The Quizbowl Resource Center

Sam

In case anyone is still planning travel, I would like to note that - unlike what we ran during the school year - we are not beholden to a 10am room reservation start time for either day of this tournament. Do expect each day to start registration well before 9am and plan your travel / hotels accord...

Sam

Excelsior (smack) wrote:
theMoMA wrote:Packets for this tournament are now available here: http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/questionsets/631/
I think (hope) you posted in the wrong thread.

The transition to collegiate quiz bowl is a lot easier if you know the questions in advance.

Sam

I'm looking for a team for the VCU site.

EDIT: Tejas Raje and I have joined forces.
EDIT2: Playing with Tejas, Ian Lenhoff, and Victor Prieto.

Sam

I've occasionally complained about writers like Chris Borglum who put left-leaning political commentary/snide remarks into current events or history questions they write, but this was certainly worse than anything Borglum has ever done. Suffice it to say, when I coined the term "modern world&q...

Sam

I guess I'll just say here, given what else may or may not be going on in other tournament discussion subfora, that the innovation of specifying "With his/her alphabetically-prior collaborator" rather than just "With a colleague" was ingenious and I hope it becomes common practi...

Sam

I totally agree. I'd be interested to hear how the writers/editors selected answers and found clues that focused on more modern research as opposed to well-worn and outdated works, because I think that might help people move beyond yet another tossup on The Affluent Society when it comes time to wr...

Sam

Can you please post the "private language" tossup? From what I can tell, every clue from the beginning of the second sentence to the word "Kripke" is not about the private language argument at all, but about the "rule-following problem," which appears elsewhere in Phil...

Sam

When writing questions, I think it's a good step to consider how people will have learned about the clues you're using. Sometimes in attempting to make "realer" clues, one can actually just make impossible ones. Here are some examples: 3. This man proposed a premise of transitivity of indi...

Sam

There was also a bonus in the Illinois B / Penn B packet that was on complex analysis and whose third part was something that sounded like "Rouche's theorem". This theorem is very much a thing, but I don't think it is given a name very often. Okay. I wasn't familiar with it so I trusted t...

Sam

Packet deadlines No packets before April 1, please. Packet submitted by May 1: $80 Packet submitted by June 4: $160 Packet submitted by June 15: $200 Packet submitted by July 1: $240 Packet submitted after July 1: +$10 per day (on top of $240) Is there any chance these deadlines could be altered so...

Sam

Lately, we've had a problem dealing with registrations. Tying registration to packet submission results in races to complete packets and thus poor-quality submissions. But having registration on a first-come-first-serve basis encourages teams that might not be serious about attending to register fi...

Sam

I'd be interested in doing this.

Sam

It is a mirror of a real-life activity that exists primarily and overridingly as a hub for discussion of that activity. The anime rule, like the related 4ch*n/no memes rule, serves as sort of a buffer that reminds people they're not just "on the internet", the idea being that those are ar...

Sam

One of the "potential errors" in the list talks about answers that apply to "all the clues up to a significantly deep point in the question." What does "significantly deep" in this case mean? Is it an instance of discretion ("anyone who knows more about Louis XVI t...

Sam

I actually really liked MAGNI. If I can be a dickhead for just a sec, I think there was a mild backlash against MAGNI (at least among me) when the MAGNI writers/editors seemingly kept over-praising their own work all the time. But it was a very good tournament, probably the best regular difficulty ...

Sam

Is there a list of officially registered teams?

Sam

But, at this point, they're a bit stale and why use the one history tournament where the scope for introducing new things is widest to rehash the same stuff? I'm not sure gettable clues and interesting but hard clues are mutually exclusive. You obviously don't want bonus parts to be six lines long,...

Sam

While I can't speak at all for what Marshall's philosophy towards difficulty is nor can I judge anything about American history, but surely there is a minimum amount of knowledge needed to acquire a 10? This isn't the tournament to be giving out 10s because you know that the first President of Amer...

Sam

My general philosophy in writing for this tournament was to write some unexplored common link tossups and in general write on things that have never shown up in quizbowl, which I hope succeeded. My goal for bonuses was to have the easy part be something that's pretty well known in the quizbowl cano...

Sam

EDIT: After posting a question it occurred to me this may not be clear yet. Is it?

Sam

Maybe a little late to ask, but do any of the people providing food (either for lunch or barbecue) want any sort of monetary reimbursement from those partaking?

Sam

I thought that maybe the rational function prompt was placed there for the synthetic division clue. The prompt doesn't apply elsewhere, but maybe it's a prompt for generosity's sake??? This is basically the reasoning. Synthetic division seemed a place where many teams would buzz, and I couldn't ima...

Sam

Is there any chance of a Minnesota Open 2012 type packet submission? Ten packets seems cutting it kind of close.

Sam

I believe us at Michigan are going to be running a tournament in the October timeslot that we've run MOO and QUARK in the past two years. This will probably involve packet submission to some extent. In terms of difficulty, it seems like there'd be room for either a regular difficulty event or a reg...

Sam

Thanks, Susan. How about NAQT? I take it that SCT will be two weeks before Regionals, as is traditional; will ICT be two weeks before ACF Nationals or two weeks after, given that after seems to be an option? And it seems like Fall did go for its traditional November spot. Does anyone have thoughts ...

Sam

EDIT: If the question was irredeemably bad or Bruce didn't think it would get converted, replacing it seems fine; I haven't seen the submitted question so I can't remark on whether or not Bruce made the correct editorial decision. However, it seems ill-advised to write questions based solely on wha...

Sam

[*] Tanzania (all mine. Columbia submitted a tossup on “Marxist Geography”, along with a warning telling me that if I replaced it with a tossup on Tanzania I was ignoring what academic geographers actually did. I took it as a challenge) A good choice! Why is this a good choice? EDIT: If the questio...

Sam

If this is paired with VCU Open at some unusual time (say, Friday during the day or evening), would that greatly affect a lot of people who can't get out of their summer employment and otherwise wanted to come? I personally like this idea the best, for the reasons Chris Ray outlined above. I think ...

Sam

This exercise is a bit discouraging, since I reluctantly would conclude that this measure is not very useful by itself. Even combined with power rate and neg rate, it doesn't tell us an extraordinary amount of information. I think it is too early, however, to completely dismiss it. It is definitely...

Sam

This looks potentially interesting, but what new information does it provide, exactly? Based on the numbers I would guess UVA has a better chance of beating Chicago C than vice versa, but it seems PPG would show the same thing.

Sam

There were also a lot of common link ideas that I heard some people didn't really care for, with someone even hilariously suggesting that I'm attempting to sabotage the common link crusaders' movement. It's certainly not true I'm trying to sabotage the common link argument, as I wrote them to incor...

Sam

Just to be clear, Chicago Open proper is still only one day, yes? July 21 will be a day of unrelated side events?

Sam

I believe only one or two instances of boring common-link tossups on words like "normal" or "simple" or whatever. So, yeah, if you want a model for how to write math, you could do a hell of a lot worse than this tournament. Answer lines like these allow the question to ask about...

Sam

Most complaints about the structure of the distribution seem to really be complaints about lazy question writing, and changing the former won't fix the latter. I like that VCU Closed and WIT both tried out distributions slightly different from ACF (as many other regular season tournaments have in th...

Sam

To summarize: out of the top 24 teams (as determined by infallible poll), one didn't play SCT, and one had some of its strongest players compete in DII. The other 22 earned bids (some of which were declined). Team number 25 probably won't squeak in. How consistent is the number of teams that declin...

Sam

There was one bonus whose lead-in asked players to name Old Testament books, and then went on to have questions on Jude, Acts, and Romans. This was confusing as those are not Old Testament books.

EDIT: It's also possible this was read wrong, or I just misheard it, in which case never mind.

Sam

A good science class might have a discussion on how creationism keeps cropping up as creation science, intelligent design etc when learning about initial resistance to Darwin's ideas. I was joking because "is taught in class" is often used as a criterion for answer line or clue selection,...

Sam

touchpack wrote:On the ID tossup I personally was buzzing from things I learned from watching a PBS special, for example.

Intelligent design is something people definitely learn in science classes. Not good science classes, but still...

Sam

John Snow, the IAS, Challenger, for example, are incredibly important subjects in the history of science (I edited an essay on Snow once for one of these classes), but people don't like questions on them because no one actually studies the history of science and so they play poorly. I'm not sure th...

Sam

Should RMP and Fine Arts be divided equally into their usual subcategories (i.e. 1/1 R, 1/1 M, 1/1 P and then 1/1 visual, 1/1 concert music, 1/1 other)?

Sam

I don't know enough about the Luces or Schurz to comment on question quality, but I think Kurtis's comment and the complaints about the achievement gap and punishment questions point towards a more general issue. In choosing answer lines, the primary focus should be on the game play aspect, rather t...

Sam

Cheynem wrote: There are no tiebreakers of any sorts; ideally all matches end in a tie in a Feit Thompson paradox.

That should come up more.

EDIT: I'd also be interested in playing this, conditional on not inconveniencing anyone sharing the car I'd be in.

Sam

I mean, I'm not really sure what you want from me here. If a bonus is submitted to me that has a decent medium/easy/hard structure and where, as far as I can tell, all three parts are reasonably important, I'm not going to waste limited time editing it to be super-exciting. When you say that "...

Sam

But yeah, overall I really enjoyed playing this. There weren't any particularly flashy answer lines, but there probably shouldn't be given the goal of the tournament. I think it could actually have stood to have a couple more flashy answer lines. Many of the bonuses especially seemed not so much ea...

Sam

One other thing I noticed which was that after the prelims finished around four or five pm (!), stats were still being hastily compiled forcing several teams to leave (at least NU and Truman) before the individual awards were announced. I'm also wondering why Wisconsin A (Alex) was playing while th...

Sam

I thought this set this a much better job of achieving a reasonable difficultly level than MOO and many other tournaments from last year that advertised a difficulty of "regular plus." The biggest weakness was the bonus difficulty: it was pretty variable, with many bonuses that were diffic...

Sam

It wouldn't be a predictions thread if someone didn't start a sentence and

Sam

It would be personally more convenient for movies and KABO to be the same day, but the division as it is now makes sense.

Sam

I agree with what everyone else has said about this turning out better than expected, both from a logistical and question-quality perspective. A grand time was had by all. One logistical change I would suggest if this happens next year is an earlier final deadline for packets. Obviously a guerrilla ...

Sam

Mike Bentley wrote: From a practical perspective, is there anyone besides Matt Bollinger and Jonathan Magin whose flight on Sunday night preculdes them playing WELD if it starts around 4?

I would miss all or most of WELD if it started around 4.

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