A Word from the President

As we all know, before the banquet, guests must be invited, music organised, the table set, and finally food be prepared. Our scientific meetings are feasts but more like potluck meals, guests bring their own talks. Otherwise their organisation is a hard work for the many people engaged. I thank all those serving on the many committees staging Bernoulli events all over the world.

This summer will see two great probability-and-statistics meetings, in fine cities embodying European cultural and scientific tradition: the 9^th Vilnius Conference the last days of June, and the 26^th European Meeting of Statisticians, a month later in Toruń. Check the programmes on the web, and sense the attraction! I remember Kolmogorov swimming at my first Vilnius Conference...
There will also be a slightly more specialised conference, that on Stochastic Processes and their Applications, in Paris. The SPA meetings have great tradition and combine intimacy and friendly athmosphere with mathematical excellence. The Paris conference will be no exception.

There are a host of other meetings all over the world, mirroring both the global membership of the Bernoulli Society, and the wide range of areas in which stochastics has become a key ingredient, from finance and molecular biology to pure mathematics. Next year the 56>^th Session of the International Statistical Institute in Lisbon will remind us about our historical closeness to problems of official statistics, not to be forgotten in these times of triumphant expansion into new applications. And in 2008 it is time for the next Bernoulli World Congress, in Singapore. I don't know what time is, but certainly it flies.

In March, i.e. after I write this but a month before this newsletter reaches you, the Bernoulli Society Executive will meet at the Frankfurt Stochastics Days. On our agenda stand a host of important topics, the hottest being those concerning publication.
The Bernoulli Journal is a great success scientifically. But we loose money on it. Can we join forces with the IMS, so successful in their publication? Or should we accept a bid from one of the many commercial publishers wanting to take it over? In that way we might be able to use our forces on more crucial matters, like membership and future activities, and maybe even get some more resources for such work. Or is that an illusion? What are our duties and what is the landscape in the electronic transformation of scientific publication?

We'll try to reach a conclusion on that and the other matters, and hope to get some time for the fascinating scientific programme!