Quant

If you can, reply with a, "This would be awesome, thank you," or whatever else you feel would be appropriate. :D It's just record-keeping, promise. :D

Tal Fishman

The e-mail ended with something along the lines of "we'll get back to you soon..."

@Aarthi done

Aarthi

@TalFishman brilliant. thank you so much! :D

how has your day been?

Tal Fishman

well, I just discovered that Excel was rounding some numbers in a spreadsheet I was looking at, and some numbers I thought would be impossible to calculate turn out to be really easy to calculate

so now I can get the numbers, but I've just wasted the last few days trying to work around it

so not bad overall, how about yourself?

Aarthi

Not too shabby, myself; I've been writing =index(A1:AXX,(Randbetween(1, XX)) functions lately.

Otherwise, just, you know, trying to stay atop an ever-increasing pile of email.

We saw each other in Econ a lot, right?

/feels like years ago

Tal Fishman

8:15 PM

@Aarthi Yeah, not enough die-hard econ ppl on SE network yet, it seems.

home page says 98 visitors a day, certainly not much

Aarthi

@TalFishman Alas, yes. Turukawa is awesome, though. I sent the link to my university department. I was an econ major, so I hope that helps some.

We have something of a similar problem on QF, iirc.

Tal Fishman

I'm an econ PhD, but I don't keep that close contact with my former classmates or professors.

The problem on QF is that too many people think they know enough to ask questions, but their questions end up being very basic.

Joel Spolsky's talked about it a bunch of times in the podcasts, I'm not sure what we should do about it, any advice?

Aarthi

Hmm.

Tal Fishman

The traffic certainly isn't bad, at 700+ visitors per day, but I feel too few of them are true quants/professionals/experts.

Aarthi

Short of getting the site featured in some sort of quant publication? your best bet is trying for finance students.

@TalFishman Ooh, yeah that's the bigger issue.

You might have to have Bloomberg or something tweet out a really good question.

Oof, I don't really know, but in part because I wasn't a real quant jock like that.

I was more soft-skills consulting type stuff.

Tal Fishman

8:20 PM

I think we have a few students already, their questions are pretty good, but working quants tend to have different sorts of questions.

I think I have maybe 10 twitter followers, and probably over half of them are also heavy users on QF.SE.

Aarthi

laughs

Hrmmmm.

The students that are using the site -- get them to be part of the Pizza Ambassadors program!

Q: Introducing Physics.SE University Ambassadors Program: calling students and teachers

StackExchange is looking for students and teachers who might be interested in helping us kick off/formalize a university pizza ambassador-type program. Physics.StackExchange would like to sponsor university students (college or graduate) and faculty members who are excited about Physics, Stack Ex...

That's for physics, but email Seth/Lauren and I'm sure they'd be happy to get Quant involved.

This way, professors and research pros can get on board, via their students.

Tal Fishman

OK, great ideas. Right now we're sort of just trying to come down harder on the marginally on-topic basic questions. If you look at the front page, you'll see at least 5 questions with negative votes, and I think we've been doing more of that since Joel mentioned us in the podcast.

But it's a tough balance sometimes, b/c sometimes the questions are not horrible, they're just not terribly difficult for a real quant.

Aarthi

That's really good, too; most of those could probably be moved to money.se without a lot of issue.

Tal Fishman

Why don't non-mods have the ability to migrate questions?

Aarthi

@TalFishman It's because the mods often ask each other if questions are on topic for other sites; it's a QC measure, basically.

Lauren

8:27 PM

hey all - I haven't really been following this conversation but I'm helping run the ambassadors program

if anyone is interested i'm happy to help you out

lauren@stackexchange.com

Tal Fishman

@Lauren Thanks, I'll try posting about it on our meta.

Lauren

@TalFishman sounds good

I'm not very active on quant.se, so just shoot me an email or ping me if you want my input or help

Tal Fishman

Q: Quant.SE University Ambassadors Program: calling students and teachers

Lauren Gundrum, member of CHAOS, has offered to help any interested students and teachers with starting a pizza ambassadors program to help get the word out about this site. Here's the description from Physics.SE: StackExchange is looking for students and teachers who might be interested i...