Acknowledgments
The course upon which this book is based was developed and taught by us at Colorado State University from 1994 onwards. Thanks are due to our many students who have been semiwilling guinea pigs over the years. We also thank our colleagues in the Statistics Department for their continued support. The late Richard Tweedie merits particular acknowledgment for his mentoring during the early years of our careers.
We owe a great deal of intellectual debt to Adrian Raftery, who deserves special thanks not only for his teaching and advising, but also for his unwavering support and his seemingly inexhaustible supply of good ideas. In addition, we thank our influential advisors and teachers at the University of Washington Statistics Department, including David Madigan, Werner Stuetzle, and Judy Zeh. Of course, each of our chapters could be expanded into a full-length book, and great scholars have already done so. We owe much to their efforts, upon which we relied when developing our course and our manuscript.
Portions of the first edition were written at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Otago, in Dunedin, New Zealand, whose faculty we thank for graciously hosting us during our sabbatical in 2003. Much of our work on the second edition was undertaken during our sabbatical visit to the Australia Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization in 2009–2010, sponsored by CSIRO Mathematics, Informatics and Statistics, and hosted at the Longpocket Laboratory in Indooroopilly, Australia. We thank our hosts and colleagues there for their support.
Our manuscript has been greatly improved through the constructive reviews of John Bickham, Ben Bird, Kate Cowles, Jan Hannig, Alan Herlihy, David Hunter, Devin Johnson, Michael Newton, Doug Nychka, Steve Sain, David W. Scott, N. Scott Urquhart, Haonan Wang, Darrell Whitley, and eight anonymous referees. We also thank the sharp-eyed readers listed in the errata for their suggestions and corrections. Our editor Steve Quigley and the folks at Wiley were supportive and helpful during the publication process. We thank Nélida Pohl for permission to adapt her photograph in the cover design of the first edition. We thank Melinda Stelzer for permission to use her painting “Champagne Circuit,” 2001, for the cover of the second edition. More about her art can be found at www.facebook.com/geekchicart. We also owe special note of thanks to Zube (a.k.a. John Dzubera), who kept our own computers running despite our best efforts to the contrary.
Funding from National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER grant #SBR-9875508 was a significant source of support for the first author during the preparation of the first edition. He also thanks his colleagues and friends in the North Slope Borough, Alaska, Department of Wildlife xvii Management for their longtime research support. The second author gratefully acknowledges the support of STAR Research Assistance Agreement CR-829095 awarded to Colorado State University by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The views expressed here are solely those of the authors. NSF and EPA do not endorse any products or commercial services mentioned herein.
Finally, we thank our parents for enabling and supporting our educations and for providing us with the “stubbornness gene” necessary for graduate school, the tenure track, or book publication—take your pick! The second edition is dedicated to our kids, Natalie and Neil, for continuing to show us what is important and what is not.
Geof H. Givens
Jennifer A. Hoeting