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WSS NEWS
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Contents:
Please come join your friends and colleagues for a celebration of the holiday season.
The 2008 WSS Holiday Dinner will be held Wednesday, December 17, at the Gordon Biersch Brewery from 6:00 to 9:00 pm. Finger foods (wings, hummus salad, pizza & artichoke hearts) and a and cash bar featuring Gordon Biersch Lagers. The Brewery is located at 900 F St, NW, D.C. - close to the Gallery Place Metro Station (green, yellow or red line).
The cost is $25 per person.
Register Online at https://www.123signup.com/register?id=zqyqt
or send cheque payable to WSS to: Yves Thibaudeau, 1037 17th St S, Arlington, VA 22202
If you have questions, please contact Yves at (301)-763-1706 or yves.thibaudeau@census.gov
Hope to see you there!
The Public Policy Program of the WSS, in partnership with the Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology's Subcommittee on the Statistical Uses of Administrative Records, is pleased to announce the launch of a seminar series on "Administrative Data in Support of Policy Relevant Statistics." The series will run from Fall 2008 until Spring 2009, with approximately one seminar a month. The series will focus on federal statistical uses of state- and locally-held administrative records, often in concert with survey data, including for federal program evaluation and other policy relevant applications.
Confirmed seminars will cover Medicaid undercount issues, Earned Income Tax Credit impact on employment, improving recidivism research, and outcomes of students attending the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. Seminars in the planning stages include examining Food Stamp eligibility and participation, innovations with the Quarterly Census of Employment, and others.
The first seminar will be: "Administrative Data in Support of Policy Relevant Statistics: The Medicaid Undercount Project." It will be held on November 13, 2008, in Room 8 of the BLS Conference Center. The full session abstract is provided below. Please put the first seminar on your calendar and watch this space for updated information each month. Direct any questions to Shelly Wilkie Martinez (rmartinez@omb.eop.gov) or Michael Cohen (MCohen@nas.edu).
Statisticians, social and behavioral scientists, epidemiologists, economists, policy analysts, and other health researchers are invited to participate in the Twelfth Biennial Symposium on Statistical Methods to be held in Decatur, Georgia (Atlanta metropolitan area). The Symposium is sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Statistical Association (ASA). The theme of the 2009 Symposium is "Info-Fusion: Utilization of Multi-Source Data." In conjunction with the Symposium, short courses will be offered on April 6, 2009 and announced at a later date.
Submission of abstracts is encouraged for contributed sessions of oral and poster presentations related to any of the following Symposium topic areas:
To submit an abstract, go to:
http://www.amstat.org/meetings/cdcatsdr
Abstracts will be considered for either oral or poster presentation and must be submitted no later than December 15, 2008. The Symposium program will be determined by the end of January, after which authors will be notified of acceptance or rejection. For more information, please contact:
Drew Baughman
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
1600 Clifton Road NE (MS C-25)
Atlanta, GA 30329
(404) 639-8198
Dbaughman@cdc.gov
The Statistical Computing Section of WSS is jointly sponsoring with the DC SAS User Group, DCSUG, two presentations by Bob Rodriguez of SAS Institute. The talks, listed below, discuss statistical graphics and a new product, SAS Stat Studio. The talks will be held on Tuesday, December 9, 2008, from 9:15 to 11:45 in the BLS Conference Center. Further details for this presentation can be found at www.dc-sug.org (from Oct 1 onwards). On that website, DCSUG is currently promoting their September 9 morning & September 24 evening meetings.
All those who plan to attend must be on WSS or DCSUG entry list or have a BLS ID.
SAS 9.1 introduced an experimental extension to the output Delivery System (ODS), which enabled over two dozen SAS/STAT and SAS/ETS procedures to create statistical graphics as automatically as they create tables. This extension, referred to as "ODS Graphics" for short, requires minimal additional syntax, and it provides commonly needed displays for data analysis and statistical modeling, including scatter plots, histograms, and box-and-whisker plots. Many ODS features, such as styles and destination statements, apply equally to tables and graphs.
With the production release of ODS Graphics in SAS 9.2, over sixty statistical procedures have been enables to use this new functionality. New SAS/GRAPH procedures, as well as existing SAS/QC procedures, also take advantage of this functionality. Additional ODS styles for statistical work are available. You can use a new point-and-click graphics editor to make changes to graphs, such as modifying titles and annotating points. This talk explains the basics of using ODS Graphics to create and manage graphs for data exploration and statistical analysis.
SAS Stat Studio 3.1 is new statistical software in SAS 9.2 that is designed to meet the needs of innovative problem solvers who are familiar with SAS/STAT or SAS/IML but need more versatility to create customized analyses. Stat Studio provides a rich programming environment that blends the flexibility of the IML matrix language with the ability to call SAS procedures as functions and create customized dynamic graphics.
With Stat Studio, you can build on your familiarity with either SAS/STAT or SAS/IML to write programs that explore data, fit models, and use linked graphics to relate the results to the data. You can move seamlessly between programming and interactive analysis. If your programs use methods that are computationally intensive, you can run them simultaneously in multiple workspaces. This talk demonstrates how Stat Studio facilitates techniques that would otherwise be difficult with traditional SAS programming.
Biographical Sketch
Bob Rodriguez joined SAS in 1983 and is currently a senior director in SAS R&D with responsibility for the development of statistical software, including SAS/STAT and SAS/QC. He received his Ph.D. in statistics from the University of North Carolina in 1977, and was a staff research scientist at General Motors Research Laboratories from 1977 until 1983. Bob is active in the American Statistical Association, where he currently serves as vice president.
Participants will include statisticians, economists, and managers, as well as other professionals in the broader statistical community who share an interest in keeping current on issues related to federal data.
Support Provided by:
Topics:
Keynote Address: Hermann Habermann, Consultant
Location and Seminar Cost: L'Enfant Plaza Hotel, 480 L'Enfant Plaza, S.W., Washington, D.C. 20024 Cost: $195.00 per person
For Further Information, Contact the COPAFS Office at: Phone: 703-836-0404 Email: copafs@aol.com Fax: 703-836-0406
The registration form is available at the COPAFS web site at: www.copafs.org
Policymakers rely on statistical data to make good decisions. Data producers constantly strive to disseminate high quality and useful data. Recent breakthroughs in technology have made this task easier. The capture and exchange of information, namely, the effective management of metadata is now transformed by the availability of eXtensible Markup Language (XML); the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI); and the Statistical Data and Metadata Exchange Standard (SDMX). The combination of XML, DDI, and SDMX technologies provide a powerful set of tools for the management and dissemination of statistical data and documentation.
This free, 1-day workshop, sponsored by NORC at the University of Chicago, is intended for a non-technical audience and is targeted at data producers and archivists. The objectives of the workshop are twofold:
This metadata workshop will cover the following topics:
This is a free workshop sponsored by NORC at the University of Chicago in collaboration with the Open Data Foundation.
PLEASE RSVP to Timothy M. Mulcahy by November 17, 2008
@ mulcahy-tim@norc.uchicago.edu
Or call 301-634-9352
Download the flyer (pdf)
November 19, 2008: Survival Models in SAS: PROC PHREG Part 5
(http://www.sas.com/apps/pubscat/bookdetails.jsp?pc=55233)
Continuing the series of talks based on the book "Survival Analysis Using the SAS System: A Practical Guide" by Paul Allison begun in October 2007, we'll finish Chapter 6: Competing Risks.
Topics covered are:
December 17, 2008: GeoDA
(https://www.geoda.uiuc.edu/)
GeoDa is thelatest incarnation in a long line of software tools developed by Dr. Luc Anselin's Spatial Analysis Laboratory (SAL) in the Department of Geography at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. It is designed to implement techniques for exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) on lattice data (points and polygons). The free program provides a user friendly and graphical interface to methods of descriptive spatial data analysis, such as spatial autocorrelation statistics, as well as basic spatial regression functionality. The latest version contains several new features such as a cartogram, a refined map movie, parallel coordinate plot, 3D visualization, conditional plots (and maps) and spatial regression.
SIGSTAT is the Special Interest Group in Statistics for the CPCUG, the Capital PC User Group, and WINFORMS, the Washington Institute for Operations Research Service and Management Science.
All meetings are in Room S3031, 1800 M St, NW from 12:00 to 1:00. Enter the South Tower & take the elevator to the 3rd floor to check in at the guard's desk.
First-time attendees should contact Charlie Hallahan, 202-694-5051, hallahan@ers.usda.gov, and leave their name. Directions to the building & many links of statistical interest can be found at the SIGSTAT website, http://www.cpcug.org/user/sigstat/.
Items for publication in the December issue of the WSS NEWS should be submitted no later than November 10, 2008. E-mail items to Michael Feil at michael.feil@usda.gov.
Washington Statistical Society
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First posted October 29, 2008 |
http://galileo.gmu.edu/~wss/wss0811.shtml |