Washington Statistical Society
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June 2005

Contents:


Message from the President

I want to make sure that you take note of a few items as we wind down another successful year in the WSS.

First, if you have not yet tried our new electronic voting procedures, I urge you to do so. (Look for the email from WSS Election.) Early returns show a sharp increase in participation, which is what we hoped would occur. The polls close at 5:00 p.m., June 3rd.

Second, our annual dinner, which rotates between sites in Virginia and Maryland, mostly, will be held on Tuesday, June 14, at Stella's Restaurant in Alexandria. Stella's is just a short walk from the King Street Metro Station and has underground parking available. Our guest speaker, and the recipient of the third annual Gertrude M. Cox Statistics Award, will be Prof. Thomas Belin of UCLA. Tom's talk will be lively and enlightening. In addition to letting us enjoy good food and drink amid good company, the annual dinner provides the occasion for presenting several awards, announcing our election winners, and identifying our new ASA Fellows.

Third, our transition to a primarily electronic newsletter is nearly complete. This issue is the last that will be delivered in hard copy to most of you. For those of you who are new to the electronic version, we hope you will enjoy the more timely delivery. If you have not received the electronic version and have not communicated that you wish to continue to receive the newsletter by paper, see the note on page two.

Last, the June meeting of the WSS Board of Directors is open to all who would like to attend. The meeting will take place from 12:30 to 1:30 on Tuesday, June 28, in the BLS Conference Center. If you are not on the BLS seminar list, e-mail your name and affiliation to wss_seminar@bls.gov at least two days in advance.

Sincerely,
John Czajka

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2005 Annual Dinner

The WSS Annual Dinner will be held Monday, June 14, at Stella's Restaurant, located across from the King Street Metro station in Alexandria, VA. Please see the flyer (pdf) for further details and a reservation form. Thomas Belin, Associate Professor of Biostatistcs at UCLA and winner of the 3rd annual Gertrude M. Cox Statistics Award, will be our guest speaker.

As always, this event provides a great opportunity to spend time with friends and make new acquaintances. We look forward to seeing you there!

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Renee Miller Wins The 2005 Jeanne E. Griffith Mentoring Award

Renee Miller has been a supervisory mathematical statistician in the Statistics and Methods Group (SMG) of the Energy Information Administration (EIA) since 1997. She coaches and mentors a team whose responsibilities include the clearance of EIA data collection forms, management of EIA's workshop program, and the provision of statistical and analytic support to EIA program offices. In addition she has been a mentor to a Presidential Management Fellow. For most of her twenty-five years at EIA, Ms. Miller has been involved with data quality issues. She was the principal author of a series of reports assessing EIA data quality (known as the "State-of-the-Data" reports) and also performed quality control audits.

Guy Caruso, Administrator of EIA says of Rene that he can see "the fruits of her efforts." "I have been able to recognize her influence as their work (junior staff members) matured under her guidance."

Recently, she has been working on data integration issues. One aspect of this work pertains to identifying and resolving cross-cutting data issues at EIA by coordinating the work of EIA's Inter-office Issues Group. An accomplishment of this group was the development of a revision policy for data that had been declared final. Ms. Miller, working with one of the newer people in SMG, presented the results to the American Statistical Association Committee on Energy Statistics.

Ms. Miller oversees the development of new and revised energy data definitions, coaching an SMG team member on coordinating their development. Previously she had chaired EIA's Common Data Definitions Team from 1998, when it was chartered to ensure that EIA has common and accurate data definitions, to 2001 when the agreed-upon work was completed.

Her inter-agency team participation includes program chair of the 2003 Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology Research Conference. In addition she has been on Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology subcommittees on data quality, statistical training, and data editing and was EIA's liaison to the American Statistical Association Committee on Energy Statistics for a number of years.

Prior to coming to EIA, Ms. Miller worked at the U.S. Bureau of the Census. She began her statistical career in the Poverty Statistics Branch and later worked in the Statistical Methods Division. She has an MS in Economic and Social Statistics from Cornell University and a BA in Mathematics from Queens College of the City University of New York. For the past five years she has been participating in the Everybody Wins reading mentoring program, helping elementary school students hone their reading and learning skills.

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Third International Conference on Establishment Surveys
ICES-III
June 18-21, 2007
Hyatt Regency Montreal
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Cosponsored by: American Statistical Association (ASA), ASA Section on Survey Research Methods, ASA Section on Government Statistics, International Association of Survey Statisticians, and Statistical Society of Canada. We invite you to submit proposals for invited paper sessions for presentations to the third International Conference on Establishment Surveys (ICES-III) by December 1, 2005. The ICES-III Program Committee will review the proposals and notify session organizers by the end of February, 2006 if their proposal has been accepted or not. The deadline for contributed papers (including topic contributed sessions) will be June 15, 2006.

Details on how to submit the proposal can be found at:
http://www.amstat.org/meetings/ices/2007/index.cfm

Invited sessions will have four slots of twenty-five minutes each. These will be used for three 25-minute presentations, followed by a 15-minute formal discussion, and a ten-minute floor discussion.

The first International Conference on Establishment Surveys (ICES-I) in 1993 convened more than 400 experts in the area of surveys of businesses, farms, and institutions. This conference set the stage by formally documenting the state of the art in 1993. In 2000 a second conference took a forward look at methods for surveying businesses, farms, and institutions.

The Conference also will include:

Three short courses on Monday, June 18, A keynote speaker and reception on Monday evening, Poster sessions, and software demonstrations throughout the conference, and Following the conference, a CD ROM of all presented papers will be sent to all Conference participants.

Montreal is a city rich in history, art, culture, and learning and sports. It combines the smarts of North America with the laid back insouciance of Europe, high tech and high style. The city's architecture too is an artful mix of old and new, with graceful historic structures lovingly preserved and merged with the cool lines of the 21st century. The visual arts flourish here at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musie D'art Contemporain, and hundreds of top-notch local galleries.

All Conference activities will be held at the Hyatt Regency Montreal. The Hyatt Regency Montreal web site is > http://montreal.hyatt.com/. (Hotel reservations will be open on March 1, 2007.)

Attendees from outside Canada, and this could include United States passport holders, must ensure they have the proper travel documents - e.g., passport, visa - to enter and leave Canada.

Further Conference information can be accessed on the ICES-III Web link provided above.

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Email Delivery

If you did not receive this issue electronically and you have not notified us that you wish to receive the newsletter in hardcopy, please send your preferred email address to svm@mitre.org and indicate that this is your address for the WSS newsletter. To continue to receive the newsletter in hard copy, contact the WSS secretary at courtney.nreiser@census.gov or (301) 763-4142.

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Note From The WSS NEWS Editor

Items for publication in the September WSS NEWS should be submitted no later than July 26, 2005. E-mail items to Michael Feil at michael.feil@usda.gov.

The biographical information of the candidates for the Board of Directors appeared in the May issue.

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Click here to see the WSS Board Listing (pdf)
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