The Quizbowl Resource Center

touchpack

4.5/4.5 Literature (1/1 American novels, .75/.75 British novels, .75/.75 Euro and World novels,1/1 Drama, 1/1 Poetry) I'd say that this needlessly restricts writers, and also seriously discourages religious literature and classical literature. And common links, which are in fact the best. Like actu...

touchpack

I don't know if there's a way to make it clearer for similar future questions, but it was hard to realize when spoken aloud that the lower-left corner bit applied to all three parts. Would "what value is in the lower left corner of each of these?" or "…each of these matrices?" b...

touchpack

On a somewhat unrelated note, the CKM matrix is pretty easy to understand if you have elementary knowledge of linear algebra (which I will assume you do have, since this is a thread about learning math). Wavefunctions are just vectors, man!

touchpack

The University of Illinois would like to announce DRAGOON (Dr. Aaron's Grand Overview Of Nonsense) , a regular difficulty tournament planned for fall 2013. We would like to run mirrors during the month of November (except for the weekend ACF Fall claims). Questions: This tournament will be house-wri...

touchpack

Illinois will be submitting two Pokemon packets to this (one by Ike Jose, one by me, Andrew Wang, and Austin Listerud)

touchpack

The condition for this gauge is to set the vector potential divergence to zero. For 10 points each: [10] Name this gauge, which renders Maxwell’s equations invariant under the gauge group of special relativity. ANSWER: the Lorenz gauge The lead-in is definitely wrong. Setting the divergence of the ...

touchpack

lots of early (and game-changing) clue drops (peroxisomes, bone marrow, RNAi, iron-sulfur proteins), Yeah, I thought this was the biggest problem overall. I would cite as some of the worst offenders the tossups on the 18-electron rule, which was immediately obvious from the very beginning (hey guys...

touchpack

Out of the 25/25 other arts in this tournament, we had 4/4 jazz. I don't think that's unreasonable. I heartily endorse this and people in quizbowl should stop expecting "1 perfunctory question on Coltrane, Davis or Brubeck" to be the extent of jazz in a tournament. I too endorse this, alt...

touchpack

all at about the ACF Fall level. I encourage you to relax this restriction--attempting to write 24-32 ACF Fall-appropriate level tossups on high-energy physics without repeats sounds like, frankly, a fucking nightmare to me. Without the difficulty restriction though I bet you could write on some re...

touchpack

I'm not totally sure I understand this one. There are Majorana fermions and Dirac fermions (although there might not be any of the former). It's uncertain which of those classes neutrinos fall into, but it's not like there are Majorana neutrinos and Dirac neutrinos. This seemed fine to me when I wr...

touchpack

Stats are located here

touchpack

It turns out I can't count to 16 (thanks Notre Dame!), but that's fine, since we now have 18 teams. The field is now closed. E-mail to come soon about format/payment.

touchpack

OP is updated with a field update--I'll work out exact logistics and get a team e-mail sent before Monday. If you have not registered for this tournament yet and would like a spot in the field, please e-mail me as soon as possible! (OSU?) Also, if you haven't confirmed the exact number of teams you'...

touchpack

Hey, it's now less than a month to the date of the tournament and only a few schools have signed up. I'd like to see more signups soon!

touchpack

I, for one, would benefit enormously from the relegation of chemistry to a minor science and the promotion of math to a major one. Over my dead body The distribution we are using is as follows: 4/4 Science (1/1 Biology, 1/1 Chemistry, 1/1 Physics, 1/1 Math and Other) Your ideas are intriguing to me...

touchpack

I THINK what Eric is asking for is to find the probability that the #1 team makes the top bracket, that BOTH the #1 and #2 teams make the top bracket, that all three of the #1, #2, and #3 teams make the top bracket, all the way up to the top 6.

touchpack

Why not 3x12 -> 6x6 then? 3x12 into 6x6 would be worse when it comes to getting the best teams in the playoffs, mainly because the top bracket is now very small. While 6x6 into 3x12 gives you a smaller sample size (5 games vs 7), the competition is going to be weaker. Last years ICT had brackets co...

touchpack

I'll preface this by saying I'm pretty upset about the Lysander tossup as we pretty much lost our game against Illinois because of it. As unfortunate as it was that you were hosed by that, after doing some investigation it turns out Aaron was hosed as well in the same packet! This function can be u...

touchpack

I agree with Nick that hydrogenation is definitely clear from the context. However, I feel that the SN2 question is a bit misleading in its introduction. I agree, chemistry specialists that definitely know what SN2 is will recognize what is going on, but the introduction makes it seem like a specif...

touchpack

I didn't play this question, but when I looked at that packet I had to read the leadin several times to parse it. It seemed like it was saying that there was one mole of the compound in the iodoform reaction or something. I almost certainly would have negged with ketones on that clue since it menti...

touchpack

Next time try describing the BWR equation of state instead of just putting the name in the first line. I guess I could have said something about an 8 parameter improvement used for hydrocarbons, but I'm not convinced how buzzable that is. That's not to say I think it's a great question (edit: it mi...

touchpack

I don't think any of these options are necessarily the best for approaching "Quiz Bowl" science. Problem with Quiz Bowl science is that it is almost always asking conceptual or definition questions and this only works in biology out of the major sciences. Both Chemistry and Physics are pr...

touchpack

Trying to study science "for quizbowl" (e.g. reading packets or lists) isn't going to work very well if you lack baseline knowledge--taking AP Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and/or Calculus will help you immensely, if your school offers them. I've heard good things about Khan Academy as well...

touchpack

The D-value being used for the teams from this site is taking both DI and DII into account under the place of finish (it's out of 28 teams instead of 7 or 21). I'm not sure how the D-value is calculated, so I have no idea if this is affecting it, but it's something I noticed that doesn't happen wit...

touchpack

This is, essentially, an extension of "easy high school quiz bowl is too easy to challenge me. Therefore, it must be redesigned so it is a challenge for me. Nevermind the consequences of that, such as sets being dramatically harder for new high school teams, or high school teams that don't hav...

touchpack

Glancing at your other posts, it seems nearly all your exposure to questions is through ProtoBowl -- it's totally logical that you would believe knowing Stribeck curve is enough to always get you questions on friction when all you have seen are the same two or three tossups on friction repeated ove...

touchpack

And yeah, Kevin, Billy is totally right -- don't try to argue that any question which your "you say Ives-Stilwell I say Doppler!" cheerleading routine fails is flawed. It's your strategy that is. That's the last thing I'm advocating. I don't pull this association :bees: at nationals (and ...

touchpack

I got a few powers here and there by hearing "Ives-Stilwell" and buzzing in with "Doppler effect" every time. Then, at PACE, this question came up: This effect was first experimentally verified when Ives and Stilwell observed the exact decrease in frequency predicted by the tran...

touchpack

This is not a particularly strong argument. Physics is also "so fundamental" (it would be hard to argue that it is less fundamental), so perhaps there is 1.3/1.3 physics in the 1/1 physics model. This is not necessarily a reason to reduce the physics distribution; it is a factual statemen...

touchpack

I'm going to be honest. I don't like science history replacing chemistry. In fact, I want this trend to stop. I think people who replace chemistry with something else are largely lazy and uncreative about writing interesting questions on chemistry. Its certainly possible to write 1/1 chemistry for ...

touchpack

Indeed it has--in order to not conflict with people's spring breaks, we have moved the tournament to the 20th of April.

touchpack

The University of Illinois will be hosting a mirror of the Minnesota Undergraduate Tournament on April 20th, a tournament written by Rob Carson, Mike Cheyne, Bernadette Spencer, Andrew Hart, Matt Menard (of UChicago), and Gaurav Kandlikar. This set's difficulty will be lower than regular--for a bett...

touchpack

Here's the scattering TU: 15. One method for solving this type of problem assumes the potential is spherically symmetric and expresses the solution as a sum of partial waves. Solving this type of problem entails finding the angle in terms of the impact parameter. The square of the namesake amplitude...

touchpack

Afterwards, Connor Teevens read his 80 tossups. Rob Carson handily won, although I somehow took second despite the vast amounts of music/video games (I think, either Ike or Aaron Rosenberg or Billy Busse can expose me as a liar if I didn't them pass in the last few tossups). Out of the 3 of us, Aar...

touchpack

Maybe there is some odd technicality that makes what I am about to say wrong, but rockslike shale are NOT minerals. They are conglomerations of minerals and other substances, which means that they do not have an explicit and consistent chemical structure. That made playing this question very confus...

touchpack

Hey, Illinois was playing the last packets in practice the other day, and there was a tossup on histones that basically began "these proteins that form octamers..." The octameric structure of histones is one of the most well-known things about them, and should be right before "nucleos...

touchpack

Sorry for the delay, one of the games wasn't entered into the stats and I had wait for Tom to e-mail me the electronic scoresheet.

Stats can be found here

touchpack

Bumping due to logistics update and to note that the field is now closed.

touchpack

I think the "halogenation" question should accept "free radical reaction" before free radicals are mentioned, or at least move the mention of "free radicals" to the beginning of that sentence, because radical reactions are as much of a thing as halogenation reactions a...

touchpack

Illinois D (Kevin, Nicholas) cleared the field with a 7-0 record to win. Illinois C (Tim, Tom) took second place.

Stats can be found here

touchpack

mr_basque wrote:Just confirming the date for this tournament. It is in fact 10/13 correct? Is there an email for the TD? I have a question related to a team that would like to enter.

The tournament is in fact on 10/13, and I am the TD. My e-mail is [email protected]

touchpack · Re: IFT @ Illinois (10/13/12) Bumping for field + location update.

Bumping for field + location update.

touchpack

The University of Illinois will be hosting a mirror of the Early Collegiate Novice Tournament on September 22, 2012. This tournament is aimed at freshman and sophomore college players with low amounts of quizbowl experience, and eligibility rules will be enforced in order to make this tournament a p...

touchpack

Cutting out a giveaway that "steps outside the question" is something that I think is reasonable at hard events - for example, it should have been done on that "trans effect" tossup. That's a fine really hard thing to write about - but it shouldn't end by saying to the player &q...

touchpack

Hey, just so everyone knows, this tournament is moving to 10/6/12.

Edited the topic title to reflect that--mgmt.

touchpack

I was under the impression that the word "factor" was used only for dimensionless numbers that produce some sort of multiplicative correction due to some effect (in this case, due to the fact that gasses have a non-zero compressibility, PV = nRT changes to PV = ZnRT). At least, the compres...

touchpack

So I was the writer of the compressibility factor tossup, and here are my thoughts: I forgot to add "accept Z" to the answerline, so it appears SteveJon added "prompt Z" I wrote the tossup from Introduction to Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics 7th ed by Smith, Van Ness, and Abb...

touchpack

This is the Illinois site of the Illinois Fall Tournament , a housewrite done by myself, Austin Listerud, and Ike Jose. Jonathan Magin will be overseeing the project and helping with things such as difficulty control. Difficulty will be "easy." (ACF Fall and MUT from the past few years are...

touchpack

Looking at some top college teams , I would say successful leading contributors tend to be no worse than 3:1 gets/neg, where successful supporting players tend to be no worse than 5-6:1 (obviously some players neg more or less than this though since there are a multitude of winning buzzer strategies...

touchpack

Austin Listerud and I are looking for teammates. I have some science knowledge, Austin can get a few things across the board but is best at myth. We certainly won't be expecting to contend though. Contact me at [email protected] if interested.

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