The Fall North American Stata Users Group (FNASUG) meeting will be held 13-14 November 2008 at Handlery Union Square Hotel, located in downtown San Francisco. This will be the first Stata users’ meeting to be held in San Francisco. Previous North American meetings have been held in Boston, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Stata Users Group meetings started in Britain in 1995 and have been spreading to more and more countries, including Italy, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Australia, Poland, and the United States. Talks are intended to be accessible to a general audience with mixed levels of expertise in Stata and statistics. Stata developers will also attend, both to present and to take notes during the popular "wishes and grumbles" session. We hope you will consider joining the meeting, as a presenter or an attendee.

Submission information

We encourage submission on any topic to do with the use of Stata in research, teaching, or any other field such as the following:

• Using Stata for modeling and analysis
• User-written Stata programs
• Case studies of research or teaching using Stata
• Using Stata to import and manage data
• Teaching Stata
• Teaching statistics with Stata
• Surveys or critiques of Stata facilities in specific fields
• Software comparisons

Please indicate whether you wish to give a

• 10-minute talk (followed by a 5-minute discussion),
• 20-minute talk (followed by a 5-minute discussion), or
• 45-minute review or tutorial (followed by a 5-minute discussion).

Please submit an abstract and contact information (name, affiliation, postal address, email address, and fax and phone numbers) online at http://repec.org/fnasug08/fnasug1.php by September 30, 2008. The abstract should be no longer than 200 words. You should also indicate the length of presentation you have in mind. Members of the scientific organizing committee will review abstracts. Conference fees will be waived for presenters.

Presenters will be asked to provide materials related to their talk (slides and programs/datasets, where applicable) in electronic form, preferably before the meetings, to the organizing committee, so that they may be posted on our web site and in the Stata Users Group RePEc archive.

If you would like to discuss an idea for a presentation or have questions about the program format, please contact a member of the organizing committee (listed below).

Please see the Stata web site for complete information (http://www.stata.com/meeting/fnasug08).

• Xiao Chen, UCLA (jingy1@ucla.edu) (co-chair)
• Phil Ender, UCLA (ender@ucla.edu)
• Estie Hudes, UCSF (estie.hudes@ucsf.edu)
• Tony Lachenbruch, Oregon State (peter.lachenbruch@oregonstate.edu)
• Bill Mason, UCLA (masonwm@ucla.edu)
• Sophia Rabe-Hesketh, UC Berkeley (sophiarh@berkeley.edu) (co-chair)
• Doug Steigerwald, UC Santa Barbara (doug@econ.ucsb.edu)

• Chris Farrar, StataCorp LP
• Gretchen Farrar, StataCorp LP