I wish to express my appreciation to San Jose State University for affording me the opportunity to work on this book. I would especially like to thank Jane Pham for her assistance in the preparation of this edition. I also greatly appreciate the artistic and technical support of Jean Shiota of the Center for Faculty Development for her work in preparing the illustrations for the text. Thanks, Jean. Finally, I wish to express my thanks to those many students in my classes over the years that have provided me with helpful comments, encouragement, and camaraderie. I am especially grateful to Deborah Danielewicz for her concise and accurate corrections of errors made in the first printing of this book.
While writing this book, I had many constructive discussions with Joe Abramson of the Department of Social Medicine, Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Public Health and Community Medicine. I thank Joe for sharing his insights generously. I also greatly appreciate his careful work in developing WINdows Programs for EPIdemiologists.9 This is really an exceptional set of programs for public health workers. Along these same lines, Paul Gahlinger (University of Utah) deserves credit for conceiving and creating the progenitor of WinPepi, PEPI (Programs for EPIdemiologists).10 I also wish to acknowledge Mads Haahr (University of Dublin, Trinity College, Ireland) for creating his true random number generator at www.random.org, and to John C. Pezzullo (Georgetown University) for his helpful compilation of web pages that perform statistical calculations at www.statpages.org.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge the contributions of my wife, who has been patient, understanding, supportive, and encouraging throughout work on this marathon project. As Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason) used to tell his wife Alice (Audrey Meadows), “[Honey], you’re the greatest!”
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9 Abramson, J. H. (2004). WINPEPI (PEPI-for-Windows): computer programs for epidemiologists. Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations, 1(1), 6.
10 Abramson, J. H., & Gahlinger, P. M. (2001). Computer Programs for Epidemiologic Analyses: PEPI v.4.0. Salt Lake City, UT: Sagebrush Press.