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/timetools/
Encoding: UTF-8
Packaged: 2012-02-06 14:41:15 UTC; vladislav
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2012-02-06 21:06:53

More information about timetools at CRAN

The anatomy of a Twitter conversation, visualized with R

2012-02-06T18:10:59+00:00

If you're a Twitter user like me, you're probably familiar with the way that conversations can easily by tracked by following the #hashtag that participants include in the tweets to label the topic. But what causes some topics to take off, and others to die on the vine? Does the use of retweets (copying another users tweet to your own followers) have an impact?

To look at this question, R user Tony Hirst dissected the anatomy of one Twitter conversation under the hashtag #ukgc12 using the twitteR package and his own R script. The visualization he created (using the ggplot2 package) is a a kind of anatomical dissection of a Twitter conversation:

Read the chart from the bottom up: each dot is a tweet. Each new participant in the conversation is listed on the vertical axis - those Twitter users with several dots in their row were active participants. You can see the conversation is quite "bursty": active periods of replies and retweets punctuated by short pauses. The red dots are "traditional retweets" (beginning with the characters "RT") -- as you can see, the new bursts of conversation are generally preceded by a new tweet (T), not a retweet (RT). And as you'd expect with any conversation, the rate of chatter (the slope of the line) reduces over time.

As far as I can tell, this analysis doesn't include new-style retweets (which rebroadcast to followers but do not create a new, distinct tweet), but it would be interesting to see how they fit into this picture as well.

OUseful.Info: Visualising Activity Around a Twitter Hashtag or Search Term Using R

New package likelihood with initial version 1.5

2012-02-06T17:16:00+00:00

Package: likelihood
Version: 1.5
Title: Methods for maximum likelihood estimation
Date: 2012-01-27
Author: Lora Murphy
Maintainer: Lora Murphy
Description: Tools for maximum likelihood estimation of parameters of scientific models.
Depends: R (>= 2.1.1), nlme
License: GPL-2
Packaged: 2012-02-06 14:53:24 UTC; lora
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2012-02-06 16:53:55

More information about likelihood at CRAN

New package multivator with initial version 1.1-0

2012-02-06T11:16:00+00:00

Package: multivator
Type: Package
Title: A multivariate emulator
Version: 1.1-0
Depends: R(>= 2.10.0), emulator (>= 1.2-8), methods, utils, abind
Date: 2011-07-28
Author: Robin K. S. Hankin
Maintainer:
Description: A multivariate generalization of the emulator package
License: GPL-2
LazyLoad: yes
LazyData: yes
Packaged: 2012-02-06 03:21:34 UTC; rksh
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2012-02-06 09:36:51

More information about multivator at CRAN

New package cpm with initial version 1.0

2012-02-06T11:16:00+00:00

Package: cpm
Title: Sequential Parametric and Nonparametric Change Detection
Version: 1.0
Date: 2012-01-01
Depends: methods
Author: Gordon J. Ross, incorporating code from the GNU Scientific Library
Maintainer: Gordon J. Ross
Description: Sequential change detection and Phase II process control for univariate data streams, using the change point model framework. Functions are provided to allow the parametric monitoring of sequences of Gaussian and Bernoulli random variables, along with more general nonparametric functions for monitoring sequences which have an unspecified or unknown distribution.
License: GPL-3
Packaged: 2012-02-06 10:16:23 UTC; Administrator
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2012-02-06 10:45:57

More information about cpm at CRAN

The R Package bild for the Analysis of Binary Longitudinal Data

2012-02-06T08:00:00+00:00

Vol. 46, Issue 9, Feb 2012

Abstract:

We present the R package bild for the parametric and graphical analysis of binary longitudinal data. The package performs logistic regression for binary longitudinal data, allowing for serial dependence among observations from a given individual and a random intercept term. Estimation is via maximization of the exact likelihood of a suitably defined model. Missing values and unbalanced data are allowed, with some restrictions. The code of bild is written partly in R language, partly in Fortran 77, interfaced through R. The package is built following the S4 formulation of R methods.

Introducing multivator: A Multivariate Emulator

2012-02-06T08:00:00+00:00

Vol. 46, Issue 8, Feb 2012

Abstract:

A multivariate generalization of the emulator technique described by Hankin (2005) is presented in which random multivariate functions may be assessed. In the standard univariate case (Oakley 1999), a Gaussian process, a finite number of observations is made; here, observations of different types are considered. The technique has the property that marginal analysis (that is, considering only a single observation type) reduces exactly to the univariate theory. The associated software is used to analyze datasets from the field of climate change.

TNG on BLU

2012-02-06T04:46:51+00:00

Perusing the shelves at Wal-Mart this weekend I picked up Star Trek: The Next Generation – The Next Level, which is a very long-winded title for something relatively simple: a three-episode preview of the upcoming Blu-Ray transfers of the series. Unlike TOS, where they took the original film and replaced the model work and primitive effects shots with modern CG elements, here CBS has mostly recomposited the original film and model-based effects shots, so basically what you’re getting is a much clearer picture of what was originally shot—instead of copies from the broadcast master tapes at 480i60, you’re getting scanned film at 1080p24. Everything basically looks great.

The episode selection is pretty decent, as well, although two of the choices are relatively light on effects shots. First you get the pilot, “Encounter at Farpoint,” squished together as a single episode (as originally aired? I’ve never seen it except as a two-parter), in all its glory—including the near-legendary cringe-worthy overacting from Denise Crosby, Marina Sirtis, and Michael Dorn. Granted, all three (Sirtis in particular) are saddled with some pretty terrible dialogue to begin with; indeed, almost surprisingly, Wil Wheaton and Jonathan Frakes are the only actors whose dialogue generally works throughout, while Patrick Stewart at least manages to ham up some of his more absurd dialogue to the point it works (for example, his expository announcements to nobody-in-particular on the bridge before they get to Farpoint), and Brent Spiner’s Data at least is decently-written when he isn’t on the bridge. Nobody’s going to accuse this of being great television by the standards of 2012, although with some judicious editing you might be able to come up with a 90-minute episode that made sense. Obviously this is the most FX-heavy of the episodes included, and it looks great, even if it’s the worst Trek pilot ever (including both TOS pilots—for my money, DS9’s “Emissary” is historically the best).

You also get season 3’s “Sins of the Father,” which benefits more from the transfer quality than you might think; the second half of the episode, set on the Klingon home world, where every set was dimly-lit, always looked like a dark mess on TV, but here everything is clear. It’s also a far better-written episode, which makes it a rather less painful experience for repeat viewing, with some nice humor (much of it stemming from Kurn’s fish-out-of-water status on the Enterprise) despite the dark subject matter. Even if Picard does still send the Enterprise to the “first city of the Klingon Imperial Empire,” which is just a little bit redundant.

Finally you get season 5’s “The Inner Light,” a legendary TNG episode. I haven’t gotten around to watching it yet, but as one of the great real science fiction stories (as opposed to space opera stories) in Trek it’s one I’m really looking forward to, even though again it is not a particularly effects-heavy outing.

At retail I think it might be a little over-priced for what you get—but then again compared to a new-release Blu-ray movie $15ish isn’t bad for essentially three hours of entertainment, albeit three hours you’ve probably seen before. I can’t imagine myself splurging for the whole collection but hopefully the transfers also find their way to Netflix and other online streaming sites in due course.

New package SCperf with initial version 1.0

2012-02-05T20:16:00+00:00

Package: SCperf
Type: Package
Title: Supply Chain Perform
Version: 1.0
Date: 2012-01-22
Author: Marlene Silva Marchena
Maintainer: Marlene Silva Marchena
Description: The package implements different inventory models, the bullwhip effect and other supply chain performance variables.
License: GPL (>= 2)
Packaged: 2012-02-05 17:32:02 UTC; root
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2012-02-05 19:34:14

More information about SCperf at CRAN

New package rapport with initial version 0.2

2012-02-04T08:16:00+00:00

Package: rapport
Maintainer: Gergely DarĂłczi
Title: rapport - a report templating system
Type: Package
Encoding: UTF-8
Description: A package that facilitates creation of reproducible statistical report templates. Once created, rapport templates can be exported to various external formats (HTML, LaTeX, PDF, ODT, etc.) with pandoc converter as a backend.
Author: Aleksandar BlagotiÄ‡ and Gergely DarĂłczi
Version: 0.2
Date: 2012-02-02
URL: http://rapport-package.info/
BugReports: https://github.com/aL3xa/rapport/issues
License: AGPL-3
LazyData: yes
LazyLoad: yes
Depends: ascii, evaluate, lattice, latticeExtra, moments, RColorBrewer, reshape, RJSONIO
Collate: 'crypt.R' 'eval.R' 'export.R' 'graphs.R' 'init.R' 'ius2008.R' 'print.methods.R' 'rapport.R' 'rp_helpers.R' 'stat_helpers.R' 'stats_univar.R' 'tables.R' 'template.R' 'utils.R' 'tpl-check.R'
Packaged: 2012-02-03 19:36:16 UTC; omleny
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2012-02-04 08:39:46

More information about rapport at CRAN

New package OptionsPdf with initial version 0.9

2012-02-04T08:16:00+00:00

Package: OptionsPdf
Type: Package
Title: This package estimates a mix of lognormal distributions from interest-rate option data.
Version: 0.9
Date: 2012-02-02
Author: Paolo Zagaglia
Maintainer: Paolo Zagaglia
Depends: R (>= 2.14.1), matlab
Description: This package provides the estimation of implied probability density functions (pdf) from options data. The pdf's take the form of a mix of lognormal distributions. The methods used in the routines are discussed in the paper: Soderlind, P., and L. E. O. Svensson (1997), "New Techniques to Extract Market Expectations from Financial Instruments", Journal of Monetary Economics, 40, 383-429. The user should kindly notice that this package is the R port of the Matlab routines originally distributed by P. Soderlind, and freely available from: http://home.datacomm.ch/paulsoderlind/
License: GPL-3
Packaged: 2012-02-04 02:55:48 UTC; Paolo Zagaglia
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2012-02-04 08:39:43

More information about OptionsPdf at CRAN

banniere

2012-02-04T07:16:52+00:00

If you live in Paris and are interested in R, there will be two meetings for you this week.

First a Semin-R session, organized at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle on Tuesday 7 Feb (too bad, the Museum is closed on Tuesdays). Presentations will be about colors, phylogenies and maps, while I will speak about (my beloved) RStudio. The slides of previous sessions can be found here (most of them are in French).

The following day, 8 Feb, a group of R users from INSEE will have its first meeting (13-14h, INSEE, room R12), about SQLite data in R, maps, and in R.

I guess anyone can join!

UPDATE: Here is a colorful map to access INSEE . Come with an ID, and say you are visiting the meeting organizer Matthieu Cornec. Room R12 is on the ground floor (left).

Because it's Friday: Star Wars, remixed

2012-02-04T00:10:44+00:00

This is just amazing: a shot-for-shot recreation of the original Star Wars movie (well actually, the 1997 Special Edition), made by fans.

Star Wars Uncut was the brainchild of Casey Pugh, who created a crowdsourcing website where budding sci-fi moviemakers could select a 15-second clip to portray, and the best ones selected by the fans. (This LA Times article explains the background of the project.) The film was actually released in 2010 (and won a Creative Arts Emmy for Interative Fiction), but I'd never heard of it until this week, when it was released on YouTube. I've been watching it in 20-minute chunks after work, and it's amazing. Once you get over the fact that the actors, set and style changes every couple of shots, it's a great way to re-live the Star Wars experience while seeing some truly amazing creativity. The recreations range from fully-realized animations and professionally-produced performances, to little kids acting out the roles in their bedrooms with blankets for costumes. Kudos to the usually IP-protective Lucasfilm folks for allowing this project to happen and then be so freely available on the web -- this is truly what remixing is all about. (And by the way, if you haven't seen the Everything is a Remix series on Vimeo -- and you should -- this is exactly the kind of example of creativity that is so often stymied by restrictive IP rules.)

Star Wars Uncut: Episode IV: A New Hope

Rstudio updates to v0.95

2012-02-03T20:58:39+00:00

RStudio, an open-source IDE for R, recently released an update to the beta, v0.95. Now included: support for multiple projects, integration with Git and subversion, and improved code navigation.

If you'd like to see RStudio in action, creator JJ Allaire will be presenting RStudio at some upcoming R user group events in Houston (Feb 7) and LA (Feb 9) if you'd like to see RStudio in action.

RStudio blog: RStudio v0.95 Released

Accelerating analytics at MSU with Revolution R Enterprise

2012-02-03T19:55:12+00:00

Erik Sigur, Information Technologist for the Department of Statistics and Probability at Michigan State University, writes at ReadWriteWeb about using Revolution R Enterprise to provide high-performance computation in R to the researchers in his department:

Our search for a more effective version of R ultimately brought us to a product called Revolution R Enterprise by Revolution Analytics, which provides commercial support and software for open source R. It takes advantage of multiple processor cores by using optimized assembly code and efficient multi-threaded algorithms that use all of the processor cores simultaneously.

The department at MSU provides high-performance computing facilities via their Statistical Computing Cluster: a network of high-performance PCs running under the Microsoft HPC Server environment. Revolution R Enterprise 5 provides features to distribute R jobs amongst the nodes of a cluster, and to use the power of distributed computing to reduce the time required to process big-data statistical analyses. Says Erik:

Once the department could schedule R jobs in an HPC environment, the demand began to drastically increase. The HPC cluster is now scheduling more than four times the amount of jobs that were scheduled in previous semesters, from 200 jobs over a year ago to over 800 jobs this past semester. Jobs that were taking over three months to complete on open source R were completed in less than a few days with Revolution R. Computational jobs are now run multiple times with significantly higher levels of accuracy than ever before.

Learn more about Erik's experiences with Revolution R Enterprise at the link below. You can also read the case study on the Revolution Analytics website, or learn more about the HPC features of Revolution R Enterprise in our archived webinar.

ReadWriteEnterprise: [Case Study] Lessons in High Performance Computing with Open Source

Forbes: Top 20 influencers in Big Data

2012-02-03T19:17:40+00:00

Haydn Shaughnessy at The Forbes blog provides a list of the "Top 20 Influencers in Big Data", and I'm humbled to report that yours truly is listed there at #2. It's an instantaneous ranking based on the social-media tracking tool Traakr, but it's still great to be listed alongside writers for SiliconAngle, GigaOM, and KDNuggets (and even Mashable!). I firmly believe that the R language has a strong future in the world of Big Data, so I'm glad to hear the message is getting through.

Forbes: Who Are The Top 20 Influencers in Big Data?

On false equivalencies

2012-02-03T17:43:35+00:00

A public service announcement, in absolutely no way inspired by the current debate over Komen’s funding of Planned Parenthood, follows:

If you are comparing your contemporary domestic political opponents (say, pro-choicers or pro-lifers) to the Viet Cong, the Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, or the Taliban, it seems to me that one of two conclusions obtain:

You should be willing to support the same level of political violence against the contemporary domestic opponents as you would against the other actors. For example, a pro-lifer who believes that Planned Parenthood is morally equivalent to the Nazis who would support assassinating concentration camp guards should also be willing to support assassinating doctors who perform abortions; similarly, a pro-choicer who thinks someone who supports sonogram bills is the moral equivalent of the Taliban, who supports the targeted killing of Taliban fighters in AfPak, should also support killing politicians who support sonogram bills.
Or, if you are unwilling to take your positions to their logical conclusion, you should tone down your rhetoric so that the apparent equivalency you have expressed is no longer seen by external observers as an equivalency. Or, if you are unable to do so, just be quiet.

This might, for example, also apply to anyone who argues that supporters of Voter ID laws are channeling the spirit of Lester Maddox, or anyone who says that people who support socializing the costs of medicine are latter day Che Guevaras.

New R User Groups in Austin, Adelaide

2012-02-03T16:50:00+00:00

It's awesome to see so many local R user groups kicking off in 2011! Yet another is the Austin R User Group in Austin, Texas. They've already held their first informal get-together, and the first formal meeting on February 23 will be devoted to data management techniques in R. Props to Sandy Donlon for organizing the group!

And I'm so pleased to report that a local R user group has started in my old hometown of Adelaide, South Australia. Organized by Jonathan Tuke at the University of Adelaide (my alma mater), the Adelaide R-users Group has already had several successful meetups and their next meeting is on February 28. Australia now has an R user group in every major city except Perth, which I'd venture makes it the country with the most R groups on a per-capita basis. (And yet, ironically, still no groups in New Zealand -- c'mon Kiwis!)

MeetUp: Austin R User Group

New package catdata with initial version 1.0

2012-02-03T11:16:00+00:00

Package: catdata
Type: Package
Title: Categorical Data
Version: 1.0
Date: 2010-04-13
Encoding: UTF-8
Depends: R (>= 2.10), MASS
Suggests: rms, qvcalc, glmmML, nnet, pscl, VGAM, gee, mlogit, Ecdat, geepack, mgcv, rpart, party, ordinal, lme4, vcdExtra, glmnet, mboost, class, e1071, flexmix, lqa, lpSolve, GAMBoost, penalized
Author: Gerhard Tutz, Marcus Gross, Sarah Maierhofer, Gunther Schauberger
Maintainer: Gunther Schauberger , Gerhard Tutz
Description: This R-package contains examples from the book "Regression for Categorical Data", Tutz 2011, Cambridge University Press. The names of the examples refer to the chapter and the data set that is used.
License: GPL-2
LazyLoad: yes
Packaged: 2012-02-03 10:29:32 UTC; schaubergerg
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2012-02-03 11:35:05

More information about catdata at CRAN

pierrejacob

2012-02-03T10:32:27+00:00

Hey there,

Next Wednesday (Feb 8th) I’ll give a talk on SMC² at the National University of Singapore (3pm, S16-06-118, DSAP Seminar Room if you’re interested).

By the way, the SMC² paper has been hugely revised, along with the python package and the supplement. Among the main changes, we made a thorough comparison with Liu & West SMC method (which is based on extending the hidden state to include the parameter), and we added a fair bit of justification of the computational cost of the method, which we believe is very reasonable considering the difficulty of the problem (ie estimation in HMM) and the cost of concurrent algorithms. We also considered the validity of SMC² on a sequence of annealed posterior densities, following a reviewer’s interesting comment. It’s good to be finished with it (for now at least), and to move to new projects!

I’ll spend next week in Singapore working with Ajay Jasra, and then I’ll head off to the Monte Carlo and Quasi Monte Carlo conference in Sydney, where I’ll stay for ~2 weeks. I’ll be worth another blog post of course.

Cheers!

Introducing Dave Rich, Revolution Analytics' new CEO

2012-02-02T19:35:07+00:00

It's with great pleasure that we welcome Dave Rich as Revolution Analytics' new CEO today. Dave comes to us from Accenture Analytics, where he was Global Managing Director. Dave's extensive experience integrating analytics platforms with day-to-day operations at Fortune 500 enterprises will be invaluable as we apply analytics based on Revolution R Enterprise to mission-critical business processes.

Former CEO Norman Nie, who over the past two years has been instrumental in setting the product vision for Revolution's product suite, is now our Senior Advisor for Products and Strategy to the CEO. It's great to have Norman's expertise in statistics and big data analytics to continue to guide our product strategy for bringing R to the enterprise.

Thanks, Norman, for your leadership, and welcome, Dave, to the Revolution team!

Revolution Analytics News Room: Revolution Analytics names David Rich new CEO

R Chart featured in Facebook IPO

2012-02-02T18:47:13+00:00

Page 7 of Facebook's 213-page S-1 filing for their record-breaking IPO includes the following chart, under the headline: "Our Mission: To make the world more open and connected".

This chart was created using the R language and Hadoop by Facebook intern Paul Butler. (Thanks to the blog IOER Tools for first noticing the inclusion of the chart.)

And speaking of R charts appearing in widely-read places, the latest issue of the prestigious science journal Nature includes several charts created in R in an article on the evolution of the nematode C. elegans. Hadley Wickham, author of the ggplot2 package, noted that his package was used to create one of the charts.

New package DiscreteLaplace with initial version 1.0

2012-02-02T17:16:00+00:00

Package: DiscreteLaplace
Type: Package
Title: Discrete Laplace distribution
Version: 1.0
Date: 2012-01-29
Author: Alessandro Barbiero , Riccardo Inchingolo
Maintainer: Alessandro Barbiero
Description: Density, distribution function, quantile function, random generation and estimation for the skew discrete Laplace distribution
License: GPL
LazyLoad: yes
Packaged: 2012-01-29 21:34:31 UTC; Alessandro
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2012-02-02 16:12:25

More information about DiscreteLaplace at CRAN

New package DandEFA with initial version 1.0

2012-02-02T08:16:00+00:00

Package: DandEFA
Type: Package
Title: Dandelion Plot for R-mode Exploratory Factor Analysis
Version: 1.0
Date: 2012-01-26
Author: Artur Manukyan, Ahmet Sedef, Erhan Cene, Ibrahim Demir (Advisor)
Depends: gplots, sfsmisc
Maintainer: Artur Manukyan
Description: This package contains the function used to create Dandelion Plot. Dandelion Plot is a visualization method for R-mode Exploratory Factor Analysis
License: GPL-2
Packaged: 2012-02-02 01:41:36 UTC; Artur
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2012-02-02 07:40:57

More information about DandEFA at CRAN

Analytic applications are built by data scientists

2012-02-02T01:03:22+00:00

Ventana Research analyst David Menninger was on the judging panel for the Applications of R in Business contest. In a post on the Ventana research blog, he offers his perspectives on the contest, noting that

R, as a statistical package, includes many algorithms for predictive analytics, including regression, clustering, classification, text mining and other techniques. The contest submissions supported a variety of business cases, including, among others, predicting order amounts to optimize manufacturing processes, predicting marketing campaign effectiveness to optimize marketing spending, predicting liquid steel temperatures to optimize steel plant processes and performing sentiment analysis of Twitter data.

(Incidentally, David also has a great riff on the terminology of "predictive analytics" and "big data" out today.) He also notes that these applications are compelling precisely because of the close relationship between the contest entrants and the business problems they demonstrated how to solve:

The entries also demonstrated a best practice: close alignment between the analyst and the underlying business objectives. Predictive analytics is not magic. It requires an understanding of business processes and an understanding of statistical techniques. The judging criteria reflected this requirement as well. One of the three categories we were asked to score was applicability of the submission to business. I think it’s clear how the analyses in the winning entries could provide significant business value.

As David notes, however, the counterpoint to this is that the analyst must combine *both* the . "How many people in your organization could perform those types of analyses", he rightly asks. A combination of statistical tools along with domain expertise (plus the technical skills to implement the solution) is the hallmark of a good data scientist, which exactly why many organizations are looking to build effective data science teams.

By the way, while the concept of "data scientist" is relatively new, this idea of combining statistical analysts with domain expertise is not. Bill Cleveland (yes, that Bill Cleveland) made similar suggestions in a prescient paper back in 2001: "Data Science: An Action Plan for Expanding the Technical Areas of the Field of Statistics". (ISI Review, 69)

David Menninger: Revolution Analytics Hosts Contest on Business Predicting the Future

You had me until the last paragraph

2012-02-01T21:33:08+00:00

This NYT article on Pomona College dismissing 15 workers who were unable to present evidence of their legal presence and right to work had me mildly sympathetic to the various workers’ plight, until the second-to-last paragraph rolled around and I had a “WTF?” moment:

Still, it does little to reassure Carmen, 30, who asked that her last name not be used for fear of alerting immigration officials. Carmen had worked at the college for 11 years, using the money she earned to put herself through a public college. But she never looked for another job, fearing that she would not be able to produce the proper documents. For years she made about $8 an hour, but in recent years raises had increased her wages to nearly $17 an hour. She and her husband bought a modest home in nearby Pomona this fall and moved in just two weeks before she was fired.

“I really don’t know what I am going to do,” she said, adding that her options were to look for work that paid in cash or move back to Mexico with her 2-year-old son while her husband, an American citizen, stayed here. “I’m still in shock. This is the only thing I’ve really ever known.”

So, to review, Carmen is legally married to a U.S. citizen, and presumably has been for a while. Thus she is eligible to legally emigrate to, and then legally work in, the United States, and presumably has been for a while. According to the government, she may not even have to leave the country to do so.

Again I accept, and even sympathize with, the argument that many people come illegally (or, almost as commonly, overstay their legal immigration visas) in part because they are ineligible to “stand in line” for legal status because they lack citizen immediate relatives, or would have to wait for years under the quota limits for relatives, as Greg Weeks often points out. But in the cases of people who are eligible to immediately normalize their status and comply with the law, as it appears this particular individual is, and apparently just can’t be bothered to do so, my sympathy meter is pretty much pegged on empty.

New package Interpol.T with initial version 1.0

2012-02-01T11:16:00+00:00

Package: Interpol.T
Type: Package
Title: Hourly interpolation of multiple temperature daily series
Version: 1.0
Date: 2012-01-31
Author: Emanuele Eccel & Emanuele Cordano
Maintainer: Emanuele Eccel
Description: Hourly interpolation of daily minimum and maximum temperature series. Carries out interpolation on multiple series ad once. Requires some hourly series for calibration (alternatively can use default calibration table).
Depends: R (>= 2.10), date, chron
License: GPL (>= 2)
URL: http://cri.fmach.eu/Research/Sustainable-Agro-Ecosystems-and-Bioresources/Dynamics-in-the-agro-ecosystems,http://www.agrometeorologia.it/documenti/Rivista2010_2/AIAM%202-2010_pag41.pdf,http://www.agrometeorologia.it/documenti/Rivista2010_2/AIAM%202-2010_pag45.pdf
Collate: 'F_bias.R' 'F_daily_mean.R' 'F_date_time.R' 'F_Mo.Th.Ra.R' 'F_par_calibration.R' 'F_plot_meas_sim.R' 'F_shape_calibration.R' 'F_Th_interp.R' 'F_Th_int_series.R' 'Interpol.T-package.R'
Packaged: 2012-02-01 10:53:15 UTC; ecor
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2012-02-01 11:13:42

More information about Interpol.T at CRAN

New package RCALI with initial version 0.2-2

2012-02-01T08:16:00+00:00

Package: RCALI
Title: Calculation of the Integrated Flow of Particles between Polygons
Version: 0.2-2
Date: 2012-01-31
Encoding: latin1
Author: Annie Bouvier, KiĂŞn KiĂŞu, Kasia Adamczyk, and HervĂŠ Monod
Maintainer: Annie Bouvier
Depends: splancs
Description: Calculate the flow of particles between polygons by two integration methods: integration by a cubature method and integration on a grid of points.
License: GPL (>= 3)
URL: http://www.inra.fr/miaj/public/logiciels/RCALI/
Packaged: 2012-02-01 08:15:48 UTC; abouvier
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2012-02-01 09:04:23

More information about RCALI at CRAN

New package FactoClass with initial version 1.0.8

2012-02-01T08:16:00+00:00

Package: FactoClass
Version: 1.0.8
Date: 2012-01-25
Title: Combination of Factorial Methods and Cluster Analysis
Author: Campo Elias Pardo and Pedro Cesar del Campo , with the contributions from Camilo Jose Torres , Ivan Diaz , Mauricio Sadinle .
Maintainer: Campo Elias Pardo
Depends: R (>= 2.7.0), ade4, xtable
Description: Multivariate exploration of a data table with factorial analysis and cluster methods.
License: GPL (>= 2)
Encoding: latin1
Packaged: 2012-01-31 16:19:52 UTC; root
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2012-02-01 08:13:22

More information about FactoClass at CRAN

New package ExomeDepth with initial version 0.6.3

2012-02-01T08:16:00+00:00

Package: ExomeDepth
Type: Package
Title: Calls CNV from exome sequence data
Version: 0.6.3
Date: 2011-11-20
Depends: R (>= 2.13.0), methods, aod, VGAM (>= 0.8.4), GenomicRanges, Rsamtools
Imports: methods, aod, VGAM, GenomicRanges, Rsamtools
Author: Vincent Plagnol
Maintainer: Vincent Plagnol
Description: Calls copy number variants (CNVs) from targeted sequence data
License: GPL-3
Packaged: 2012-02-01 00:20:27 UTC; vincentplagnol
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2012-02-01 08:13:21

More information about ExomeDepth at CRAN

New R User Group in Cambridge, UK

2012-01-31T23:53:50+00:00

2012-01-30T23:58:57+00:00

The worldwide R user conference, useR! 2012, will take place this year June 12-15 in Nashville, Tennessee. In addition to the regular program of invited and contributed talks, a highlight of every useR! is the pre-conference tutorials: hand-on, half-day in-depth expert-led sessions with a focused on a specific area of methodology with R. This year's roster of tutorials has been announced, with topics such as reproducible research, parallel programming, medical image analysis, Hadoop, predictive modeling, and many more.

And as an extra-special bonus, Bill Venables (of Introduction to R fame) will present a one-day course on June 11. This session will be a "gentle survey of modern data analysis, graphics, and statistical modeling in the style of Modern Applied Statistics with S, Venables' classic textbook with co-author Brian D. Ripley, including developments both in R and statistics since the latest edition." Bill is one of the greatest tutors on statistics and R (he taught me most everything I know), so this is definitely not to be missed.

Tutorials often sell out, and early-bird registration for the conference is now open, so be sure to register early to secure your place.

useR! 2012: Tutorials

New package fwsim with initial version 0.1-2

2012-01-30T17:16:00+00:00

Package: fwsim
Version: 0.1-2
Date: 2012-01-30
Title: Fisher-Wright Population Simulation
Author: Mikkel Meyer Andersen
Maintainer: Mikkel Meyer Andersen
Depends: R (>= 1.8.0)
Description: Simulates Fisher-Wright populations with growth.
License: BSD
URL: http://www.r-project.org
Packaged: 2012-01-30 15:41:01 UTC; mikl
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2012-01-30 17:31:26

More information about fwsim at CRAN

2012-01-29T08:16:00+00:00

Package: rSFA
Maintainer: Martin Zaefferer
License: GPL (>= 2)
Title: Slow Feature Analysis in R
Type: Package
Author: Wolfgang Konen , Martin Zaefferer, Patrick Koch; Bug hunting and testing by Ayodele Fasika, Ashwin Kumar, Prawyn Jebakumar
Description: Slow Feature Analysis in R, ported to R based on the matlab versions SFA toolkit 1.0 by Pietro Berkes and SFA toolkit 2.8 by Wolfgang Konen for matlab.
Version: 1.00
URL: http://gociop.de/research-projects/sfa/
Date: 2012-Jan-28
Depends: R (>= 2.0.0), MASS
Collate: 'eta.R' 'gauss.R' 'lcov.R' 'nlRegress.R' 'sfa.R' 'sfaClassify.R' 'sfaCreate.R' 'sfaExecute.R' 'sfaExpand.R' 'sfaFileIO.R' 'sfaGetHf.R' 'sfaHelperFunctions.R' 'sfaParamBoot.R' 'sfaStep.R' 'sfaTimediff.R'
Packaged: 2012-01-28 18:50:02 UTC; Martin
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2012-01-29 07:59:36

More information about rSFA at CRAN

New package marelac with initial version 2.1.2

2012-01-29T08:16:00+00:00

Package: marelac
Version: 2.1.2
Title: Tools for Aquatic Sciences
Author: Karline Soetaert , Thomas Petzoldt , Filip Meysman
Maintainer: Karline Soetaert
Depends: R (>= 2.10), shape, seacarb
Description: Datasets, constants, conversion factors, utilities for MArine, Riverine, Estuarine, LAcustrine and Coastal science. The package contains among others: (1) chemical and physical constants and datasets, e.g. atomic weights, gas constants, the earths bathymetry; (2) conversion factors (e.g. gram to mol to liter, barometric units, temperature, salinity); (3) physical functions, e.g. to estimate concentrations of conservative substances, gas transfer and diffusion coefficients, the Coriolis force and gravity; (4) thermophysical properties of the seawater, as from the UNESCO polynomial or from the more recent derivation based on a Gibbs function.
License: GPL (>= 2)
LazyData: yes
Packaged: 2012-01-28 19:48:23 UTC; user
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2012-01-29 08:13:23

More information about marelac at CRAN

New package ReCiPa with initial version 1.0

2012-01-28T17:17:00+00:00

Package: ReCiPa
Type: Package
Title: Redundancy Control in Pathways databases
Version: 1.0
Date: 2012-01-26
Author: Juan C. Vivar
Maintainer: Juan C. Vivar
Description: Pathways in a database could have many redundancies among them. This package allows the user to set a maximum value for the proportion of these redundancies.
License: GPL-2
LazyLoad: yes
Packaged: 2012-01-27 14:47:33 UTC; jcvivar
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2012-01-28 17:00:22

More information about ReCiPa at CRAN

New package geotools with initial version 0.1

2012-01-28T17:17:00+00:00

Package: geotools
Version: 0.1
Date: 2007-10-03
Suggests:
Title: Geo tools
Author: Antoine Lucas
Maintainer: Antoine Lucas
Description: Tools
License: GPL
Packaged: 2012-01-28 11:49:33 UTC; antoine
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2012-01-28 18:08:23

More information about geotools at CRAN

New package bild with initial version 1.0-3

2012-01-28T17:16:00+00:00

Package: bild
Type: Package
Title: bild: a package for BInary Longitudinal Data
Version: 1.0-3
Date: 2012-1-28
Author: M. Helena Gonçalves, M. Salomé Cabral and Adelchi Azzalini, apart from a set of Fortran-77 subroutines written by R. Piessens and E. de Doncker, belonging to the suite "Quadpack"
Maintainer: M. Helena Gonçalves
Description: bild performs logistic regression for binary longitudinal data, allowing for serial dependence among observations from a given individual and a random intercept term. Estimation is via maximization of the exact likelihood of a suitably defined model. Missing values and unbalanced data are allowed, with some restrictions.
Encoding: latin1
License: GPL (>= 2)
LazyLoad: yes
LazyData: yes
Depends: R (>= 2.10.0), methods, stats, graphics, utils
Packaged: 2012-01-28 13:46:17 UTC; Helena
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2012-01-28 16:55:03

More information about bild at CRAN

New package bit64 with initial version 0.8-2

2012-01-27T23:16:00+00:00

Package: bit64
Type: Package
Title: A S3 class for vectors of 64bit integers
Version: 0.8-2
Date: 2011-12-12
Author: Jens Oehlschl\xE4gel
Maintainer: Jens Oehlschl\xE4gel
Depends: R (>= 2.14.0), bit (>= 1.1-8), methods
Description: Package 'bit64' provides serializable S3 atomic 64bit (signed) integers that can be used in vectors, matrices, arrays and data.frames. Methods are available for coercion from and to logicals, integers, doubles, characters as well as many elementwise and summary functions. With 'integer64' vectors you can store very large integers at the expense of 64 bits, which is by factor 7 better than 'int64' from package 'int64'. Due to the smaller memory footprint, the atomic vector architecture and using only S3 instead of S4 classes, most operations are one to three orders of magnitude faster: Example speedups are 4x for serialization, 250x for adding, 900x for coercion and 2000x for object creation. Also 'integer64' avoids an ongoing (potentially infinite) penalty for garbage collection observed during existence of 'int64' objects (see code in example section). Last but not least, this package has no commercial copyright attached, it is not sponsored by any commercial company or otherwise influenced by commercial interests. Its mix of high-level R code with low-level C-code protects against misuse outside the GPLed R context.
License: GPL-2
LazyLoad: yes
ByteCompile: yes
URL: http://ff.r-forge.r-project.org/
Encoding: latin1
Packaged: 2012-01-26 21:52:56 UTC; rforge
Repository: CRAN
Repository/R-Forge/Project: ff
Repository/R-Forge/Revision: 94
Date/Publication: 2012-01-27 21:44:43

More information about bit64 at CRAN

Because it's Friday: Movie Poster Cliches

2012-01-27T21:58:52+00:00

The principle of "small multiples" — displaying multiple charts of the same type to compare differences — was introduced by Bill Cleveland and popularized by Edward Tufte and the "lattice" package in R. Now, the same principle is applied to movie posters in this display of "Over-Used Movie Poster Clichés":

Apparently, a couple standing back-to-back on the poster is a good indicator of a tough-love relationship between the protagonists, and an all-yellow background indicates an adorable indie-flick. Follow the link below for more examples:

FlavorWire: Visual Representations of 15 Over-Used Movie Poster Clichés

New R User Group in Cleveland

2012-01-27T17:55:44+00:00

Another new local R user group has just started up, this time in Cleveland, OH. The Cleveland R User Group is the brainchild of R user Nicholas Hermez, and their first meeting on February 22 is a get-together to plan future topics, presenters and venues. If you're in the Cleveland area why not drop by and contribute your ideas?

By the way, don't forget that both existing R user groups and new R user groups like the Cleveland group are eligible for sponsor that sponsorships from Revolution Analytics.

MeetUp: Greater Cleveland useR Group

New package PopGenome with initial version 1.0

2012-01-27T14:16:00+00:00

Package: PopGenome
Type: Package
Title: Population genetic analysis
Version: 1.0
Date: 2011-03-17
Author: Bastian Pfeifer
Maintainer: Bastian Pfeifer
Depends: R (>= 1.8.0), methods
Description: PopGenome is an R-library for Population Genetic Analysis
License: GPL-2
LazyLoad: yes
Packaged: Fri Jan 27 11:21:33 2012; bapfe
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2012-01-27 12:51:08

More information about PopGenome at CRAN

Package glpk (with last version 4.8-0.5) was removed from CRAN

2012-01-27T14:16:00+00:00