For anyone interested in statistics and in attending the annual meeting of
the American College of Sports Medicine in Denver, May 31-June 3, 2006...

Last year there was a successful trial of a thematic poster session on
biostatistics. The conference committee has therefore now created a
category for submission of free communications under this heading, in the
section on Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Health Promotion. Please make a
special effort to submit an abstract in this category for the Denver
meeting. We need half a dozen submissions or more to keep the category
there for future meetings, and to keep the conference committee favorably
disposed to accepting our proposals for the special symposia, tutorial
lectures and so on. It might help if you let me or Ian Shrier know whether
you intend to submit anything, in case we have to stir up more interest.

The deadline for submission of abstracts is Monday November 1. That's only
two weeks away. For more information, click on the link to the submission
site at http://www.acsm.org/.

Will Hopkins and Ian Shrier
Co-chairs, ACSM Biostatistics Interest Group

P.S. A number of people submitted proposals for special presentations on
stats at the next meeting. (The deadline for those proposals was
mid-June.) The conference committee recently decided to amalgamate some of
the proposals into a single symposium, which was finally agreed as follows:

Symposium title: Tradition and Innovation in Data Analysis
Moderator: Glen Fincher

"Show me the data!" Using Graphs to Guide Analysis, Understand Data, and
Present Results (Dwight J. The)

Choosing a Model: Assumptions, Outliers, and Transformations
(Alan M.
Batterham)

Magnitude Matters: Effect Size in Research and Clinical Practice
(Will G. Hopkins)