ASA President Nancy Geller led the board through a packed agenda during its first meeting of 2011 at the ASA Office in Alexandria, Virginia, April 8–9.

The International Indian Statistical Association Conference, titled “Probability, Statistics, and Data Analysis,” attracted close to 300 participants that included both well-established and emerging young statisticians from Germany, France, South Africa, Canada, Thailand, Singapore, and India.

The executive committee of the Operations Research Society of South Africa (ORSSA) recently awarded its 2011 conference to the Zimbabwean OR community. In doing so, ORSSA hopes to foster greater collaboration and cooperation across southern African OR communities, accelerate the expansion of OR applications and education in Zimbabwe, and encourage the establishment of a Zimbabwean OR society.

The special issue of Statistical Analysis and Data Mining is dedicated to papers from the field of symbolic data analysis.

On March 30, Indian scientist and former president of India A.P.J. Abdul Kalam lay the foundation stone for Sankhya, The National Museum of Statistics, at the University of Hyderabad campus.

The Operations Research Society of Eastern Africa will host ORSEA 2011 at the Kenyatta International Conference Center in Nairobi, Kenya, from October 13–14.

At this year’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Section U—the Statistics Section of AAAS—celebrated its 50th anniversary.

The Research Section of the Royal Statistical Society is seeking manuscripts for possible publication, with discussion, in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B.

The U.S. Census Bureau announced in March that it is releasing its Synthetic Longitudinal Business Database Beta Data Product (SynLBD) for use by the general public.

SIAM, joint publisher of the ASA-SIAM Series on Statistics and Applied Probability, has enacted the Textbook Adoption Discount Program, which offers students 20% off list price for any SIAM book adopted as a primary text for an undergraduate- or graduate-level course.