The Quizbowl Resource Center

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NAQT staff check-in (and some set-up tasks) for the ICT *starts* at 7:30, so a 6:30 start time for this tournament is completely infeasible (unless you can get Joel to exempt Lederberg participants) I've sent an email asking how Joel would like us to handle Friday evening staff check-in and set-up.

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We won the first game when I managed to get this tossup: His strength derives from his large, fuzzy ears, and his name refers to his skill in dealing with certain marauding animals, whom he kills by grabbing their jaws and ripping them apart bare-handed. For 10 points, name this title badass of the...

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A short anecdote: because of this discussion, I went back to look at some first-lines and I noticed in particular this lead-in for the "Volsunga saga": A poem about the “Lovers” of a character from this work appears in the third part of The Earthly Paradise by William Morris After a bit...

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Ophir's raw data conveniently lists if a TU was gotten as a "bounceback." I went ahead and computed the cdf for the "average" ACF Regionals 2019 TU that was not a bounceback. This cdf only includes gets that were not gotten after a neg. Below is a plot of this cdf against Will A...

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I decided to take a graphical look at how this year's Regs compared to the hypothetical buzz distributions in Seth's post. The graph below compares the cumulative distribution of buzzes (both gets and negs) in Regs to hypothetical y = x, y = x^2, and y = x^3 distributions. https://i.imgur.com/LI6x8...

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I am including negs currently, since I think the real point we should be discussing is if clues are drawing buzzes of any type. A question drawing an unusually high number of early buzzes which are all negs would suffer from a different problem than what I'm looking at here. Ah, interesting. I'm us...

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I've went through round one and added more data - first & second sentence buzz #s and word counts, plus percentages for both. I wanted to make sure people thought this info was actually going to be useful before I kept working on this. Fred, do your second-sentence buzz data include the first-s...

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First off, thanks to Fred for starting this discussion—this is an issue I've been hoping someone would tackle since the advent of Ophirstats. And thanks to Ophir for his outstanding work on providing detailed buzz point and conversion data, of course! Whether or not people wind up deciding that chan...

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2. If the prelims are a split-field round-robin followed by bracketed playoffs that do not repeat any opponents from the preliminary pools (formats marked "SFRR" for 15 through 24 teams on the approved SCT format list ), then teams are ranked within each playoff bracket by overall record....

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Jeff posted our ranking policy for the 2019 SCT, but I wanted to clarify that we are planning on reassessing the policy this summer. If you disagree with any part of the policy, it would be helpful to do as Cody has done: post arguments and data that seem especially germane. (That is, I don't think ...

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Asking for a teammate: was there any point in the Young's modulus tossup (I think it was round 3) where bulk modulus was also an acceptable answer, specifically around the second sentence or so (sorry, I'm physics illiterate)? We ended up losing that game and were curious whether protesting would'v...

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Paсk 4 HK, Shanghai, Burma and Bali? Four Asian tossups in the same paсk A san-fran history and geo bonus in the same paсk Paсk 8 Bonus on conjugated system and tossup on resonance in the same paсk Bonus 8 was on British architecture, tossup 9 was on British architecture. These have all been split ...

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Will have more to say later once I read through my copy of the set, but just off the top of my head: -- Sogdian is not "derived from Aramaic" in any way, shape or form. Its writing system is. That's like saying Hungarian is "derived from English, but with double acute accents". ...

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NAQT is discussing possible changes to the D-value calculation (and the SOS calculation in particular); we'll see what the results look like once we finish running the numbers. Looking back at Ryan's initial post, I disagree with some of his arguments. Last Saturday, DePaul played the Missouri SCT s...

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I'm open to suggestions - would people consider playing this at CO? Is there enough space at ICT for both events? Or should I postpone until 2020? I think there's space at ICT for both events, but I'm biased: I will almost certainly play this if you run it at ICT, and almost certainly will not if i...

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I'm going to playtest physics and other science this weekend or early next week. I'll probably hold the sessions one after the other, but I'm open to having them at separate times depending on interest. I've made two doodle polls to select times: physics , other science . You certainly don't need t...

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I don't dispute any of that, and I'm not totally opposed to a large number of SCT sites. I do think that the late announcement of these locations complicates matters entirely though--there's only a couple of weeks until SCT--would some of the schools who already made plans to go farther away have c...

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I didn't help at all with (or pay almost any attention to) SCT site selection this year, so I may be way off base here. But thinking about it now, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to have sites at Northwestern and Michigan this year, given what happened last year. Here's my thinking: On the one ha...

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I think the idea of writing cross-disciplinary questions is fine, but they need careful execution. There are ways to mess up cross-disciplinary questions that aren't really a concern for straightforward, single-topic question. Andrew already pointed out one important possible stumbling block. I woul...

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We are discussing this policy, and I hope we will have an update ready sometime in the next week or so. (To be clear, I don't know if that update will be "we have changed this policy, here are the new details," or if it will be "we are retaining this policy, here are our reasons."...

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papaechotango wrote:There used to be an annual non-pyramidal competition that would attract dozens of teams from similar schools in the Benelux, Germany, England, Italy, and even as far as Turkey and Bahrain.

What competition is (was) this?

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I worked on the physics, astronomy, earth science, and applied math/statistics. Stephen Eltinge contributed some excellent questions (all the more welcome for helping cover solid state topics that I'm not particularly knowledgeable about), and helped me with editing advice on a couple more questions...

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Another minor point: twice we ended up in tied games with one or more protests lodged. The first time this happened, we played a tiebreaker and the winning team's protests were considered moot (they would no longer affect the result of the game). The second time we waited for the protest to be reso...

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This is a relatively minor point, but there were several times when issues with incomplete answer lines (and in one case an inconsistent question) could have decided our matches. The three biggest issues were: channelrhodopsin not being acceptable for the rhodopsin (One of the clues in the bonus re...

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I heard a story I want to confirm. Apparently in the Columbia vs Toronto game, there was this tossup on the small intestine: Though they are not from this organ, Caco-2 cells grow to resemble its cells. Congenital ectopic tissue in this organ can be detected using a pertechnetate scan. Different pa...

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Can I see questions on the following? *Burlingame *John II of France *Philippians Sure thing. After the assault of Charles Sumner, this man called Preston Brooks "the vilest sort of coward" and challenged him to a duel. This non-Cabinet member negotiated an agreement that granted both sig...

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I think one of the really frustrating aspects of the current format is that if you end up in a bracket with one of the best teams in the tournament (like Chicago in our case) ICT becomes single elimination for your team. Perhaps this format is optimal, but it can really punish teams for playing one...

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I'm curious which questions fall in the 3/3 quantum you mention. I guess I overlooked the delta function questions in my first post because I buzzed on the vector calc clue, but maybe it had more quantum clues; the identical particles tossup in the finals could count as well, though that seems more...

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Just an observation: There was a packet where there were effectively 3 math (or stats) tossups in my room. Frequentist, sets (I buzzed on the phrase "naive set theory", which I know from math exposure, not philosophy) and then a physics tossup on Cauchy that switched to "as a mathema...

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I said "slaves in Egypt" for _pyramid builders_ and got negged; I understand not all of the builders may have been slaves per se, but what were the acceptable and promptable responses? The answer line was pyramid builder s (accept answers that mention people who worked on pyramid s at Giz...

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"Era" was a somewhat suspicious pronoun for "The Fifties". Is there a reason why anything more specific couldn't have been used? To head off any confusion, the DI set had a sociology tossup on the 1950s (in America), while the DII set had a completely unrelated tossup on the 195...

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I said "slaves in Egypt" for _pyramid builders_ and got negged; I understand not all of the builders may have been slaves per se, but what were the acceptable and promptable responses? The answer line was pyramid builder s (accept answers that mention people who worked on pyramid s at Giz...

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One point in favor of the clock at ICT is that it helps keep rooms (nearly) synchronized, even across brackets and divisions. Since the DI and DII sets share converted questions, avoiding situations where one division is way ahead of the other is important. This year we did have a scheduled mismatch...

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I really enjoyed the physics and physics-y astro in the DI set. It did a great job touching on important topics from classes and things people might know from general interest. Here are some brief comments/observations. It seemed like there wasn't as much quantum mechanics as I might have expected....

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I really really really disliked the schedule format that this year's ICT used. The first five games having essentially the largest effect on final placing by a pretty huge margin didn't feel great, especially since for some reason we had to play a 2 seed vs 3 seed matchup as our very first game of ...

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I thought the history and trash tossups I heard in Div II were better this year than the older sets I played in practices and in the car ride before. For history, it seemed much more varied in the sort of answerlines compared to older sets, which seem to be focused disproportionately on Named Event...

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Can I see the tossup on frequentist statistics? I heard (or misheard) it as saying that credible intervals are used in frequentist statistics, when in fact they are used in Bayesian statistics. This approach is often used on the German tank problem, for which it yields a simple formula and not a ma...

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Could you please post the tossup on Wu? It seemed really difficult from my recollection, and I'm curious to see what the pre-FTP clues were. I assume you mean the tossup on Wei: A dynasty of this name required each would-be empress to forge a golden statue. That dynasty of this name began construct...

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As the author of both the only John Cleese-themed Festivus packet and the only food tossup specifically on chocolates from the Crunchy Frog sketch, I would be remiss if I did not note that the Cleese-played character Eric Praline is not the manufacturer of chocolates in the Crunchy Frog sketch (as ...

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Could I see the tossup on the 1910s? I had a sense it was that, but never heard anything definitive to buzz on, so I'd like to see what I missed. In this calendar decade, a massacre of miners at Myslowice prompted the first Silesian Uprising. In this decade, political parties agreed to the Burgfrie...

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Oh, right, could I also see the tossup on the Los Angeles Times bombing, from the same packet as the last two questions? Nothing wrong with this one, I just wanted to see it again since it is apparently more notable than I first thought. The man responsible for this event, who was identified by a c...

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An Economic Ignoramus wrote:In a bonus part, Bakongo was not accepted for the "Kongo People". Given that Bakongo is this ethnic group's endonym, this should not be the case.

I've added _Bakongo_ to the answer line.

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Could I please see the bonus where the middle part (if I remember correctly) (at least, it was the second of the three parts) was "holotype"? The answer we gave was "type specimen" which was evidently not deemed acceptable or promptable. For 10 points each--answer the following ...

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I would love to see the bonus on "Box" and "Cox," so I can get it framed or something. A play about these two characters was adapted into a comic opera in the 1860s by Arthur Sullivan. For 10 points each-- A. Name these two men who simultaneously rent a room from Mrs. Bouncer in...

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Could I see the "subaltern" TU from Round 15? Something in there is sticking in my mind, but I'm not sure what.. The "knowledges" of this group--such as "border thinking"--are discussed in Walter Mignolo's Local Histories/Global Designs , which refers to it in the subt...

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"Era" was a somewhat suspicious pronoun for "The Fifties". Is there a reason why anything more specific couldn't have been used? To head off any confusion, the DI set had a sociology tossup on the 1950s (in America), while the DII set had a completely unrelated tossup on the 195...

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The Tahiti tossup seemed to suggest the mutiny on the Bounty was against Fletcher Christian, not led by him. Yeah, we messed this up—the offending phrase is "A mutiny against Fletcher Christian derailed the Bounty 's journey to . . ." I've fixed this up in the DI set. Thankfully the mista...

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I want to thank Matt Bollinger and Andrew Hart for working with me on the DI set, and Jeff Hoppes, Larissa Kelly, and Neilesh Vinjamuri for taking care of the DII set. Billy Busse and Ike Jose also gave valuable feedback on the sets. I also want to thank the many writers and subject editors who cont...

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I would like somebody who was on the Berkeley team in the early to mid 2000's, when it was organized along the lines of the Roman Republic with Consuls and Praetors and such, to come post in this thread. Apparently I have been summoned in my official capacity as An Old. This organizational structur...

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Hi all, as Andrew noted over in this thread , in July NAQT began offering a "consistency bonus" to writers who reliably write questions each week. We're very pleased with the response to the program, so we plan to offer a similar program next year, and we thought we should let everyone kno...

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