There are so many people to thank for their help, encouragement, and sympathetic understanding for this novel project in statistical education. Special thanks go to Jon Roberts, who first showed me how a Java™ applet could help us see statistics. Many kind people at the University of Colorado provided technical help, statistical advice, and moral encouragement, including Richard Cook, Charles Judd, Ernie Mross, Peter Polson, David Rea, Taki Maghjee, Mary Ann Shea, Jim Rebman, Michael Lightner, Marty Goldman, Bobby Schnabel, Donnie Lichtenstein, and Bill Oliver. I am indebted to the members of the Boulder Java Users Group who generously teach others about Java just because it's fun. Hundreds of students over the years have granted me the privilege of being their teacher, and they in turn taught me so much about what works in teaching. Former students, especially Mina Johnson, kept asking "Why can't we have more pictures?" and thus motivated this visual approach to statistics.

Seeing Statistics benefited from helpful critiques by a number of statistics educators including Subra Chakaborti, Univeristy of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; David Howell, University of Vermont; John Dutton, North Carolina State University; Tom Gatliffe; Adele Cutler, Utah State University; Ruth Maurer, Walden University; Robert Miller, University of Wisconsin, Madison; and Antonie Stam, University of Georgia. Their detailed comments offered the sympathetic encouragement necessary for this project to continue while at the same time providing the sharp, but friendly, criticism necessary to shape and to refine Seeing Statistics. They of course are not to blame for any errors that remain or for any hard-headed insistence on my part to do it a particular way. Also, by now many instructors and students using Seeing Statistics have suggested improvements and pointed out various technical problems. I'm especially indebted to Sue Ravenscroft, Iowa State University, and Gwen Terwilliger, University of Toledo, for their helpful notes.

Invaluable assistance was provided by several different units of Thomson Publishing. Of special note are Bill McLaughlin of Thomson.com for help on server issues and Tracey Claude, Joe Hoover, and Gary Olinger of the Thomson Technology Consulting Group for help with design, graphics, colors, scripting, layout, and template construction. Anyone who saw my early versions knows those individuals made major improvements to the "look and feel" of Seeing Statistics.

To create Seeing Statistics, I depended heavily on a variety of computer tools. Of special help were Bare Bones Software BBEdit (www.barebones.com) from Bare Bones Software, MathType (www.mathtype.com) from Design Science, Inc., ImageReady (www.adobe.com) from Adobe®, Mathematica (www.wolfram.com) from Wolfram Research, and Code Warrior (www.metrowerks.com) from Metrowerks. Some of the probability distribution and quantile functions are based on models from Numerical Recipes (www.nr.com). The backup software Retrospect Express (www.dantz.com) from Dantz allowed me to sleep better. None of the interactive graphs would have been possible without Sun® Microsystems development and support of the Java programming language (www.javasoft.com).

Someone asked me what an author's most important consideration should be in selecting a publisher. My advice, which I followed when I signed with Duxbury, is to go with the publisher who has the best people. The wonderful people at Duxbury have exceeded all my expectations. Special thanks are due my editor Curt Hinrichs who believed in Seeing Statistics and a new way of publishing long before anyone else and who has been wonderfully supportive throughout. A number of people at Duxbury and its parent, Brooks-Cole, have been creative, flexible, tolerant, and encouraging in developing and marketing this book. I'm especially grateful to Kevin Connors, Carolyn Crockett, Laura Hubrich, Marlene Thom, and Carrie Izant. I'm grateful to Charles Seiter for developing the print component; Charles understands better than most anyone else what I'm trying to accomplish with Seeing Statistics. Bob Caceres helped me fix wording, punctuation, and notation and Brian Lewis greatly reduced the number of broken links and other navigation problems. Brad Wagner of Thomson Learning--Technology Services moved everything to the web server and implemented the registration module.