Oh my God...this is simply the best book I have ever read. Thank you Dr. Bonevac. You have made me realize I can be more than I am. Thanks for showing me the light!!

I never would have been able to understand this kind of technology if i didn't read the book!

George Box is one of the statistical giants of the 20th Century. He started his career in chemical engineering in England where he learned the importance of experimental design and statistical methods. He came to the US in 1953 and spent time at North Carolina State College and later came back to be part of the statistics group at Princeton. After that he founded the Department fo Statistics at the University of Wisconsin. This history and other important career decisions icluding the founding of Technometrics are detailed in the brief section "My Professional Life" that he wrote for this volume.

Box's contributions to statistics are diverse and large. He developed many practical statistical designs including the central composite design. He is responsible for evolutionary operation and wrote a book on it with Norman Draper. He has also made major contributions to response surface methodology.

With Gwilym Jenkins he systematized the application of the ARIMA models and led the development of software for easy application of these model building techniques. He championed the concept of parsimonious models and insisted that model building should be an iterative and continually evolving technique. He contributed to the area of control through his stochastic time series models and found ways to incorporate it in manufacturing process control.

With David Cox he developed the Box-Cox family of transformations. These simple power transformation can be used to make the data have an approximate normal shape. he gave a prescription for how to estimate or pick the power to use based on the data.

These enormous contributions can be found in the volumes of collected works that Tiao and others have edited. His contributions can also be seen from his books on evolutionary operation, time series analysis, automated process control, empirical model building and response surfaces, and practical experimental designs ("Statistics for Experimenters").

However in the decades of the 80s and 90s from age 60 to 80, instead of retiring, George Box took on the challenge of developing a center for quality and productivity at the University of Wisconsin. This volme, edited by Tiao, Bisgaard, Hill, Pena and Stigler provides a collection of articles by Box. These are mostly articles written in the 1990s covering the subjects of A) continuous process improvement, B) designing experiments to gain quality information, C) sequential investigation and discovery (including response surface methods), D) quality control and E) learning how to identify and reduce variation or be less sensitive to it by constructing robust processes (i.e. processes not sensitive to minor changes in process parameters). The articles are mostly directed toward quality issues and are mostly articles that were published in the 1990s or 2000 with a few from the 80s. Some are important technical contributions but many are also very philosophical.

George Box is one of the great thinkers of the 20th century and his philosophy on statistics and scientific inference is as important as his many technical contributions. There are 46 articles in total 4 on topic A, 12 on B, 10 on C, 11 on D and 9 on E. Each topic area has a brief introduction identifying a unifying theme in the papers in that section.

Box has a terrific sense of humor that often comes out in his lectures and sometimes in his writings. One gets a good appreciation of it by reading the three songs on statistics that are included in Part F of the book. This is only a sample of several that he has written that are parodies of familiar tunes. Of these three my favorite is "There's no theorem like Bayes theorem" to the tune of "There's no business like show business."

There is a nice bibliography in the back of the book that is followed by a biography on Box and a list of his books and articles published between 1982 and 1999. This includes 3 books and 91 articles! Believe it or not he published even more in his earlier years.

Build Your Own Low-cost Timber And Beam House by wooden timber and beam construction expert William Stephens is a practical, step-by-step, "user friendly", do-it-yourself guide to constructing a sturdy shelter for practical use. From selecting the right materials, to basic carpentry and assemblage instructions, Build Your Own Low-Cost Timber And Beam House is an economical, practical, and straightforward, self-help guide to creating one's own shelter. Indeed, William Stephens' own hand-built house only cost him an estimated a capital investment of $22,000. Highly recommended reading for anyone contemplating constructing their own timber or beam based dwelling, the text for Build Your Own Low-Cost Timber And Beam House is enhanced with black/withe photography and line drawn illustrations.

Dr. Ausband's elegant, easy, affable writing style (threaded with humor and just a hint of the bawdy) mirrors that of his subject, and reading this book is very much like listening in on a conversation between two men sharing their thoughts, observations, and tall tales about their adventures in a land they both love, while warming their hands around a steaming mug of coffee before an autumn campfire. The fact that they are separated by three centuries of "progress" is no barrier to their camaraderie, and because the book is so well written, the reader becomes a member of Byrd's expedition team, too, as Ausband does---without having to clean the mud off his or her boots, or cut through the brush in the Dismal Swamp. Almost incidentally, he or she also gets an education in botany, ornithology, and zoology along the imaginary line that separates Virginia from North Carolina, the descriptions of the animals, plants, and people Byrd encountered (and Ausband revisits) as colorful as the Carolina parakeet that once overran the area--and nowhere to be found is the cloying smell of leather elbow patches and tweed the one might expect such a book to exude.

It's a skillful piece of work, written by a master storyteller, and will be of interest to anyone who is a student of Byrd of Westover, a resident of the geographic area, a fisherman or hunter or hiker, or a bibliophile unable to resist the lure of an exceptionally well-wrought book.

This is the absolutely best Cayman Island Dive Guide I have read and seen. It gives great details all of the best dive sites to visit. Has excellent detail on where to exactly go, water depths, plant and aquatic life in certain areas... An absolute must for the Cayman diving enthusiast.

In Civility In An English Village, William Stephens found an English countryside community where the children were well-behaved, school ran smoothly, there was no violence, people felt safe, levels of trust ran high, people watched out for each other, the medical care was better than that in America, doctors were unhurried in their time with patients, old people were routinely looked after by their neighbors and by the ladies of the village, trades people looked after their customers, men and women had a keen civic sense, the villagers cared deeply and actively about community affairs, treating their village responsibilities and concerns with the same dedication as they did their well-tended gardens. Enjoyable, engaging, informative, at times inspiring, Civility In An English Village also records British quirks and weaknesses, while offering applicable solutions to a great many of America's current social woes and problems.

This Book is about a king who lives in a castle. He has a baker called Adrian.The King always eats eggs. Adrian makes the king chicken eggs,goose eggs,duck eggs.Then he shouts More More More! The Next day he read in his Newspaper that a dodos egg was spotted on an island.So he told Adrian to prepare the boat.To get to The island.

This is a highly readable discussion of the 33 and 34 act requirements of the SEC as they apply to accountants. I think it is essential reading for any Controller/ CFO or independent accountant about to perform work for and SEC registrant or private company about to file an s1.

I find it highly readable. The CD alone is worth the price.

This book is excellent for those wanting to know how to create Windows 95 online Help. It describes the different types of topics to create and how to structure the system of topics. Excellent chapter on choosing an online Help tool such as RoboHelp or Doc To Help.