I recently found a little bit of spare time, so I've been working on adding more tournaments to the database. I'd like this thread to be stickied as a running list of which tournaments are up. You can and should also post in this thread to request a particular tournament. You are welcome to bring any mistakes in the entry to my attention in this thread, but it would be better if you just emailed me with the text [QBDB] in the subject line. That's also a good place to make feature suggestions, though right now I'm solely focused on adding more content; additional features will come later. Finally, you can email me if you would like to help with the project. At the moment, I have password-protected the upload page but if you are interested in helping me, I'll make an account for you so you can upload stuff. You are much more likely to see some particular tournament entered into the database if you volunteer to help. Distributed workloads mean that if everyone formats just one set, we'll soon have every tournament ever played. I'll outline what you can do to help in the next post.
With that in mind, here is the list, sorted by year:
2009
ACF Nationals
The Emergency
Early Fall Tournament
Lederberg Memorial Science
Chicago Open
2008
Penn Bowl
ACF Regionals
MLK/Terrapin
ACF Nationals
Cardinal Classic
Chicago Open
EFT
FEUERBACH
Gaddis
Minnesota Open
July Crisis
Chicago Open Lit Doubles
T-Party
Illinois Open
Zot Bowl
2007
Michigan MLK
Maryland Terrapin
ACF Nationals
ACF Fall
Penn Bowl
Florida Sunshine State Invitational
Chicago Open
Literature Doubles
2006
ACF Fall
ACF Regionals
Aztlan Cup
Last edited by grapesmoker on Wed Oct 28, 2009 4:21 pm, edited 19 times in total.
Jerry Vinokurov
ex-LJHS, ex-Berkeley, ex-Brown, sorta-ex-CMU
presently: John Jay College Economics
code ape, loud voice, general nuissance
Format packets according to the ACF formatting guidelines. That means that tossups should look like this (thanks Andrew Hart):
Its creator lists "RETURN 2 DA PIT" as a personal favorite, and it is followed by Jared McGrath's "Jambalaya of the World's Cities and Soundscapes." Its first iteration featured a discussion about the Generation of 98 that culminated with an Antonio Machado poem being read by "Andrew from Minnesota," while the second version saw "Matt from Virginia's" discussion of Henrik Ibsen interrupted by a girl who apologized for being late for the next slot. For 10 points, name this "show about learning," hosted by a certain literature-loving Maryland quizbowler.
ANSWER: Unnamed Show 621 [accept Jonathan Magin's unnamed radio show or equivalents; prompt on Jonathan Magin]
And bonuses like this:
A sacred text of this religion centers on the fifteen tasks undergone by Jerry to make himself fiercer, including entering Steinhice's "Bowl of Swords." For 10 points each:
[10] Name this religion that worships Eric from Brown.
ANSWER: Mukherjudaism [accept Mukherjew]
[10] Typically depicted as a turbaned, mustachioed imp, this trickster god of Mukherjudaism rides the Bactrian camel Harvona and trained the talking raven Negbash.
ANSWER: Meigs [do not accept "Charles Meigs"; prompt on "the deceiver," "the lie-monger," "lattavosh," "he who plays with Chris Ray," or "he who loves Jonathan Magin"
[10] This is the sacred jar of Mukherjudaism, a venerated object in which Eric carries additional excellence.
ANSWER: the kumbha
The file should be saved in standard Word format, devoid of any special formatting or characters. The name of the file should be given as <year> - <tournament name> - <author>.doc. Example: 2007 - ACF Nationals - Brown.doc.
If you're interested in working on a particular set, coordinate with me to make sure no one else is working on it.
Jerry Vinokurov
ex-LJHS, ex-Berkeley, ex-Brown, sorta-ex-CMU
presently: John Jay College Economics
code ape, loud voice, general nuissance
2008 Penn Bowl, 2008 Regionals, 2008 Nationals, and 2007 Titanomachy should all be in ACF format already, so you can import their currently circulating versions.
Matt Weiner
Advisor to Quizbowl at Virginia Commonwealth University / Founder of hsquizbowl.org
Matt Weiner wrote:2008 Penn Bowl, 2008 Regionals, 2008 Nationals, and 2007 Titanomachy should all be in ACF format already, so you can import their currently circulating versions.
Great, thank you.
Jerry Vinokurov
ex-LJHS, ex-Berkeley, ex-Brown, sorta-ex-CMU
presently: John Jay College Economics
code ape, loud voice, general nuissance
Other things not to put into packets: any text like "Extra tossups" or "sudden death tiebreakers." I assume anyone familiar with quizbowl understands the purpose of tossups 21 and up. This really screws up the parsing.
Jerry Vinokurov
ex-LJHS, ex-Berkeley, ex-Brown, sorta-ex-CMU
presently: John Jay College Economics
code ape, loud voice, general nuissance
Hey Jerry, the questions used on scobowl are all formatted in a standard way so they should be easily importable into your database. Let me know if you're interested. The only caveat is that they're tossup only, but tossup are probably better than nothing.
Bentley Like Beckham wrote:Hey Jerry, the questions used on scobowl are all formatted in a standard way so they should be easily importable into your database. Let me know if you're interested. The only caveat is that they're tossup only, but tossup are probably better than nothing.
Tossup only is not a problem. Send them my way.
Jerry Vinokurov
ex-LJHS, ex-Berkeley, ex-Brown, sorta-ex-CMU
presently: John Jay College Economics
code ape, loud voice, general nuissance
I do not have any packet libraries of my own but am happy to format. If you have tournaments you'd like added but don't have time to clean them up, feel free to send them to kathryn dot e dot peters at gmail.
Katy
Vanderbilt '06 / Harvard '11 / freelance moderator
[10] Considered the greatest Tang emperor, this second emperor of the dynasty encouraged his father to overthrow the Sui (pron. approx.: Sway) and ruled from 626 to 649, a reign considered exemplary by later writers.
Answer: Edward Sapir
[10] Considered the greatest Tang emperor, this second emperor of the dynasty encouraged his father to overthrow the Sui (pron. approx.: Sway) and ruled from 626 to 649, a reign considered exemplary by later writers.
Answer: Edward Sapir
If it's in the database, it must be true!
I know some of the entries have come out wacky and I know why, so I will be tracking them down. Thanks.
Jerry Vinokurov
ex-LJHS, ex-Berkeley, ex-Brown, sorta-ex-CMU
presently: John Jay College Economics
code ape, loud voice, general nuissance
MLWGS-Gir wrote:
Absolutely nothing. The link changes color when my cursor's over it. That's all.
Edit: If I try double-clicking it highlights whichever word I'm closest to.
I'm somewhat confused by where you are on the page. If you go to http://www.grapesmoker.com/qbdb you should wind up at the main page; you can navigate by choosing a tournament from the menu on the left, and there is no option for displaying bonuses separately from tossups. If you can explain to me where you encountered this link, I'll try to fix the problem, but I'm pretty sure there shouldn't be any such links on the page.
Jerry Vinokurov
ex-LJHS, ex-Berkeley, ex-Brown, sorta-ex-CMU
presently: John Jay College Economics
code ape, loud voice, general nuissance
MLWGS-Gir wrote:
Absolutely nothing. The link changes color when my cursor's over it. That's all.
Edit: If I try double-clicking it highlights whichever word I'm closest to.
I'm somewhat confused by where you are on the page. If you go to http://www.grapesmoker.com/qbdb you should wind up at the main page; you can navigate by choosing a tournament from the menu on the left, and there is no option for displaying bonuses separately from tossups. If you can explain to me where you encountered this link, I'll try to fix the problem, but I'm pretty sure there shouldn't be any such links on the page.
At the bottom of each toss-up round. It's not on the main page. The one I'm looking at now says "2007 Literature Doubles Bonuses by Packet 11." It's in a little box that changes color when I moved my cursor over it. I've only seen a few pages (not all of them from the same tournament, though), but all of them have had that box and none of the boxes have done anything...
Upon further inspection, the Toss-up box at the top also changes color, and that doesn't look like a link...I also just found another page that has the bonuses under the toss-ups, so it could be that there aren't bonuses for those packets and I'm merely being confused by a template...
Sam L,
Maggie L. Walker Governor's School 2010 / UVA 2014 / VCU School of Education 2016
PACE
everyday847 wrote:I bet there just aren't any tossups with the name "James" in them.
Nah, I think this might be a bug.
At the very least, with that search you should get literature tossups on James and the Giant Peach and science biography tossups on James Watt, the steaming Scot.
I can't seem to acess the database. Is there a issue or is it just my computer?
Douglas Graebner, Walt Whitman HS 10, Uchicago 14
"... imagination acts upon man as really as does gravitation, and may kill him as certainly as a dose of prussic acid."-Sir James Frazer,The Golden Bough
Douglas Graebner, Walt Whitman HS 10, Uchicago 14
"... imagination acts upon man as really as does gravitation, and may kill him as certainly as a dose of prussic acid."-Sir James Frazer,The Golden Bough
I've been trapped in a boring meeting for the last two days so I decided to do some updates. Cardinal Classic and ACF Nationals are up, and most things from 2008 will be up soon as well.
Jerry Vinokurov
ex-LJHS, ex-Berkeley, ex-Brown, sorta-ex-CMU
presently: John Jay College Economics
code ape, loud voice, general nuissance
I have implemented categorizing and rating abilities for QBDB. To use them, you must first register for an account, which you can do by clicking a link at the top left that invites you to register. Then you can log in and navigate to any packet and change the categories or rate the question by either quality or difficulty. The updating is handled seamlessly through the power of AJAX! The "Overall:" field contains the average result of everyone's votes; everyone has one vote that they can change at any time. In addition, anyone can currently change the category to which a question belongs; please don't abuse this function.
I would invite you all to take a look at this new feature and see if you can spot any bugs. Don't get too wild with the categorizing just yet because some of the questions may have to be reuploaded and this will cause your efforts to be lost. But do play with it and see if it works like it should. One thing to note is that I have not yet implemented cookies that keep you logged in, so your session will just expire after some time.
Jerry Vinokurov
ex-LJHS, ex-Berkeley, ex-Brown, sorta-ex-CMU
presently: John Jay College Economics
code ape, loud voice, general nuissance
Wow, this seems like it could be really useful. Any suggestions on what difficulty rankings should mean? (i.e., is there some kind of scale we can apply to ACF Fall and Penn Bowl alike?)
Cameron Orth - Freelance Writer/Moderator, PACE member
College: JTCC 2011, Dartmouth College '09-'10, '11-'14
Mathematics, Computer Science and Film/Media Studies
High School: Home Schooled/Cosby High '08-'09, MLWGSGIS A-E '06-'08
Tower Monarch wrote:Wow, this seems like it could be really useful. Any suggestions on what difficulty rankings should mean? (i.e., is there some kind of scale we can apply to ACF Fall and Penn Bowl alike?)
This is a feature which I believe Matt Weiner suggested to me at one point, and I didn't have the time to implement it until now. I should explain that the difficulty and quality rankings are, as you can see, on a 6-point scale. The inspiration is Jonathan Magin's difficulty scale, which I suggest using to rate questions (I will put up a link at some point that helps explain this scale, but basically 1 is easiest and 6 is hardest). Likewise for the quality: 1 is very bad, 6 is superlative. Using your example, I would say ACF Fall should probably end up with a score of between 1 and 2 and Penn Bowl should be in the vicinity of 3. The nice thing about this is that once a lot of people sign up and start rating things, the aggregate numbers should provide a nice way of quantifying how hard this or that tournament was.
edit: by the way, if you are not logged in, the page should still display the difficulty and quality ratings of the question as well as the category, if those values exist. You just won't be able to modify them.
Jerry Vinokurov
ex-LJHS, ex-Berkeley, ex-Brown, sorta-ex-CMU
presently: John Jay College Economics
code ape, loud voice, general nuissance
Now is a good time to say that if you are a CSS wizard and are good at design, I would like to hear from you if you can spend an hour of your time to design some pretty stylesheets for QBDB. I want to keep the same 3-column + header layout, but I'm aware that my color schemes leave something to be desired. I've been relying on CSS floating menus in the past and I don't mind staying with it, but perhaps someone who is better at design than me could make them look prettier.
Also, I have received a couple of requests for source code, so I am making it available here. It's a largeish tarball because it includes a lot of crap like uploaded packets and lots of other garbage, but if you unzip it, the root folder contains most of the code. You should be able to divine the SQL structure from this if you care.
Jerry Vinokurov
ex-LJHS, ex-Berkeley, ex-Brown, sorta-ex-CMU
presently: John Jay College Economics
code ape, loud voice, general nuissance
I also want to remind people that if they would like to help out, they can join this spreadsheet and sign up to format tournaments. I'm getting all the raw tournaments off Christian Carter's archive. You can refer to the 2008 ACF Nationals set as an example of a properly formatted tournament.
Jerry Vinokurov
ex-LJHS, ex-Berkeley, ex-Brown, sorta-ex-CMU
presently: John Jay College Economics
code ape, loud voice, general nuissance
Whig's Boson wrote:The spreadsheet appears to be invite-only.
Hmm, I hit the button that says "publish to the world," which I assumed would allow anyone to use it. Perhaps you need a Google account for this?
Yes, google accounts are required for access to google documents. however, I was logged in with my google account and still got a page asking me to request access first. I did so; did you receive a notification of some sort?
Katy
Vanderbilt '06 / Harvard '11 / freelance moderator
Whig's Boson wrote:The spreadsheet appears to be invite-only.
Hmm, I hit the button that says "publish to the world," which I assumed would allow anyone to use it. Perhaps you need a Google account for this?
Yes, google accounts are required for access to google documents. however, I was logged in with my google account and still got a page asking me to request access first. I did so; did you receive a notification of some sort?
Yeah, I see now that I did receive it. I guess I still have to approve editors for access to the spreadsheet.
Jerry Vinokurov
ex-LJHS, ex-Berkeley, ex-Brown, sorta-ex-CMU
presently: John Jay College Economics
code ape, loud voice, general nuissance
Jerry, there should be a way to invite everyone as a viewer and restrict collaborators/editors, as that is what I'm doing with the Fantasy Quizbowl spreadsheet, I think.
My packet archive got mostly wiped out in a computer crash last summer, but I'm willing to format other things. I also have printouts at home of several things that UCLA didn't want when I left, so if I feel really bored over the break I can retype some of those into ACF-formatted documents.
Dwight Wynne
socalquizbowl.org
UC Irvine 2008-2013; UCLA 2004-2007; Capistrano Valley High School 2000-2003
"It's a competition, but it's not a sport. On a scale, if football is a 10, then rowing would be a two. One would be Quiz Bowl." --Matt Birk on rowing, SI On Campus, 10/21/03
"If you were my teammate, I would have tossed your ass out the door so fast you'd be emitting Cerenkov radiation, but I'm not classy like Dwight." --Jerry
Something seems off with the categorization for bonuses. Specifically, I was categorizing the first three packets of 2006 Atzlan Cup and the TUs worked but none of the bonuses show a category...
Cameron Orth - Freelance Writer/Moderator, PACE member
College: JTCC 2011, Dartmouth College '09-'10, '11-'14
Mathematics, Computer Science and Film/Media Studies
High School: Home Schooled/Cosby High '08-'09, MLWGSGIS A-E '06-'08
Tower Monarch wrote:Something seems off with the categorization for bonuses. Specifically, I was categorizing the first three packets of 2006 Atzlan Cup and the TUs worked but none of the bonuses show a category...
Thanks for letting me know, I will look into it.
Jerry Vinokurov
ex-LJHS, ex-Berkeley, ex-Brown, sorta-ex-CMU
presently: John Jay College Economics
code ape, loud voice, general nuissance
Tower Monarch wrote:Something seems off with the categorization for bonuses. Specifically, I was categorizing the first three packets of 2006 Atzlan Cup and the TUs worked but none of the bonuses show a category...
Thanks for letting me know, I will look into it.
So it looks like I just forgot to implement the bonus categorization before; it should work just fine now. In general, anything from 2008 is good to be categorized and rated except for Penn Bowl (I'm having a few problems with it). Go wild.
Jerry Vinokurov
ex-LJHS, ex-Berkeley, ex-Brown, sorta-ex-CMU
presently: John Jay College Economics
code ape, loud voice, general nuissance
Jerry, did you get the CO 2006 I formatted a while back? I may not be doing it right but I don't see it up there, so if you want me to resend it let me know.
Charlie Dees, North Kansas City HS '08
"I won't say more because I know some of you parse everything I say." - Jeremy Gibbs
"At one TJ tournament the neg prize was the Hampshire College ultimate frisbee team (nude) calender featuring one Evan Silberman. In retrospect that could have been a disaster." - Harry White
Jeremy Gibbs Free Energy wrote:Jerry, did you get the CO 2006 I formatted a while back? I may not be doing it right but I don't see it up there, so if you want me to resend it let me know.
Oh yeah, let me find that and upload it.
Jerry Vinokurov
ex-LJHS, ex-Berkeley, ex-Brown, sorta-ex-CMU
presently: John Jay College Economics
code ape, loud voice, general nuissance
I've requested access to the tournament formatting google doc; in the meantime, I will confirm the formatting of ACF Regionals 2007.
EDIT: Also, Jerry--I'm working on a project and would be eternally grateful if I could check out your packet import script. One of my regexes isn't working and I've zero idea why.
The power supply on the QBDB server has developed a horrible grinding noise, so I'm taking the server offline for a few days until I can either fix the problem or replace the PSU. Sorry for any inconvenience.
Jerry Vinokurov
ex-LJHS, ex-Berkeley, ex-Brown, sorta-ex-CMU
presently: John Jay College Economics
code ape, loud voice, general nuissance
grapesmoker wrote:The power supply on the QBDB server has developed a horrible grinding noise, so I'm taking the server offline for a few days until I can either fix the problem or replace the PSU. Sorry for any inconvenience.
I have replaced the fan and the server is now back online.
Jerry Vinokurov
ex-LJHS, ex-Berkeley, ex-Brown, sorta-ex-CMU
presently: John Jay College Economics
code ape, loud voice, general nuissance
Is the database down again or is my computer being annoying?
Douglas Graebner, Walt Whitman HS 10, Uchicago 14
"... imagination acts upon man as really as does gravitation, and may kill him as certainly as a dose of prussic acid."-Sir James Frazer,The Golden Bough