John Fox is the Senator William McMaster Professor of Social Statistics in the Sociology Department of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Professor Fox earned a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan in 1972. He has delivered numerous lectures and workshops on statistical topics, at such places as the summer program of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, and the Oxford Spring School in Quantitative Methods for Social Research. He has written many articles on statistics, sociology, and social psychology, and is the author of several books on statistics, including most… recently Applied Regression Analysis and Generalized Linear Models, Second Edition (Sage, 2008) and A Mathematical Primer for Social Statistics (Sage, 2009), and (with Sanford Weisberg) An R Companion to Applied Regression, Second Edition (Sage, 2011). Professor Fox is an active contributor to the R Project for Statistical Computing and is a member of the R Foundation. His work on this book was partly supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.