On May 27-31, 1985, a series of symposia was held at The University of Western Ontario, London, Canada, to celebrate the 70th birthday of Pro­ fessor V. M. Joshi. These symposia were chosen to reflect Professor Joshi's research interests as well as areas of expertise in statistical science among faculty in the Departments of Statistical and Actuarial Sciences, Economics, Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and Philosophy. From these symposia, the six volumes which comprise the "Joshi Festschrift" have arisen. The 117 articles in this work reflect the broad interests and high quality of research of those who attended our conference. We would like to thank all of the contributors for their superb cooperation in helping us to complete this project. Our deepest gratitude must go to the three people who have spent so much of their time in the past year typing these volumes: Jackie Bell, Lise Constant, and Sandy Tarnowski. This work has been printed from "carnera ready" copy produced by our Vax 785 computer and QMS Lasergraphix printers, using the text processing software TEX. At the initiation of this project, we were neophytes in the use of this system. Thank you, Jackie, Lise, and Sandy, for having the persistence and dedication needed to complete this undertaking.

V. M. Joshi and the Markov Oscillation Problem.- Probabilistic Models of the Photographic Process.- A Stochastic Model for the Effect of Incident Light Intensity on CO2 Uptake in Leaves.- An Application of Some Curve-Crossing Results for Stationary Stochastic Processes to Stochastic Modelling of Metal Fatigue.- Limit Theorems Arising in Soil Erosion Modelling.- Fitting Cosines: Some Procedures and Some Physical Examples.- The Convergence of the Solution of a Boltzmann Type Equation Related to Quantum Mechanics.- Some Recent Work in Epidemic Models.- Transience in a Queueing System with a Finite Number of Locally Interacting Servers.- Central Limit Theorems for Cluster Point Processes.- Asymptotic Theory of Estimation in Nonlinear Regression.- Likelihood Asymptotics for the Discrimination Problem.- On Fréchet Bounds of Bivariate Distributions.- Strong Limit Theorems for Sums of Random Variables Defined on a Finite Markov Chain.- On Admissibility and Uniform Admissibility in Finite Population Sampling.- Overlooked Correlation in Finite Population Inference.- Ideas from the Foundations of Sampling Applied to the One-Way Layout.- Analytic Uses of Survey Data: A Review.- Estimators of the Factor Model for Survey Data.- Some Experiences in Computing Estimates and Their Variances Using Data from Complex Survey Designs.- Estimation of the Characteristics of Rare Animals Based on Inverse Sampling at the Second Occasion.- Identifying Rational Opinion-Formation with the Overlapping Information Model.