R

Thanks to Reddit.com/r/programming for directing me to this excellent compilation of R programming information by Hadley Wickham.

Most of us in analytics use R just to get stuff done. It has a large number of packages that lets us produce insights at our own pace. What I mean by "at our own pace" is that we typically analyse data either individually or within our team, with the results communicated to our audience independently of the analysis itself.

Creating interactive maps is typically either difficult (e.g. openheatmap) or expensive (e.g. ESRI). However, I came across an interesting R package not to long ago that allows for flexible online visualization of geographic data, googleViz. Below is a simple example using the included R datasets. It displays graduation rates by states, mousing over a state provides its name and given graduation rate. After the map is quick tutorial on how to do it.