Everybody else: you've got a few more hours to nominate if you're thinking about it. Thanks to @RoryAlsop, @JaneS, and @yochannah for standing. We've got three candidates with different mixes of experience; should be an interesting election, and even though there's only one seat, I think we'll all benefit from the discussions that'll come from it.
In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&A thread for the candidates. Questions collected from an earlier thread have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as the space for the candidates to provide their answers. Due to the lack of submission count, we have sel...
I saw that @Enderland, but I didn't see that anyone had answered yet. on CR several Candidates had already started on their Questionnaire prior to the actual post. I am kind of surprised that there aren't that many that ran for moderator.
I'd like all of your constructive comment on these two questions: 1) interesting, but ambiguous, sprawling and lacks specific context (which phone? shared office phone? cellphone? 'Necessary' for what? Just for TA'ing? Interacting with supervisor? Preparation for effective communicating in general, outside the lab, with non-academics?)...
@smci Regarding the phone question: I don't really think it needs to be addressed by a mod. The community has managed to understand it and provide meaningful answers (I actually upvoted it myself, as I've worked in academia-related places where no one would answer the phone, including one guy who was borderline phobic of it).
@smci The second question you've asked seems like a reasonable edit. When you're answering a question it does need to be in the context of the question, not just the title - and the body of the question did clearly mention that it was regarding mathematical proofs. I'd suggest 1) modify your existing answer to apply to only mathematics, which would answer the question more effectively anyway,
@smci and possibly 2) consider asking a similar question in a broader or non-mathematical scope, if you think it would be accepted by the community. That said, I'm not a very active Academia.SE member, so I don't feel that I can specifically advice for them :)
yochannah: The phone question totally needs to be addressed by a mod, that's why I'm explicitly bringing it to your attention. It's so sloppily-worded it could mean twenty different things: 1a) Is it a reasonable expectations that all academic interactions are by email, so you never need to pick up the phone? (What if you need to sign for an important courier delivery, and you fail to?)
1b) You work in a shared office with 10 other people and one shared landline. It rings constantly. It might be for you, and urgent, but then again it might not. There is no caller ID. Is it "necessary" for you to answer it?
1c) You TA a class. Can your supervisor require you to answer questions by phone? (as well as email). What if some students are remote/ off-campus? What if your email interaction is not great and they prefer to use the phone? What if your professor messed up an assignment definition, they're unavailable, and it's 2 hours before submission? (I've seen this happen, multiple times)
1d) As a TA, should you be required to disclose your cell number to students? If yes, what is a reasonable expectation of when you are/aren't required to answer to them? What if a handful of them overuse it, can you stop answering any of them?
It's pretty much a case study in how to not write a question on SE network, waste everyone's time and cause aggravation all because users can't be bothered stating things clearly.
2) Since the generality of the original title ("Footnotes in proofs?") disagreed strongly with the specificity of the question details. I interpreted the details as being just one for-instance, and if the OP had actually wanted to ask only about mathematics papers, they would have taken all of like 5 seconds to make that self-evident edit. Since they didn't, and just titled it "Footnotes in proofs?", I answered that question as asked. Signal-processing and ML papers are very different to
... maths papers, for the reasons I stated. Clearly, putting effort in and only getting downvotes and cranky comments back is not worth my time.
(By the way, the above examples are for Academia.SE not TheWorkplace, simply because they were paradigmatic examples I recently found that illustrate generic SE behavior problems)
@enderland true; if I had a Workplace example at hand to illustrate, I would have posted it. If any of you know of one, please post it and let us discuss it instead. If none of you know of one, I still see a lot of value in discussing either both my examples 1),2)
2015 Workplace Moderator Election
2015 Workplace Moderator Election