andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-970 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Sining Chen told me they’re hiring in the statistics group at Bell Labs . I’ll do my bit for economic stimulus by announcing this job (see below). I love Bell Labs. I worked there for three summers, in a physics lab in 1985-86 under the supervision of Loren Pfeiffer, and by myself in the statistics group in 1990. I learned a lot working for Loren. He was a really smart and driven guy. His lab was a small set of rooms—in Bell Labs, everything’s in a small room, as they value the positive externality of close physical proximity of different labs, which you get by making each lab compact—and it was Loren, his assistant (a guy named Ken West who kept everything running in the lab), and three summer students: me, Gowton Achaibar, and a girl whose name I’ve forgotten. Gowtan and I had a lot of fun chatting in the lab. One day I made a silly comment about Gowton’s accent—he was from Guyana and pronounced “three” as “tree”—and then I apologized and said: Hey, here I am making fun o
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1 Sining Chen told me they’re hiring in the statistics group at Bell Labs . [sent-1, score-0.206]
2 I worked there for three summers, in a physics lab in 1985-86 under the supervision of Loren Pfeiffer, and by myself in the statistics group in 1990. [sent-4, score-0.47]
3 He was in his mid-40s and was married with a little baby, but he came in to the lab every day and worked the whole time. [sent-17, score-0.226]
4 The second summer I worked at the Labs, I was making a huge amount of progress near the end, but then I had to stop the project in the middle because I’d planned a trip to Europe. [sent-27, score-0.237]
5 When I worked there in 85 and 86, I stayed in some dorm housing they arranged at a nearby college campus. [sent-39, score-0.341]
6 One of my roommates in 85 was a fun guy named Bob Miller who had a thick Pittsburgh accent and a Pierce Brosnan-like attractiveness to women. [sent-40, score-0.501]
7 We had two other roommates who were a couple years older: Guy Marong from Luxembourg and a guy whose name I forget from the Bronx who had a tough life—during the year he went to school at the College of Staten Island, which he said involved an exhausting subway/ferry/bus commute. [sent-43, score-0.324]
8 This guy was a big eater—for dinner he would fry up three big burgers on the stove—and he had some great stories. [sent-44, score-0.199]
9 As a teenager, he told us, he’d worked in a religious store in the Bronx, the kind of store that sold statues of angels in the front and potions in the back. [sent-45, score-0.277]
10 Bell Labs arranged a bus that would take us from the dorms to the work in the morning and return us at 5 in the afternoon. [sent-47, score-0.26]
11 One weekend night a bunch of us drove to some faraway place to go to a club that wouldn’t let us all in—they checked id’s and I was only 20. [sent-51, score-0.315]
12 So we ended up driving back—the guy driving me had had a few drunks and was going way too fast on the freeway ramp. [sent-52, score-0.32]
13 (A couple years later a different friend got mad at me because I insisted on taking the subway rather than get in a car he was driving from Manhattan to Brooklyn. [sent-54, score-0.259]
14 ) I had some roommates in 1986 as well, but it wasn’t quite so much fun, maybe it was the different group or maybe just that the second year is never quite the same. [sent-57, score-0.203]
15 One of my three roommates was Rick, a very nice guy from southern Ohio, where his family ran a car-repair place. [sent-59, score-0.392]
16 One of the others was a flamboyant Latino gay guy named Art who I would sometimes give a lift to a club in New Brunswick. [sent-60, score-0.281]
17 One weekend Rick had a friend visiting, his roommate from MIT, a buttoned-down white guy who was a real homophobe. [sent-64, score-0.222]
18 The last time I was there was a bit over five years ago, when Diane Lambert was nice enough to invite me to a mini-conference they’d arranged on the occasion of John Chambers’s retirement. [sent-125, score-0.293]
19 The conference was interesting and I followed it up by writing a several-paged single-spaced letter in my notebook (my paper notebook—this was before I had the portable laptop computer) to John, conveying my thoughts on the connections between statistical graphics and complex modeling. [sent-127, score-0.284]
20 When I was applying to grad schools in physics, Loren was one of my letter writers, but I was a little afraid of what he might write—he was a very nice guy but a bit personally distant—so as a safeguard I had one of his letters sent to me. [sent-140, score-0.305]
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