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Stats + Stories: Happy Birthday, R!

Nick Thieme (@FurrierTransform) is a researcher and freelance reporter with writings appearing in Slate Magazine, BuzzFeed News, Significance Magazine, and Undark Magazine.

WYSO is partnering with Stats and Stories, a podcast produced at Miami University.

Open Source technologies have been hailed as democratizing spaces - spaces where users can help shape the development and evolution of technologies. If you've used Mozilla's Firefox to visit Stats and Stories, you've used an open source technology. Or if you've stalked a long lost high school friend on Facebook, you've also used a kind of open source technology. What you may not know, or maybe you do because you listen to Stats and Stories, is that some of this data visualizations you come across as you surf the web using Firefox could have been created with another type of open source tack, this time a statistical programming language known as R. Since it was first launched, millions of users and have adopted R for data analysis and presentation. The R community is marking a pretty big milestone in the life of the programming language.

Rosemary Pennington is joined regular panelists John Bailer, Chair of Miami Statistics Separtment and Richard Campbell, Chair of Media Journalism and Film. Their guest, making his second appearance on Stats and Stories, is Nick Thieme. Thieme is a freelance reporter whose work has appeared in Slate, Buzz Feed and Undark. He's also a researcher at new America's Open Technology Institute investigating fair internet usage and net neutrality. He's here today to talk about an article he's written for Significance magazine about R's twenty fifth birthday. 

Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University's Departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter or iTunes. If you'd like to share your thoughts on our program, send your e-mail to statsandstories@miamioh.edu and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.