A great start to the Connecticut R Users Group

Tuesday night was our first meetup, and it went off exceptionally well. Jay is a great leader for a discussion, and the ten plus people who came to our first meeting really got a treat.

Rather than do a strict presentation Jay just threw up live onto the screen two projects that he was working on. There is no better way to show the power of R of than in exploratory data analysis. In minutes Jay was able to read in a data set from the web, clean up that data and play with it. I do not believe any other language can do this type of work with the speed and ease of R.

This format went so well that we will continue to use this format for the Connecticut R Users Meetup with a little modification. The basic format will be one or two lighting talks by members about what they are working on in R followed by a bring in your problem/code session.  The second part is similar to what Jay has been doing with his Statistics Lab at Yale for years with great success. The idea is someone brings in some code and/or a data set that they are working on and having trouble with. The group than works on that problem collectively to develop approaches and implementations to exact information from that problem.

I am looking forward to our next meeting in May.