In case you missed them, here are some articles from October of particular interest to R users. Sponsorships for local R user groups from Revolution Analytics are now open to applicants worldwide.During the landfall of Hurricane Sandy in the US, several R-based apps used public weather and social media data to document its impact, like this timeline of power outages and this impact forecast.Technology media site TechCrunch published this list of trendy open-source techs for Big Data, including R.A summary of the new features in R 2.15.2.Steve Yun from insurance company Allstate gave a presentation at the Strata conference, and compared SAS, Hadoop, R and Revolution R for fitting Poisson models with 150 million rows of data.R was mentioned in many talks at the Strata conference, including those by Booz Allen Hamilton, Zillow, and Metamarkets.I gave a new webinar presentation on data science, big data and R (slides and replay available).According to a new Gartner report, companies will spend $232B on "big data" over the next 5 years.A time-series boxplot of DW-NOMINATE scores show how the US Republican Party has drifted to the right since 1975.TIBCO launches a proprietary run-time version of the R language engine, and Teradata's new Big Data appliance integrates R.A report on a speech from Coursera's cofounder (Coursera has a course on R).The stargazer package creates regression tables in LaTeX suitable for inclusion in many journals.A recent Bay Area R user group meeting featured talks on mapping, election prediction, distributed R, conjoint analysis and more (slides available).An analysis of GitHub and StackOverflow data places R in the top tier of popular languages.You can use the new Themes feature in ggplot2 to make your charts look like those in the Economist, Excel or even the web-comic XKCD.The RHadoop project improves the simplicity and performance of integrating R and Hadoop with version 2.0 of the rmr package.Jeffrey Breen shares some slides with useful tips on accessing data from various sources with R.You can now use a 3-D printer to render physical versions of surfaces created with R's persp function.There are new R user groups in Stockholm, Taipei, Thailand, Marburg, Luxembourg, Poznań, New Delhi and Madrid. Some non-R stories in the past month included: a Gangnam-style Halloween light show, dividing the world into seven equal parts, a continuous version of Conway's Life, 43 big-data experts on Twitter, and a time-lapse view of Southern Hemisphere stars.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.