Amazon associates links (warnin’)

As in previous years, let me warn unwary readers that the links to Amazon.com and Amazon.fr found on this blog are actually susceptible to earn me a monetary gain [from 4% to 7%] if a purchase is made in the 24 hours following the entry on Amazon through this link, thanks to the “Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com/fr“. As with last year, most of the items purchased through the links and contributing to my bookoholic addiction are rather unrelated with the purpose of the ‘Og, but, as already mentioned , anything can happen within 24 hours! Here are the weirdest ones:

• Toy Vault 12″ Cthulhu Plush Toy and Pokemon Pillow
• Stewart’s Pro-Treat 21 ounce Tub Freeze Dried Dog Treats, Beef Liver
• ten copies of Hp Compaq Evo N610v Ac Adapter 0mAh
• Philosophy Purity Made Simple One-Step Facial Cleanser
• Nile Spice Lentil Soup
• ten copies of Donald in Mathmagic Land

plus of course the books I actually reviewed along the past months, positively or negatively… Like seven copies of Error and Inference. And a dozen of R for dummies. And many other books on Bayesian statistics and R programming. Thanks!

R for dummies

Just saw this nice review of R for dummies. And thought after this afternoon class that my students in the simulation course at Paris-Dauphine could clearly benefit from reading it! They in fact had a terrible time simulating a truncated normal distribution by accept-reject. As they could not get the notion of normalising constants… (Yes, indeed, this very truncated normal distribution!) Even the validity of simulating a normal variate until the truncation is satisfied was not obvious to them and they took forever to program the corresponding code. Anyway, I will certainly order the book to check for myself (after receiving Genetics for dummies to make sure I use the right vocabulary, even though it is a bit too light in the end…)! And write a review for CHANCE if it generates enough interest in doing so…