Dr. MacFarland (tommac@nova.edu) is Senior Research Associate (Office of Institutional Effectiveness, http://www.nova.edu/ie/) and Associate Professor (Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences, http://scis.nova.edu/) at Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA. Dr. MacFarland first used S on a UNIX platform in 1988 to teach statistics for face-to-face and online distance education students majoring in the computing sciences and later in the 1990s transitioned to R. Since then Dr. MacFarland has used R for graduate students in non-computing majors, such as allied health, disaster preparedness, dispute resolution, education, and marine biology. An interest in biostatistics was developed when Dr. MacFarland studied agriculture at the baccalaureate and graduate level, but prior to the use of hand-held calculators and personal computers.