A colleague and friend of mine, Katia Begall, successfully defended her PhD dissertation: Occupational Hazard? The Relationship between Working Conditions and Fertility. It’s is a great study, several chapters of which already were published in high impact journals. From the …
Book
With the Triumph of Numbers, I read and wrote about the power of using numbers, and how the observation of empirical regularities led to the basic knowledge on how to use such numbers. Already in the triumph of numbers, it …
How does one teach statistics? Is it more important to start with mathematical thoroughness, or to help students to gain a conceptual understanding first? Few give a comprehensive introduction to statistics for those without the otherwise indispensable mathematical background. Manfred …
My new job involves working with numbers. A lot. So, I started reading about using numbers, and I very much enjoyed ‘The Triumph of Numbers’ by I.B. Cohen (2005). This book gives an historical account not only of how numbers …
How does one teach statistics? Is it more important to start with mathematical thoroughness, or to help students to gain a conceptual understanding first? There’s something to say about both, depending on the setting you’re in, but fact is that …


Despite the reference to S and S-PLUS in the title of this book, it offers an excellent guide for the nlme-package in R-Project. Reason for this is the close resemblance between R and S. The nlme-package, available in R-Project for estimation of both linear and non-linear multilevel models, is written and maintained by the authors of this book.

For those who have theoretical knowledge on statistics and regression techniques, and who want to learn to use R-Project to analyze some data, John Fox wrote just the book.
The introductory chapter shows the most basic aspects of R-Project. Halfway this chapter the reader finds himself analyzing real data using regression techniques. The following chapters introduce the reader to other aspects of the analytical process: reading data into your statistical program, exploring the data and performing some bivariate tests. Then, three full chapters are devoted to regression techniques. While working on practical examples, the reader is introduced to more fundamental aspects of the R-Project software where needed.

Peter Dalgaard is associate professor at the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and a member of the R-Project Core Development team. Also, he is an active participating and respected member of the R-help mailing-list. Based on these experiences, he set to write an introductory book on statistics and R.
Those of you who have ever attended a ‘Fête Nos’, a typical Brêton festival-type of gathering with music and people dancing, may immediately understand what I’m going to write about. All the others who have attended another gathering of a …


