The editor and executive editor give some thoughts on the recent past, the present, and the immediate future of the Stata Journal. Copyright 2003 by Stata Corporation.

It is commonplace to compute various flavours of residual and predicted values after fitting many different kinds of model. Official Stata supplies as built-ins a bundle of commands originally written for use after regress: avplot, avplots, cprplot, acprplot, lvr2plot, rvfplot and rvpplot. These...

The Stata program triplot produces a triangular plot of three variables with constant sum. Most commonly, three fractions or proportions add to 1, or three percents add to 100. The constant sum constraint means that there are just two independent pieces of information. Hence, it is possible to...

Graded data are those possessing an inherent order but falling short of a metric scale. Examples are opinions on a five-point scale, such as strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree. Graded data are, like ranked data, one kind of ordinal data. They are common in many fields,...

Circular data are a large class of directional data, which are of interest to scientists in many fields, including biologists (movements of migrating animals), meteorologists (winds), geologists (directions of joints and faults), and geomorphologists (landforms, oriented stones). These examples...

Circular data are a large class of directional data, which are of interest to scientists in many fields, including biologists (movements of migrating animals), meteorologists (winds), geologists (directions of joints and faults), and geomorphologists (landforms, oriented stones). These examples...

Seasonal effects are dominant in many environmental time series and important or at least notable in many economic or biomedical time series, to name only a few application areas represented in the Stata user community. In several fields it seems rare to use anything other than basic line graphs...

It is commonplace to compute various flavours of residual and predicted values after fitting many different kinds of model. This allows production of a great variety of diagnostic graphics, used to examine the general and specific fit between data and model and to seek possible means of...

Most statistical data analysis, and thus most graphical data analysis, is directed towards modelling of relationships, but many statistical problems have a different flavour: their focus is comparison, and the key question is assessing agreement or disagreement between two or more data sets or...