The ‘Editorial’ article from the 2012-1 issue.
Earlier this week I was at the “Premières Rencontres R” in Bordeaux, the first francophone meeting of R users (although I confess that I gave my talk in English). This was a very enjoyable experience, and not just because it coincided with the Bordeaux wine festival. The breadth and quality of the talks were both comparable with the International UseR! conferences. It was another demonstration of the extent to which R is used in diverse disciplines.
As R continues to expand into new areas, we see the development of packages designed to address the specific needs of different user communities. This issue of The R Journal contains articles on two such packages. Karl Ropkins and David Carslaw describe how the design of the openair package was influenced by the need to make an accessible set of tools available for people in the air quality community who are not experts in R. Elizabeth Holmes and colleagues introduce the MARSS package for multivariate autoregressive state-space models. Such models are used in many fields, but the MARSS package was motivated by the particular needs of researchers in the natural and environmental sciences,
There are two articles on the use of R outside the desktop computing environment. Sarah Anoke and colleagues describe the use of the Apple Xgrid system to do distributed computing on Mac OS X computers, and Timothy Bergsma and Michael Smith demonstrate the Sumo web application, which includes an embedded R session.
Two articles are of particular interest to developers. Daniel Adler demonstrates a Foreign Function Interface for R to call arbitrary native functions without the need for C wrapper code. There is also an article from our occasional series “From the Core”, designed to highlight ideas and methods in the words of R development core team members. This article by Kurt Hornik, Duncan Murdoch and Achim Zeilies explains the new facilities for handling bibliographic information introduced in R 2.12.0 and R 2.14.0. I strongly encourage package authors to read this article and implement the changes to their packages. Doing so will greatly facilitate the bibliometric analyses and investigations of the social structure of the R community.
Elsewhere in this issue, we have articles describing the season package for displaying and analyzing seasonal data, which is a companion to the book Analysing Seasonal Data by Adrian Barnett and Annette Dobson; the Vdgraph package for drawing variance dispersion graphs; and the maxent package which allows fast multinomial logistic regression with a low memory footprint, and is designed for applications in text classification.
The R Journal continues to be the journal of record for the R project. The usual end matter summarizes recent changes to R itself and on CRAN. It is worth spending some time browsing these sections in order to catch up on changes you may have missed, such as the new CRAN Task View on differential equations. Peter Dalgaard highlighted the importance of this area in his editorial for volume 2, issue 2.
On behalf of the editorial board I hope you enjoy this issue.
openair, MARSS, season, Vdgraph, maxent
Environmetrics, Hydrology, SpatioTemporal, TimeSeries
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For attribution, please cite this work as
Plummer, "Editorial", The R Journal, 2012
BibTeX citation
@article{RJ-2012-1-editorial,
author = {Plummer, Martyn},
title = {Editorial},
journal = {The R Journal},
year = {2012},
note = {https://rjournal.github.io/},
volume = {4},
issue = {1},
issn = {2073-4859},
pages = {3-3}
}