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“Do (workers elsewhere) Immediately embrace the statistical method as an integral thread in the fabric of their own enterprises and decision making ventures, or have we become Isolated and irrelevant?” Set against the backdrop of ASA's first century of writers, we attempt to cast a critical eye at the role of statistics and the role of the statistician, both in Its practice and in the training and preparation of the practitioner for the next century. This includes addressing the role of the Association and the profession.

One of the concerns of a plant scientist is the need to control disease and its spread through crops, plants, and pasture. This leads to the study of the progress of disease as it spreads through the plant and, in particular, to plant stress measured by the area under the disease progress curve. A nice review of this and related concepts has been provided elsewhere, but that work restricts attention to deterministic models. In this work, we develop a stochastic model for disease spread. Hence, plant stress is a stochastic variable. We show that this stress follows a mixture distribution related to sums of known exponential random variables, and we derive the corresponding mean and variance of stress experienced by the plant until prespecified proportions become infected. Through numerical illustrations, we discuss the significance of the model parameters. We also derive limiting formulas as the number of leaves/size of plants becomes large.

Partial table of contents: ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS Spatial Pattern Analyses to Detect Rare Disease Clusters (L. Waller, et al.) Prediction Models for Personal Ozone Exposure Assessment (D. Wypij & L.-J Liu) FORESTRY, FISHERIES, GENETICS Estimating Pine Seedling Response to Ozone and Acidic Rain (J. Rawlings & S. Spruill) Survival Analysis for Size Regulation of Atlantic Halibut (S. Smith, et al.) HABITAT AND ANIMAL STUDIES Spatial Association Learning in Hummingbirds (J. Graham & A. Petkau) Time-Series Analyses of Beaver Body Temperatures (P. Reynolds) HEALTH CARE AND PUBLIC HEALTH POLICY Analysis of Attitudes Towards Workplace Smoking Restrictions (S. Bull) CLINICAL TRIALS Early Lung Cancer Detection Studies (B. Flehinger & M. Kimmel) Quality Control for Bone Mineral Density Scans (S. Wong & N. Lane) EPIDEMIOLOGY, TOXICOLOGY Patterns of Lung Cancer Risk in Ex-Smokers (B. Gillespie, et al.) Drug Interactions Between Morphine and Marijuana (C. Gennings, et al.) Appendix References Indexes.

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