I've volunteered to take over the R Users Group. Thanks
so much for the efforts that Madelaine Gogol has spent over the past couple of
years keeping this group going.
I've put in a reservation for a room at the Plaza
Library. When I get official confirmation of the room, I'll send out another
email.
If anyone would like to help out with the organizational
aspects of this group, please let me know. The more the work is shared, the
less that anyone has to do. Also, I'd be glad to give you a special title like
"Co-chair of the Kansas City R Users Group" that you could place on
your resume. Don't laugh. Sometimes these things can help you stand apart in a
crowded job market.
I'd like to request some help from some of you to give
short talks
(15-30 minutes) at this and at future R User Group
meetings. I will be contacting some of you privately, but feel free to step
forward if you already have a topic you can talk about.
We'll have at least one speaker at the November meeting.
I will share some of the stuff I learned at a short course that I took in
August at the Joint Statistical Meetings called Practical Software Engineering
for Statisticians that was taught by Murray Stokley of Google. It covered
version control and unit testing, among other things. I'm writing an NIH grant
right now that involves program development in R (and Java), so I need to
demonstrate that our research team will use professional standards in the
development of these programs.
I'm sure that some of you already know more about this
than I do, and if anyone wants to talk (formally or informally) about things
like documentation standards in R, Google's R Style Guide (http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/Rguide.xml),
or related topics, please let me know.
I'd also like to alternate meetings between advanced
topics like this stuff and basic tutorials. There's a lot of interest in people
who want to learn R, and if we advertise this well, we might be able to
increase our attendance. The tutorials could cover things like data import
options in R, simple graphic options like the rgb and layout functions, basic
methods like the lm function, etc.
And no matter how much time any of us has spent with R,
we all could benefit from a review of the basics, right? There are lots of
hidden treasures in R that are really simple, if you just knew where to look
for them.
I've also been very impressed with the organization and
promotion that www.meetup.com has done for
others like the Data Science KC group. I think it would be well worth the
monetary investment to set ourselves up with them.
I won't make any major changes without the consensus of
the group, of course. I'll reserve some time at the beginning of the November
meeting so we can talk about this and general directions for this group. If you
have ideas now, though, that you can share in this email group, please do so.
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