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Today Revolution Analytics announced a partnership with Kaggle to provide Revolution R Enterprise software for free to participants in Kaggle's data contests. Competitors can download the software here.

Revolution is a company that provides commercial support and tools for the statistical programming language R (see our previous coverage). Kaggle hosts data analysis competitions for organizations such as such as Deloitte, NASA, Wikipedia and The Heritage Health Network.

R, the statistical programming language, continues to grow in popularity. A recent poll at KDnuggets found that 34% of respondents do at least half of their data mining in R. Although it's a domain specific language, it's versatile. Here are three different presentations, each on a different aspect of R.

jStat is a JavaScript library for statistical operations. It aims to provide a JavaScript-based alternative to MATLAB or R. The documention is unfinished, leaving the range of features unclear. But it's has potential.

"It's certainly not a full-fledged stats package in the same sense as R or SPSS or SAS," says R developer Ed Borasky. "But the trend is clearly towards building statistics and visualization software in JavaScript." Borasky's mantra is "Perl is the past, R, Ruby, Python, PHP and Java are the present, and JavaScript is the future."

IBM Netezza and Revolution Analytics announced today at the Predictive Analytics World event that the two companies are working together to integrate the statistical programming language R into Netezza's Netezza TwinFin data warehouse appliance. The companies want to make it possible use R to process data on the data warehouse  appliance without moving to another system. This should enable much faster data processing.

Although no release data has been set, representatives from the companies say work on the project has begun in earnest. Select customers will beta test the integration in the coming months.

Cloudnumbers.com, a cloud-based high-performance computing platform for complex computing, is now open for beta. Cloudnumbers.com will eventually support math and statistics environments like R and NumPy, specialized scientific software like AutoDock, and video rendering applications like Blender. For now it's specifically looking for users to test its R environment.

RStudio a is free and open source IDE for R programmers. It's available for Linux, OSX and Windows - and you can run it from the Web. It's built with HTML and JavaScript and looks pretty slick. You can find it on Github here.

According to the RStudio blog, the team plans to monetize the product by selling services such as support, training, consulting and hosting.

Revolution Analytics is a company that provides commercial support for the open source statistical programming language R. Its flagship product is Revolution R for Enterprise, a distribution of R that competes with other commercial statistical products such as SAS and SPSS. Revolution CEO Norman H. Nie was the co-inventor of SPSS.

On the one year anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, journalist Peter Aldhous created a data visualization that shows how the Carribean country's relatively low seismic earthquake had as many fatalities as all but one earthquake over a time span of almost 40 years.

The data visualization is striking but also a study in how journalists are increasingly telling stories that leverage datasets that are freely available to the public.

Peter Aldhous, San Francisco Bureau Chief for New Scientist magazine, created the interactive graphics. We asked him to explain how he created the visualizations which compare seismic activity to fatalities caused by earthquakes over the span of four decades.

If The Graduate were remade today, the advice to young Benjamin Braddock might be "just one word... statistics."

The explosion of digital data has generated a need for technology to store, serve, and analyze petabytes of data. But it's also creating a lot of opportunities for people who are trained in the field of statistics. And more and more, that training involves learning R, the open source statistical programming language.