Hi Everyone:
Given that there's currently a government shutdown of non-essential government employees, and as a former government non-essential employee, I have a question to ask: Did I do anything worthwhile in my six years of working for the US Government?
To give some background, I left my home at Virginia Tech in November of 1975 and went to work for the United States Census Bureau in Suitland, Maryland (which is right outside of Wshington DC) as a Mathematical Statistician. My first three-and a-half years I worked in Statistical Methods Division with the vast majority of my work being on something called
The Annual Housing Survey which (I believe) still exists today and is now called the
American Housing Survey (AHS). Anyway, after three-and-a-half years of this I was an expert on things like how many rooms were in the typical house, how mobile homes were difficult to find, and what the differences were between urban and rural housing.
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ahs.html
My next two-and-a-half years were spent in Laguna Niguel CA at one of the three processing centers doing Quality Control work for the 1980 Census. This included a period of over six months where I worked a minimum of 10 hours a day, didn't have a day off, and was not paid for most of this overtime. I also had as much as 700 people working for me. And even though I was still a mathematical statistician, I think most of my time was spent dealing with bad clerks who didn't want to do their job.
As a result of my six years with Census, today I refuse to participate in any surveys and believe that the number of questions on the decennial Census should be reduced. Also, to show I actually did a few things during my time at Census, in August of 1978 I presented a paper which I wrote at The American Statistical Convention titled "The Advantages and Disadvantages of Rotating the Annual Housing Survey, National Sample From a Nonresponse Point of View" and below you will find a link to a Statistical Policy Working Paper where my name is mentioned:
https://nces.ed.gov/FCSM/pdf/spwp3.pdf
All comments are welcome.
Best wishes,
Mason
PS: As an aside, one worthwhile thing I did learn was that it's best to design statistical surveys so that they are "self-weighting." When I got into gambling, I immediately understood that you need to do the opposite if you want to be successful at games like poker. Those of you who have read my
Gambling Theory book will be familiar with what I call "Non-Self-Weighting Strategies." Well, my years at Census is where this came from.
Also, my best friend from graduate school and my years at Census was a man named John H. Thompson who became the 24th Director of the U.S. Census Bureau from 2013 into 2017. Ironically, the last time we talked was during the government shut-down under President Obama. He actually spoke to me from his office at the Census Bureau and told me he was one of the only people there. Here's his bio, and notice that his degrees are exactly the same as mine and his early years at Census he also worked in Statistical Methods Division:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_H._Thompson