The Quizbowl Resource Center

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I didn't play this tournament, I merely moderated at the Maryland site. Here are my thoughts: (1) Definitely lots of problems with typos, lead-ins, etc. One bonus asked both "this work" and "this author" (or something like that - forget the exact words) confusing teams as to what...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

What do we lose by prompting on Clinton? The prompt adds perhaps 6 seconds to the game.

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Going off this, shouldn't we not accept Tokugawa for Tokugawa Ieyasu given Tokugawa Iemitsu and many of the other shoguns during that particular bakufu were important in Japanese history. Who accepts this? At any tournament I've been involved in, saying "Tokugawa" gets you a prompt. There...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I would never accept "The Shah of Iran" or "Shah Pahlavi" as an answer for this particular figure - though I'd certainly prompt on the latter. But I think it's accurate to say that this particular figure was referred to as "The Shah" and "Shah Pahlavi" in medi...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Back when I was editing tournaments (like, 5 years ago), I found editing packet submission tournaments to be more annoying than editing house-written tournaments. It was relatively easy for me to sit down, and write dozens of tossups in a single Word document, all in the same format, same font, etc....

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I'll do a better job of sharing it on Facebook each week. Some of my non-quizbowl friends found this interesting as well.

A lot of adults are into graphical representation of data.

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Why don't we discuss models of how something like this might work? Here is a simple one: Suppose I am an investor in quizbowl activities and I am looking for a 10% annual return on my quizbowl investments. However, I haven't played quizbowl in years, don't know what makes a good question by modern s...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Slumdog Millionaire is about a quiz show and is substantially better than most of the movies listed above. Except for Mean Girls, of course.

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Will NAQT's new President, Lee Henry, be making any other major changes? Should I be worried that he might fire Seth Teitler?

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I do not have much experience with Skype, or knowledge of why quizbowl tends to use Skype for tournaments rather than other remote video chat tools. The Skype revolution has happened since my complete retirement from quizbowl. However, I will mention that Google Hangouts is another tool you can use ...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Single game upsets are not unusual in quizbowl: an obscure team can often beat a very good team if the questions line up with their pet interests/areas of strength, or if the good team plays a mistake-ridden game. At any given tournament, odds are at least one of the top teams will take a random los...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Muncie is in a great location for quizbowl. Draw a circle containing all points within a 6 hour drive of Muncie, and that circle contains many of college quizbowl's best teams and most frequent tournament hosts. Tournaments will almost always be on Saturday, starting relatively early in the morning ...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

So there are history questions in regular quizbowl packets too - history comprises a good 20% of a standard quizbowl packet. Many of those questions are written by the same people who write NHBB questions. There are a ton of quizbowl packets here: http://www.quizbowlpackets.com/ There are also other...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

How are these written? Do we just write tossups that use "this action" as a pronoun, and the person can buzz in at any time and perform the action? Are these tossups 6 lines long? What do the answer lines look like?

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I thought it was pretty cool that one year when Matt saved NHBB and ACF Nationals in the same year.

Skepticism and Animal Feed

First of all, I respect the right of the tournament editor to set whatever terms and conditions for the tournament they please, even if they are totally insane. After all, it is Ike and his co-editors who are doing the important work of keeping CO alive, not any of you. If he wishes to be paid only ...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

All of this is good stuff. I want to put in a plug for another resource: other people. They might not always be available: maybe this is a tournament you have to write solo, or literally everyone else is playing, or it's just for your packet, etc. But odds are there will be people who are not playin...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

The words "noted" and "notably" The phrase "Among the [ethnic group]" Beginning the third part of a really hard bonus with "For a final 10 points," Using the phrase "In this work, the speaker notes that" in tossups on rap songs, where the phrase is f...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

At my first-ever college tournament, I asked one of my teammates to punch me, in the hopes that this would give me an adrenaline rush and cause me to perform better in our final game. Said teammate declined and also quit quizbowl after the tournament.

Part of me wonders if that would have worked.

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I will not accept second place to anyone in my Ted Gioia apologism, but yeah one of my reactions to this poll was that Tommy was by far the most underrated player on the list. It's not just Ted and Dallas he's better than.

Skepticism and Animal Feed

56. RICHARD MASON (Yale): Perhaps the most forgotten player to win Chicago Open in recent years, Rich and John Lawrence formed the 1-2 punch of the Yale Renaissance, and for a brief period, I thought Rich was the better player. However, his peak was kind of short and he didn't improve as dramatical...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Putting two and two together here, do you see this as reason enough to make mythology less than 1/1 of the distribution? No. I acknowledge the central point of this thread: that mythology has such a small body of sources, that coming up with fresh questions is uniquely challenging there. There's no...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

In terms of actually working for NHBB or other Maddenverse organizations, I have no complaints. I was always paid promptly. Dave Madden was always nice to me. They always have plenty of polos for NHBB moderators and seem to treat staff well during NHBB itself. The pay is good compared to the rest of...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I used to compare PACE to the Stanford Prison Experiment, except with a corporate bureaucracy instead of a prison. Perfectly normal quizbowl people would get elected to PACE and then, especially if they were the Communications Officer, they would cease to talk like human beings, and start talking li...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I've never written or attempted to write for NAQT before. I hear they have a comprehensive editing process and once had a major question security breach. They're also the only surviving "legacy" quizbowl organization that seems to actually have multiple employees/members who make all or a ...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

It's interesting that when I first started playing quizbowl, I was very offended by many of the Norse myth questions I heard. It seemed like questions existed for no other reason than the fact that Norse culture had the quirk of every damn object having a given name. There's some HSQB post from 2005...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Look I'm sure there are challenging things about editing hard tournaments and challenging things about editing easy tournaments. As somebody who exclusively edited hard tournaments, I would rather go to the dentist once a day for an entire week than edit an easy tournament like ACF Fall. Perhaps it ...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I'm retired from quizbowl and have no stake in this, but I'd in general love to see more serious academic side events or serious academic open tournaments adopt rules variations from outside of the mACF world. It would have been really fun to play an academic summer open on Ann B. Davis rules, for e...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

If you want to learn a specific time period that you are not very familiar with, I found it useful to read multiple books on the same topic, and seeing what gets mentioned in multiple books. Also a helpful way to not get misled by the various biases (or pet theories/viewpoints of the author) that bo...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

So I think a lot of it boils down to "can I describe what I am looking for easily", i.e., does this answer line easily turn into a pronoun. Some creative answerlines do better here than others. Back in the day, I wrote a lot of navy tossups. The answerlines would be things like "The A...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

So I think a lot of it boils down to "can I describe what I am looking for easily", i.e., does this answer line easily turn into a pronoun. Some creative answerlines do better here than others. Back in the day, I wrote a lot of navy tossups. The answerlines would be things like "The A...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Back in the day, I wrote a lot of "creative" type answerlines - "Finnish fascists", things like that. I regret it. There is nothing you can accomplish by writing a tossup with the answerline "Finnish fascists" that you cannot accomplish by writing a tossup on "Finl...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Back in the day, I wrote a lot of "creative" type answerlines - "Finnish fascists", things like that. I regret it. There is nothing you can accomplish by writing a tossup with the answerline "Finnish fascists" that you cannot accomplish by writing a tossup on "Finl...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Not only are NAQT questions good, but NAQT is probably the most professional and reliable question writing company in existence.

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Look I'm not alleging that Cuba was not a key theater of the Spanish-American war or that there was not a "Cuban campaign" in the technical, military strategy sense of the term. I'm simply stating that writing a tossup on "The Cuban Campaign of the Spanish American War" creates o...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I'm not involved in NSC in any way, and I certainly didn't play it, but as an outside observer "Cuban theater of the Spanish-American War" sounds like an extremely cumbersome answerline and I'm not sure what is being accomplished that could not be accomplished with a tossup where the answe...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Person who actually talks to Dennis here: That's him, yes. He does not remember it fondly. He also did not attend Harvard, though he did hang out with the team while he lived in Boston. During the late 2000's, Dennis Loo was not a student at Harvard (or anywhere) but he attended almost every single...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Miracle on Ice

Skepticism and Animal Feed

For reference, I don't believe the announcement for ACF Fall had any explicit or even implicit language in it this year discouraging good players from playing it:

http://www.hsquizbowl.org/forums/viewto ... =8&t=17524

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Another argument against three-team games is that it penalizes teams of generalists by potentially exposing them to two sets of specialists at the same time.

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Quizbowl must realize its manifest destiny and tame the mountain west.

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I'll add that I find "interesting" questions much more enjoyable to write than the alternative. Back when I was writing hundreds of questions a year, I probably would have gone insane if all I was writing was the boring ones. Inserting interesting clues, "amusing" commentary, etc...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I know this is an ACF thread, but let's remember that Minnesota led by Carson/Hart/Byrne beat Harvard at the 2010 ICT despite the fact that somebody on the other team had all of the answers. This is an underrated achievement by that group. That late 2000's Harvard team might have won a few things le...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

How does NHBB store and transport 100+ buzzers?

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Content repetition. I'll hold off discussing the actual answerlines until that gets cleared, but there were clear instances in the bowl of the same answer appearing two, and possibly three, times. If the eligible pool of answers is "anything that has happened in the past", as it has once ...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Fear not, though - I will lose that battle handily, and quizbowl in 2025 will certainly demand that all tossups contain citations to major university syllabi. The lamps are going out all over the Canon, and we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime. And yet even in this dystopia, Plato will b...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

What, if any, are the logistical obstacles and limitations preventing your computer from, say, playing Chicago Open? (Other than the field being full).

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Failure is a terrible feeling; many great quizbowl players have said here (or elsewhere) they they were motivated by a distaste for failure as much as (or even more so than) an enjoyment of victory. Unfortunately, in any high-stakes competitive activity worth its salt, more people will fail than suc...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I first fell in love with quizbowl as a high school student circa 2001. Here was an activity that rewarded me for what I was already doing: reading books, paying attention in class, visiting museums in my spare time, etc. At the time, both Illinois and the league my high school played in used crappy...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I wouldn't say that I knew Andy Watkins "well", but being his teammate for three years I probably know him a bit better than most of you. The rumors that Andy cheated began almost immediately after the 2010 ICT (and perhaps earlier, but that was the first time I noticed them). I was very s...

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