Editorial

The ‘Editorial’ article from the 2009-2 issue.

This issue of the R Journal comes on the heels of R 2.10.1. R 2.10 sports a variety of changes to

• the documentation system

• factor handling

• debugging and code analysis support

• encodings management

• [``[ semantics

• regular expression processing

• data compression facilities

• package installation and checking

among other features. Most users will want to familiarize themselves with the details of items described in R_HOME/NEWS and in this issue’s “Changes to R” article. Thanks are due to the core members and other contributors who have introduced these enhancements, many of which will increase the ease and scope of use of R in the growing set of domains for which effectiveness requires excellent data analysis.

The R Journal also has some new or impending features of interest. A number of readers have inquired about subscriptions and RSS feeds. We now have a feed, thanks to Heather Turner: http://journal.r-project.org/rss.xml. It is also a pleasure to announce the addition of Jay Kerns as Book Review Editor; the Book Review section will be inaugurated in the next issue. Thanks to efforts of Achim Zeileis, we have added subsections to the “Changes on CRAN” regular feature that describe new CRAN task views and new allocations of packages to CRAN task views. In the PDF image of the Journal, these are all hyperlinked to the view or package resources on CRAN, so that readers can quickly investigate or acquire packages in views of interest. Finally, in this issue we have a nice piece by R core members Duncan Murdoch and Simon Urbanek describing changes to the R help markup language and its processing. This article is the first for a recurring journal section “From the Core” where we plan to highlight new ideas and methods in the words of core members themselves.

It has been a pleasure to assemble this number. We have a special item on the sociology of the R project from our past editor-in-chief, John Fox. Research articles cover topics in random forest interpretation, meta-analysis, complex surveys in health policy research, data mining via GUI, enhanced support for resource discovery, and issues in teaching about convergence of sequences of random variables and large sample inference.

My tenure as Editor-in-Chief of the R Journal comes to a close with this issue. Peter Dalgaard now takes the reins. I am deeply indebted to Peter, John Fox, Heather Turner, Uwe Ligges, and Bill Venables for their editorial assistance, and to Martin Maechler for systems support. John Fox is owed a special thanks for staying in the editorial group for an extra year; we welcome Martyn Plummer of IARC who is joining as Associate Editor.

To close, I’d like to suggest to readers that they spend at least a little while in the “Changes on CRAN” section. There is much to be learned there from the perspective of software interoperability alone, with new packages defining interfaces to MS Word, Apache ant, NVIDIA CUDA, and sendmail, for example. Folks interested in working with AVIRIS hyperspectral images, NIfTI-formatted brain images, or the TikZ system for algebraically specified vector graphics will find connections to R in this section. Owners of multicore hardware will want to get acquainted with new contributions from Revolution Computing, Inc. Lastly, browsing the new contributions inspired me to learn that “quaternary science” denotes the study of the past 2.6 million years on Earth. Go CRAN!

Note

This article is converted from a Legacy LaTeX article using the texor package. The pdf version is the official version. To report a problem with the html, refer to CONTRIBUTE on the R Journal homepage.