WSS NEWS

News about activities of the Washington Statistical Society
A Chapter of the American Statistical Association

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April 2000

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Contents:

• WSS Annual Dinner
• Herriot Award Nominations Sought
• ICES II, June 17-21, Buffalo, NY
• SIGSTAT for April
• Employment Opportunities
• Courses
• Seminars
• Area Meetings and Courses (Adobe Acrobat PDF file)
• Note From The WSS NEWS Editor
• WSS People

Herriot Award Nominations Sought

After the sudden death in May, 1994 of Roger Herriot, an Associate Commissioner for Statistical Standards and Methodology at the National Center for Education Statistics, the Washington Statistical Society, the Social Statistics and Government Statistics Sections of the American Statistical Association established an award in his memory to recognize individuals who develop unique approaches to the solution of statistical problems in federal data collection programs.

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;
• Improvements and use of statistical data or policy analysis.

The recipient of the 2000 Roger Herriot Award will be chosen by a committee of representatives of the Social Statistics Section and Government Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association and a representative of the Washington Statistical Society. Roger Herriot was associated with and strongly supportive of these organizations during his career. The award consists of an honorarium of $500 and a framed citation.

Joseph Waksberg (Westat), Monroe Sirken (National Center for Health Statistics), Constance Citro (National Academy of Sciences), Roderick Harrison (U.S. Bureau of the Census), Clyde Tucker (Bureau of Labor Statistics), and Tom Jabine (Consultant) are previous recipients of the Herriot Award.

The award is not restricted 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, from entry to senior, federal employees, private sector employees, or employees of the academic community, may be nominated on the basis of the significance of the specific contribution.

A nomination form can be obtained by contacting Fritz Scheuren at 202-261-5886, by fax at 703-549-1119, or e-mail scheuren@aol.com.

All nomination forms should be returned to the Roger Herriot Award Committee, c/o Fritz Scheuren, 1402 Ruffner Road, Alexandria, VA 22302. Completed nomination forms must be received by April 28, 2000.

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ICES II, June 17-21, Buffalo, NY

Among the invited topics are business registers, linking longitudinal business and household data, coverage in school sampling frames, coordinating sampling between and within surveys, Poisson sampling, e-mail and web-based data collection, use of cognitive methods in establishment surveys, outliers, strategies for editing and imputation, the use of administrative records, generalized systems for processing and for estimation, variance estimation with imputed data, trend estimation, seasonal adjustment, the measurement of commodity flows, and business metadata.

The web-site, www.eia.doe.gov/ices2, contains both invited program and logistical information. Very soon a preliminary schedule of the entire program, including contributed papers and software demos, will be available there. June 17 is set aside for short courses, a bargain at $50. June 18 features a conference luncheon, Linacre's keynote address, and Niagara Falls tours. Sessions and software demos run June 19-21, ending around noon on Wednesday. May 22 is the deadline for early conference registration at the rate of $350. The Adam's Mark Hotel, the conference site, is offering special room rates until the supply runs out or May 22, at the latest.

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SIGSTAT for April, 2000

The April SIGSTAT meeting will be on the 5th and features a demo of some new SPSS products by Laura Wood and Bill Haffey of SPSS. In particular, the topics covered will be:

The release of SPSS 10
• Model deployment features
• New architecture
1. The new SPSS Maps module

2. The new time series product, 'DecisionTime', as well as the DecisionTime model viewer, 'WhatIf'?

3. A demonstration of the SPSS data mining product, 'Clementine'.

Directions to the building can be found at the SIGSTAT website, www.econ.ag.gov/sigstat/.

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Note From The WSS NEWS Editor

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WSS People

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First posted March 31, 2000
Last modified June 2, 2000

Webmaster: Dan Jacobs, Maryland Sea Grant