The Roads Travelled

Abstract

It is an honor and a privilege to thank Regional Whynott Chairman of the Regional Municipality of Hamilton-Wentworth for his warm welcome to Canada and to Hamilton and also our thanks through him for the support and hospitality of the Tourism and Conventions Office of the Department of Economic Development. It is also a privilege to thank Dean Bob McNutt for his greetings on behalf of McMaster University for the occasion of our Seventeenth International Biometric Conference. May I take this opportunity to thank Judith O'Fallon, President of the Host Region, for the invitation to hold our IBC in this Eastern North American Region of the IBS. I wish on behalf of the International Society to thank the Chair of the Local Organizing Committee Peter MacDonald who together with his committee has worked long and hard for the success of this week. To this we add our thanks to Byron Morgan and his Program Committee who have organized an outstanding scientific program for us to savor and enjoy. We shall be thinking, dreaming, and breathing statistics this week. To ensure we retain a balanced perspective on life, I refer you to the famous American Robert Frost's well known poem The Road Not Taken. With apologies to Robert Frost, rather than focussing on roads not taken, we shall briefly consider instead roads we have taken, or The Roads Travelled. Past Presidential Addresses have largely taken the form of a state of the profession or state of the society review type format, though some have focussed on some specific statistical issue. One of these latter is that of Professor Cochran who in 1955 addressed the Society under the title The 1954 trial of the poliomyelitis vaccine in the United States. A cross-reading of the registration of participants in 1955 and today 1994 reveals that, except for David Finney and P. V. Sukhatme, none of us heard that presentation. Perhaps Professor Finney and Suhkatme can verify for us, but my reading of this address is that it was surely a compelling presentation dealing as it did with a disease that was seemingly running rampant and which almost surely was capturing everyone's attention. As Cochran (1955) stated