NCR-170: Research Advances in Agricultural Statistics

Minutes of the meeting held July 11-12, 2002, University of Maryland, College Park

Official Members Present: J. Aleong (VT), T. Bailey (IA), D. Bullock (IL), P. Cornelius (KY), B. Craig (IN), L. Douglass (MD), S. Durham (UT), G. Fernandez (NV), E. Gbur (AR), L Miller (USDA-CSREES), B. Shafii (ID), R. Tempelman (MI), M. West (USDA-ARS-NPA)

Official Members Absent: C. Goad (OK), L. Madden (OH), D. Nettleton (IA), R. Nordheim (WI), T. Park (GA), B. Yandell (WI), R. Alldredge (WA), L. Young (NE)

Guests/Participants: G. Bollero (IL), M. Christman (MD), A. Huberty (MD), M. Jackson, M. Kramer (USDA-ARS-BA), K. Lii (CA), V. Louis, D. Meek (USDA-ARS-MWA), G. Milliken (KS),B. Momen (MD), M. Ould-Moustapha, C. Ren (SD), E. Russek-Cohen (MD), C. Swan (MD), B. Vinyard (USDA-ARS-BA), J. Zhu (WI), H. Zhang (WA)

2002 Officers:
Larry Douglass, Chair; Mark West, Secretary
 

Thursday, July 11, 2002

The meeting began on 8:45 am with opening remarks from Estelle Russek-Cohen and greetings from Dr. Scott Angle, Associate Dean, College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Associate Director, Maryland Agricultural Experiment Station. Technical presentation in the morning were given by Mary Christman for Linda Young ("Change of support and related issues"), Jun Zhu ("Spatial scale - combining data at different scales" ), Estelle Russek-Cohen, ("Bivariate spatial issues"), George Milliken ("Comparing split-plot designs and spatial structures") and Ed Gbur and Bruce Craig ("Choice of variogram functions").

Afternoon presentations were given by Larry Douglass ("Data driven analyses"), Hao Zhang ("Spatial Sampling Designs"), and Mark West ("Spacing of Samples in Spatial Analyses"). The afternoon session ended at 4:00 and the group enjoyed an ice cream making demonstration at the university dairy.

Friday, July 13, 2002

Friday's session began at 8:15 am with a computer demonstration by George Fernandez ("SAS macros for data mining"). This was followed by speakers Matt Kramer ("Spatial analyses of Binomial and exponentially distributed data") and Rob Tempelman ("Spatial analyses and microarray experiments"). The business meeting began at 10:00 am with Larry Miller providing the group an administrative update.  Larry Douglas presided over new business. The first issue that was addressed was to determine who would be program chair for next year's meeting. Mary Christman was selected and accepted the responsibility. Next year's meeting will be held in Reno, NV with George Fernandez hosting. The tentative dates for next year's meeting are July 10-11, 2003. Tentatively the meeting will be in St. Augustine in 2004 to be held concurrently with the USSES meeting.

The meeting proceeded with the issue of where the NCR170 group was headed. What product are we interested in developing? What is the group's intended audience? While it was agreed that the Mixed Model Workshops offered to researchers in agriculture were successful and they should be continued, it was also agreed on that more time is needed to pursue our interests in Spatial Statistics before we could decide on a product or audience.

Larry Douglass announced that Cole Gustafson is no longer the project's administrative advisor. Currently Ken Grafton (NDSU) has this office. Larry Miller stated that the current NCR170 project is on it's second year of approval.

A repository for NCR-170 materials and resources was discussed. The consensus was presentations would be stored in pdf format and available on our NCR170 web-site but that portion of the web-site would be password accessible for members only. All members and interested participants are encouraged to supply resources for Spatial Statistics.

Next year's project topics:

Possible external speaker topics for next year:
    1. SAS ( Genomics)
    2. Arcview

It was noted that the program chair needs to coordinate with the host to set up our next meeting and to please target the KSU Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture in April 2003 for finalization. The group extended their thanks and gratitude to Estelle Russek-Cohen, Mary Christman and Larry Douglas for a very enjoyable meeting. The meeting adjourned at 12:00 pm.