In case you missed them, here are some articles from January of particular interest to R users. Anthony Damico created an amusing and useful flowchart for finding resources for learning R, especially for survey analysis. All R users: please be counted for the 2013 Rexer Data Miner Survey (R was the #1 software reported in the last survey). Relatedly, Joe Rickert will give a free webinar on February 14, "Introduction to R for Data Mining". I'll be talking about R in Santa Clara at the O'Reilly Strata Conference. An analysis of American football kicking data with R shows how the probability of making an NFL field goal diminishes with distance. A video replay of Jeffrey Breen's webinar, "Using R with Hadoop". The votamatic.org website, which correctly predicted the outcome of the US presidential election, was created using R by Drew Linzer. An R chart shows the rise of life expectancy in the US against the falling retirement age. Noam Ross shares some useful tips for sharing and collaboration with R. A Forbes article argues that Data Science is a management fad; I say it's just the opposite, and the R language is a key reason. Hadley Wickham's guide to functions in R, with background on function elements, scoping rules and argument assignment. My podcast with DataInformed on the history with R and the changing technology landscape for predictive modeling. JJ Allaire has created a gallery of examples of the Rcpp package in action. The latest version of Mathematica features an R connection. O'Reilly's Ed Dumbill cites R as part of "data computing", one of his four D's of the future of programming. If you haven't yet read "Elements of Statistical Learning" or used the many R packages it mentions, you can download a PDF from the authors. Keynote speakers for R/Finance 2013 have been announced, and the call for papers is open. Duncan Murdoch used his rgl package to create a real-world 3-D sculpture for $22. Sean Taylor on what your choice of statistics software says about you: "[R] is not causing you to be a better scientist, but better scientists will be using it." A preview of R version 3, scheduled for this April. Some non-R stories in the past month included: "Losing My Religion" in a major key sounds hopeful, an engrossing tour of the International Space Station, a useful data visualization based on the Tube map, Nate Silver reveals his software choices on Reddit, dumb ways to die, why you should say "Data is" and not "Data are", and some tips on getting started with Data Science. There are new R user groups in Edmonton, Manila, San Francisco, Auckland, Manchester and Munich. As always, thanks for the comments and please send any suggestions to me at david@revolutionanalytics.com. Don't forget you can follow the blog using an RSS reader like Google Reader, or by following me on Twitter (I'm @revodavid). You can find roundups of previous months here.