A Tale of Working for Two Federal Government Agencies

• Activity Number: 553
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 6, 2014 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section for Statistical Programmers and Analysts
• Author(s): Mark Otto*+
• Companies: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Abstract

Much of my work with Time Series Staff at the Census Bureau was supporting and developing the seasonal adjustment program,X-12-ARIMA. At the Fish and Wildlife Service, I now design and analyze migratory bird surveys. Much of my time is spent on developing databases for surveys and on checking and preparing data for analysis. The actual analyses have usually been easy. I will talk about (1) developing, testing, and writing help files for a highly-used program (2) using relational databases to ensure the integrity of the data, (3) acquiring flexible, scalable tools to process and check data, and (4) using R to combine the data, code, and help files, along with my analyses. Even though I am not a programmer, much of my work has involved programming because the particular statistical tools were not available. These skills are not glamorous but have been a great help throughout my Federal career.