Abstract
A graduate student, Robert Goodnow, in Social Relations had a substantial impact on my life shortly after I came to Harvard, an impact that has rippled through the years. Bob, like many social psychologists, was quantitatively inclined and had good training in statistics and its applications before he became a graduate student. He used his statistical training to help support himself in graduate school by working on projects in the Department of Anesthesia directed by Henry K. Beecher at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Beecher was an organizer and a researcher, and his anesthesia department was among the first to be formed in the U.S.A.
Beecher had many bright physicians carrying out research, either evaluating drugs and medications, especially analgesics, or studying the physiology of the upper respiratory system. These many investigations naturally created the need for special statistical designs and analyses. So many projects required statistical assistance that Goodnow suggested to Beecher that he ask me to help, not only because of the size of the research effort but also because some of the problems being treated required new statistical or mathematical developments.
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Mosteller, F. (2010). Evaluation. In: Fienberg, S., Hoaglin, D., Tanur, J. (eds) The Pleasures of Statistics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-77956-0_16
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