The Quizbowl Resource Center

ArnavS

Maybe it's just me, then. But what were the answerlines for those?

ArnavS

This thread makes me think about how I write questions. When I think of topics for a math question, I usually default to picking one of the major subfields: analysis, algebra, topology, geometry, combinatorics/discrete, or something like that. For some reason, "statistical theory" (e.g., the Kolmogo...

ArnavS

A few initial thoughts: 1. Cheating prevention necessarily demands a loss of privacy. But I don't think that's bad, in itself. We already sacrifice some autonomy to go to quiz bowl tournaments (we have to show up, not smell, refrain from being flagrantly disruptive, give up the ability to multitask,...

ArnavS

not everyone gets the same punishment for the same crime in our criminal justice system Hold on, is this supposed to be a good thing? Who are we to say whether or not it is a good thing, but lesser penalties for first-time offenders and/or people who have a long track record of being good citizens ...

ArnavS

I'm slightly less optimistic than you are about how that isn't suggesting a "double standard for well-connected and established players." Certainly nobody would argue that simply being good at the game entitles you to leniency. The difficulty is that a lot of the more innocuous bases are only unlock...

ArnavS

There's been some discussion of how cheating works differently for "elite" players (for lack of a better term) vs others. Maybe they have higher pressures, different motivations, etc. Maybe being a community luminary is a mitigating factor, maybe otherwise. As a decidedly non-elite player, there is ...

ArnavS

My contract is up at UBC this June. Will take a gap year before starting econ PhD in 2021. Not sure what my QB situation is but I will likely be based in Vancouver.

ArnavS

Unfortunately I'm not familiar enough with everyone on the circuit to submit a full 25-person ballot. But a few things: - Rein Otsason tops my staffer poll (not sure if this formally exists, but Henry mentioned it). Notably for having a screwdriver, prying open a broken buzzer, and un-breaking it. -...

ArnavS

Reviving a bit of an old thread, but just wanted to say: I'm in roughly the same boat. I was a fairly strong (NAQT) DII player, and am studying sporadically and "recreationally" to improve on DI, but my impact on teams is generally at the margin. The reason I like quizbowl, ironically enough, is for...

ArnavS

Yeah, thanks to Toronto for being a hospitable and fun site. Was great to finally bring a UBC team here. Even though nobody paid us to come.

ArnavS

I was really impressed by how gettable a lot of the more arcane content seemed to be. There were many questions I was reading where I was thinking "this is 100% going dead/zeroed," but the specialists snapped it up. The math also had a nice selection (analysis, algebra, topology, diffEq, computation...

ArnavS

Another small quibble: The question about General Meade introduced the NSA far too early.

ArnavS

Considerable confusion was caused at the British site by mentioning the "Canterbury Plain" as a clue on the Stonehenge bonus part. Stonehenge is located on the Salisbury Plain. (On a sidenote, does anyone know when the packets will be available online?) I remember reading this question, and it defi...

ArnavS

I think phonons were a tad over-represented in the set. Rooms I was reading for had audible groans whenever they came up. Edit: Also, I thought some of the quantitative questions were a bit weird. For ex., asking for a "magic angle" of 1.05 degrees, or the precise number of bandits in a Chinese gang...

ArnavS

Final results: Oregon beat UBC in a final after winning a play-in against UW. Capilano got 4th.

Great performances by new players at UBC.

Will post stats etc. soon. Thanks all for coming to what was possibly the first the first ACF Regs in Western Canada.

ArnavS

Field for this tournament is:

UW A
Oregon A
Capilano A
UBC A
UBC B
UBC C

Looking forward to see you all on Saturday.

ArnavS

Has that packet been read yet?

I'd be interested in playing such a thing over Skype/Discord, if that's still in the cards.

ArnavS

Cool. UBC was talking about hosting. Ultimately decided we'd rather just field a team, but if there's no suitable site, we could probably host in a pinch.

ArnavS

Has the PNW site for this been decided?

(edit: sorry, saw the edits on OP... do you have a sense of where/when it usually is?)

ArnavS

Thanks Raymond for the shoutouts to some of our rookies. I will pass the news along, I'm sure it'll be very much appreciated.

ArnavS

All good, don't beat yourself up. I'd offer to help write the set, but that means I couldn't play it.

ArnavS

$209 CAD is $155 USD, which is about on the higher end for the fees for a single team at a tournament (before any discounts.) I'd just like to clarify that we charge all our tournament fees at par with USD and do not adjust for the exchange rate, so $209 CAD would in fact be a very high fee for us ...

ArnavS

$0.1/mile/team works out to a $209 discount for a team coming from Vancouver to Toronto, which is much more than the cost of any tournament. This is just false. $209 CAD is $155 USD, which is about on the higher end for the fees for a single team at a tournament (before any discounts.) Chicago's FS...

ArnavS

Just a gentle reminder that, if participation from Western Canada in this summer's batch of "Canadian circuit" tournaments is indeed a goal, then those dates should be picked sooner rather than later. It's also my understanding that there are usually travel subsidies offered to teams from Ottawa/Mon...

ArnavS

Wouldn't a player poll just for people enrolled in Canadian universities solve almost all of these eligibility problems? These rules aren't that much better than the Ontario circuit poll. Yeah, this is the optimal eligibility criterion, and it's the fix I had in mind for the Ontario poll. I deliber...

ArnavS

I think we need to look at the advanced stats here. How many of these players, for example, are over 180 lbs or 6'3?

ArnavS

People discussing quizbowl-related things is what the quizbowl discussion forum is for. I don't believe a semantics debate was the kind of quizbowl discussion that this thread was created to facilitate. That is immaterial. On this the board rules are clear (emphasis mine): As a result of the above,...

ArnavS

Honestly I'll probably self-fund, at least initially (and if we host another tournament in time, we could probably bring another person or two.) But we were discussing some useful ideas on Discord on how to make it feasible for teams like UBC to play in the established circuit. A special travel disc...

ArnavS

Formally, the eligibility criterion is similar to what it was in the poll's first iteration. That is: Also, Open players are eligible. Could you clarify this? Well what I meant is that this isn't restricted to collegiate players. Although this poll may be more of a lightning rod than I anticipated...

ArnavS

Sure, works for me.

ArnavS

Thanks Rein for the commentary. Of course, I would point out that Western Canadian quizbowl is a part of the "Canadian quizbowl community," but we can have that discussion another time. The implications, though, go beyond "some sort of imaginary feud"; I'd say there is a generally insular and patron...

ArnavS

(Edit: Removed a bit.) I've decided to give this a shot. If it goes well, we can adopt this format for the polls in future years. Formally, the eligibility criterion is similar to what it was in the poll's first iteration. That is: Vote for your top 25 of active collegiate players (active being defi...

ArnavS

Without responding in depth, just wanted to say that I found the last couple posts very reasonable and educational.

ArnavS

Sure, and I guess I should've anticipated what sort of minefield I waded into. For starters, I think Will's earlier list of criteria (i.e., things to think about when sculpting the distribution) is a good starting point. Michael is correct that the structure of the academy shouldn't per se determine...

ArnavS

Why is literature the natural place to cut back? So yeah, you could make similar arguments that history is also ripe for a haircut. I guess some of this comes from the way the academy is currently structured ("history" questions are accessible to people with majors like Asian Studies, straight Hist...

ArnavS

Well, Rein said it better than I could, so I'll just quote him: I would suggest that the literature distribution taking up a full 4/4 is a significant constraint on the rest of the distribution, and that this weighting is not justified by the relative importance of the study of literature to, for ex...

ArnavS

Yeah, this is incidentally good reason to do what someone else suggested and take a hard look at the lit distribution. What do we mean by "take a hard look at the lit distribution?" Perhaps the literature distribution could stand to have a bit more non-fiction than it currently does, but in general...

ArnavS

Yeah, this is incidentally good reason to do what someone else suggested and take a hard look at the lit distribution. That's why I'm in favor of some sort of catchall math-y category ("quantitative science?"), like the one mentioned. It might be difficult to argue that math, per se, merits 1/1 atte...

ArnavS

This thread is a bit stale (and I participated in these discussions briefly over Discord), but I just discovered it. So, FWIW, wanted to cast my vote for something along the lines of "1/1 `pure math, applied math, statistics, quantitative methods, etc.`" I think with statistics, differential equatio...

ArnavS

I know I said I wouldn't jump in again, but I’d simply like to point out that the “fairly arbitrary characteristic” you describe is “being a Canadian Quizbowl player.” Which seems like a good choice, given the poll's title. Meghan said you get pushback on this every year. Maybe that’s a sign that th...

ArnavS

As I mentioned, you are more than welcome to create a similar poll for your own circuit, but please do not keep commenting on this thread to propose further ways that people could include you on their ballot. I think this is a remarkably naive and uncharitable reading of what I'm saying. I couldn't...

ArnavS

Fair enough Chris, but in that case I think the poll should probably be renamed to what you wrote ("the task is to determine the best players on the (Eastern) Canadian QB circuit.") I guess my point is that a putatively national poll should, I think, at least try to cover the whole country. Maybe "p...

ArnavS

Dunno about the eligibility nuances, but there are probably some PNW players who should be on the list.

In terms of tournaments, UBC played SCT at UW, FST at UW, Terrapin at UW, and probably some other stuff that I don't remember. Carlos Doebli could give a more concrete list.

ArnavS

He's done some work on this the LetsEncrypt front (good call @Matt, I didn't know there were free CAs like this) and will be taking another look this weekend. They will also be reviewing the archives to make sure nothing is impacted.

ArnavS

Is there a way that we could volunteer to make it happen? All that the admins would need to do is delegate access to somebody for (say) a day or two. Or, we could write a small step-by-step instruction set that we could execute. Alternately, we could chip in to fund time for one of the maintainers t...

ArnavS

These forums still use unsecured, vanilla HTTP as opposed to encrypted HTTPS. This is bad for security reasons , but also because browsers are making it increasingly difficult to authenticate without encryption. See, e.g., the attached screenshot from Firefox. I think all that needs to be done is fo...

ArnavS

Thanks all for coming to this tournament. We had a great time, and we have the following results:

1st: UHill/Hamber
2nd: St. George's
3rd: SFU

We'll post detailed stats soon.

--- Arnav

ArnavS

The University of British Columbia will be hosting a Spring Invitational Tournament on Sunday, April 7th. (**note:** We're pushing back a week due to availability from teams and staff.) Eligibility --- HS players who've been to 2 or less tournaments. (College players who meet this requirement are al...

ArnavS

Overall, I had a great time playing this set (the affection for animals was something we noted, but I viewed it as more of a drinking-game type quirk). Two specific thing/nits to picks: - There was a bonus about functions whose squares are integrable, but it didn't have a note to accept things like ...

ArnavS

We'll probably be doing what Michael said. If you're running short on staffers, Harrison Hsu said he can be one of last resort (but he has to come up from Weehawken, so we should try to exhaust all options). It doesn't seem that other people at NYU are available.

Also, we'll be dropping to one team.

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