The Quizbowl Resource Center

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Steven : Powering Hawking radiation from the formula for the power spectrum of Hawking radiation On my statistical mechanics problem set, we actually derived this - I remember because any problem that actually facilitates learning new physics on top of revieing old catches my attention - also a pro...

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Congrats to to Team Sam, who won the online tournament in a complete landslide! I would be remiss if I did not mention the Herculean efforts of a one Mr. Steven Hines, who went from a modest 16.29 PPG on a Division at SCT to follow his team to sixth place, to today, a mere two and a half months lat...

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Stats are posted here. Note that in the combined stats, Panda Express is listed as 4th, but they actually took 2nd. This is because one of their prelims losses was to a team that did not make the top bracket, and thus did not carry over.

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Chicago beat Panda Express in a 1-game final to win. Stats will be posted later.

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Is the field in the OP final? Your Facebook message to me seems to indicate that you got my e-mail and that we're in the field, but the OP seems to indicate otherwise. You should let me know either way so I don't drive us 2.5 hours to a tournament we aren't actually in the field for. If we are in, ...

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Mexdude wrote:What time do you want us there? In case you already sent an tourny info email can you send it to me again?

I sent you another copy of the info e-mail and PM'd you.

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I'd like to praise the Earth Science [tossup] answerlines. They were all very good, from what I remember. I also want to discuss something I see a lot in NAQT and saw a little bit in MUT, which is that you don't accept common "abbreviations" for quantities/things/elements (from packet 1: ...

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So I'm basically going to ignore a lot of what has been said above and present my own personal philosophy of question construction. Feel free to discuss whether or not you think it is good or not. When constructing my tossup's pyramid, I tend to think about two things when considering my middle clue...

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I definitely know the Darwin term from quantum mechanics, but I can't imagine what a tossup on C.G. Darwin himself would look like. Perhaps he's known for a few other things but this seems pretty thin material-wise to me; I've never encountered his name in any other context. IIRC like 70-80% of the...

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This tournament was wacky and great. 10/10 would play again.

For anyone curious about results, the teitler/koo/sundberg/beyer team beat the busse/jose/mcpeak/silverman team in the finals 90-80.

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I just edited the OP with an information update. E-mail me with any questions.

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I don't much about CS, so I'll ask: In the "log" question, what other answer could it be when you say "the runtime of blah blah computer science is this function"? I felt like the answer was log from the 2nd line but didn't buzz because it seemed too obvious. Aren't most of the ...

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I extend my thanks to Ike Jose for helping me finish the science during the last week--he wrote most of the computer science, most of the earth science, and the biology tossup on "shells." @Peter, if there were only a couple questions you feel were problematic, go ahead and feel free to po...

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The science in this tournament was great. One thing the questions should be particularly commended for was the cutting away of extraneous words to make very clue-dense concise questions. While I was playing the tournament, I was wondering what the length cap was since the questions seemed to have a ...

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This is the announcement for the Illinois mirror of the Minnesota Undergraduate Tournament . The goal for the difficulty is as follows: The difficulty of MUT 2014 will be similar to that of MUT 2013, with (ideally) some of the difficulty spikes evened out. The goal is to provide something   along th...

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My hesitation with Skype is that this can be harder for people to participate in and also minimize noise--I assume many people who playtest things are somewhat multi-tasking which can be trickier with Skype. If this works, though, assuming a smallish group, go for it. I totally agree that it's alwa...

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For the record, what I actually said was "cosmic distance model," which I assume was accepted because "model" and "ladder" have the same meter or something. It was not an intentional Daichi and I had no idea the distance "ladder" was a concept so I didn't thi...

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Something I personally believe should become standard practice is doing away with the IRC and playtesting over Skype instead. You get a better idea of how your questions are actually going to play in a real game, and in my opinion, you catch more typos/grammar errors when you actually read your ques...

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There are currently 35 people who want to play this tournament, and the field cap is set for 32 people. Is this tournament going to remain doubles, is further interest simply going to be met by expanding the field to massive size? I'd like to know so I can start figuring out who I want to play with ...

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Hey, so I may or may not post more about this tournament later but I'm just going to point this out for now. In division 2, there's a chemistry tossup on "P" that leads in like this: "This letter denotes a 'coefficient' equal to the ratio of a substance's solubility in octanol and wat...

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So this isn't actually about the SCT questions, but it involves SCT question content, so I'm posting it here. If a moderator believes that this discussion merits a new thread, feel free to split it off. Twice in our games at the Chicago mirror, a moderator made a mistake regarding acceptable answers...

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Can you please take down the DRAGOON packet immediately? The set is not yet cleared.

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Quick note: I think the fertilization/gastrula/archenteron question referred to a "haploid zygote." I have no idea if such a thing exists, but I suspect the question was meant to read "diploid zygote." Noted. I see my standard critiquing style has been skewered. I'll try to post...

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Could someone post the time derivative question? As a reader, I remember thinking tossups whose alternate answerlines require nearly as much text as the question itself might not be a good idea. The problem is the leadin (and the leadin only) could have potentially applied to the material derivativ...

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-I don't like the clues used in the fossils question, since the clue about superposition gives away that it's something you find buried in the earth pretty early. So, the fossils tossup is what I consider an "obviously bad" question, a number of which appeared across this set. I don't thi...

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Boring useless nonsense posts like these do more to drive away interested users from attempting to productively engage with hsquizbowl than Matt Weiner ever will. Post about individual questions you liked-disliked here. I did as the thread title instructed, though I guess had some other commentary ...

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Chicago A went undefeated to clear the field. Chicago B and OSU A tied for second place. Stats will come when I actually make them (I only have the scoresheets)

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A representative from each team attending should have just received an e-mail from me. If this is not the case, let me know ASAP.

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So I think the Moon tossup may have not been clear about what it wanted with its pronoun. I think I just heard "this," buzzed in when I heard Wadjet, said "eye" and then was negged. Would someone mind explaining the early clues to me to see if what I was thinking was wrong (whic...

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I think that the fine structure constant is one of only two important unitless quantities you can toss up in regular difficulty physics (refractive being the other). I'd be interested if you can think of some more (Reynolds number, at a stretch?). Stretching even further, coefficient of friction, g...

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The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi wrote:Were you guys going to set up a discussion forum for the set?

A discussion forum has been created and you can request access to join in the User Control Panel under Usergroups.

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Post commentary about the set in general, trends across it, etc. here.

I'd like to thank Ike for writing way more questions than he said he would initially--the set certainly would be worse off were it not for his contributions.

Discuss!

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Post about individual questions you liked-disliked here. The following categories were primarily written by 1-2 people: British Lit: Ike American History: Austin European History: Aaron World History: Aaron Biology: me and Andrew Chemistry: me Physics: me Other Science: Ike Painting: Ike and Chinmay...

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Inkana7 wrote:We're going to have to drop to 2 teams. Sorry.

That brings us back down to 19 teams, with 1 spot left in the field.

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Hey everyone, I'm working on securing staffers as fast as I can, but currently I only have enough staffers to support a 20 team tournament, so that is the temporary field cap. (I hope to improve this to 24). If you wish to secure a spot in the field, please _E-MAIL_ me, or you risk being left on the...

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I would agree that you have to consider the difficulty of the tossup at the end vs the middle/early clues. For example, while buckminsterfullerene is pretty easy at the end, I'd say it's definitely easier to get an early buzz on liquid-liquid extraction than it is to get an early buzz on buckminster...

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4 x 7 -> 7 x 4 with crossover should work. In addition to what other people have pointed out, the biggest problem with this is that one loss can eliminate you from the tournament since only one team is taken from each bracket to the top bracket. I like the 8/8/6/6 idea much better. Not if you move ...

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Grams's Go-Go Boots wrote:4 x 7 -> 7 x 4 with crossover should work.

In addition to what other people have pointed out, the biggest problem with this is that one loss can eliminate you from the tournament since only one team is taken from each bracket to the top bracket. I like the 8/8/6/6 idea much better.

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Questions will be hard-capped at 7 lines of 10-pt Times New Roman before the powermark (there will be powers). Emphasis added. That's a typo, right? No, it isn't. Due to the variable length of powermarks, a question with a longer power will thus be constrained to a shorter length cap if we capped q...

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Is there going to be a sign-up list for the Illinois site posted in this thread, or will it be split off into its own announcement? (Disclaimer: The following is an unofficial statement made by me, not the UofL quizbowl team) Louisville is planning to register a minimum of one team for that tournam...

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This is the announcement for the Illinois site for DRAGOON , a regular difficulty tournament produced by various members of the University of Illinois. Logistics: The tournament will be held in Gregory Hall, which is located here . A full interactive map of campus is located here . The most convenie...

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(mostly) Science comments! So, this tournament was great. I haven't seen many high school tournaments, but this tournament had some of the best science I've ever seen in a high school tournament. That said, it's MINOR NITPICKING TIME Packet 1: -The leadin kinda tells you it’s tetravalent immediately...

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Can someone from the ABT please confirm that Earlybird is still happening on the 5th? If so, where and when does it start? It's at the point where schools have to make transportation arrangements and we haven't heard a peep from the people running the tournament. If you don't respond within the nex...

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I'll throw in my 2 cents regarding science (mostly chem since that's what I know best and Sriram specifically asked for feedback) The chemistry at this tournament was particularly difficult, hard to power (if Billy's only getting two powers at this tournament you've probably done something wrong) Wh...

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I haven't talked with my teammates yet, but I'd be willing to bet Illinois would be interested in coming to a Pittsburgh site.

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I've updated the opening post with all the confirmed mirrors so far. Anyone else interested in mirroring should contact me. (Austin or I will probably get into contact with possible hosts soon)

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postfan wrote:How do you get on IRC?

Go to slashnet.org, then click on "Clients" and then "SlashNET Web Client." Choose a name and you'll join IRC. To join a channel, type /join #nameofchannel

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So, is this tournament 21 tossups in regulation, or 20 tossups, with a tiebreaker? Does that mean all the tiebreakers are other science? I haven't decided yet; I'm inclined to just make it 21 tossups in regulation, just letting ties stand. If I decide to go with 20 tossups in regulation, the tiebre...

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So, is this tournament 21 tossups in regulation, or 20 tossups, with a tiebreaker? Does that mean all the tiebreakers are other science?

touchpack

So I wrote the acetic acid question, along with a small handful of other questions for this set, which I consciously wrote to be easier than my DRAGOON questions (if you want to hear some "nosebleed" level hard parts of bonuses in chem come to DRAGOON!). The next clue was about TFA. I wasn...

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