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Looking for innovative ways to use R, the Big Data open source analytics language? Then take a gander at the two top winners of the first of a series of contests that R's corporate caretaker Revolution Analytics has produced. The winners, announced today, receive prizes that range from $1,000 to $10,000 for their submissions. It is an interesting collection and shows off the power of the language itself.

Older Internet consumers are very low users of smartphones and online media, states a new report from McKinsey. To analyze this more, we decided to compare the youngest and oldest groups surveyed: "Digital-media Junkies" (average age 28) and "Traditionalists" (average age 48).

McKinsey states that "Digital-media junkies" are three times more likely to be early adopters of new technologies. This segment makes up 19% of McKinsey's survey, up 7% from 2008. The "Traditionalists" meanwhile make up 24% of the survey respondents, the same as in 2008. Traditionalists overwhelmingly do not own smartphones. They also have not yet adopted online media devices, such as tablets and e-readers.

Every time I look at the visitor statistics for my blog, I'm amazed at the plethora of ways that people consume the content I create. Apart from the people who merely read my posts within a third-party feed reader, I have site visitors that are viewing on mobile devices of varying formats, users coming from different locations and a host of different variables.

Since data scientists Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden (disclosure: Pete writes for ReadWriteWeb) presented information about how iPhones store a log of your location data in an unencrypted file, there's been a mix of reactions. Some are outraged by the privacy implications. Some don't see why it's a big deal, citing either the forensic community's prior knowledge of the logs or the fact that many people share location information on Foursquare. Others have been intrigued at the possibilities of exploring their own personal location information.

Analytics appliance vendor, Netezza (which was acquired by IBM last year posted a series of videos dedicated to Thomas Bayes, a Presbyterian minister and mathematician who lived from 1702 to 1761. Bayes formulated Bayes' Theorem, the foundation for probability theory and predictive analytics. The theorem wasn't published until after Bayes' death, when his friend Richard Price presented it to the Royal Society.

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.

Last week we told you that enterprises are investing more into business intelligence and analytics initiatives. This week there's more good news for professionals in this area: according to KDNuggets, salaries are rising for analytics and data mining professionals.

Based on a poll with approximately 250 respondents, KDNuggets found that salaries are up from its 2010 poll in North America, Western Europe, Asia and Latin America. (There is no mention of Eastern Europe, Africa or Antarctica.)

It's a good time to be a geek, particularly one with a background in statistics, analytics and data mining. But a bad time to be almost any other type of worker.