In Memoriam: George Zyskind 1929–1974

Improving the quality of presentations is an important goal of the American Statistical Association. This article summarizes information presented in workshops held at annual meetings to provide guidance for the presentation of statistical papers to general and technical audiences. Four key areas are emphasized in these workshops: (1) careful selection and organization of key themes and results to be presented; (b) construction and use of high-quality visual aids; (c) use of handouts for methodologic details; tables, graphs, and references; and (d) rehearsal, critique, and revision of oral delivery.     

In Memoriam: Jack Carl Kiefer 1924–1981

This note provides a new explanation for Tukey's definition of “(inner) fences” for box-and-whiskers plots. The starting point is explicit bounds for the sample mean based only on the box plot. Starting from these bounds we define a dataset to contain outside values if at least one of the latter bounds is outside of the box. This leads to a new, yet simple definition of fences. They are symmetric around the box if, and only if, the median is in the middle of the box. In that case, the new definition coincides with Tukey's rule of 1.5 times the inter quartile range. To avoid instabilities for small (sub-) samples we propose to complement the box-and-whiskers plot of the original data with a box-and-whiskers plot of Walsh means.