24 Days of R: Day 1 by PirateGrunt.
From the post:
Last year, the good people at is.R() spent December publishing an R advent calendar. This meant that for 24 days, every day, there was an interesting post featuring analysis and some excellent visualizations in R. I think it’s an interesting (if very challenging) exercise and I’m going to try to do it myself this year. is.R() has been fairly quiet throughout 2013. I hope that doesn’t mean that their effort in December 2012 ruined them.
First, I’ll be talking about how this task will be a bit easier thanks to RStudio and knitr. Yihui Xie has some fantastic examples of all the cool stuff you can do with knitr. I’m particularly intrigued by how it can be used to blog. I’ll admit that I’m not the biggest fan of the WordPress editor. Moreover, it’s counter to the notion of reproducible research. If I’m writing code anyway, why not just upload it directly from RStudio.
Well, you can! William Morris and Carl Boettiger have already figured this out. I had made one half-hearted attempt a few weeks ago, but got hung up on loading images. I’ve taken a second look at Carl’s post and have adopted something very similar to what he has done. FWIW, you can read about image uploading from the master himself here.
The start of an interesting series on using R that runs for 24 days.
I mention it for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, you may want to hone your R skills over the holiday season.
If 2013 was any indicator, the number of specious claims about big data and data processing are only going to increase in 2014.
Knowing R will help you discriminate between advertising, exaggeration, mis-leading, careless, lies, damned lies and just poor data analysis. With the ability to say why it is false, etc.
The second reason though, is that the next big event on the liturgical calendar is Lent.
What would you do (as opposed to give up) for the forty days of Lent? In a blogging context?