Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

The annual meeting of the University Statisticians of Southern Experiment Stations (USSES)was held on the SAS Campus in Cary, NC, in June, 2012. The meeting was joint with the NCCC-170 group. The program involved a progression of talks from SAS employees and also from Francis Giesbrecht, Professor Emeritus from N.C. State. The presentations all covered recent developments in statistical software from SAS and JMP. Technical Program: Speaker Title Radhika Kulkarni High performance analytics : Competing in the 21st century Bradley Jones (JMP) A class of three-level designs for denitive screening in thepresence of second-order effects Francis Giesbrecht(NCSU) Constructing Plans for experiments: A package of SAS modules F. Michael Speed(SAS) Is variable selection in PROC REG obsolete? Min Zhu(SAS) Bias adjustment methods for small sample inference in mixed models Maura Stokes (SAS) Look out: After SAS/STAT 9.3 comes SAS/STAT 12.1! Russ Wolnger (JMP) Update on JMP Genomics Reports from USSES members:  Jason Osborne (NCSU) - No raises in the last four years, but there is talk of one this year. College ofAg continues to be supportive of statistical consulting within the dept. Going to hire half a position(other half through vet school) for non tenure-track consulting  Jerry Davis (UGA) - no cuts this year. admin is \moving towards" hiring somebody at Tifton. No raises last four years.  Edzard van Santen (Auburn) - hiring for the position of head of a consulting center but seems to have ignored the consulting that Edzard has been providing for years. They belatedly asked him to participate in the search and he declined..  Jay Gegan (LSU), 4th year without raises. Lost one position in the Department of Statistics.  Arnold Saxton (UT-Knoxville) - reported favorable outlook in Tennessee, 2 raises of 2.5% across the board, raises the last two years, New Chancellor, New Dean for Agricultural Research.  Linda Young (UFL) - no cuts in ag this year, but cuts elsewhere in the university impact teaching within the Statistics Department. Several personnel changes were reported, Dr. Randles retired, Dr. Casella passed away unexpectedly and Dr. Daniels is leaving the department. All of these will have major impact on the department.  Hoke Hill (Clemson) - reported further minor cuts to the rather drastic ones in the past, with things now level for 2012,2013. After four years of no raises, there was a 2% merit raise last year and there will be cost-of-living and merit raises in the next year. The transition of personnel into the Math. Dept.has been smooth. Pat Gerard was voted by the graduate students as most helpful faculty member, underscoring this smooth transition. New Business Ken Koonce (LSU) raised the issue that the USSES program needs to be validated again this year, with a proposal that needs to be done around June, 2013. There was considerable discussion about the possibility of proposing a deliverable. Edzard lamented the decline of delity to good statistical principles in agronomy journals and Osborne complained that many students seeking statistical consulting had little knowledge of the tenets of sound experimental design, including randomization and blocking. Edzard and Kevin mentioned multivariate methodology as an area where techniques beyond principal components analysis are not well-known. Plans for next year The meeting will be held in Tennessee, most likely at or near the campus of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The date will be sometime in June or July, 2013.