2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

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2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by jaimiec »

This is the thread to discuss specific questions from 2021 ACF Regionals.

Subject Categories:

Head Editor: Jaimie Carlson
------
American Literature: Jaimie Carlson
British Literature: Tim Morrison
European Literature: Tim Morrison
World Literature: Tim Morrison
Ancient Literature & Poetry (across multiple lit distros): Michael Kearney
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American History: Jaimie Carlson, Jonathan Tran
European History: Hari Parameswaran
Ancient & Other History: Michael Kearney
World History: Hari Parameswaran
------
Biology: Hasna Karim
Chemistry: Stephen Eltinge
Physics: Stephen Eltinge
Astronomy: Stephen Eltinge
Other Science & Earth Science: Natan Holtzman
Computer Science: Jaimie Carlson
Math: Tim Morrison
------
Painting / Sculpture: Annabelle Yang
Music: Natan Holtzman
Other Fine Arts: Natan Holtzman, Tim Morrison
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Religion: Annabelle Yang, Hasna Karim, Nick Dai
Mythology: Annabelle Yang
Philosophy: Jordan Brownstein
Social Science: Hasna Karim
------
Geography: Nitin Rao
Current Events: Nitin Rao
Other Academic: Jaimie Carlson
Popular Culture: Tim Morrison

In addition to players asking editors about questions, we also wanted to give editors a chance to shout out some of their favorite submissions! We were blown away by the creativity and range of the questions submitted, and encourage teams who enjoyed submitting packets to this tournament to get involved with writing and editing in their quizbowl community.

Specific favorites (other editors feel free to add on, and I will probably add more to these! These were just off the top of my head.)

UC Davis: American Literature, gold rush. So refreshing to see a historical period question that was not "9/11" or "World War II"! I really enjoyed editing this question.
MIT A: American Literature, Hal/David bonus. I promise that I will never again refer to 2001: A Space Odyssey as anything but the work containing "the most classic Hal/David pair."
UBC B: Any Literature, Antarctican literature bonus. Thank you for taking the phrase "any literature" literally. I would have not thought it possible to write a question on Antarctican literature, but you proved me wrong!
UGA A: American Literature, My Year of Rest and Relaxation bonus. This was a fun idea to clue a newer work without getting too hard.
Liberty A: British Literature, George Eliot. Normally, packet submissions on a mainstream answerline like Eliot don't have as much of a theme to them, but the idea of specifically cluing religion in Eliot's works was really neat and gave me the opportunity to learn more about her personal philosophy.
Rutgers A: American History, AT&T. Learning about phone phreaking was extremely fun.
Liberty A: World History, ancient prosthetics. Really neat idea to emphasize science/medicine-adjacent topics in the ancient world!
Vanderbilt A: Computer Science, classification. It was great to be able to edit an ML tossup based on useful tasks I do every day as a software engineer, where the answerline wasn't just "neural networks"!
Brown A: Computer Science, proofs. Super creative, let us mix a lot of concepts from math and CS.
UC Davis: Other Arts: hair. This was an incredibly fun idea!
Liberty A: Other Arts: interior design. Relative to the amount of time/effort people spend on it, interior design as a field really almost never comes up, so it was neat to see!

I would also like to personally thank every single team who submitted a question on Nagorno-Karabakh. I lost count at 7.

Add comments below!
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by kearnm7 »

I received some excellent submissions overall in Ancient & Other history, including Nick Jensen's archaeology tossup on "Tunisia," but my particular favorite was Purdue A's bonus on "Theodora/Byzantine/The Buildings." This is partly due to the bonus itself, which was interesting and hardly needed editing, but also due to a rather remarkable coincidence that occurred in my daily life.

Upon receiving the bonus, I was unsure about the difficulty of the hard part and decided to think about it for a while. Then, two days later, I went to get a haircut and got to chatting with the guy in the other chair, who turned out to be a retired Russian professor at the local state university. I told him that I was a Classics major and, as he was leaving, he mentioned that he was "off to afternoon tea and to read a Greek classic." I asked him what work, assuming that he was reading Sophocles or Aeschylus or similar, but he said "Procopius' The Buildings of Constantinople." I was shocked but said I had, though I of course did not indicate or explain that it was part of a submitted bonus I had received for ACF Regionals: for to do so would have required me to (1) explain what ACF regionals was and (2)—far more crucially—reveal unclear set content. But from then on, I knew that it was practically ordained that the bonus would make it into the set.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by warum »

Here are some questions I found particularly enjoyable to edit and read:

Tossups
Monteverdi - Berkeley A - extremely good clues, hardly needed editing
Czech republic in music - UBC B - Loved the inclusion of Pavel Haas, and the other clues were really well-chosen too
France in music - Harvard A - Spectralism is not clued often and it was nice to see it come up
Carbonate - Caltech - the clues on the oceanic carbon cycle were really interesting
London in architecture - Texas A - the early clues on the MI6 building were fascinating

UVA A and Chicago B both submitted questions on jazz album art, and I had a lot of fun working on the final question that arose from those submissions

Bonuses
Architectural quotations - Berkeley A - very fun theme!
"Summer wind" in music - UNC A - wonderfully creative topic for a bonus!
"Ever is Over All" - Rutgers A - impressively tightly themed!
Julius Eastman - NYU A - it was high time that he made his debut as a QB answerline!
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by tpmorrison »

In addition to the ones Jaimie already mentioned, here is a non-exhaustive list of some of my favorite submissions (not all of which were edited by me):

Berkeley A: tossup on Homer (in the works of Derek Walcott), bonus on translations of Yeats
MIT A: tossup on millers in The Canterbury Tales
UNC B: tossup on Naples (changed to Ferrante)
Columbia A: bonus on Michael Kohlhaas (and novels that reference it)
Cambridge A: tossup on Byron (from his satires/insults)
UGA A: tossup on drugs in Aldous Huxley books (changed to just soma)
Princeton A: bonus on feminist readings of Milton/Paradise Lost
McMaster: math tossup on factorization, bonus on French lit inspired by Eugène-François Vidocq
Toronto A: bonus on A Brief History of Seven Killings
WUSTL C: bonus on The Book of the City of Ladies
Columbia B: bonus on Lot’s Wife in poetry
Duke A: bonus on jewel thiefs in detective fiction
McGill A: bonus on Lauryn Hill
Northwestern A: tossup on Lauryn Hill (merged with the above!), tossup on eigenvalues from an applied/numerical perspective
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by chartong »

Played the HS mirror of this set and overall enjoyed it. I thought the history was quite good overall, but would like to make mention of the Julius Caesar tossup. I thought it was a creative and well executed premise, the fact that it sounded like a lit tossup caused me to partially zone out and by the time I had figured out what was going on I had lost the buzzer race, haha. Props to whoever wrote that.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by Smuttynose Island »

I really enjoyed the math in this set. Not only was it topical, but it did a very good job drawing early clues from beginning graduate and advanced undergraduate coursework.

I was a little perplexed by the answer lines on two questions. I am far from an expert, but was confused by the lack of a prompt on "cloud formation" for "cloud seeding." I was also surprised when my early answer (midway through the description of the America theft) of "readymades" was outright rejected on the "toilets" question. Could I see the question? Maybe one of the first two clues ruled this out.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by warum »

Smuttynose Island wrote: Mon Feb 01, 2021 11:12 pm I am far from an expert, but was confused by the lack of a prompt on "cloud formation" for "cloud seeding."
The answerline said "prompt on making clouds." It's conceivable that another moderator might have interpreted "cloud formation" as equivalent to "making clouds" since "making" wasn't underlined, and prompted you. However, ultimately the responsibility for anticipating each possible answer lies with the editor, and I apologize for the wording of the answerline, which in retrospect seems quite unclear as to what sort of phrasing is promptable.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by Hot Soup »

The science in this set was fun; a huge thank you to the editors for their hard work. Off the top of my head, the TUs on hematopoesis, HeLa cells, and Zero Friction all seemed like interesting tossups on fresh answerlines. I particularly appreciated what seemed like a noticeable increase in bonuses highlighting the works of women scientists.

My minor feedback would be on the use of the word "structures" to describe stop codons; I get that the word "sequence" may be too transparent, but I don't think anyone would describe stop codons as structures. (it did result in me negging with a hilariously wrong answer of "tRNA anticodon loop.") It is possible I misheard the pronoun, however.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by csa2125 »

Let me preface this post by saying this set was great. I want to try to point out as many positive examples as problems I had. I’m just going to go by the packets we played at the Invitational mirror:

Round 1 (Packet L):
-Matisse/Ernst/Ed Ruscha bonus was strong and well-themed
-Yom Kippur TU was well done for a well-mined topic
-Jane Austen from letters in her books was an interesting approach
-Pathetique Symphony felt a little easy for the medium part on the Rococo Variations/cello/Pathetique Symphony bonus, but I don’t think I would’ve made it easy at this level.
-axis mundi/Louhi/Kalevala was a great bonus; I appreciated the interpretative clues, which made the bonus more interesting to me than Finnish myth just from some Kalevala story.
-development / Banerjee or Duflo / microlending was a solid bonus.
-London’s architecture has been well-mined too; this seemed alright nonetheless.
-I didn’t get why “lead sheet” was asked in the seventh/tritone/lead sheet bonus. It fits the theme, and from my experience it seems likely that many people know exactly what these are without knowing the name. Is important, given the Wikipedia section on the legal definition of music for copyright being in lead sheet form; I just don’t know that this is the way I’d introduce the topic to quizbowl. Maybe an explanation of the intention would help out.
-“categories” seemed a little easy for a hard part, but that may be my philosophical proclivities showing.
-Moriscos seemed like a gimme for medium; playing at invitational may have skewed my view on this, though.
-I liked the concept of the due process TU
-How often was the Peter Wimsey part converted in that bonus?
-Dead Sea / Aqaba / Valley of the Moon seemed somewhat rough; I’m not the best geography player in quizbowl by far, but I do want to see if there’s any agreement that the geography often swung harder than some other categories.

Rd 2 (Packet I):
-Out of curiosity, how often was the Black Shuck bonus part converted?
-Learning to Labor / England / dehumanization had a rough middle part; I couldn’t figure out what was wanted while having at the least heard a lot of Fanon content in previous sets.
-Toni Cade Bambara seems especially tough without “The Lesson,” but I’ll wait to hear about the conversion stats on this.
-ancestor worship was a good question conceit.
-Scotland music TU was strong.
-the “imitation” psych tossup went awry in our game at the Bobo Doll clue(s). The early stuff was important and interesting, regardless.
-the City of Ladies bonus was excellent.
-Haiti as a colony was a nice TU idea.
-Billy Graham felt oddly easy for what seemed to be the medium part on the North Korea / Chondoism / Billy Graham bonus.
-“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” seemed easy from the name drop of its draft “Beginners” in the first line, but maybe I’m oddly familiar with the history of its writing.
-solid bonus on Wong Kar Wai; good part on “California Dreamin’”
-our opponents got a little confused on the race part in the race /ideology / oppression bonus, but it seemed fine to me.

I’m going to stop here for now. I don’t know if talking about nearly every question is very productive, but I did want to show how my reaction to several things were mixed; the scales were certainly tipped toward the “good” side, and some of my complaints are likely personal quibbles. I do want to show some more care for the writing process and make sure the editors know that there are audience members who are critically engaging with what they put out, as creating questions can very often be a thankless task; and that much of what they did was very good (since criticism can just as often tend toward the negative). Great job to everyone who worked on this set!
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by SortesVirgilianae »

I absolutely adored the tossup on Antigone in packet N, which seemed to be themed around postcolonial adaptations of the play (at least for the early clues). This picks up on the approach to the early clues in the Lysistrata tossup from Regionals 2020 (B.1), which clued its 20th century performance history. I think this is an excellent approach, as it ties in with a lot of (in my opinion) the most interesting current scholarship on Athenian drama, which is on its reception.* I also think this is a much better idea than digging up plot or quotation clues from Athenian plays for the first two lines, as a lot of the hardest plot clues (and even character names) are often non-unique or otherwise generic.

*This coming from someone who researches Athenian drama but not its reception.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by Inscrutable Fox »

Smuttynose Island wrote: Mon Feb 01, 2021 11:12 pm I was also surprised when my early answer (midway through the description of the America theft) of "readymades" was outright rejected on the "toilets" question. Could I see the question? Maybe one of the first two clues ruled this out.
Here is the question:
2021 ACF Regionals › 2021-01-30 edition › Packet C (MIT A, NC State, Waterloo A, Oklahoma A) wrote: 5. Sophie Matisse baked a cake in homage to a work featuring one of these objects for an exhibition hosted by Francis M. Naumann. One photographer likened his image of a work with one of these objects to a cross between a “Veiled Woman” and a “Buddha.” Another of these objects was stolen from a 2019 exhibition at Blenheim Palace. A work featuring one of these objects may have been created by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Visitors at the New York Guggenheim used a golden example of these objects as part of Maurizio Cattelan’s America. A photo for The Blind Man shows one of these objects in front of Marsden Hartley’s The Warriors. That example of these objects was exhibited by Alfred Stieglitz and signed “R. Mutt.” For 10 points, Duchamp’s Fountain is what sort of object?
ANSWER: toilets [or urinals; prompt on Fountain] (Sophie Matisse’s cake was appropriately titled Urinal Cake.)
<Painting/Sculpture>
Readymades should absolutely have been promptable – that was an oversight on my part, and I apologize for it. I will be updating the answerline to reflect this. I do still think that readymades should be prompted on rather than accepted. This tossup was written specifically about urinals/toilets, and while readymade is technically correct, it is also an answer that can be more specific. To borrow the response we sent when asked on tournament day why we would not just accept readymade: while “sculpture” might be accurate for an artwork that gets tossed up, it’s also very general. While we’d typically consider “sculpture” general; to the point of being unpromptable, “readymade” is both specific enough to be worthy of a prompt but, in my opinion, not specific enough to outright accept. I hope this clears up my approach to the answerline, and apologize again for the frustration it caused you on Saturday.
Last edited by Inscrutable Fox on Tue Feb 02, 2021 12:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by Inscrutable Fox »

csa2125 wrote: Mon Feb 01, 2021 11:58 pm -Matisse/Ernst/Ed Ruscha bonus was strong and well-themed
-axis mundi/Louhi/Kalevala was a great bonus; I appreciated the interpretative clues, which made the bonus more interesting to me than Finnish myth just from some Kalevala story.
Thanks – I’m very glad to hear you enjoyed the Matisse / Ernst / Rucha and axis mundi / Louhi / Kalevala bonuses! I do need to thank Jaimie for her work on the former. For the Kalevala content, I was definitely trying to engage with a bit more than just the stories, which tend to come up so often, and it’s great to hear that that came through.

Conversion data on specific bonuses will be available once advanced statistics are published, so I won’t comment on any of that specifically for now. Based on some of the discussion I’ve seen in the Discord and general discussion of the set, however, it does appear that there were several bonuses that felt pretty hard to people. For my part, I did my best to balance interesting, thematically coherent bonuses with reasonably answerable content, but I do apologize if I missed the mark on some questions.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by t-bar »

Submissions that I especially loved included those on protein folding with DeepMind clues (TU, Brown A), the Hall–Héroult process (TU, Edinburgh A), ray tracing (TU, George Washington A, converted to rays), desiccation (TU, Harvard A), position in quantum mechanics (TU, MIT B), relativistic clocks (TU, Toronto A), spins as degrees of freedom (TU, UNC A), Saturn's polar hexagon (bonus, UVA A), cyclic macromolecules (TU, Vanderbilt B), and creating a laboratory vacuum (TU, WUSTL A). The bonus on lunar distance in Packet L started life as a submitted tossup from Texas A, which I also wanted to acknowledge as an inspired choice even if it only survived in toned-down form.

We did not end up including "mixed academic" content in the science distribution, but Colorado A's common link tossup on the word "magic" was delightful.

Honorable mentions: I liked both submitted tossups on time-reversal symmetry (Johns Hopkins A and Princeton A), but I thought the answerline was a bit too hard. Toronto A submitted a great tossup on redshift that overlapped too much with the rest of our astrophysics. Penn State A's tossup on dipoles had a heap of very fun clues, but we couldn't find a packet where it fit by the time it was submitted. I was this close to including the UVA A tossup on Louis de Broglie, but I felt we already had enough hardcore quantum mechanics.

Tossups that were not workable at this level but I would have loved to see in a science side event: the aforementioned JHU A tossup on time-reversal symmetry, Minnesota B's tossup on astronomy research done at Caltech, Penn State A's tossup on observers, and Rice A's tossup on strange stars.

Finally, a note about tossups on elements and individual scientists. They're hard to do well, and I generally advise against them, but several teams submitted very well-executed examples of these questions. I loved Claremont College A's tossup on nitrogen in the solar system (moved to tiebreakers for subdistributional reasons), MIT B's tossup on atomic hydrogen in the universe, and Warwick A's tossup on Josiah Willard Gibbs that focused on thermodynamics and the Gibbs distribution. Rather than dropping a list of random facts from a Wikipedia page, each of these tossups used a simple answer line as a way for talking about an interesting, coherent theme. This is a common tactic in other categories, and I'm thrilled to see people using it in science too.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone »

Questions I particularly enjoyed that I can remember right now - the ancient prosthetics bonus set, the ancient Egyptian art TU (which I shamefully failed to work out, despite it talking about an object in a museum less than a mile from me), axis mundi bonus set - generally, I enjoyed this set, and thought it fundamentally accomplished what Regionals should do, so thank you to those who put in the hard work producing it.

The only two minor problems that I can remember standing out over the day were calling Gnosticism 'this movement' which implies a unity which as far as I understand it is not really there across the broad tradition that comprised Gnostic thought, and the line in the bulls TU, which described 'The Earthshaker' as delighting in these animals, which could probably have done with something to explicitly exclude horses.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by Bhagwan Shammbhagwan »

To follow up to Jaimie's OP, here was a subset of some of the submissions that I particularly liked:
  • Berkeley A's tossups on the Xhosa (seems quite under-asked) and Iceland (in the Cold War)
  • MIT B's tossup on London's police
  • UC Davis's tossup on the Thai people (as opposed to a question on Thailand)
  • Columbia A's tossup on Angkor Wat
  • Cambridge A's tossup on the 1300s in France
  • UC Davis's bonus on the Mandinka (turned into a question on Senegal)
  • Waterloo A's submission on the Grand Trunk Road
  • Toronto A's bonus on the Olmecs as a mother-culture
  • Rutgers B's bonus on the European winter of 1713
  • Oxford A's bonus on El Salvador
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by knife emoji »

I had a lot of fun reading the submissions for this tournament, so here’s my (non-exhaustive) list of favorite submissions, some of them for the freshness of content, some because they meshed with my own personal interests, others simply because they amused me.
  • Waterloo A’s endosymbiosis tossup: just a really strong idea for a tossup.
  • Carleton College A’s carnivorous plants tossup: a personal favorite; thanks for giving me the chance to take a deep dive into the biophysics of pitcher plants and sundews.
  • Claremont College A’s endometrium tossup: I ultimately was worried about the difficulty of the answerline, but it was nice to see a unique and important answerline with a number of solid clues!
  • Oklahoma A’s amusing Sonic hedgehog [do not accept or prompt “Sonic the Hedgehog”] tossup, which may have been too difficult but certainly was fun.
  • Berkeley A’s bonus on Yeats and his afterlives in other languages: it’s already gotten a shoutout, but I thought I’d add my own because it’s a brilliant theme.
  • Carleton College A’s ghazals bonus I also loved—I wasn’t a lit editor, but thanks to Tim and Jaimie letting me work with this.
  • Illinois B’s bonus on horseshoe crab blood, hemocyanins, and LAL: seeing this submission made my day; I’ve been waiting for this to come up in quizbowl since I can remember. I was this close to using it but ultimately did not for fear of including like 2/2 blood content in one set.
  • On the note of blood content I appreciated, Columbia B’s hematopoietic stem cell transplant tossup was also a really cool idea.
  • Duke A’s bonus on development economics, Banerjee and Duflo, and microfinance required very little editing and was lovely to read; thanks for teaching me something new.
  • Columbia B’s bonus on feminism, Angela Davis, and bell hooks, which I so wanted to include but could not for overlap.
  • And last, but certainly not least: Liberty A’s truly inspired leadin for their submitted hemophilia bonus, which is too good not to share: “Ra-Ra-Rasputin! Lover of the Russian Queen! Let’s talk about poor Alexei Romanov’s blood, for 10 points each:”
Last edited by knife emoji on Tue Feb 02, 2021 2:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by 34 + P.J. Dozier »

I thought that the set's content was by and large excellently formulated and executed, and I really loved the literature and arts in particular. There were so many questions that I would love to single out as having been excellent that I've forgotten some of them -- a good problem to have, to be sure -- but the James Joyce tossup cluing Mulligan Stew was certainly a highlight.

I will say that the science tossup on forest fires seemed a bit transparent, especially considering that it explicitly mentioned "precipitation," "bark," and "trees" relatively early on. A great idea for a tossup, but I wonder if it was just me who thought that the cluing on that could've been a little more careful.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by Inscrutable Fox »

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone wrote: Tue Feb 02, 2021 12:17 pm The only two minor problems that I can remember standing out over the day were calling Gnosticism 'this movement' which implies a unity which as far as I understand it is not really there across the broad tradition that comprised Gnostic thought, and the line in the bulls TU, which described 'The Earthshaker' as delighting in these animals, which could probably have done with something to explicitly exclude horses.
Sorry that this played confusingly. The clue was written in reference to Book XX of the Iliad, when the sacrifice of a bull is explicitly said to delight the Earth-Shaker (this aspect of the clue was originally in the question and got moved to a note over the course of editing). However, I agree that this line of the tu could be much clearer with more context/disambiguation from horses, and will go back to fix this.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by Inscrutable Fox »

I’m a little late, but to add to the non-exhaustive list of favorite submissions:

Stanford A’s upside-down in myth tu (an idea that I was truly jealous of - loved working with this)
MIT A’s myth tu on dreams
Princeton A’s bonus on the Navajo Monster Slayer Twins (very creative men and women living separately answerline)
Toronto A’s bonus on horses in the Shahnameh (would have loved to include Shabrang/Siyavash too)
Maryland A’s bonus on dependent origination (this was quite cool, and I appreciated the original 6-line answerline in all its glory)
Carleton A’s UFO tu
VCU’s Samhain bonus, which I did not edit but thought was well put together
MSU's highly entertaining tu on aiguillette
Purdue A’s bonus on Cheri Samba
UC Davis’ tu on the Fragonard family
Columbia A’s Monet tu with clues from critics, which I thought was a fun approach and was sorry not to use in the end for distributional purposes, and the sea-goat bonus, which entertained me
Columbia B’s tu on Trafalgar Square
UBC B’s bonus submission on the dodo in art was wonderfully creative, and I highly appreciate that you took the time to write such an entertaining bonus
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by Muriel Axon »

hasnak wrote: Tue Feb 02, 2021 1:55 pmCarleton College A’s carnivorous plants tossup: a personal favorite; thanks for giving me the chance to take a deep dive into the biophysics of pitcher plants and sundews.
I thought this question was excellent.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by $5 Bits of Broken Chair Trophy »

Was there a reason why a TU on the Hall-Heroult process (2010 called, they want their TU back) needed to happen, could this have not just been a TU on aluminum
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by Zealots of Stockholm »

I greatly enjoyed this set as a whole, including a number of individual questions, and hope to maybe come back and give some more thoughts once the packets are posted.

Some personal highlights: the Germany tu in other ac that clued the history of higher ed, which might be the only time I'll get points from my masters degree, the Bar at the Folies-Bergere tu, which had interesting early clues, several of the American lit tossups, especially reservations and gold rush, but also others that I'm forgetting right now, and finally the League of Legends bonus, even though I was furious to not be able to answer it.

A pair of tossups I wanted to mention some personal gripes with:
In the tossup on Jacob Lawrence, unless I'm misremembering the wording, Gwendolyn Knight was mentioned, but only in the context of "she was his wife." I'm really not a fan of reducing female artists to "this [male] artist's wife," and I personally think it would have been better to either not mention her or find a way to include something relevant to her own career. Also potentially a bit too early in the tossup regardless of my gripes.

I, and at least a few other people I've spoken to, found the Turing tossup confusingly worded. My teammate buzzed and negged with Searle at the same place I would have, shortly before Searle's name was said. I had just studied the Chinese Room thought experiment with what I thought was a reasonable amount of depth the week prior to the tournament, and think this tossup could've done a better job of making clear it wasn't referring to Searle.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by Inscrutable Fox »

Zealots of Stockholm wrote: Thu Feb 04, 2021 12:16 am In the tossup on Jacob Lawrence, unless I'm misremembering the wording, Gwendolyn Knight was mentioned, but only in the context of "she was his wife." I'm really not a fan of reducing female artists to "this [male] artist's wife," and I personally think it would have been better to either not mention her or find a way to include something relevant to her own career. Also potentially a bit too early in the tossup regardless of my gripes.
For reference, this is the Jacob Lawrence tu:
2021 ACF Regionals › 2021-01-30 edition › Packet F (Princeton A, WUSTL A, UNC B, McMaster, Chicago A) wrote: 17. This artist depicted men in horizontal profile stacked in bunks in Shipping out to Victory, the first of a War Series heavy on brown and black tempera. Historical quotations like “is life so dear or peace so sweet…” title entries in another series by this artist, which is currently touring in the “American Struggle” exhibition. This artist’s wife, Gwendolyn Knight, helped edit his often-didactic titles. Colorful New York tenements inspired the style of this “Dynamic Cubist,” who created silkscreen prints on the Legend of John Brown. This artist depicted three girls in red, yellow, and blue at a blackboard and included a blue and brown lattice above a crowd of people funneling into doors for “St. Louis,” “Chicago,” and “New York.” For 10 points, name this Harlem Renaissance artist of the Migration series.
ANSWER: Jacob Lawrence
<Painting/Sculpture>
I wanted to acknowledge Gwendolyn Knight’s influence on Jacob Lawrence’s work. That, to me, is far better than not mentioning her at all. I am certainly reflecting on ways I could have done this more actively (I wanted to err on the side of caution and avoid making blanket statements, but do think I should have replaced the "helped edit" with simply "edited"). However, I also do not think I have reduced her to just his wife: I find the titles of Jacob Lawrence’s work quite memorable, and thus believe that Gwendolyn Knight’s involvement in editing them, in addition to preparing panels for the Migration Series (which itself I did not clue in an attempt to introduce somewhat more novel clues), is significant.

I felt that mentioning Gwendolyn Knight midway through the tossup was in keeping with precedent set by tournaments of comparable difficulty, but would absolutely be excited to see her as a more canonically-clued artist.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by Zealots of Stockholm »

Inscrutable Fox wrote: Thu Feb 04, 2021 1:33 am
Zealots of Stockholm wrote: Thu Feb 04, 2021 12:16 am In the tossup on Jacob Lawrence, unless I'm misremembering the wording, Gwendolyn Knight was mentioned, but only in the context of "she was his wife." I'm really not a fan of reducing female artists to "this [male] artist's wife," and I personally think it would have been better to either not mention her or find a way to include something relevant to her own career. Also potentially a bit too early in the tossup regardless of my gripes.
For reference, this is the Jacob Lawrence tu:
2021 ACF Regionals › 2021-01-30 edition › Packet F (Princeton A, WUSTL A, UNC B, McMaster, Chicago A) wrote: 17. This artist depicted men in horizontal profile stacked in bunks in Shipping out to Victory, the first of a War Series heavy on brown and black tempera. Historical quotations like “is life so dear or peace so sweet…” title entries in another series by this artist, which is currently touring in the “American Struggle” exhibition. This artist’s wife, Gwendolyn Knight, helped edit his often-didactic titles. Colorful New York tenements inspired the style of this “Dynamic Cubist,” who created silkscreen prints on the Legend of John Brown. This artist depicted three girls in red, yellow, and blue at a blackboard and included a blue and brown lattice above a crowd of people funneling into doors for “St. Louis,” “Chicago,” and “New York.” For 10 points, name this Harlem Renaissance artist of the Migration series.
ANSWER: Jacob Lawrence
<Painting/Sculpture>
I wanted to acknowledge Gwendolyn Knight’s influence on Jacob Lawrence’s work. That, to me, is far better than not mentioning her at all. I am certainly reflecting on ways I could have done this more actively (I wanted to err on the side of caution and avoid making blanket statements, but do think I should have replaced the "helped edit" with simply "edited"). However, I also do not think I have reduced her to just his wife: I find the titles of Jacob Lawrence’s work quite memorable, and thus believe that Gwendolyn Knight’s involvement in editing them, in addition to preparing panels for the Migration Series (which itself I did not clue in an attempt to introduce somewhat more novel clues), is significant.

I felt that mentioning Gwendolyn Knight midway through the tossup was in keeping with precedent set by tournaments of comparable difficulty, but would absolutely be excited to see her as a more canonically-clued artist.
Thanks for posting this. This is better/different than I initially remembered, and I agree it is better to mention her in this context than to leave her out of the question. A small suggestion would be to reword the sentence to "This artist's often-didactic titles were edited by his wife Gwendolyn Knight." I think you're probably right about the placement of her name, and I personally was primed to buzz on it quite quickly since I had a hunch it was Lawrence from the context of the second sentence.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by Auger recombination »

Zealots of Stockholm wrote: Thu Feb 04, 2021 12:16 am I, and at least a few other people I've spoken to, found the Turing tossup confusingly worded. My teammate buzzed and negged with Searle at the same place I would have, shortly before Searle's name was said. I had just studied the Chinese Room thought experiment with what I thought was a reasonable amount of depth the week prior to the tournament, and think this tossup could've done a better job of making clear it wasn't referring to Searle.
FWIW I also negged the Turing tossup with Searle on the Chinese Room description.

Can I see the tossup on bias? I think I heard something about the UMVUE early in the question but my connection cut out a little bit so I couldn't hear the whole thing. Overall I really liked the selection of topics in the math distribution.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by tpmorrison »

singlet oxygen wrote: Thu Feb 04, 2021 5:33 pm
Zealots of Stockholm wrote: Thu Feb 04, 2021 12:16 am I, and at least a few other people I've spoken to, found the Turing tossup confusingly worded. My teammate buzzed and negged with Searle at the same place I would have, shortly before Searle's name was said. I had just studied the Chinese Room thought experiment with what I thought was a reasonable amount of depth the week prior to the tournament, and think this tossup could've done a better job of making clear it wasn't referring to Searle.
FWIW I also negged the Turing tossup with Searle on the Chinese Room description.

Can I see the tossup on bias? I think I heard something about the UMVUE early in the question but my connection cut out a little bit so I couldn't hear the whole thing. Overall I really liked the selection of topics in the math distribution.
2021 ACF Regionals › 2021-01-30 edition › Packet O (Finals 1) wrote: 7. Optimal estimation when this quantity is zero is the subject of the Lehmann–Scheffé (“sheh-FAY”) theorem, which can be used to find UMVUEs (“U-M-V-U-E’s”). When the model is true, this quantity is nonzero for ridge regression and LASSO, but zero for OLS (“O-L-S”). The Gauss–Markov theorem is a result about linear estimation when this quantity is zero. When this quantity’s (emphasize) decrease is outweighed by a related quantity’s (emphasize) increase, overfitting can occur; that is because the variance plus the square of this quantity equals the mean squared error, by a namesake “tradeoff.” This quantity equals the expected value of an estimator minus the true parameter. For 10 points, give this term that also names a more general phenomenon in experimental design, whose “selection” form is caused by non-random participant choice.
ANSWER: bias [accept unbiased; accept selection bias; prompt on bias–variance tradeoff] (The UMVUE is the “uniformly minimum-variance unbiased estimator.”)
<Other Science (Math)>
Glad you liked the math! There was indeed a UMVUE clue, sorry your connection didn't cooperate :sad:
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by caroline »

Could I see the tossup on Pangloss? I buzzed second line with Candide because Candide also goes with Pangloss to see the dervish and participates in the conversation with him. (The Wikipedia summary makes out Candide to be the most involved in that conversation, though admittedly in the book he only talks like once during it, but I thought it was a fair buzz nonetheless.) I’m not sure I heard the entire clue, though.

Also, I have lots of good things to say as well, I’m just waiting for the packets to come out to talk about questions I liked because my memory is a bit hazy.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by Jem Casey »

Zealots of Stockholm wrote: Thu Feb 04, 2021 12:16 am I, and at least a few other people I've spoken to, found the Turing tossup confusingly worded. My teammate buzzed and negged with Searle at the same place I would have, shortly before Searle's name was said. I had just studied the Chinese Room thought experiment with what I thought was a reasonable amount of depth the week prior to the tournament, and think this tossup could've done a better job of making clear it wasn't referring to Searle.
singlet oxygen wrote: Thu Feb 04, 2021 5:33 pm FWIW I also negged the Turing tossup with Searle on the Chinese Room description.
Here's that tossup:
2021 ACF Regionals › 2021-01-30 edition › Packet J (Duke B, NYU B, WUSTL B, Columbia B, Indiana, Maryland A) wrote: 15. He’s not Descartes, but in writing on a scenario proposed by this thinker, Hilary Putnam noted the lack of “entry rules” and “exit rules” that allow content about “apples, fields, and steeples” and proposed a “for reference” variant of that thought experiment. In a paper, this thinker considered nine objections, including “heads in the sand,” “arguments from various disabilities,” and “Lady Lovelace’s Objection.” Ned Block’s “Blockhead” is an objection to a concept that this thinker devised in an article that begins “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’” That criterion created by this man is also the target of John Searle’s “Chinese Room” argument. For 10 points, name this scientist who imagined an “imitation game” or “test” in which an AI attempts to pass as a human.
ANSWER: Alan Turing [accept Turing test] (Putnam’s discussion of the “Turing Test for Reference” appears in “Brains in a Vat” in Reason, Truth and History.)
<Philosophy>
It's worth noting that none of the clues are descriptions of the Chinese Room or refer to Searle's work in any way until his name is read. That said, I completely understand taking that plunge on a philosophy tossup on a "thinker" discussing strong AI, given where those tossups usually go, and I wish I'd noticed that aspect of possible gameplay during set production. Sorry about the frustrating neg.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by tpmorrison »

caroline wrote: Thu Feb 04, 2021 6:06 pm Could I see the tossup on Pangloss? I buzzed second line with Candide because Candide also goes with Pangloss to see the dervish and participates in the conversation with him. (The Wikipedia summary makes out Candide to be the most involved in that conversation, though admittedly in the book he only talks like once during it, but I thought it was a fair buzz nonetheless.) I’m not sure I heard the entire clue, though.

Also, I have lots of good things to say as well, I’m just waiting for the packets to come out to talk about questions I liked because my memory is a bit hazy.
2021 ACF Regionals › 2021-01-30 edition › Packet A (Berkeley A, Waterloo B, CWRU A, Rutgers B, WUSTL C) wrote: 6. This character claims that centaurs and fauns are the products of inter-species reproduction. This character gets a door slammed in his face after consulting a dervish who tells him “Be silent.” After returning a flower to a woman, this character is sold into slavery. This character is thought to be dead until he screams when dissected by a surgeon. This man, who gives a maid “a lecture in experimental philosophy,” cites the introduction of chocolate to Europe as justification for the existence of syphilis. This professor of “metaphysico-theologo-cosmolo-nigology” survives being hanged at an auto-da-fé and refuses to help the drowning Jacques, since Lisbon’s harbor was created to drown him. For 10 points, name this tutor of Candide who claims that we live in the “best of all possible worlds.”
ANSWER: Dr. Pangloss
<European Literature>
Yeah, sorry about that. The "Be silent" part is unique to Pangloss, but the sentence ordering doesn't help there, and you're definitely right that the clue should disambiguate more.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by Zealots of Stockholm »

Jem Casey wrote: Thu Feb 04, 2021 6:45 pm
Zealots of Stockholm wrote: Thu Feb 04, 2021 12:16 am I, and at least a few other people I've spoken to, found the Turing tossup confusingly worded. My teammate buzzed and negged with Searle at the same place I would have, shortly before Searle's name was said. I had just studied the Chinese Room thought experiment with what I thought was a reasonable amount of depth the week prior to the tournament, and think this tossup could've done a better job of making clear it wasn't referring to Searle.
singlet oxygen wrote: Thu Feb 04, 2021 5:33 pm FWIW I also negged the Turing tossup with Searle on the Chinese Room description.
Here's that tossup:
2021 ACF Regionals › 2021-01-30 edition › Packet J (Duke B, NYU B, WUSTL B, Columbia B, Indiana, Maryland A) wrote: 15. He’s not Descartes, but in writing on a scenario proposed by this thinker, Hilary Putnam noted the lack of “entry rules” and “exit rules” that allow content about “apples, fields, and steeples” and proposed a “for reference” variant of that thought experiment. In a paper, this thinker considered nine objections, including “heads in the sand,” “arguments from various disabilities,” and “Lady Lovelace’s Objection.” Ned Block’s “Blockhead” is an objection to a concept that this thinker devised in an article that begins “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’” That criterion created by this man is also the target of John Searle’s “Chinese Room” argument. For 10 points, name this scientist who imagined an “imitation game” or “test” in which an AI attempts to pass as a human.
ANSWER: Alan Turing [accept Turing test] (Putnam’s discussion of the “Turing Test for Reference” appears in “Brains in a Vat” in Reason, Truth and History.)
<Philosophy>
It's worth noting that none of the clues are descriptions of the Chinese Room or refer to Searle's work in any way until his name is read. That said, I completely understand taking that plunge on a philosophy tossup on a "thinker" discussing strong AI, given where those tossups usually go, and I wish I'd noticed that aspect of possible gameplay during set production. Sorry about the frustrating neg.
Having seen this, I think its more of a case of trying to differentiate these things at game speed being kind of difficult, which is of course partly one of the skills which quizbowl tossups seek to test.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by Amizda Calyx »

I enjoyed the bio in this set, and was especially pleased with helicase and mucus (which sadly turned up in our bye round, although I did get to witness WVU tragically neg pretty early with "mucin"). I loved the DRP-1 clue in the binary fission tossup, but it was also a bit confusing--I wasn't sure what to answer since a) a tossup on mito fission just seemed way too hard, and b) it seemed to be a tossup on mito fission that led in with the canonical mito fission protein (where could it go from there!). I would not have made the connection to binary fission if it had been prompted instead of accepted (an exhausting amount of my dissertation involves DRP-1 so I might have regurgitated one of my presentation slides as a panicked prompt answer). Endosymbiosis and GABA were fun to play, and I think HeLa was a great idea. And I love the Rosetta programs so of course I appreciated protein folding.

I also remember being pretty excited about the X-ray crystallography bonus centered on Hodgkin.

I am terrible about writing down answers during online tournaments, so I basically only remember the rounds before lunch. Once the set is posted I might add more feedback. But over all I thought this set was extremely polished (and it helped that our Discord mirror ran so smoothly!).

Bonus pics of worm neuronal mitochondria with a drp-1 deletion (because of course I have labeled pngs on imgur already):

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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by Auger recombination »

Jem Casey wrote: Thu Feb 04, 2021 6:45 pm It's worth noting that none of the clues are descriptions of the Chinese Room or refer to Searle's work in any way until his name is read.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by Zealots of Stockholm »

In the tiebreakers packet, there is a slight error in bonus 15. Dangarembga's The Book of Not was the sequel to Nervous Conditions, and This Mournable Body is the third book in the series. Nevertheless, always good to see Zimbabwean literature come up!
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by Zealots of Stockholm »

EDIT: mods pls delete i posted in wrong thread
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by cwasims »

A few thoughts based on reading some more packets in practice as well as some critiques I had during the tournament:

In pack A, the tossup on "Jews" erroneously claims that Handel's Judas Maccabaeus is an opera as opposed to an oratorio (and also includes an earlier clue about it in a tossup that otherwise only uses opera clues). Later in the same pack, there's a tossup on Monteverdi which mentions numerous Italian-language terms and "madrigals" quite early in the question, which seems suboptimal to me.

In pack B, I wasn't a huge fan of "this model" for the Phillips curve tossup - while Wikipedia does label it as a model, in my experience it's treated more as a prediction of a model than a model in itself. "This construct" or something similar might be better in my opinion.

In pack H, the tossup on Franck mentions his F minor piano quintet without all that much to disambiguate it from Brahms's besides mentioning Saint-Saens - given that I would say Brahms's F minor piano quintet is probably better-known than Franck's, I think it would be good to explicitly rule him out.

Overall, though, I really enjoyed playing Regionals this year - thanks to all the editors!
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by Grace »

In a year full of excellent, original sets, I have to say that Regs is my favorite all-subject set this year. It stood out above a crowded field with the polish and care put into each question. A huge thank you, too, to the editors for being so generous and responsive in discussing their editorial choices and highlighting submissions.

Since no one ever posts just to say that everything is delightful, I do want to argue that the first clue in Packet G's play within a play question should have offered a prompt on "wedding," since I think the bloody goings-on in the masque concluding Women Beware Women happen in the context of a wedding.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by caroline »

A lot of these are concentrated around the same packets because I was too lazy to go through every single packet and the list of things I liked was getting long, but some content I really liked: Homer from Walcott (very fun conceit!), the Korea bonus part in the Yeats bonus (very nice link), the bad poetry bonus (we just read part of The Tay-Bridge Disaster in my poetry writing class a few weeks ago :-)), diaries in Chinese lit, the link between Evaristo and Smith, the Gilbert and Gubar part on the Milton bonus, and the hurricanes bonus linking together Jesmyn Ward and Hurston. Also, a lot of the extra-textual lead-ins are really interesting: Dostoyevsky’s Pushkin speech, the Some Prefer Nettles clue on Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Maryse Conde on the Hester tu, the Pam Zhang novel on gold rush, etc. I am somewhat biased by the fact my tastes skew modern, but I really like that the lead-ins largely take a more modern approach / lens to a lot of less modern content.

A couple minor criticisms from questions I still enjoyed overall:
"green" as a hard part for Garcia Lorca seems pretty overused by now and has been asked about a lot (including that specific GL poem), though I didn't know the thing about Adela's dress and that's really cool!
“They taste good to her” in “A Poor Old Woman” on the plums tossup seems pretty early, since you’re basically saying it’s objects that taste good in a WCW poem, but maybe I overestimate how well-known the title is? [EDIT: okay, I retract that criticism after checking that it has come up three times and will admit to being mildly jealous because I had the same idea the week before Regionals.]
Referring to Sandi as her half-brother in the Wide Sargasso Sea tossup kind of threw me off, since Antoinette refers to him as her cousin throughout the book. I'm not entirely clear on their exact relation, but it seems like from a quick command+f in the book that he's the son of Alexander Cosway, who's one of her father's illegitimate sons.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by tpmorrison »

caroline wrote: Sun Feb 21, 2021 3:42 am Referring to Sandi as her half-brother in the Wide Sargasso Sea tossup kind of threw me off, since Antoinette refers to him as her cousin throughout the book. I'm not entirely clear on their exact relation, but it seems like from a quick command+f in the book that he's the son of Alexander Cosway, who's one of her father's illegitimate sons.
Antoinette and Sandi are half-siblings (Antoinette’s father, Alexander, is also Sandi’s father). She does call him “cousin Sandi” once, but my thinking was that using the genealogically correct term would be more helpful and less likely to trip people up. Sorry if it had the opposite effect though!
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

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tpmorrison wrote: Sun Feb 21, 2021 3:42 pm
caroline wrote: Sun Feb 21, 2021 3:42 am Referring to Sandi as her half-brother in the Wide Sargasso Sea tossup kind of threw me off, since Antoinette refers to him as her cousin throughout the book. I'm not entirely clear on their exact relation, but it seems like from a quick command+f in the book that he's the son of Alexander Cosway, who's one of her father's illegitimate sons.
Antoinette and Sandi are half-siblings (Antoinette’s father, Alexander, is also Sandi’s father). She does call him “cousin Sandi” once, but my thinking was that using the genealogically correct term would be more helpful and less likely to trip people up. Sorry if it had the opposite effect though!
I think maybe according to the book there are two Alexander Cosways, one of who is Antoinette's father and the other Antoinette's father's son (and Sandi's father). (Amelie to Rochester: "Daniel is a bad man and he will come here and make trouble for you. It’s better he don’t come. They say one time he was a preacher in Barbados. He talk like a preacher, and he have a brother in Jamaica in Spanish Town, Mr Alexander. Very wealthy man. He own three rum shops and two dry good stores. I hear one time that Miss Antoinette and his son Mr Sandi get married, but that all foolishness.") That being said, a lot of sources seem to say conflicting things and I might just be reading the passage incorrectly.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - Specific Question Discussion

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

In pack B, I wasn't a huge fan of "this model" for the Phillips curve tossup - while Wikipedia does label it as a model, in my experience it's treated more as a prediction of a model than a model in itself. "This construct" or something similar might be better in my opinion.
Agree with Chris on this 100%
Will Alston
Dartmouth College '16
Columbia Business School '21
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