finance

First things first, Dirk Eddelbuettel was recently named ordinary. This seems contradictory, since Dirk is a known HPC expert, an organizer of the R in Finance conference, the creator of Rcpp, and a Debian contributor. These are only a few of the many accolades bestowed upon Dirk without even a hint of puffery. And yet, Dirk Eddelbuettel is considered ordinary. What makes Dirk ordinary? It should be mentioned that to the Vienna-based nonprofit that provides R’s leadership, the R Foundation for Statistical Computing, ‘ordinary’ means something quite different to the lay person. Ordinary members provide guidance and direction for the R Project for Statistical Computing. It’s hard to imagine someone more qualified than Dirk for this task.

Last week the LA R meetup featured 5 speakers each highlighting a few things they had found interesting at the useR! 2014 conference (which I had the pleasure of helping to organize this year in Los Angeles). This meetup proved to be interesting even to those of us who attended the conference (which was about half of our audience), simply because there were so many cool things to hear and enough parallel sessions at the conference that no one could possibly capture all of the action.