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March 2008

Contents:


2008 Wray Jackson Smith Scholarship

Applications due by April 15, 2008! The Government Statistics Section (GSS) and Social Statistics Section (SSS) of ASA are pleased to announce the availability of a scholarship in memory of Wray Jackson Smith, a founding member of the GSS and long-time contributor to Federal statistics. The Wray Jackson Smith Scholarship (WJSS), co-sponsored with the Washington Statistical Society, the Caucus for Women in Statistics, Harris-Smith Institutes, Mathematica Policy Research, and Synectics for Management Decisions, Inc., is intended to reward promising young statisticians for their diligence, thereby encouraging them to consider a future in government statistics. Everyone is encouraged to seek out promising candidates and to urge them to apply.

Type of Project

The WJSS Award provides funding of $1,000 for use in exploring any of a broad number of opportunities for furthering the development of a career related to government statistics. Applicants are encouraged to be creative in seeking support for a wide variety of uses, including:

  • Tuition, board, and books for courses or short courses
  • Conference attendance
  • Purchase of books, software, data sets, or other supporting materials for research projects related to government statistics.
Activities may relate to any level of government, including Federal, state, and local governmental units. They must be statistical in nature, focusing on data, methodology, analysis, or data presentation. Recent award winners have used the WJSS to fund attendance at the Joint Statistical Meetings, support continued public policy research, and to take short courses to better understand and analyze data for current research.

Application

To apply for a WJSS Award, the following information must be sent to the Wray Jackson Smith Scholarship Committee by April 15, 2008:

  • A completed WJSS Application Form
    (see: http://www.amstat.org/sections/sgovt/) for current year's form and click on the format you want to use)
  • A proposal of activity to be funded
  • Academic transcript (for current/recent students) or job performance reviews for the past 2 years (for non-students) or equivalent proof of superior academic and/or professional performance
  • Two letters of recommendation.

Please send materials to:

Wray Jackson Smith Scholarship Committee
&nsp;   c/o Michael P. Cohen
&nsp;   1615 Q Street NW #T-1
&nsp;   Washington DC 20009-6310 USA

or electronically to: mpcohen@juno.com

Selection Process

The WJSS Committee, consisting of a total of three GSS and SSS members, will review each proposal, based on an established rating scheme, and select the awardee. Each application will be judged based on the following criteria:

  • Stage in Career
  • Past Performance
  • Quality of the Proposed Activity
  • Relevance of Activity to Government Statistics
  • Innovation/Ingenuity of the Proposed Project
  • Feasibility of Completion of Activity
  • Two Letters of Recommendation

Announcements of the awardees are made by June 1, 2008. All applicants are notified by e-mail.

Eligibility

The WJSS is targeted at students and persons early in their career in government statistics. Applicants must have a Bachelor's degree or equivalent level of education. Membership in the Government Statistics Section, Social Statistics Section, or in the ASA is not required. For more information, contact Mike Cohen by e-mail: mpcohen@juno.com

Wray Jackson Smith Scholarship Committee

The Committee for 2008 consists of Michael P. Cohen (Chair) [mpcohen@juno.com], Robert A. Kominski [Robert.A.Kominski@census.gov], and Stephen Campbell [Stephen.Campbell@nist.gov]. The Committee members thank Juanita Tamayo Lott for her invaluable advice and assistance.

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Herriot Award Nominations Sought

Nominations are sought for the 2008 Roger Herriot Award for Innovation in Federal Statistics. The award is intended to reflect the special characteristics that marked Roger Herriot's career:

  • Dedication to the issues of measurement;
  • Improvements in the efficiency of data collection programs;
    and
  • Improvements and use of statistical data for policy analysis.

The award is not limited to senior members of an organization, nor is it to be considered as a culmination of a long period of service. Individuals at all levels within Federal statistical agencies, other government organizations, nonprofit organizations, the private sector, and the academic community may be nominated on the basis of their contributions.

The recipient of the 2008 Roger Herriot Award will be chosen by a committee comprising representatives of the Social Statistics and Government Statistics Sections of the American Statistical Association, and of the Washington Statistical Society. Roger Herriot was associated with and strongly supportive of these organizations during his career. The award consists of a $1000 honorarium and a framed citation, which will be presented at a ceremony at the Joint Statistical Meetings in August 2008. The Washington Statistical Society will also host a seminar given by the winner on a subject of his or her own choosing.

The previous recipients of the Roger Herriot Award are Joseph Waksberg (Westat), Monroe Sirken (NCHS), Constance Citro (CNStat), Roderick Harrison (Census Bureau), Clyde Tucker (BLS), Thomas Jabine (SSA, EIA, CNStat), Donald Dillman (Washington State University), Jeanne Griffith (OMB, NCES, NSF), Daniel Weinberg (Census Bureau), David Banks (FDA, BTS, NIST), Paula Schneider (Census Bureau), Robert E. Fay III (Census Bureau), Nathaniel Schenker (NCHS), and Nancy Kirkendall (EIA).

Nominations for the 2008 award will be accepted beginning inebruary 2008. Nomination packages should contain:

  • A cover letter from the nominator that should include references to specific examples of the nominee's contributions to innovation in Federal statistics. These contributions can be to methodology, procedure, organization, administration, or other areas of Federal statistics, and need not have been made by or while a Federal employee.
  • Up to six additional letters in support that demonstrate the innovative nature of each contribution.
  • A current vita for the nominee, including contact information.

Both individual and group nominations may be submitted. The committee may consider nominations made for the 2007 award, but it encourages resubmission of those nominations with updated information.

For more information, contact Brian Harris-Kojetin, Chair, 2008 Roger Herriot Award Committee, at 202-395-7314, or bharrisk@omb.eop.gov. Completed packages must be received by April 1, 2008. Electronic submissions in MS-Word or as a "pdf" file are strongly encouraged. Please contact the chair if you need to make arrangements to fax or mail a nomination.

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The Jeanne E. Griffith Mentoring Award

On receiving the Roger Herriot Award in June 2001, Jeanne E. Griffith said:

One of the most rewarding aspects (of Federal statistics) for me was the opportunity to promote creative activities and energies among my staff When I have had the blessing to mentor young people in their careers, I have tried to emphasize (that) only they, themselves, can make the most of (the) .chances that life presents.

Dr. Griffith died in August 2001 after working for more than 25 years in the Federal statistical system. Throughout her career, and especially in her latter senior management positions at the National Center for Education Statistics and the National Science Foundation, one of Jeanne's highest priorities was to mentor and encourage younger staff at all levels to learn, to grow, and to recognize and seize career opportunities as they came along.

The Jeanne E. Griffith Mentoring Award has been established to encourage mentoring of younger staff in the Federal statistical system. It is presented annually, beginning in 2003, to a supervisor who is nominated by co-workers and supervisors, and chosen by the Award Selection Committee.

The award is co-sponsored by the Interagency Council on Statistical Policy, the Council for Excellence in Government, the Washington Statistical Society, the Social Statistics and Government Statistics Sections of the American Statistical Association, and the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics.

Nominations for 2008 will be accepted beginning in January 2008. The last date for submission of nominations is March 28, 2008, and the Award Committee will make its determination of the award winner by May 9, 2008. The award will consist of a $1,000 honorarium and a citation, which will be presented at a ceremony arranged by the co-sponsors in June 2008.

The winning mentor will be selected for his or her efforts in supporting the work and developing the careers of younger staff. Examples of typical mentoring activities include:

  • Advising junior staff to help them create career opportunities, networking skills, and contacts for growth and development;

  • Counseling junior staff and providing resources to help develop their technical writing, analysis, presentation and organizational skills and knowledge;

  • Encouraging junior staff growth and career development through attendance and oral presentations at meetings with higher level officials, staffs of other agencies, professional associations, training courses, and conferences;

  • Motivating junior staff and building self confidence through feedback on their efforts, being a listener when that is needed, and creating a caring and supportive environment;

  • Serving as a role model for junior staff through professional expertise, information and insights, balancing collegial and personal roles, and including everyone across rank, race, ethnicity, and seniority.

For further information on the award, contact Ed Spar, Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics (COPAFS) by phone: 703-836-0404; fax: 703-836-0406; or by e-mail at copafs@aol.com. The nomination cover sheet and guidelines form-or a photocopy of it-should be attached to a nomination memorandum or letter. Forms can be obtained by contacting Ed Spar, or by downloading from the COPAFS website at http://www.copafs.org. All nominations should be returned to the Jeanne E. Griffith Mentoring Award Committee, c/o COPAFS, 2121 Eisenhower Avenue, Suite 200, Alexandria, VA 22314 no later than March 28, 2008.

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Nominations Sought for 2008 Julius Shiskin Award

Nominations are invited for the annual Julius Shiskin Memorial Award for Economic Statistics. The Award is given in recognition of unusually original and important contributions in the development of economic statistics or in the use of statistics in interpreting the economy. Contributions are recognized for statistical research, development of statistical tools, application of information technology techniques, use of economic statistical programs, management of statistical programs, or developing public understanding of measurement issues. The Award was established in 1980 by the Washington Statistical Society (WSS) and is now cosponsored by the WSS, the National Association for Business Economics, and the Business and Economics Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association (ASA). The 2007 award recipient was Arthur Kennickell, Senior Economist and Head of the Microeconomic Surveys Unit at the Federal Reserve Board, for his leadership of the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances and his achievements as an international expert on the design and implementation of household economic surveys.

Because the program was initiated many years ago, it is little wonder that statisticians and economists often ask, "Who was Julius Shiskin?" At the time of his death in 1978, "Julie" was the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and earlier served as the Chief Statistician at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the Chief Economic Statistician and Assistant Director of the Census Bureau. Throughout his career, he was known as an innovator. At Census he was instrumental in developing an electronic computer method for seasonal adjustment. In 1961, he published Signals of Recession and Recovery, which laid the groundwork for the calculation of monthly economic indicators, and he developed the monthly Census report Business Conditions Digest to disseminate them to the public. In 1969, he was appointed Chief Statistician at OMB where he developed the policies and procedures that govern the release of key economic indicators (Statistical Policy Directive Number 3), and originated a Social Indicators report. In 1973, he was selected to head BLS where he was instrumental in preserving the integrity and independence of the BLS labor force data and directed the most comprehensive revision in the history of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which included a new CPI for all urban consumers.

Nominations for the 2008 award are now being accepted. Individuals or groups in the public or private sector from any country can be nominated. The award will be presented with an honorarium of $750 plus additional recognition from the sponsors. A nomination form and a list of all previous recipients are available on the ASA Website at www.amstat.org/sections/bus_econ/shiskin.html or by writing to the Julius Shiskin Award Committee, Attn: Monica Clark, American Statistical Association, 732 North Washington Street, Alexandria, VA 22314-1943. Completed nominations must be received by April 1, 2008. For further information contact Steven Paben, Julius Shiskin Award Committee Secretary, at paben.steven@bls.gov.

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Capital Science 2008

The Washington Academy of Sciences and its Affiliates Present Capital Science 2008 to be held March 29-30, 2008.

On Saturday and Sunday, March 29-30, 2008, The Washington Academy of Sciences and its Affiliated Societies (including WSS) will hold the third in the series of biennial pan-Affiliate Conferences, Capital Science 2008. It will be held in the Conference Facility of the National Science Foundation in Arlington, VA at the Ballston Metro stop. With about 20 of the Affiliates participating, the Conference will serve as an umbrella for scientific presentations, seminars, tutorials, and talks. These pan-Affiliate Conferences underline the fact that the Washington, DC area is not only the political capital of the country but, in many respects, the nation's intellectual capital -- with several major universities and government laboratories that are the homes of an astonishing number of Nobel laureates.

Keep checking theWeb site http://www.washacadsci.org/capsci08/Index.htm for more information as it becomes available.

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Seminar on Survey Respondent Incentives: Research and Practice

March 10, 2008
L'Enfant Plaza Hotel
Washington, DC

Hosted by the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics

Incentive payments to survey respondents have been used extensively for many years to improve response rates. Considerable research evidence supports the value of monetary incentives to increase cooperation and improve the speed and quality of response in a broad range of data collection efforts. In 1992, a Symposium on Providing Incentives to Survey Respondents, hosted by the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics (COPAFS), brought together a broad spectrum of survey research professionals from government, business, academia, and research organizations to focus on these issues in detail to review the "state-of-the art." (To read the report go to: www.members.aol.com/copafs/incentives.htm). Since that time, the use of respondent incentives in survey practice has increased dramatically across all sectors. Yet there has been no professional forum since the 1992 symposium that has sought to bring survey professionals together with a specific focus on these issues. The purpose of the proposed seminar is to fill that void.

The first session of the seminar will describe current practices in the use of respondent incentives across the three major domains of surveys: 1) surveys sponsored by federal agencies; 2) surveys conducted by academic investigators, including those funded by federal or other grants; and 3) surveys sponsored and conducted by private sector organizations and commercial establishments.

Session two will be a panel discussion bringing together survey research professionals who have conducted and are knowledgeable of major research, practices and trends on the use of respondent incentives in government, academic, commercial surveys. The theme of this session is: who, what, where, when, why and how do we pay? The panelists will focus in detail on what we are doing and what we know about the use of respondent incentives.

The concluding session will bring together a panel of survey researchers who have had considerable experience in the design and implementation of sample surveys. They will attempt to consolidate and synthesize the seminar discussion, identify common elements/themes, and suggest future directions for implementation and research.

Seminar Registration: $125.00. For a copy of the program and registration information contact COPAFS at copafs@aol.com or call COPAFS at 703-836-0404 and ask for Edward Spar or Lee Ann Sklar. The program and registration form are also available at the COPAFS site at: http://www.copafs.org

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Joint Program in Survey Methodology Distinguished Lecture

Survey Design a la carte: Survey Research in the 21st Century
Colm O'Muircheartaigh

3:30 pm, April 11, 2008
2205 Lefrak Hall
University of Maryland, College Park

Joint Program in Survey Methodology (JPSM) is sponsoring a Distinguished Lecture by Colm O'Muircheartaigh on Friday, April 11. The title is "Survey Design a la carte: Survey Research in the 21st Century." The talk will begin at 3:30 pm at 2205 Lefrak Hall on the University of Maryland, College Park Campus. There will be a reception immediately afterwards.

The talk is open to the public, but please let us know you are coming by sending a note to Rupa Jethwa Eapen at RJEapen@survey.umd.edu. For those of you who haven't been to JPSM, there are directions on our web site: http://www.jpsm.umd.edu/jpsm/?geninfo/directions.htm.

The lecture will discuss the state of survey research in the 21st century. Following its introduction in the late 19th century, the social survey had reached a relatively stable state by the middle of The 20th century. By the beginning of the 21st century, however, the Survey had encountered serious challenges to its claims as the pre-eminent source of scientific data about society. The current challenges of sample design, coverage, and nonresponse have their roots in the development of the survey enterprise. The talk will present an interpretation of the history and some suggestions for the future.

Colm A. O'Muircheartaigh is a professor in the Harris School and Senior fellow in the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). O'Muircheartaigh's research encompasses survey sample design, measurement errors in surveys, cognitive aspects of question wording, and latent variable models for nonresponse. He is principal Investigator on the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Internet Panel Recruitment Survey, and co-principal investigator on NSF's Data Research and Development Center and the National Institute on Aging's National Social Life Health and Aging Project (NSHAP). He is also responsible for the development of methodological innovations in sample design for NORC's face-to-face surveys in the U.S

He joined the Harris School from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where he was the first director of the Methodology Institute, the center for research and training in social science methodology, and a faculty member of the Department of Statistics since 1971. He has also taught at a number of other institutions, having served as a visiting professor at the Universities of Padova, Perugia, Firenze, and Bologna, and, since 1975, has taught At the Summer Institute of the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research.

There will be two discussants-Bob Groves from the University of Michigan and JPSM and Deborah Griffin from the Bureau of the Census. Please join us on the 11th.

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Students' Corner

This month I'd like to bring to your attention something that has interested me the past few months. I start by paraphrasing a good example given by the New York Times science journalist John Tierney (Tierney, 2007). Suppose a pop song is playing on the radio, and it is announced that it has been at the top of the charts for 39 days. And assume that there was no special reason for you to have heard the song at this particular point in time; you just happened to have turned on the radio to a random channel and stumbled upon the song and the announcement. (E.g., you were not actively seeking 39-day chart toppers.) Can you estimate some confidence interval for this song's longevity, with only the following two givens:

  1. the duration of time observed thus far, tpast (e.g., 39 days); and
  2. the assumption that there was no special reason for you to have observed the song at just that time?

The assumption that there is nothing special about this particular moment of observation is called the Copernican Principle, since it is analogous to Copernicus' assumption that there was nothing special about our vantage point in the universe (and thus Copernicus displaced mankind from the center of the universe). But whereas Copernicus was concerned with a spatial observation point, here we are talking about a temporal one.

Astrophysicist J. Richard Gott III has proposed the following line of reasoning to address the question (Gott, 1993). By the Copernican Principle, there was nothing special about the day that we happened to have observed the pop song. It is therefore unlikely that we have just happened to have caught the song at the very tail end of its time at the top of the charts. Quantitatively, there is only a 1 out of 40 chance that we have caught the song in the final one-40th fraction of its time at the top. (We can generalize this and say that there is only a 1 out of X chance that we have caught the song in the final one-Xth fraction of its time at the top.)

To help visualize the situation, let us represent the song's time at the top of the charts as a line segment, whose length represents the unknown length of time T; see the figure below. And let the arrow containing the question mark point to the time at which we have observed the pop song in its time at the top. The probability that we just happen to have made our random observation sometime within the final one-40th fraction of T is 1 out of 40, or 2.5%. So, there is only a 2.5% probability that the song will remain at the top for only one more day, before retiring after a 40-day stretch of time.

timeline

In exactly the same way, Gott would argue that there's only a 1 out of 40 chance that we have caught the song at the very first one-40th fraction of its time at the top. So, there is only a 2.5% probability that the song will remain at the top of the charts for another 39 x (39 days) = 1521 days.

So, we have determined that there is only a 2.5% probability that the song will remain at the top for only one more week, and that there is only a 2.5% that it will remain at the top for another 1521 days. Thus there is a 95% probability that the song's remaining time at the top, in days, is within the interval [1,1521].

Do you agree with this "disarmingly simple statistical calculation" (Babu and Feigelson, 1993)? Is there a flaw in the logic?

Dr. Gott has most famously applied this sort of reasoning called the - delta t argument - (Babu and Feigelson, 1993) to estimate the time remaining before the human species goes extinct. Given that the human species has been around for about tpast=200,000 years, and using the Copernican Principle, Dr. Gott estimates that the time remaining for humans to survive as a species is between 5,100 years (200,000/39 = 5128) and 7.8 million years (200,000x39 = 7,800,000). (Gott, 1993). Using the same sort of argument, he has further observed that there is a 50% chance that we're already into the second half of the human space programme's total lifespan. If we take the age of the human space programme to now be about 47 years (last year, Mr. Tierney was using the number 46 years, so I have incremented the number), that means that there is a 50% chance that it will end by the year 2055. Dr. Gott sees space colonization as crucial for ensuring the survival of our species; given the finite estimate of the time remaining for the human species to survive (7.8 million years), he therefore argues that it is urgent that we expend more resources towards space exploration while we still have an active space programme (Gott, 1993; Gott, 1997; Tierney, 2007).

Interestingly, the Wikipedia entry on using the Copernican Principle to estimate the time remaining for the human race (entitled "Doomsday argument") uses the number of human lives lived thus far rather than the number of years that the human species has survived thus far. Using an estimate that 60 billion humans have been born so far, Wikipedia comes up with a much lower upper estimate of the time remaining to the human race: only 9120 more years! Try reading the Wikipedia entry. Given that the total human population has been rapidly increasing during only the past couple hundred years or so, does it make sense to perform the measurement in terms of human lives rather than chronological years? I suppose the argument might be that, because of the rapid increase in population during the past few centuries, Dr. Gott would have been more likely to have been born and therefore alive to make his observations during the past few centuries, because that's when most humans have been alive.

As you might expect, there have been counterarguments and criticisms of Dr. Gott's estimate for the longevity of the human species. In their 1993 book, authors G. Jogesh Babu and Eric D. Feigelson offer two criticisms of Dr. Gott's "delta t argument." Their first criticism concerns the assumption of a uniform distribution for:

  1. The underlying survival distribution of species; and
  2. The arrival time of the observer (Dr. Gott himself) to obtain his observation.

(Babu and Feigelson, 1993). Item #1 above seems to take issue with the fact that Dr. Gott's application of the delta t argument' to the human species' "survival time" ignores actual data that we have for species longevities using fossil evidence; for example, Homo erectus lasted about 1.6 million years (Gott, 1997). Thus, Babu and Feigelson seem to be arguing that we are not given merely the single piece of information of how long humans have been around, but we actually have more data; thus they would argue that the given item (A) that I mentioned at the beginning of this column is not actually the only piece of information we have.

Item #2 above seems related to Wikipedia's use of human lives rather than chronological time to estimate the human species' survival time. Here, Babu and Feigelson seem to be arguing that there is indeed special reason for Dr. Gott to have observed the human race at just that time. Thus they would argue we violate the assumption in item (B) mentioned at the beginning of this column.

Babu and Feigelson's second criticism is that Dr. Gott has actually calculated the probability P(tpast/39 < tfuture < 30xtpast) = 0.95, but has mistakenly interpreted it as the conditional probability P(tpast/39 < tfuture < 30xtpast|tpast = K) = 0.95, where K is some known fixed quantity such as 39 days or 200,000 years (Babu and Feigelson, 1993).

The aforementioned Wikipedia entry offers several other rather more subtle counterarguments "subtle" here meaning that I, being a mere student, do not fully understand them! If you're interested, take a look at them and see whether you can understand them. See especially the "self-referencing doomsday argument rebuttal."

That's all for this month. If you have any feedback on this column or ideas for future topics, please email me at jmm97@georgetown.edu. As always, your thoughts will be greatly appreciated.

Joe Maisog
Georgetown University / Medical Numerics

References.
Babu GJ and Feigelson ED, Astrostatistics, London:Chapman & Hall, 1996. See Chapter 11, section 4.
Gott JR, Implications of the Copernican principle for our future prospects. Nature. 1993; 363:315
Gott JR, A grim reckoning, New Scientist. 18 Nov 1997; p. 3636.
Landsberg P, Dewynne J, and Please C, Rise and fall, Nature. 1993; 365:384
Monton B, Kierland B, How to predict future duration from present age, The Philosophical Quarterly. 2006 Jan; 56(222):16-38.
Tierney J, A Survival Imperative for Space Colonization, New York Times, July 17, 2007.
Wikipedia entry on the Doomsday Argument: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument

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SIGSTAT Topics for Spring 2008

March 12, 2008: Rasch measurement using SAS procedures

The Rasch measurement model is a latent-trait item response theory model that is being used increasingly to assess and develop multiple-indicator measures of social, psychological, and other phenomena outside of the educational testing field where most of the development of such models has occurred. Specialized software exists to fit response data to Rasch and related models, but for some applications, SAS procedures can also be used. Joint (or unconditional) maximum likelihood models (JML) can be estimated using SAS PROC LOGISTIC. A new STRATA option in PROC LOGISTIC makes it possible to estimate conditional maximum likelihood (CML) models. Marginal maximum likelihood (MML) models can be estimated using PROC NLMIXED. The talk will be presented by Mark Nord.

April 16, 2008: Survival Models in SAS: PROC PHREG Part 1
(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, in November we'll start Chapter 5: Estimating Cox Regression Models with PROC PHREG. Topics discussed are:

  1. The proportional hazards model
  2. Partial likelihood
  3. Tied data

May 21, 2008: Survival Models in SAS: PROC PHREG - Part 2
(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 start Chapter 5: Estimating Cox Regression Models with PROC PHREG.

Topics covered are: Tied data

June 18, 2008: Survival Models in SAS: PROC PHREG - Part 3
(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 start Chapter 5: Estimating Cox Regression Models with PROC PHREG.

Topics covered are: Time-Dependent Covariates

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/.

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Note From The WSS NEWS Editor

Items for publication in the April issue of the WSS NEWS should be submitted no later than March 15, 2008. E-mail items to Michael Feil at michael.feil@usda.gov.

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Click here to see the WSS Board Listing (pdf)
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