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The Norman Mailer bonus part says The Naked and the Dead is about Vietnam, which is not right.

The polymerization question had a hose at the beginning: I buzzed with metathesis on the ADMET clue, because that's a metathesis reaction that can polymerize the olefins that undergo it.

Yeah, there were two olefin metathesis polymerization clues in that tossup (ADMET and ROMP) but for whatever reason I didn't envision people buzzing with metathesis, which was pretty stupid. I'll clean it up.

I don't have the set in front of me, so these are some general impressions/commentary with regards to specific tossups. In general, the set seemed to have a number of ill-conceived questions that I suspect originated from submissions, and I'm disappointed that the editors chose to use these questions.

The Sundiata question (MIT A/Illinois B) seemed to be very top-heavy, until you get to the stock stuff about Sumanguru and the Battle of Kirina. I'm not sure how this played out at other sites, and this could just be my impression based on the rather repetitive nature of a lot of pre-modern West African history questions (this contrasts with the pretty good Nigeria question in the set).

The "cars" question from German clues (MIT A/Illinois B) just seemed like a very bad idea and I don't think it played well, though I can't offer many specifics. I suspect that in most games without top tier teams, this question turned into people buzzing on clues about gas or Volkswagen, assuming they didn't know what a Trabant is/was. I also suspect the "duels" question (Harvard packet) ended up playing out in a similar manner.

I have also heard from multiple people that the Santa Maria tossup played out between top teams as a buzzer-race on "flagship". It was trivial to figure out that the question was asking about the Nina, Pinta, or Santa Maria, but very few people actually would know which one it is until you hear the other two names or "flagship" because, frankly, how important is who built and/or rebuilt the ship, where they did it, etc. anyways?

The Cincinnatus/dictator/farmer bonus lacks a hard part, unless the idea is that Cincinnatus is supposed to be hard if you don't give the famous anecdote. I'm okay with this bonus being a 20 for people who've heard the anecdote, but it also lets you figure out the hard part really easily if you know what time period Cincinnatus is from.

The Marduk/Enuma Elish/Nabu bonus has two medium-easy parts and a hard part, in my opinion. Perhaps it could be reordered to go Enuma Elish/Marduk/Nabu, with a description of the events in Enuma Elish instead of saying what it is. The same thing about Denmark/Christian/Schleswig-Holstein, though I'm not as sure about how to fix that one.

I don't know if other people feel this way, but I don't think Ned Kelly deserves as much attention as quizbowl gives him. I don't know much about Australian history, but I haven't really seen many American history tossups on Jesse James or Billy the Kid while playing quizbowl, so why are we paying so much attention to this Australian dude? Do people really like buzzing on hearing the name Ah Fook that much? If he's really that important to Australian history, please enlighten me.

The Maria Theresa tossup mentioned that the ruler in question was female fairly early on. It's unfortunate, but I think it's very ill-advised to mention that a specific pre-modern ruler/leader is female early in a question because it rapidly narrows the answer space.

gamegeek2 wrote:Do people really like buzzing on hearing the name Ah Fook that much?

Yes, because it never gets old. (I do agree that we could use fewer Ned Kelly questions in quizbowl.)

I could do with less Ned Kelly questions, but I would also say that western outlaws tend to get short shrift in quizbowl lately.

Cheynem wrote:I could do with less Ned Kelly questions, but I would also say that western outlaws tend to get short shrift in quizbowl lately.

Yeah I think the problem here isn't that outlaws are getting tossed up too much or whatever, but rather that there has to be a bigger canon of Australian history than just 1,000,000 Ned Kelly questions.

Sulawesi Myzomela wrote:

Cheynem wrote:I could do with less Ned Kelly questions, but I would also say that western outlaws tend to get short shrift in quizbowl lately.

there has to be a bigger canon of Australian history than just 1,000,000 Ned Kelly questions

There already is one, though -- even at this tournament:

Harvard/Florida A/Louisville A wrote:14. Anthony Grey claimed that a prime minister of this country was a spy for China who escaped to a submarine in 1967, rather than drowning. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this country of Harold Holt that was led during most of World War II by John Curtin, who sought to defend it from a Japanese invasion.
ANSWER: Commonwealth of Australia
[10] On February 19, 1942, this capital city of the Northern Territory experienced the only major assault on Australian soil during World War II when it was bombed by the Japanese.
ANSWER: Darwin
[10] During World War II in 1942, Robert Menzies gave this series of radio broadcasts on Friday nights, including a namesake speech. These talks helped revive Menzies’s political career before he helped start the Liberal Party.
ANSWER: Forgotten People speeches

RyuAqua wrote:

Sulawesi Myzomela wrote:

Cheynem wrote:I could do with less Ned Kelly questions, but I would also say that western outlaws tend to get short shrift in quizbowl lately.

there has to be a bigger canon of Australian history than just 1,000,000 Ned Kelly questions

There already is one, though -- even at this tournament:

Harvard/Florida A/Louisville A wrote:14. Anthony Grey claimed that a prime minister of this country was a spy for China who escaped to a submarine in 1967, rather than drowning. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this country of Harold Holt that was led during most of World War II by John Curtin, who sought to defend it from a Japanese invasion.
ANSWER: Commonwealth of Australia
[10] On February 19, 1942, this capital city of the Northern Territory experienced the only major assault on Australian soil during World War II when it was bombed by the Japanese.
ANSWER: Darwin
[10] During World War II in 1942, Robert Menzies gave this series of radio broadcasts on Friday nights, including a namesake speech. These talks helped revive Menzies’s political career before he helped start the Liberal Party.
ANSWER: Forgotten People speeches

Yes, there is. And there will be plenty more at other tournaments. Hopefully a few less of them are on Ned Kelly.

While there were a few things that I wanted to mention, one jumps out at me right now - Tossup 10 in the Dartmouth/Notre Dame packet (art museums) notes that Louis Kahn designed two of them for Yale, while Bonus 8 in the WUSTL/Columbia B/Berkeley packet asks for the answer of Yale by mentioning that Louis Kahn designed two art galleries there.

Another two that came up:

I said ultramicrotome for microtome.

The Siam tossup started by saying that one ruler of this nation promoted a policy called "official nationalism". At this point, Patrick buzzed in and said "Russia", thinking of the "official nationalism" promoted by Nicholas I and Sergei Uvarov. You could probably move that sentence around and make it better.

EDIT: Just heard the last packets in practice.

The Vermillion bird (Zuque, Suzaku, etc) represents the south. That's not the same as fenghuang, who represents the empress.

I thought the "newsreels" tossup was a little unclear. The Starship Troopers clue is a propaganda news film, which is different than a literal newsreel as seen in Citizen Kane. I think this may have been confusing for people (and I negged it in playtesting with answer about "celebrating the end of WWII" on the first clue).

As for the history questions being discussed in the other thread:

*There is a clear distinction between the two Gracchus brothers. You could argue, I guess, it was too hard to ask people to distinguish between them, but I don't think it should have been unclear.

*I'm unsympathetic to the idea that you can quickly realize it's a Columbus ship and not realize the Santa Maria is the ship that those clues applies to. There are not very many important clues at all for the Nina or the Pinta.

*I thought cars may have cliffed and I bet it induced a host of negs. I think this was just a case of difficulty issues though--the question itself seems fine.

Cheynem wrote:I thought the "newsreels" tossup was a little unclear. The Starship Troopers clue is a propaganda news film, which is different than a literal newsreel as seen in Citizen Kane. I think this may have been confusing for people (and I negged it in playtesting with answer about "celebrating the end of WWII" on the first clue).

As for the history questions being discussed in the other thread:

*There is a clear distinction between the two Gracchus brothers. You could argue, I guess, it was too hard to ask people to distinguish between them, but I don't think it should have been unclear.

*I'm unsympathetic to the idea that you can quickly realize it's a Columbus ship and not realize the Santa Maria is the ship that those clues applies to. There are not very many important clues at all for the Nina or the Pinta.

*I thought cars may have cliffed and I bet it induced a host of negs. I think this was just a case of difficulty issues though--the question itself seems fine.

I should have used a different clue for the newsreel tossup. I understand the confusion there, and have taken this out for future mirrors.

I think some of the biology questions had easy clues very early on. Specifically:
*The retina question- it describes retinoblastoma in the second clue which I would argue is one of the two most well known oncogenes and the only oncogene that I can think of that is named for the tissue that it is derived from
*The inflammation question- the first clue is "Upregulation of this process is the characteristic sign of the wheal-and-flare reaction" which is so obviously inflammation I thought that the answer line must be something more specific.
*The lac operon question- I will readily admit to being wrong on this one because I could definitely been biased by the introductory biology labs I've done but the first clue is about x-gal color selection which is very widely used and I would argue a much easier clue than the ones that come after it.

Margo wrote:I think some of the biology questions had easy clues very early on. Specifically:
*The retina question- it describes retinoblastoma in the second clue which I would argue is one of the two most well known oncogenes and the only oncogene that I can think of that is named for the tissue that it is derived from
*The inflammation question- the first clue is "Upregulation of this process is the characteristic sign of the wheal-and-flare reaction" which is so obviously inflammation I thought that the answer line must be something more specific.
*The lac operon question- I will readily admit to being wrong on this one because I could definitely been biased by the introductory biology labs I've done but the first clue is about x-gal color selection which is very widely used and I would argue a much easier clue than the ones that come after it.

I agree with you on all counts (if I had to pick three bio questions that I was concerned about difficulty on, it'd be these), though I will note that it is not easy to find hard clues about the lac operon that are specific to it and not operons, and are also not minutiae. I will try to add on a clue to retina and lac, and maybe just get rid of that inflammation clue.

vcuEvan wrote:

Cheynem wrote:I thought the "newsreels" tossup was a little unclear. The Starship Troopers clue is a propaganda news film, which is different than a literal newsreel as seen in Citizen Kane. I think this may have been confusing for people (and I negged it in playtesting with answer about "celebrating the end of WWII" on the first clue).

As for the history questions being discussed in the other thread:

*There is a clear distinction between the two Gracchus brothers. You could argue, I guess, it was too hard to ask people to distinguish between them, but I don't think it should have been unclear.

*I'm unsympathetic to the idea that you can quickly realize it's a Columbus ship and not realize the Santa Maria is the ship that those clues applies to. There are not very many important clues at all for the Nina or the Pinta.

*I thought cars may have cliffed and I bet it induced a host of negs. I think this was just a case of difficulty issues though--the question itself seems fine.

I should have used a different clue for the newsreel tossup. I understand the confusion there, and have taken this out for future mirrors.

The Starship Troopers clue was in the Texas mirror, and was where I negged with war propaganda films.

I don't remember what it was, but in our match against St. John's in round 1 with LASA A's packet, a painter who was the middle part was mentioned earlier in the same bonus (I think it was somewhere in the first few bonuses).

Wasabi wrote:

vcuEvan wrote:

Cheynem wrote:I thought the "newsreels" tossup was a little unclear. The Starship Troopers clue is a propaganda news film, which is different than a literal newsreel as seen in Citizen Kane. I think this may have been confusing for people (and I negged it in playtesting with answer about "celebrating the end of WWII" on the first clue).

As for the history questions being discussed in the other thread:

*There is a clear distinction between the two Gracchus brothers. You could argue, I guess, it was too hard to ask people to distinguish between them, but I don't think it should have been unclear.

*I'm unsympathetic to the idea that you can quickly realize it's a Columbus ship and not realize the Santa Maria is the ship that those clues applies to. There are not very many important clues at all for the Nina or the Pinta.

*I thought cars may have cliffed and I bet it induced a host of negs. I think this was just a case of difficulty issues though--the question itself seems fine.

I should have used a different clue for the newsreel tossup. I understand the confusion there, and have taken this out for future mirrors.

The Starship Troopers clue was in the Texas mirror, and was where I negged with war propaganda films.

I don't remember what it was, but in our match against St. John's in round 1 with LASA A's packet, a painter who was the middle part was mentioned earlier in the same bonus (I think it was somewhere in the first few bonuses).

I made this change on Tuesday. Chris Romero requested the packets on Monday so he could print them on time.

There are some problems with the early clues in the T cells tossups. CLIP and MHC class II presentation are features of professional antigen-presenting cells (dendritic cells, Langerhans cells, macrophages, B cells and some weird epithelial cells like those in the thymus). The TCR of CD4+ T cells INTERACTS with MHC class II presented by professional APCs; T cells don't express class II MHC (they do express class I, but so do all nucleated cells). TAP is certainly not unique to T cells since it's involved in processing antigens for MHC class I presentation.