We had a mostly successful meeting I think. We are still working out
some technical kinks and appreciate your patience. We did get quite a
few remote participants in through the conference calling system which,
from our end, seemed to go well. (John - we moved the speaker to the
middle of the room and hope that helped). The sound over the web cam
did not work and I understand they will be trying a new system next
week for the sound. Another option is to call in on the teleconference
line.

Thanks to Lisa and Curt for overseeing our web page and e-mail list
respectively. I forgot to mention that Carey Priebe (Johns Hopkins)
has an interesting sounding link on his web site "Scan Statistics on
Enron Graphs" which we all might enjoy viewing. Our URL is
http://www.samsi.info/200506/ndhs/workinggroup/ad/
and it contains a secure data link as well as other information that I
will mention shortly. Since our web page is up and running, let me suggest
that all future presentations be posted on that web page if possible so
that our remote participants can view them as they are presented.

Myron, Henry, and Galit mentioned some interesting data sources and I
am hoping all of us will keep thinking about this. Gauri did an
excellent job reviewing the Kulldorff paper A Spatial Scan Statistic.
That is one of our web page scanned papers. There was quite a bit of
discussion centered around this paper. Ideas like taking unions of the
"zones" that the statistic detects and trying to somehow rank the zones
came up. There may be some research component that emerges from this.

For next week, Yajun will talk with us about change point detection
methods. I'll say a little about time series methodology and
"intervention analysis" if time remains, or will talk about it the next
time. I am a total novice at this but am willing to be the emcee as
long as I can get guidance and help from the group. Susie has agreed
also to give us an introduction to her area of interest at a later
meeting.

I suggest that we continue by each of us volunteering to present
something (a paper or something about our area of research) at a future
meeting. Please think about what you might be willing to do. Ideally,
it would be like today's presentation, which I thought generated some
interesting discussion, and would be posted in some electronic form
prior to your Thursday. Suggestions from our distance participants as
to relevant papers would also be appreciated. Finally, Lisa suggested
a couple of information sources

http://www.syndromic.org/index.php
and
http://www.niss.org/dgii/TR/FienbergShmueli-SIM-2005.pdf

that might be of interest to the group (thanks Lisa). Electronic
resources or datasets can be sent to Lisa <[email protected]> for
posting.