2017 ACF Regionals - specific-question discussion
Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2017 4:19 pm
This is the thread in which to note errata and discuss specific questions from the 2017 ACF Regionals set.
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I believe I sent Watchmen in as other lit, so I'm assuming it stayed under that category. (Was admittedly a little struck that they also included elves in the same packet, but I think that was one of Oxford's questions.)Imperial Cormorant wrote:In packet F, which answerline was in the lit distribution, Watchmen or elves?
The Watchmen question was in literature; the "elves" question was classified as trash/other.Imperial Cormorant wrote:In packet F, which answerline was in the lit distribution, Watchmen or elves?
Yeah, it looks like that should've been acceptable; I've added it to the prompt. Apologies for the omission.Bensonfan23 wrote:For the gram negative bacteria bonus (don't remember which packet, sorry), I'm pretty confident that "injectisome" should have been acceptable, or at least promptable, for the part on the Type 3 Secretion System.
The tossup on Abbey Road was classified as trash/other.El Cool Rectangle wrote:Was the Abbey Road tossup under other arts or trash? Regardless, thanks to whoever wrote it. Really enjoyed it.
Yeah, I think this should have been an acceptable answer before "convex up" was read in the question. Apologies for the omission; I've added it to the answer line.kitakule wrote:What was up with the convex tossup? Surely "concave up" should have been accepted?
Are you talking about this bonus? It's bonus 1 in the packet with those tossups, and it's a physics bonus, but it seems to specific the answer it's looking for in its first part:Urech hydantoin synthesis wrote:I don't remember the exact bonus or the exact packet, but the first part of the first bonus (physics, I think) in the packet that had tossups on stomach acid and formaldehyde did not specify an answer that it was looking for.
packet 15, bonus 1 wrote:1. A Wick rotation of a hyperbolic Feynman propagator allows one to consider elliptic operators, whose Green’s functions can be expressed in terms of this solution. For 10 points each:
[10] The Minakshisundaram–Pleijel (min-AHK-shee-SOON-dah-rahm PLY-el) asymptotic expansion of what fundamental solution, often represented p or K, can be used to prove the Atiyah–Singer index theorem or compute perturbative expansions in quantum field theory and quantum gravity?
ANSWER: heat kernel
[10] Applying a linear partial differential operator to a fundamental solution, such as the heat kernel or a Green’s function, yields this function, which is used to represent a point source in physics.
ANSWER: Dirac delta function
[10] For heat kernels on a Riemannian manifold, Alexander Grigor’yan developed a universal way of obtaining “upper bounds” named for this prolific German polymath because they involve an exponential similar to the normal distribution, which is often named for him.
ANSWER: Carl Friedrich Gauss [or Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss]
Yep, that's totally my bad. I added that late to the list of acceptable answers but forgot to make the change in the final packet; apologies.Bensonfan23 wrote:For the gram negative bacteria bonus (don't remember which packet, sorry), I'm pretty confident that "injectisome" should have been acceptable, or at least promptable, for the part on the Type 3 Secretion System.
Concave up is wrong for about half the clues in that tossup. (it's a convex combination and convex hull for instance). I guess no one would say concave up until the clues applying to it would be read, so it's fine to just take it the whole way through from a player empathy perspective. But that's the reason it didn't occur to me to put it in the answerline.kitakule wrote:What was up with the convex tossup? Surely "concave up" should have been accepted?
The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:Can I see the albinism question please?
I will note that Minnesota's Sam Levin got this question on the first clue, almost immediately after his parents arrived to watch the last match of the tournament, helping Minnesota B upset Minnesota A.packet L, tossup 2 wrote:2. This condition occurs with a coagulation deficiency in Hermansky–Pudlak syndrome. Mutations in the P protein lead to this condition, which is why it is often a symptom of Prader–Willi (PRAH-dur vill-ee) syndrome. The copper-dependent enzyme absent in this condition hydroxylates and then oxidizes tyrosine to give a quinone. People with this condition have no RPE layer in their retinas. The opposite phenotype to this condition occurs in patients with Addison’s or Cushing’s disease because they overexpress melanocyte-stimulating hormones. The oculo·taneous (ock-yoo-lo-TAY-nee-us) form of this condition often leads to deafness, vision trouble, and susceptibility to skin cancer. For 10 points, name this recessive condition in which the body can’t produce melanin, which causes unpigmented skin.
ANSWER: albinism [or word forms such as albino; or hypopigmentation; accept oculotaneous albinism; prompt on descriptive answers]
Silverman wrote:I don't remember the exact phrasing, but the tossup on _binary trees_ opened with a clue about the Catalan numbers. Given that there are at least a dozen reasonable combinatorial interpretations of those, I'm not confident the first clue is sufficiently unique.
Cody and I went back and forth on this tossup a bit--it originally had language that attempted to rule out other trees on the first clue--and in the end, we decided that the least-confusing way to formulate the question was to word the answer line to accept various other trees before clues that ruled those types of trees out (see above).round 8, tossup 1 wrote:1. The number of different “full” examples of these structures with n internal vertices is the nth Catalan number. An example of these structures with good amortized properties uses zig, zig-zig, and zig-zag operations. Rotation of these structures maintains their balance, a concept introduced by Evgenii Landis and Georgii Adelson-Velskii. On average, the basic operations on a randomly built example of these structures can be done in big theta of log n time. A balanced example of these structures maintains its properties using the red or black property of each node. The “search” type of these structures has left and right subnodes that, respectively, have a lesser and greater value than the parent node. For 10 points, what structure has at most two children at every node?
ANSWER: binary tree [or self-adjusting binary search tree; or self-balancing binary search tree; or BST; or splay trees; or AVL trees; or red-black trees; accept rooted tree or ordered tree or plane tree or k-ary tree before “zig”; prompt on “tree”; do not accept or prompt on answers that do not mention “tree”]
west neg, new york wrote:Can I see the exact phrasing of the "vibrations" tossup, especially the lead-in about PQR branches? I might be remembering wrong, but I think that part was more applicable to transitions between vibrational states than to the act of vibrating itself.
packet B, tossup 11 wrote:11. The “forbidden Q branch” in a “P·Q·R” spectrum corresponds to this process. The “group” form of this process identifies irreducible representations that correspond to it by just looking at rows in the character table that transform as a linear or quadratic function of a coordinate. Centro·symmetric molecules cannot have overlapping peaks in spectroscopy that excites this process by causing a change in the polarizability tensor or dipole moment. The an·harmonic Morse potential models the energy required to excite this process, which is often reported in inverse centimeters. Nonlinear molecules have “three n minus six” degrees of freedom—or normal modes, such as wagging, scissoring, or bending—for this process. For 10 points, what process, detected by I·R spectroscopy, occurs when nuclei move back and forth?
ANSWER: molecular vibration(s) [accept word forms such as vibrational; prompt on “molecular motion” or similar answers; prompt on “rovibration” or “libration”; do not accept or prompt on “translation(s)” or “rotation(s)”]
I'm not sure there's really a fundamental difference between those two things? If a molecule vibrates, then it has been excited by a transition in its vibrational energy spectrum, right? I hope this wasn't confusing; certainly, I'd like to avoid phrasing like "corresponds to this process" to be more precise, but I couldn't really come up with anything better to describe what's happening here, and I thought this was relatively clear for anybody who knows the basics of rovibrational spectroscopy (which, frankly, is all I know about rovibrational spectroscopy).west neg, new york wrote:Can I see the exact phrasing of the "vibrations" tossup, especially the lead-in about PQR branches? I might be remembering wrong, but I think that part was more applicable to transitions between vibrational states than to the act of vibrating itself.
In case it's unclear, the second sentence is referring to the OCA2 gene, one of the proteins that gets lost/mutated in Prader-Willi, so I think the clue is fine as it reads. Perhaps it's unclear because albinism isn't the most famous symptom of Prader-Willi, but it is a common one... to my mind, this is a completely true statement, and the sentence taken in its entirety is uniquely identifying. You can argue that the clue is too hard as it stands for second line of a Regionals question, and I would probably agree with that--there wasn't a lot of deep, gettable stuff that I could find for this answerline, unfortunately.The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:Can I see the albinism question please?
Yeah, I think the first clause of your second paragraph sums up my feelings on this question. Full disclosure, we just learned about PQR stuff this week in class, so I'm not talking from any real position of expertise on the topic. I'm just a little confused why, even though I got prompted on it during the game, "transition" isn't mentioned anywhere on the answerline, even though the Q-branch is (as I understand it) a subset of the transitions between vibrational energy levels. I think it's an important distinction to make, since the PQR branches and other results from spectroscopy depend on forced transitions between vibrational states and not just the fact that the molecule is naturally vibrating at a constant energy level. I'll concede that whether it makes any difference in a quizbowl setting is probably less clear, since if you know what the Q-branch is, getting prompted on "transition" is probably just going to lead to "vibrational transition" or "transition between vibrational energy states" or other things like that which will get you points. I also agree that "correspond to" is not great here; as it stands, I'm pretty sure "exposing to radiation" or "absorbing energy" or other weird answers technically work if I buzz at the end of first sentence.adamsil wrote:I'm not sure there's really a fundamental difference between those two things? If a molecule vibrates, then it has been excited by a transition in its vibrational energy spectrum, right? I hope this wasn't confusing; certainly, I'd like to avoid phrasing like "corresponds to this process" to be more precise, but I couldn't really come up with anything better to describe what's happening here, and I thought this was relatively clear for anybody who knows the basics of rovibrational spectroscopy (which, frankly, is all I know about rovibrational spectroscopy).west neg, new york wrote:Can I see the exact phrasing of the "vibrations" tossup, especially the lead-in about PQR branches? I might be remembering wrong, but I think that part was more applicable to transitions between vibrational states than to the act of vibrating itself.
I guess you could make the case that an excitation from one vibrational state to another vibrational state not including the ground state doesn't count as a "vibration" as much as a "change in vibrational mode/frequency", but at this point it seems like it's getting pretty granular?
Gotcha. Well, I hope getting you prompted got you to the right answer, in any case. For what it's worth, the last version of the question that I submitted had the first line written aswest neg, new york wrote:Yeah, I think the first clause of your second paragraph sums up my feelings on this question. Full disclosure, we just learned about PQR stuff this week in class, so I'm not talking from any real position of expertise on the topic. I'm just a little confused why, even though I got prompted on it during the game, "transition" isn't mentioned anywhere on the answerline, even though the Q-branch is (as I understand it) a subset of the transitions between vibrational energy levels. I think it's an important distinction to make, since the PQR branches and other results from spectroscopy depend on forced transitions between vibrational states and not just the fact that the molecule is naturally vibrating at a constant energy level. I'll concede that whether it makes any difference in a quizbowl setting is probably less clear, since if you know what the Q-branch is, getting prompted on "transition" is probably just going to lead to "vibrational transition" or "transition between vibrational energy states" or other things like that which will get you points. I also agree that "correspond to" is not great here; as it stands, I'm pretty sure "exposing to radiation" or "absorbing energy" or other weird answers technically work if I buzz at the end of first sentence.adamsil wrote:I'm not sure there's really a fundamental difference between those two things? If a molecule vibrates, then it has been excited by a transition in its vibrational energy spectrum, right? I hope this wasn't confusing; certainly, I'd like to avoid phrasing like "corresponds to this process" to be more precise, but I couldn't really come up with anything better to describe what's happening here, and I thought this was relatively clear for anybody who knows the basics of rovibrational spectroscopy (which, frankly, is all I know about rovibrational spectroscopy).west neg, new york wrote:Can I see the exact phrasing of the "vibrations" tossup, especially the lead-in about PQR branches? I might be remembering wrong, but I think that part was more applicable to transitions between vibrational states than to the act of vibrating itself.
I guess you could make the case that an excitation from one vibrational state to another vibrational state not including the ground state doesn't count as a "vibration" as much as a "change in vibrational mode/frequency", but at this point it seems like it's getting pretty granular?
This is more of a nitpick, but saying that the Q-branch "corresponds to" vibration/vibrational transitions (let's just say they're interchangeable for this next point I'm about to make) seems to leave out the fact that the P- and R-branches also "correspond to" vibrational transitions, but with an added rotational energy transition as well.
Maybe the phrasing could be improved to something like "Unlike the P- and R-branches, the Q-branch arises solely from a change in the energy level of this process," although that seems a bit contrived and possibly transparent, too. I don't want to seem like I didn't like the science overall in the set; I think it was pretty good (e.g., the rest of this tossup seems fine to me). Also, like I said, this critique is coming from a very not-authoritative source (i.e., my 5-day-old understanding of rovibrational spectroscopy), so perhaps I'm the only person who had trouble parsing the question; if I'm mistaken here, I'd really love some corrections since I've got a lab report on this stuff due next week .
Xochicuicatl Cuecuechtli wrote:Could I see the questions on The Master and Margarita, The Underground Man, and The Gay Science?
packet F wrote:17. This book contends that, when a man loves a woman, he hates nature and rejects the “human beneath the skin” in a section titled “We Artists.” This book contains the line “I wish to be a yes-sayer” in a section advocating the uncompromising acceptance of reality. Five years after this book was published, its author expanded it to include a fifth section and an appendix of songs. One section of this book begins by noting that, after Buddha’s death, people would show his shadow in a cave for centuries and posits that, “for millennia yet,” people will do the same for another dead figure. The concepts of amor fati (ah-"MORE" FAH-tee) and eternal recurrence were introduced in, for 10 points, what Friedrich Nietzsche (NEE-tchuh) book that preceded Thus Spake Zarathustra in its use of the phrase “God is dead”?
ANSWER: The Gay Science [or Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft; or The Joyful Wisdom]
packet D wrote:9. A maître d’ in this novel, called “the pirate” or “the commander of the brig,” reacts unfavorably when another character, dressed only in his underwear, enters a restaurant and raves about his stolen clothes. A frantic chase that unfolds at a surreal pace in this novel ends with those clothes being lost when a man strips naked to search a river. This novel begins at the Patriarch’s Ponds, where a poet known as “Homeless” sees a dark prophecy involving spilled sunflower oil realized when a man’s head bounces down a cobbled street. A clown named Korovyov (koh-ROH-vee-ahf) and a cat named Behemoth join in the demonic Professor Woland’s rampage in, for 10 points, what novel that interleaves the story of Pontius Pilate with a visit by Satan to Moscow and that was written by Mikhail Bulgakov?
ANSWER: The Master and Margarita [or Master i Margarita]
Packet I wrote:14. This character is concerned about the yellow stain on his trousers after arriving to a dinner party an hour early. He obsesses over “the man of nature and truth,” a corruption of a quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, before claiming that “twice two makes four is an excellent thing” but “twice two makes five” is a “very charming thing too.” This character compares the Crystal Palace in Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s (chur-nih-SHEV-ski's) What Is to Be Done? to a chicken coop and makes plans to bump into a villainous lieutenant on the street. He is ditched by Simonov and others, who go to a brothel without him, in the section “Apropos of the Wet Snow.” At that brothel, this man meets the prostitute Liza. For 10 points, what unnamed antisocial man’s “notes” form a novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky?
ANSWER: Underground Man [accept answers conveying the idea of the protagonist or narrator of Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld or Zapiski iz podpol’ya]
Wynaut wrote:Could I see the tossup on the Great Leap Forward? It seemed really obvious to me from the start, but held off buzzing until "sparrows" was said.
packet J wrote:14. A poem criticizing this government program declares that “the millet is scattered over the ground, the leaves of the sweet potato are withered,” which was used as evidence to fire a defense minister. A fake photo circulated by the government as part of this program appeared to show a wheat field supporting the weight of several children. Jasper Becker highlighted foreign news coverage of this program’s deadly aftermath in his book Hungry Ghosts. The effects of this program were exacerbated by the extermination of sparrows, which were labelled one of the “Four Pests.” As part of this program’s focus on steel production, household utensils were melted down in backyard furnaces. For 10 points, what program started in 1958 and attempted to rapidly modernize the economy of China?
ANSWER: Great Leap Forward [or dà yuè jìn; accept Great Leap Forward Famine; prompt on the “Great Chinese Famine” or “Three Years of Difficulty”]
This, to me, is the most serious problem. Most of the other things - weird answerline selection, openly inaccurate clues - are fixed rather easily. This sort of conclusion-summary style writing, though, is both harder to fix and extremely detrimental to the "feel" of the questions. Take, to use an arbitrary example, The Makropulos Case by Bernard Williams. A tossup in the style that I'm criticizing could clue it along the lines of "this philosopher referenced the 'old Jewish reply' in an essay that argues one should not wish to live forever, The Makropulos Case." If I hear this, there's nothing in it that suggests to me I might be interested in reading The Makropulos Case - all I know is that he took a position plenty others have historically taken. I'd far prefer a brief summary of one of the actual arguments in play - it would seem to be much more in keeping with the way that one actually reads philosophy. Papers are not read because one is interested in finding out what conclusion the paper reaches, so telling me the conclusion of some argument by some philosopher simply tells me what they think. It gives me no information about the actually interesting parts of the text. This acts as a major contributor to the "boring" nature of the questions that Joey was pointing out earlier.Short-beaked echidna wrote: Another problem with the philosophy was the lack of engagement with argumentation, which made it feel like a bunch of literature-style tossups sprinkled with 'named thing' clues.
Yep, we got that fixed. Thanks.Imperial Cormorant wrote:In packet E tossup 13, the first line includes a pronunciation guide for CRISPR but doesn't actually include the word CRISPR.
This assumes 1) that quizbowl should only be interested in treating philosophy as a bunch of people arguing with each other, 2) that it's somehow unbuzzable unless you're told exactly who made an argument that is being clued (although presumably for pyramidal reasons, the people making the arguments are typically named later in the tossup), 3) that Joey's and Alston's view of what parts of thought constitutes "philosophy" determines whether a tournament's philosophy distribution is good or bad.Short-beaked echidna wrote:So we can see there are systematic issues in the philosophy. Many clues are straight up inaccurate, and another bunch are defensible interpretations presented without context, so they appear inaccurate or dogmatic. Philosophy tossups are readings of the texts and philosophers they treat! Most of philosophy is about deciding how things ought to be read, so if you're cluing an interpretation, know that you're interpreting, and tie it to a major thinker who reads it that way. Another problem with the philosophy was the lack of engagement with argumentation, which made it feel like a bunch of literature-style tossups sprinkled with 'named thing' clues. On top of this there was an odd conception of what belongs within the philosophy distribution. Then we have the fact that there wasn't really a new approach presented here, so we've combined a bunch of pretty critical issues, which made the category pretty frustrating, and consequently, dull to play. I recognise philosophy is super hard to write (it took me way, way longer to write for WAO than my other categories, and was probably the category that I was, nevertheless, overall least happy with), so I'm not claiming all this would have been easily fixed. Nevertheless, it was pretty disappointing.
Yeah, this is like, a problem with the format, since we wrote this up after talking about the questions to some extent and coming to a point of agreement on more or less all of them. The point about Constant, for instance, was originally raised by me - it's simply a consequence of how we prepared this that I come off as syncophantic. We could have easily synthesized this into a single set of criticism. I'd attribute the failure to do so not to some sort of attempt to like, come off as having more people on our side (?) or whatever it is you think was being accomplished but rather to simple laziness. I was, in fact, saying things, just to be clear, even in this format. Criticisms of clue placement, support for the assertion that Santayana doesn't seem very currently relevant, etc. This post is more or less an attempt to protect my fragile ego from the appearance of vapidity or w/e but I would like to respond to some of the rest of your post later on, so I'll just leave this here for now.gyre and gimble wrote: Just saying, the post reads like Alston is just agreeing with everything Joey is saying, while adding nothing of substance on his own. Is this just to show that at least one other person (and thus far only one other person, though I'm willing to and will even assume that there are others) agrees with Joey? Seems like you can do this by just saying "Alston agrees with me." I don't know what other phrase besides "mutual mental masturbation" can describe how I see this conversational format.
Joey reached out to me with this concern (which I'm inclined to believe is not unjustified). I told him:Short-beaked echidna wrote:I'll reply tomorrow to this very mean spirited post
I hope we've come to an understanding on the intent of my post. Alston, the reason I'm including this here is to clarify that intent for you, and to apologize to the extent that I was excessive. And also to clarify that your conversation post came across to me (and Andrew, evidently) as very condescending, and unproductively so.Me, on Facebook wrote:I found your post to be incredibly condescending, and tried to illustrate how your leaps in logic made it that way. I normally try not to be aggressive when I post, but the aggression was intentional in this case. I hope you can find some substance in there (I believe it's all substance, and I hope you'll readily believe me when I say I never post simply to be rude) because otherwise, "rude" is all it will be to you and that wasn't my intent.
I might have chosen the wrong tone, so in any case I apologize! And im happy to retract anything I've said if you prove me wrong.
I honestly don't think, and never thought, that you were being sycophantic or substanceless in your real-life conversation with Joey. But Joey's post was written that way. I only characterized it as I did, seemingly mean-spiritedly, to highlight the condescension present in your conversational format. It read very much like, "Yes, we are two very knowledgeable people who are in perfect agreement that this set of questions were terrible." Maybe that was just in my head?heterodyne wrote:We could have easily synthesized this into a single set of criticism. I'd attribute the failure to do so not to some sort of attempt to like, come off as having more people on our side (?) or whatever it is you think was being accomplished but rather to simple laziness. I was, in fact, saying things, just to be clear, even in this format. Criticisms of clue placement, support for the assertion that Santayana doesn't seem very currently relevant, etc. This post is more or less an attempt to protect my fragile ego from the appearance of vapidity or w/e but I would like to respond to some of the rest of your post later on, so I'll just leave this here for now.
How is Constant not a philosopher? Eric Xu first-lined this tossup with something he read in his political philosophy class, and most classes on Kant will at least mention him.Short-beaked echidna wrote:
Liberty--
J: Spends a bunch of time on Constant, who is, like, not a philosopher?
A: Yeah, once again, if your goal when writing a philosophy question is to reward engagement with philosophy, you should clue philosophers.
The problem is to have actual full-blown albinism you have to hit both copies of OCA2 (it's a recessive disease). Light skin (not albinism) is a minor criteria in PWS, because some deletions on chromosome 15 will take out one copy of OCA2, but its very rare for someone to inherit a PWS deletion in one chromosome and a mutation on OCA2 on the other. So in an absolute sense, albinism isn't a part of PWS, which is part of that reason that the clue confused me.adamsil wrote:In case it's unclear, the second sentence is referring to the OCA2 gene, one of the proteins that gets lost/mutated in Prader-Willi, so I think the clue is fine as it reads. Perhaps it's unclear because albinism isn't the most famous symptom of Prader-Willi, but it is a common one... to my mind, this is a completely true statement, and the sentence taken in its entirety is uniquely identifying. You can argue that the clue is too hard as it stands for second line of a Regionals question, and I would probably agree with that--there wasn't a lot of deep, gettable stuff that I could find for this answerline, unfortunately.The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:Can I see the albinism question please?