R News and Updates

[trinker]

Very exciting news. Hadley, Chang and Garrett are joining the RStudio team!!!!!!!!!!!!

http://www.r-bloggers.com/welcome-ha...n-and-garrett/

[trinker]

ggplot2 0.9.2 release!

Here's a copy of the email from Winston: (LINK)

[bugman]

Thanks trinker, thats really useful.

[Lazar]

New release of simsem SEM simulation package today.

https://github.com/simsem/semTools/wiki

[trinker]

New release of devtools:

for more see: https://github.com/hadley/devtools/blob/master/NEWS

[trinker]

New release of psych package:

Dear fellow R users.

I have released version 1.2.8 of the psych package. This replaces 1.2.4 from the April release.

The more important changes

o Modified score.irt so that subjects who miss all items or pass all
items are given an estimate based upon the (product) of the
difficulty of the items they miss (pass) and then adjusted based
upon half the quantile difference from 0 (if they miss all items)
and 100 (if they pass all items).

o Modified sim.omega to allow for specifying a general factor. This
allows for tests of not just the bias in the case of no general
factor, but also the ability to detect a general factor. Also
modified it to include calls to omegaSem.

o Modified iclust so that the fit statistic is based upon the
off-diagonal elements unless otherwise specified. Use diagonal
=TRUE to get fits matching previous analyses.

o Added a function (irt.responses) to plot responses as a function of
the latent score for analyzing multiple choice alternatives.

o Added a function, statsBy, to find summary statistics (means,
sample sizes, standard deviations) by a grouping variable. Similar
to describeBy but somewhat easier to use. Also will report (as an
option) the pooled within group correlations. Calculates the within and between group correlations.



This has the normal number of small bug fixes and feature changes requested by various helpful users.

For a full list of changes try
news(Version > "1.2.4",package="psych")

Suggestions for additions and improvements are always welcome and sometimes implemented.

Bill

[Dason]

New release of devtools:

for more see: https://github.com/hadley/devtools/blob/master/NEWS

Ooo. Some nice additions in that.

[trinker]

New release of lubridate: https://github.com/hadley/lubridate/blob/master/NEWS

[bryangoodrich]

Nice! I love this package. I did notice and see others complain about its speed. Good to know that's improved. On top of that, they've made it even better at conversion and stuff. Definitely a package worth having developed. If you deal with dates and time, it can save you headaches!

[bugman]

package release for indicator species analysis - nice!!

CRAN page and (pdf)

[trinker]

New release of httr: http://www.r-bloggers.com/new-version-of-httr-0-2/

I don't use it but it looks pretty nice for dealing with URL stuff more easily than RCurl.

Hope bryangoodrich gives it a whirl and let's us know how it compares to RCurl

[Lazar]

Australian academics now have access to the nectar super computer . This allows you to have a nice Ubuntu virtual desktop (so easier to use than the national computer infustructure) and will happily run R. I also here that at the moment not many people are using it so most large (but reasonable) allocation requests will get accepted. All this is good news given this http://www.r-bloggers.com/r-at-12000-cores/

[bryangoodrich]

Thanks Tr, I'll have to check that out! I've never even looked at httr, before. Wrappers are usually good, if they're done right! I mean, would you prefer learning grid yourself or use ggplot2? lol

[trinker]

R 2.14.2 released:

As promised, the source distribution for R 2.15.2 is now available for download from the master CRAN repository. (Binary distributions for Windows, MacOS and Linux will be available from the CRAN mirror network in the coming days.) This latest point-update — codenamed "Trick or Treat" — improves the performance of the R engine and adds a few minor but useful features. Detailed changes can be found in the NEWS file, but highlights of the improvements include:

New statistical analysis method: Multistratum MANOVA
Hyman's method of constructing monotonic interpolation splines is now available.
Improved support for Polish language users
Functions in the parallel package (such as parLapply) will make use of a default cluster if one is specified.
Improved performance and reduced memory usage for some commonly-used functions including array, rep, tabulate and hist
Increased memory available for data on 64-bit systems (increased to 32Gb from 16Gb)
Several minor bugfixes
There is likely to be at least one further update to the 2.15.x series: a round-up of any further changes will probable be released as 2.15.3 shortly before R 2.16.0 is released, most likely around March 2013.

http://cran.r-project.org/src/base/NEWS.html

[trinker]

Don't know much about this but it sounds cool: http://www.rstudio.com/shiny/