2nd Announcement and Call for Papers --------------------------------------

The 4th German Stata Users Group Meeting will be held on Friday, 31th March 2006 in Mannheim at the University of Mannheim. We would like to invite everybody from everywhere who is interested in using Stata to attend this meeting.

In the meeting various papers will be presented, but there will also be time for discussion. Presentations will focus on three main topics: user-written Stata programs, research and teaching experience using Stata, and critiques of Stata facilities in specific fields. We are very delighted that Alan Riley, Vice President of Software Development, and Roberto Gutierrez, Director of Statistics, will be able to join us and will inform us about the latest developments at StataCorp.

We are also delighted to have Andrew Pickles (University of Manchester) and Roger Newson (King?s College London) as international guest speakers. Andrew Pickles is one of the developers of -gllamm-, the famous user written program for "Generalized latent linear and mixed models". Roger Newson is an associate editor of the Stata Journal, and well known to Stata users for various programs and articles in the Stata Journal. The presentations of the international key note speakers will be on:

- Intervention evaluation using -gllamm- (Pickles) - Resultssets, resultsspreadsheets and resultsplots in Stata (Newson)

The academic program of the meeting is being organized by Johannes Giesecke, University of Mannheim (giesecke@rumms.uni-mannheim.de ), Ulrich Kohler, WZB (kohler@wz-berlin.de) and Fred Ramb, German Central Bank (fred.ramb@bundesbank.de). The conference language will be English due to the international nature of the meeting and the participation of non-German guest speakers. Once a final program has been put together it will be posted on the web (http://www.stata.com and http://www.dpc.de) and mailed to the Stata users. The deadline for submissions is 28th February 2006.

The logistics of the conference are being organized by Dittrich und Partner, distributor of Stata in several countries including Germany and Austria (http://www.dpc.de).

Participants are asked to travel on their own fees. There will be a small conference fee (regular 20 Euro, students 10 Euro) to cover costs of coffee, tea, and luncheons. There will also be an optional informal meal at a Mannheim restaurant on Friday evening (costs: 20 Euro).

You can enroll by contacting Anke Mrosek by email or by writing, phoning, or faxing to

Anke Mrosek Dittrich & Partner Consulting GmbH Kieler Str. 17 42697 Solingen

Tel: +49 (0) 212 260 66-24 Fax:+49 (0) 212 260 66 -66 anke.mrosek@dpc.de.

We look forward to seeing you in Mannheim on March 31th where you can help us to make this an exciting and interesting event.

The conference venue is:

Universität Mannheim Verfügungsgebäude L7

(see http://www.uni-mannheim.de)

Johannes Giesecke, Ulrich Kohler, Fred Ramb