Interactive maps of Crime data in Greater London
In the previous post we looked at ways to perform some introductory point pattern analysis of open data downloaded from Police.uk. As you remember we subset the dataset of crimes in the Greater London area, extracting only the drug related ones. Subsequently, we looked at ways to use those data with the package spatstat and perform basic statistics. In this post I will briefly discuss ways to create interactive plots of the results of the point pattern analysis using the Google Maps API and Leaflet from R.

Big Data Hadoop Alternatives: What They Offer and Who Uses Them
1. Apache Spark
2. Cluster Map Reduce
3. High Performance Computing Cluster
4. Hydra

Great R packages for data import, wrangling & visualization
Some tasks are common to almost all users, though, regardless of subject area: data import, data wrangling and data visualization. The table below show my favorite go-to packages for one of these three tasks (plus a few miscellaneous ones tossed in). The package names in the table are clickable if you want more information. To find out more about a package once you’ve installed it, type help(package = ‘packagename’) in your R console (of course substituting the actual package name ).

R vs Python for Data Science: Pro´s & Con´s
In the battle of ‘best’ data science tools, python and R both have their pros and cons. Selecting one over the other will depend on the use-cases, the cost of learning, and other common tools required.

New Version of RStudio (v0.99) Available Now
We’re pleased to announce that the final version of RStudio v0.99 is available for download now. Highlights of the release include:
• A new data viewer with support for large datasets, filtering, searching, and sorting.
• Complete overhaul of R code completion with many new features and capabilities.
• The source editor now provides code diagnostics (errors, warnings, etc.) as you work.
• User customizable code snippets for automating common editing tasks.
• Tools for Rcpp: completion, diagnostics, code navigation, find usages, and automatic indentation.
• Many additional source editor improvements including multiple cursors, tab re-ordering, and several new themes.
• An enhanced Vim mode with visual block selection, macros, marks, and subset of : commands.
There are also lots of smaller improvements and bug fixes across the product. Check out the v0.99 release notes for details on all of the changes.