The Quizbowl Resource Center

Sam

This was a great set. The answer lines were all very playable. I have a terrible memory for tournaments, but I think not that long ago hearing "Description acceptable" elicited groans, as people steeled themselves for a morass of prompts and guesswork. There was virtually none of that here...

Sam

I'm sorry about the Scotland question; although the description of Maeshowe did exclude Newgrange with other details, I probably should not have used the solstice as a clue since that is a common feature of many passage tombs in the British Isles. To be clear, I don't know if the clue was actually ...

Sam

For reference, this is the tossup: The claim that this concept is the “sensorium of God” was attacked as heretical because it implied that the essence of God contains parts. Immanuel Kant claimed that this concept’s corresponding mathematical science is the [emphasize] analogue of mechanics, not ar...

Sam

I agree with Will Alston about the "freshness" of the questions. (I was particularly excited to see Old Europe coming up after hearing about it on Patrick Wyman's podcast .) I think the editors made it more difficult than Fall the correct way: have a good number of questions that wouldn't ...

Sam

How are you determining if someone cheated or not? This to me is the bigger problem--there are very, very few admitted cheating cases out there, but lots of "suspected" ones. What's the standard of evidence that will be used to determine if there was cheating or not? Would something akin ...

Sam

Re: grad students playing -- Some of the concerns about unfairness seem to be that people who are more experienced tend to be better and that experience is something that can be acquired passively, just by showing up. I think the first point is undeniable: all else equal, someone who has played twe...

Sam

I suspect a lot of people would object to this today (and in fact, plenty of people objected to it then!). It's just not relevant to why you would care about these people. To use an apt phrase Clark Smith invoked when talking about some iffy clues in WORKSHOP, these facts are "trivially true,&...

Sam

I'm sorry. I don't think this question worked as well as I thought it would. I wanted to write a question focused on contemporary spiritualism and new religious movements. When I wrote this question initially, the leadin was entirely about Edzard Ernst, a prominent scholar and critic of alternative...

Sam

Thanks to the editors for this tournament. I agree with Jacob Reed on the difficulty; I thought it was very well managed. There were a few instances where a healthy chunk of the question was really hard, and the difficulty was "saved" by the answer line being the type of thing that most pe...

Sam

I would very much like to second this request. I think one of the earlier clues mentioned 1 Corinthians 12, but the chapter is known for discussing a bunch of spiritual gifts. Trying to figure out which one is nigh impossible. Sort of related to this: many of the religion questions directly tied to...

Sam

Thanks to the editors and staff for a great tournament! Between this, Age of Empires, and Scattergories, it was impressive how consistently good everything was, from the proofreading (at least from the player's point of view) to the content of the questions, to the skill of the teams, to the logisti...

Sam

Science Man here giving my thoughts on Science People: Geoff is #1, and it's not close. Look at his PIANO and ICT stats if you don't believe me--dude is a monster with high potential to become the GOAT in undergrad. I never see people play enough to have something smart to say in these threads but ...

Sam

I was intending to post here the same time I did in the logistics thread and for some reason never got around to it. Mostly I just wanted to thank the editors for an excellent tournament. I was especially impressed that so many people on the editing team were relative newcomers, at least in terms of...

Sam

]Rule F.2*, as presented in its entirety at the staff meeting, requires that there be no unnatural pauses in amending an answer, so the situation as written-up would not allow the player to gain any advantage. If the player answers and the moderator pauses to rule on the answer, then the player has...

Sam

I don't know enough about tournament direction or production to say anything about the format, but I was really impressed with the overall logistics of the tournament. Conor already said most of this, but the general tournament infrastructure (working buzzers set up on time, schedules printed in rea...

Sam

It may be simpler to just start a "Post here if you are not going to Illinois for school next year (Collegiate 2019)" thread.

Sam

This is a good observation. I'll add that, in the context of tournament discussions, people choosing to vent in private has the unfortunate effect of removing discussion from the public sphere so that the editors of the tournament, or other editors and writers who are interested in people's feedbac...

Sam

There was something odd going on with the Uranus tossup. Rob Carson took down a note so maybe it's been fixed already. I think "beliefs," "jobs," and more than any question I can remember in recent memory, whatever that nonsense about making mistakes when you speak and saying the...

Sam

Would there be any interest in Mike's film tournament, maybe right after NASAT? I don't know how many will have seen it at Illinois already.

Sam

Cheynem wrote:There seemed to be a fair amount of Minnesota content in the set as well (but perhaps I'm exaggerating).

A quick survey reveals nearly all Americans currently reside in Minnesota, so this makes sense.

Sam

This was a great tournament. It was also quite long. I'm not sure if questions were longer or maybe just more were answered near the end, but the recent CO goal of finishing before 9 seems a worthwhile one. Logistically, everything ran pretty smoothly. Thank you to everyone who staffed, especially t...

Sam

Also, I reversed your grievous error from 2013 of throwing out a David Harvey tossup in favor of a dry geography tossup on Tanzania by keeping a Harvey submission and writing zero dry tossups on African countries. A tossup which was, at least in our room, answered much earlier than the Tanzania tos...

Sam

Could you explain a little more why this is a problem? Intuitively it seems true that there shouldn't be any sudden jumps in the tournament, but as long as everyone hears the same questions I'm not sure I can articulate why. Sorry, to be clear, are you asking why I think the "two tournament&qu...

Sam

Where it becomes a problem is only if one half of the tournament seems to systematically reward one skill / knowledge base, while the other half rewards another. This is especially true of any format in which some of the games played in the first half are carried over (and this is almost every curr...

Sam

Given quiz bowl's newfound love of cooperative game theory, something that may be close to you what Andrew is describing is the Shapley value. (No link because I'm on a phone, but it's on Wikipedia.) The idea is to consider all the possible coalitions that can be formed without a given player, seein...

Sam

In general, I thought the Saturday logistics were a real problem—being told that we were eating lunch so incredibly late to avoid waiting half an hour, and then waiting something like an hour and a half for tiebreakers wasn't my favorite thing in the world. (I am aware that I had a personal stake i...

Sam

I typically tend to be very activist in my editing, and I was in this tournament as well, but having not previously edited a tournament that had so many editor packets, I don't think I accounted for just how much idea selection plays a role in a tournament's feel. If we had another month to edit th...

Sam

Generally, I don't think "make everyone else's friend" is really being proposed. But like Bruce said, a good way to break insularity is to just talk to people. Doesn't have to be much. I'll never forget when I was an undergrad and our team got beaten badly by one of the great early 2000s ...

Sam

When the original poll was posted, I voted "Too insular" and "Lack of professionalism." With this post I'd like to offer my opinion on why I think college quizbowl is too insular, as someone who hasn't really been involved in college quizbowl for that long and whose time (and, u...

Sam

Would anyone be interested in putting together a collective food order of some sort? I would like this to begin by 8PM so that we can finish by midnight or so. There will be ten packets, with 24 tossup questions and zero bonuses per packet, and I'd like to give people a chance to play as many of tn...

Sam

EDIT: Even messaging Vasa last year saying "hey, I could write some questions for EMT" was terrifying to me. Actively soliciting writers is the right thing to do, and even then it's scary to put yourself out there! I was actually going to post a thread about how great collegiate quiz bowl...

Sam

I should note that I really like the creation of a "Thought" category. I think John makes some good points about trying to explore different topics in a more user-friendly manner. To be clear, my issue is more of the general feeling that thought-based questions tend to dominate hard tourn...

Sam

How did other people feel about the epsilon-delta tossup? I knew most of the clues in the second half but was utterly thrown off by "this statement" (which I guess I took to mean "this result"). Is there any pronoun that's even more neutral? Maybe "this method" or &quo...

Sam

[*] As Erik said, a fair number of history questions on peripheral topics like pirates, gangs, criminals etc. This is writing history like the mythology questions that give that category a bad name (basically "pop" version of an "academic" subject). [*] A "core" almost...

Sam

The tossup on "National Security Council" calls it an "agency" throughout. That seems misleading, at best, though admittedly I'd be hard-pressed to think of a good filler word that doesn't immediately give the game away.

Sam

Thanks to Berkeley and friends for writing this. I've been thinking lately about how much average collegiate quiz bowl quality has improved since I began playing in 2009, which wasn't even really the Dark Ages of good quiz bowl. It's encouraging to see house sets produced by a group of relatively ne...

Sam

(5) The reality of time. Our experience of time may be highly subjective, but the actual duration of five seconds is not. You, as TD, may feel stupid explaining to a room of adults (or near-adults) how to count off five seconds. But your discomfort is outweighed by the distress of your players when...

Sam

I may be misremembering but I think the question on "money supply" mentioned some clues on deriving the demand function for money, which is a little confusing.

Sam

ments either by application or by open interest (within reason). You could do it NAQT-style where someone submits [n] questions, although I'd imagine it wouldn't matter if they were "clean" or not. As an example of the latter, see the same done in the high school section . I think ACF Fal...

Sam

If anyone is interested in splitting a hotel room, I booked one at the Red Roof Inn in Ann Arbor on 3505 South State Street from Friday to Sunday. It sleeps up to four.

Sam

I look at the primal scream therapy in the same way. Yes, this is not something people who study psychology on a formal basis will encounter. But it's something from the "history of psychology" that an intellectually curious person might encounter (or someone whose psychological studies d...

Sam

To whom should packets be sent?

EDIT: I have been told through shady back channels to send it to Ike. Can you confirm your email is still the one that begins "sep..." and ends "...mail.com?"
EDIT: Never mind, I just saw the button on your forum account.

Sam

The other categories, as people have pointed out, were also extremely good. I think the social science in this tournament is the type of thing that we want to see more of, but a lot of it wasn't what I've learned how to study for. This lead to a lot of the questions going pretty late to whoever fig...

Sam

We were constrained by the number of teams that wanted to come (and the number of packets). We had a 3-stage format for 42 teams. As the field dropped to 40 teams, I drew up a 2-stage limited single-bye schedule for the tournament. (A format I will write up at some point.) Is there any thing in par...

Sam

A final note on distribution: I told Matt and Evan that I conceived of this as a tournament with "something for everybody," and accordingly did my best to write questions spanning the full historical and generic range of literature and classical music. I thought the tournament did an exce...

Sam

I don't know where the 1990's tossup went, but I buzzed on political history clues. Oh, that may be true. I remember there being something about Harrod's but I guess it was more about the owner's involvement in politics. As an aside, the question of whether some categories were more difficult than ...

Sam

Some of the more "miscellaneous" questions in academic categories had the related problem of being on gettable answerlines who don't have middle clues either period (Theo Van Gogh—great, you have to guess at some point!) or within the "theme" (Mussolini—you couldn't add a single...

Sam

I enjoyed this tournament. I agree with Jerry that some things were very difficult and some were pretty easy, given the field and stated difficulty. The writing could have benefited from another read through. There were multiple times where moderators had to guess missing words, re-order clauses, or...

Sam

I tried several approaches to this subject matter and the decade answer line was the best way I could incorporate all of the important details and events (I'd already done guitar for EFT, and I couldn't come up with enough material on a single individual / song / U.S. state / year / what-have-you)....

Sam

To provide an analogy: Suppose that a player writes a senior thesis on Proust. That probably entails far more engagement with Proust than any other person in quizbowl has experienced. Now, I suspect that Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life is not a must-read for all Proust scholars (m...

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