congrats, friends!

Congrats to my friends who got academic recognition at JSM last month, among whom Bin Yu for her 2023 COPSS Distinguished Achievement Award and Lectureship, Veronika Rockova for her Emerging Leader Award, Nancy Reid for her David R. Cox Foundations of Statistics Award, Malay Ghosh for his Deming Lecture, Andrew Gelman for his Monroe G. Sirken Award, Noel Cressie for his Outstanding Statistical Application Award, and Peter Bühlmann for his Presidential Address!

A misleading title…

When I received this book, Handbook of fitting statistical distributions with R, by Z. Karian and E.J. Dudewicz,  from/for the Short Book Reviews section of the International Statistical Review, I was obviously impressed by its size (around 1700 pages and 3 kilos…). From briefly glancing at the table of contents, and the list of standard distributions appearing as subsections of the first chapters, I thought that the authors were covering different estimation/fitting techniques for most of the standard distributions. After taking a closer look at the book, I think the cover is misleading in several aspects: this is not a handbook (a.k.a. a reference book), it does not cover standard statistical distributions, the R input is marginal, and the authors only wrote part of the book, since about half of the chapters are written by other authors…