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A letter to the editor is presented in response the article "RETHINKING THE PAPER HELICOPTER: COMBINING STATISTICAL AND ENGINEERING KNOWLEDGE" in a previous issue.

The article discusses the editor's experience of being associated with journal "The American Statistician." The editor has reviewed 120 new manuscript since July 1, 2005. A new section called "Interdisciplinary" has been added to the journal to bring good statistical science to a variety of disciplines and to bring good discipline-specific science to statisticians. Papers in this section might contain overviews of discipline-specific issues in need of statistical solutions. The journal has adopted an online manuscript management system since October 1, 2005.

The article discusses various articles published within the issue, including one on statistician Samuel S. Wilks' contributions to statistics and another by W. Edwards Deming on Wilks award.

A response by the author is presented to a letter to the editor about his article "RETHINKING THE PAPER HELICOPTER: COMBINING STATISTICAL AND ENGINEERING KNOWLEDGE" in a previous issue.

This article recalls and comments on the varied contributions, many of enduring value, made by Samuel Wilks to the theory and practice of statistics. Multivariate analysis, order statistics, and statistical inference have especially benefited from his research. His unflagging work on behalf of the profession as teacher, writer, editor, advisor, and committee member raised the visibility of the field of statistics and increased recognition of its wide relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the properties of Graeco-Latin squares enumerated by mathematician Leonhard Euler. Euler suggested that a Graeco-Latin square of size n could never exist for any n of the form 4k +2, although he was not able to prove it. A Latin square is an n-by-n array of n distinct symbols in which each symbol appears exactly once in each row and column. On the other hand a Graeco-Latin square is an n-by-n array of ordered pairs from a set of n symbols such that in each row and each column of the array, each symbol appears exactly once in each coordinate. In one of his papers on Graeco-Latin squares, Euler used magic squares, which are closely related to Graeco-Latin squares. Magic squares were constructed by using Graeco-Latin squares of orders 3, 4 and 5. He showed that a Graeco-Latin square of order n can be converted into a magic square by the use of an algorithm. One can construct Graeco-Latin squares of every order n except those values for which the prime factorization of n contains only a single factor of 2.

The article reviews the scientific word processing software Scientific WorkPlace 5.5 from the firm MacKichan Software.

The article presents information related to the establishment of a sound pattern of statistical education for college undergraduates. The uses of statistics and statistical methods have become evident throughout business, industry, government, and scientific research in recent years that this matter concerns not only the professional statisticians themselves, but many thousands of persons in these fields who are finding it necessary to become intelligent consumers of statistics and statistical methods. The validity of the urgent need of a better educational set- up for statistics should be based on the premise that statistics is fundamentally important and in fact indispensable to modern society.

The article discusses errors in surveys. In the planning of a survey, effort should be directed toward the reduction of all of the errors that it is possible to reduce. Consideration of all the errors that will affect the ultimate usefulness of a survey largely determines whether errors should be taken at all. A thorough-going plan of theoretical and experimental investigation into the nature of bias and variability in response is needed to avoid errors. Sampling errors have the characteristics of being controllable through the size and design of the sample.

A response by the author is presented to a letter to the editor about his article "GRAPHICAL VIEWS OF SUPPRESSION AND MULTICOLLINEARITY IN MULTIPLE LINEAR REGRESSION" in a previous issue.