2021 ACF Winter - Thanks and General Discussion

[tpmorrison]

This is the general discussion thread for 2021 ACF Winter. Thanks so much to everyone who played the tournament, and thanks especially to all the staffers who volunteered their time to make this weekend a success.

By my rough count, we had 182 teams play ACF Winter and 78 submit half-packets, both very exciting numbers to see. It was a lot of fun to get to read so many strong submissions, and I hope teams enjoyed hearing their questions played.

The subject editors were really the stars of the show; I would strongly recommend any of them for any future project. Here was the category breakdown:
Ethan Ashbrook: European Literature, Mythology, Philosophy
Vikshar Athreya: World History
Nick Jensen: American History, European History, Other History, Earth Science, Other Academic
Joseph Krol: World Literature, Painting/Sculpture, Other Arts
Angela Lin: American Literature, British Literature
Steven Liu: Physics, Other Science
Benjamin McAvoy-Bickford: Religion, Geography, Current Events
Eric Mukherjee: Biology, Chemistry
Chris Sims: Classical Music, Social Science

-Ethan produced uniformly interesting, polished, and well-controlled questions across several categories. Despite me not being much of a myth player, several of his myth questions ended up among my favorite questions in the set, a testament to his talent and hard work.
-Vikshar’s impressive passion for history made his world history questions enjoyable to play and interesting to hear. He did a really nice job touching on well-known and important topics from an interesting angle.
-Nick managed to write scores of great questions across a large portion of the distribution, all the while offering loads of useful feedback to everyone else via playtesting and extensive comments. Nick also put in a ton of time in the last few weeks, giving the set a thorough read-through and catching improvements of all kinds. His creativity, work ethic, and attention to detail are really quite impressive.
-Joseph has an astonishing knack for writing fresh questions and finding interesting angles to draw connections, and he did a great job threading the needle of core and advanced topics across his categories. Hopefully everyone else enjoyed his self-described love of common links as much as I did.
-Angela’s questions needed virtually no work, with evocative and memorable early clues/hard parts and excellent difficulty gradation. I was especially impressed by how she managed to keep answers well-controlled while still drawing in exciting secondary material in early clues and bonus themes.
-Steven is one of the best young science writers in the business, and his physics and other science questions were astonishingly polished from the get-go. He also produced some of my favorite math and CS questions I’ve seen at this difficulty.
-Benjamin did a really nice job with his categories and produced loads of great questions. Several of his religion questions were among my favorite ideas in the set.
-Eric’s extensive science editing experience was a big asset for this set, and he did a great job producing interesting and well-controlled questions in biology and chemistry, categories that can be especially hard to navigate at this difficulty.
-Chris translated his expertise in music and economics into some really interesting questions that required very minimal work and were uniformly fun to play and hear even as a non-expert. I especially enjoyed his questions on empirical social science, a very important topic in the real world that can be hard to execute well in quiz bowl.

I’d like to thank all of the playtesters, who provided loads of feedback that improved the set considerably: Mike Bentley, Iain Carpenter, Erik Christensen, Ariel Faeder, Doug Graebner, Will Grossman, Chinmay Kansara, Aseem Keyal, Rahul Keyal, Chris Manners, Tejas Raje, Jonathen Settle, Jon Suh, and Matt Weiner.

Taylor Harvey, ACF’s Editor-in-Chief, provided lots of helpful comments via his thorough read-throughs of the set, and even chipped in a great poetry tossup on short notice.

Ganon Evans very generously offered to proofread the set and found scores of edits both big and small that helped make it more readable and playable. He’s also one of the most enthusiastic people in quiz bowl and a joy to work with.

Cody Voight likewise graciously set up his script to be able to incorporate Ophir's pronunciation guide database and helped me troubleshoot some issues, which made adding PGs so much easier. This is one of the coolest and most helpful tools I’ve seen in quiz bowl, and I hope to see it used a lot more in the future.

Last but certainly not least, Theresa Nyowheoma did a fantastic job as ACF’s Site Coordinator. This set had 14 mirrors — some online and some in-person — and several more sites that came and went as teams adjusted to their schools’ Covid policies. Theresa juggled all of this uncertainty extremely well and made sure that the host sites had the resources and information they needed to hold a successful mirror.

Thanks again to all the players and staffers who made this weekend possible. We would love to hear your thoughts.

[SirMrGuy]

I know it already says this up top, but I edited physics and other science (minus earth science) for this set. I wasn’t sure initially whether I wanted to play Winter or edit it, but I’m glad I took the dive. This was a wonderful team to work with for my first foray into editing a collegiate set!

Special thanks (in no particular order) to Tim for being an active and all-around extremely helpful head editor; Nick and Ganon for helping to polish a ton of phrasing, answerlines, and other “mechanical” aspects that are no less important than the content they present; Tim and Joseph for providing excellent feedback on my categories and a place to bounce ideas off of (especially in math, which would have been a lot worse off if I didn’t have their help); and Jonathan, Iain, and Aseem (apologies if I’ve missed anyone!) for playtesting and providing tons of useful feedback for content and difficulty calibration. I’d also like to do the cheesy thing of thanking all of the people who took the time to work on this set, who collectively made the many hours I sunk into this that much more worthwhile. I’m not particularly good at many categories outside of the ones I edited, but most of the questions I saw generally were very interesting in their own right, and also set quite a high bar for me to try and match.

Now for the vision thing. Like any editor, across my categories I wanted to strike a good balance between having interesting, fresh clues and being accessible to people who aren’t necessarily science specialists. Beyond that, some of my priorities were:

• Keeping things thematically coherent. This means that, for instance, I avoided pulling clues from both particle physics and classical mechanics in the same tossup as much as possible while still keeping things at an appropriate difficulty.

• Including a healthy amount of engineering and applied content. As a possibly-not-exhaustive list, clues were taken from mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, signal processing, control theory, propulsion, computer graphics, and whatever you want to classify calipers as.

• Emphasizing deeper engagement with “core” topics over more cursory knowledge of advanced content. This heavily influenced the subdistributions and clue selection within the categories - classical mechanics and electricity+magnetism got a fairly large share of the physics distribution, for instance. Also, when I used clues that have come up before, I tried to find fresh angles or to ask about them more deeply, both to keep things interesting and to ward off binary association.

• Keeping tossup answerlines tame. This is pretty self-explanatory, although I’m not sure how well I followed through on it. I think some answerlines did end up playing harder than I wanted them to.

There were definitely several poor decisions I made that reared their ugly heads when the set got played for real, but that’s all part of improving at question-writing, I suppose. Any issues left in my categories are, of course, on me.

I'll also make a post in the other thread at some point soon to highlight some submissions and make some other comments, but it's late so I'll compile those thoughts later.

[vathreya]

Editing the World History for this set was a really enjoyable experience, and I’m extremely thankful to everyone involved in the production of the set for their help and guidance. 

In no particular order, I’d like to offer my thanks to the following people:


- Special thanks to Tim, our head editor, whose guidance was key to ensuring that the World History was polished and enjoyable. His comments on everything from difficulty to phrasing helped improve the category immensely, and his leadership was extremely helpful in motivating me to try my best when writing or editing.
- Nick was a phenomenal history editor to work with, and I’m not sure what I would have done without his guidance. Whether it was making suggestions when I got stuck, commenting to improve my phrasing, or even contributing a tossup of his own, Nick was extremely helpful in getting the World History to where it was. As others have said, he put in an incredible amount of work on this set, and I am truly inspired by his knowledge and work ethic.
- Steven, Chris, Joseph, and Eric all provided comments on the World History that were very helpful in improving the category.
- Taylor’s comments on my questions were extremely helpful, and his observations were key to ensuring the category was polished.
- The rest of the editors, including the ones not mentioned above - Ethan, Angela, and Benjamin - wrote/edited questions I really enjoyed, and they inspired me to try my best on my own category.
- Ganon’s proofreading was nothing short of excellent, and his comments helped ensure that even in the late stages of production I could significantly improve the questions in my category. His sense of enthusiasm and positive attitude brought many smiles to my face during production.
- The playtesters - Mike, Tejas, Jon, Matt, and Doug - all gave excellent feedback and had great ideas to patch up any holes they found.
- To everyone who submitted questions, thank you for providing me with a lot of creative questions to work with, and I really wish I was able to include everyone’s questions in the set.
- To all the tournament directors and staff - thank you for making it possible for people to hear our questions!
- And lastly, thank you to the players for coming out and hearing our questions! I hope I made the World History enjoyable and fun for y’all, and I hope it added positively to your tournament experience.

In terms of vision, one thing I sought to do was highlight areas of world history that tend to be both temporally and geographically underrepresented, while also presenting many “core” topics from interesting angles. In particular, I tried to focus more on movements and cultures throughout history, rather than just tossing up the countries they were found in. I hope this made the world history enjoyable!

If there were any issues in the category, please feel free to let me know - I’d appreciate feedback (good or bad). This tournament was a wonderful learning experience for me, and I hope to learn from your feedback as well.

I’ll also make a post in the Specific Question Discussion thread to highlight submissions I really enjoyed and thought were neat - stay tuned for that :).

[cwasims]

This was my second time editing ACF Winter, and I enjoyed it just as much as I did last time, so thanks to all the editors for creating such a collegial environment. Thanks especially to Tim, our head editor, for doing a fantastic job of looking over all the questions and providing encouragement, Nick for giving excellent suggestions on everyone's questions, and Joseph for letting me co-opt the opera questions. Nick, Vikshar, and Ethan all contributed some questions in my categories, and those were appreciated as well. Ganon and Taylor left helpful feedback related to proof-reading and overall difficulty, respectively, and the playtesters also gave valuable feedback that made my questions much better.

Classical music was, along with American history, one of only two categories to have the same editor as last year, and I think my approach was pretty similar to what I did then with maybe a bit more adventurous choice of topics. I generally wanted most of the tossups to contain at least some "score clues" (not necessarily note sequences), although some tossups like solfège, Vienna, and Berlioz spoke to the more music history/culture side of things. The main subdistributions were based on era and genre, and I also think different locations ended up being fairly evenly represented. If you are interested, I created a Spotify playlist of the classical music and opera that I clued in my questions, which can be found here.

This was, somewhat surprisingly given my field of study, the first time I have edited social science for a tournament. I wanted to make sure that economics and psychology were both well-represented given my view that they are the most important social sciences in terms of impact and enrollment, while also making sure that the other social science fields were given adequate question space. I generally tried to include a mix of applied and theoretical work, focusing in particular on recent developments that I think are particularly noteworthy (Talhelm's work on China, Henrich's recent book, the exposé of Ariely, many of the clues in the India tossup, etc.). I probably succeeded more in this in the economics questions since that's where my expertise lies, but I hope the other questions also had clues that spoke to what people in those fields care about nowadays.

In the next few days, I'll make a post in the Specific Question Discussion thread highlighting some of the excellent submissions I received, not all of which were able to make it into the set given subdistribution requirements.

[Ehtna]

I was the European literature, philosophy, and mythology editor for Winter this year. Despite some of the frenzies that come with editing packet sub tournaments, this was an amazing group of people to work with and I would not have gotten through this without them! I want to give special thanks to Tim, Angela, Nick, Joseph, and Chris for their suggestions and feedback on my questions during the editing process for each of the categories. It was very helpful to receive feedback from other knowledgeable editors with different perspectives and ideas on directions to take questions, and I greatly appreciate all of your contributions. I also want to recognize Vikshar, Benjamin, and Eric for their feedback in specialty areas and the many interactions we’ve had during set production. They were very helpful for nicher areas that they knew a lot about, and their help when incorporating those areas was phenomenal. Overall, thank you to the entire team for your knowledge, determination, and toleration of my jokes.

Shoutouts to Ganon and Taylor for being amazing proofreaders and offering very helpful suggestions on edits near the end. And while I can’t name specific playtesters without risking forgetting someone, their feedback was critical to ensuring the questions were balanced and diverse, and this tournament would not have happened without their help!

I didn’t have any particular agendas going into this tournament for my categories, however there were a few goals I had when writing and editing content:
1. European literature - try to highlight authors who aren’t straight white males. I think the European literature “canon” is one of the most difficult categories to account for diversity in, given that it’s overwhelmingly white and male (I’d argue much more so than the other literature subdistributions). I did my best to account for authors who didn’t fit that status quo (and received some great submissions that helped me with that!), though I do think that if I had more time, there are many more routes I could have explored and highlighted.
2. Philosophy - emphasize ideas and concepts over names. This was harder to do with tossups out of fear of difficulty, but in the bonuses especially I wanted to reward philosophical knowledge that was more than surface-level and encouraged engaging in philosophy, whether that be through reading SEP articles or listening to podcasts or whatnot. Whether it was successful, I’m not sure, but I consciously tried to avoid making hard parts on people if there was another option.
3. Mythology - make interesting questions and expand the breadth of topics. My hunch is mythology is often viewed as the category with the least amount of room for canon expansion and exploration due to its source pool being limited compared to every other category. To try and solve that for this tournament, I attempted to expand what we typically call mythology to include things such as Biblical legends, mythological influences on today, folklore, and so on. Admittedly, I think this led to the category being a bit more Eurocentric than I wanted, which is something I’ll try to take into account if I end up editing mythology for tournaments in the future. But above all, I wanted to make the questions fun and get people just a little bit interested in mythology (and happy that they could 30 bonuses from reading the Kane Chronicles and other Riordan books ).

While I can’t necessarily incorporate it now, feedback is appreciated if anyone has comments on specific questions or the set as a whole. I’ve got a couple of submissions that I really liked and will highlight shortly in the other thread. Otherwise, thanks again to everyone involved in the production and I hope everyone enjoyed the questions!

[bkmcavoybickford]

First of all, thank you so much to all the ACF Winter editors; y’all did a great job with this set and I’m incredibly grateful for your wonderful suggestions and feedback on my questions. I’d like to especially thank Tim for his work as a head editor; he did an outstanding job making sure we were all on the same page. Thanks also to Nick and Steven for chipping in some CE questions towards the end that were extremely well-written, and to Ethan for helping minimize religion-mythology overlaps. All the other editors, playtesters, and ACF people were also great to work with. Lastly, thanks to Owen and Nathan for running the high school online Sunday mirror; getting to hear my questions was enjoyable even if it went a bit late.

Now for some general thoughts on the categories I edited: religion, CE, and geography. I’ve heard from a few different people that there was a lot of content dealing with minor religions. This was by and large an intentional choice, although I do think that I should tone it down a little bit in any future sets I edit. It also may have come at the expense of Islam and other major religions- I think that this is somewhat true but also reflects what packets people played. My rationale for this is that the number of adherents can’t really say how important a religion is, because all have developed complex traditions regardless of their numbers. Furthermore, some, like Zoroastrianism and Tengrism, were historically important. I hope people enjoyed the slightly different quirk of the subdistribution.

All in all, I wanted the religion in this set to have a little of everything. I aimed for a balance of texts versus practices; it may have slightly shaded towards texts and history. I liked having some questions heavier on historical and archaeological clues (Jesus, Celts), but also wanted to include some religion-as-literature questions (Daniel). I made a conscious effort to have strong thematic links on the bonuses; hopefully that worked out well. However, I do think that I probably shot a little too far towards letting submissions dictate the feel of the category; next time I would like to enforce a bit more of my editorial point of view on submissions to give the category a stronger feeling of coherency without sacrificing a wide range of content.

For geography, I was lucky to have a ton of usable submissions; I’ll try to highlight some of them later. I tried to lean it more towards cultural geography, which is pretty much standard practice in quiz bowl sets these days. Current events had a few questions written by other editors, which was great; thanks a lot to them! I honestly don’t have much else to say about current events and geography since they are both only .25/.25 slices of the distribution. It was a great experience to be able to edit all these questions, and I welcome feedback on them.

[krollo]

I edited World Lit, VFA and OFA (except opera) for this set – hopefully they were enjoyable! First of all I'd like to say thanks to the other editors for their help during set production, especially Tim and Nick whose comments and criticisms were consistently very useful. Thanks too to everyone who came out to play it on Saturday!

------

Insofar as I have an editorial "philosophy", I imagine it is fairly standard, but humour me for a moment. My general principles – and really that's far too grandiose a term, but anyway – were along these lines:

• Keep tossups "intellectually coherent". In other words, I tried to ensure questions had some sort of "point" rather than being disconnected collections of facts, at least in the harder parts. Sometimes these themes were pretty natural to put into place ("Arabic" focused on modern poetry, "United Kingdom" from the early-20th c. Royal Ballet); other times the connections were perhaps less obviously direct, but the clues still shed some kind of light on each other (the weird exoticism of elephants in 20th-century art, "beats" in African music). Although looser links can allow harder material into early clues, I've never been an aesthetic fan of cluing a recent novel in a CL just because it has "solitude" or whatever in the title; where I did this I tried to do so with at least somewhat "genuine" themes.
• Keep answerlines "simple". I don't necessarily mean "easy" here – answerlines like Vikram Seth or Giacometti or Sofia Coppola are not the easiest things in the world at this level (and a few harder answerlines are good, I think, for keeping players "honest"). But very few of my answerlines were complicated – the vast majority were people, countries, and some titles, the kind that really shouldn't confuse a player who knows the clues. There's always a tendency in quizbowl, especially at lower college difficulties, to think that answerlines on "standard" things should be novel or "interesting", which generally leads to answerlines like "the house from the House on Mango Street" or whatever, where the actual clues are the same difficulty except that newer players get confused. If you want to make questions on standard canonical stuff interesting, usually (but, to be fair, not always) I find the most sensible thing to be to keep the answerline the novel or the painter and make the clues or theme interesting. Contrived answerlines are normally a very forced sort of interest at best, and disadvantage knowledgeable players at worst. (The main exception in my categories was maybe "Britain and Nigeria", but the role of Britain in the literature clued is absolutely central and at any rate "these two countries" should not confuse people as to what the answerline wants, unlike "this scene" and so on.)
• Where possible, keep bonuses "tight". This is far less central, and far more personal, than the two points above, but the fun of quizbowl is for me mainly in connections – using a bonus to pick out a recurring theme in an author's work, or a subject that happens to recur in one tradition's artworks. (Some were more natural than others – war in Weimar art or mud in the Black Paintings is clearly a genuine theme, dogs in Brazilian novels or maybe more of a coincidence – but both are, to me at least, aesthetically pleasing.) I should be clear – writing, say, novel / author / plot point, if executed well, is absolutely fine, and often better than contriving a link that isn't there – but if you can unintrusively get people to notice an amusing literary synchronicity, why not?
• Reward multiple kinds of engagement. Emphasis on the "multiple" here. Real knowledge is great of course, and it can come from many directions – clues that reward visiting art galleries, so-called "shibboleths" to help people who've read a novel, content on events that newspapers or RYM or the art Twittersphere are constantly going on about recently. Where possible my early clues and hard parts were things someone who has engaged decently with the works ought to have remembered naturally rather than learning it specifically for quizbowl. But learning from playing quizbowl is still learning, and I tried not to go out of my way to avoid important clues that have come up a fair bit. Plenty of my hard parts and early clues have come up before – if you remember them, take your points!
• Keep things fun! As I said above, one thing I love about quizbowl is the way it encourages connections, two bits of the canon colliding in a memorable way (Vikram Seth buying George Herbert's old house, Dante calling Giotto's kids ugly). Of course sometimes a fact is just entertaining on its own merits (Dali getting a baby elephant as recompense for designing Air India's ashtrays, Paul Simon and Derek Walcott writing a musical about a convicted murderer together, Edward Weston spending a week photographing his toilet bowl). I deeply enjoy finding out this kind of nonsense, and hopefully you do too; used in the right proportion I think they can keep a set engaging without crowding out more "traditional" clues.
• To paraphrase Orwell, break any of these rules sooner than writing a question that plays badly.

------

Somewhat longer than I expected there, but anyhow. As many players have noted, this set was somewhat harder than Winter 2020, and at least in my case this was a conscious move; while last year's Winter was a great set, I'm unsure whether it really went far enough to bridge the massive gap between Fall and Regionals. For the most part my answerlines and easy parts were still very accessible, I hope, but a few slightly tougher answers both keeps more experienced players on their toes a little and gives newer players and idea of where the canon might go from here. Even so, this change was meant to be very marginal, and I hope it wasn't too oppressive.

One more small point is that as regards submissions, I consciously avoided being too precious – even when a submitted question was perfectly functional, I would generally change a few clues to match my intentions above. In general, the questions I used were a) submitted a month or more in advance, b) had usable early clues/hard parts, c) weren't wide-ranging common links (which have a tendency to clash), and d) avoided the very obvious paths without being too outlandish (I think I got seven Murakami submissions in the end, almost all the submitted OAFA was opera, and about half the submitted VFA was France 1850-1930).

------

In terms of the individual subjects, again, I doubt I was too radical; again, I will discuss them at unnecessary length. One by one:

• World Lit: Filling out 16/16 of World Lit at lower college difficulties is tough just due to the size, and relative stickiness, of the canon. As such the answerline selection here was pretty conservative, with canon-pushing coming in early clues and hard parts based around accessible answerlines (see the Nazik al-Malaika leadin for Arabic, for instance). I tried to keep a fairly strong geographic and genre spread here, with clues about minority authors where possible. There were some well-worn favourites with fresh early clues (Cry, the Beloved Country), and some less-trodden content (Eleanor Catton novels, Ancient Egyptian stories), so hopefully there was something for everyone.
• VFA: VFA has more options at this level than World Lit, but not massively so. In particular, bringing in world art into lower-level college quizbowl is still tough without increasing difficulty; I mainly did this with geographical/historical answerlines (Byzantine empire, moai), with a conscious effort to make these genuinely about the art, rather than becoming extra history as they often devolve into. Outside of this, I did my best to spread content out both temporally and in terms of genre; it was perhaps a little older-skewed than some sets, but hopefully not egregiously so. Again, there was some very core stuff, though generally with some theming (The Anatomy Lesson, Thomas Cole). VFA, though, allowed a few more (genuinely) novel answerlines (Obama, the Minoans).
• OFA: Dare I say it, perhaps the most fun: it's a massive spectrum of stuff, lots of things people engage with outside of quizbowl, and as such very ripe for fresh content. Many of the best submissions were in this bit of the distro. Once again, I tried to emphasise world and minority content, which in OFA is extremely doable. Perhaps more controversially I slightly reduced the amount of "traditional" OFA content to free up room for more miscellaneous things. As such, there was only 1/2 pure jazz, for instance, but you got OAFA TUs on "beats" in African music and the musical influence of the BBC; only 1/2 pure architecture, but you got OVFA TUs on Mies van der Rohe as a designer and on recent Vantablack scandals. Of course, integrating newer content and solidly buzzable bits of the canon is the game here, and I hope I accomplished it.

------

Jesus, how long has this got? (Vaguely philosophising about quizbowl is far more fun than actually writing it.) But I hope this summarises my approach to my categories in this tournament; I'll be listing some of my favourite submissions in the specific questions thread in the coming days. As ever, comments/praise/advice/invective are all gladly welcomed. Once again, thanks to everyone who made this tournament happen!

[coffeespoons]

I edited American and British Literature for this year’s Winter set. This was my first time editing, and although it was initially a bit intimidating, all the editors on the team contributed to creating a welcoming and positive environment. Throughout the whole process, I received valuable feedback on all my questions, especially from Tim, Nick, Joseph, and Ethan -- many thanks to them! Everyone had such inspiring ideas, and working on this set really shaped my growth as a writer.

A few goals I had in mind:

• Write interesting and meaningfully-themed questions on more standard answerlines (eg. the Salinger tossup which focused on his depictions of veterans & PTSD)

• Include a variety of clues beyond plot/characters: things like stage props, translators, publication history, biographical details, literary form/techniques, etc.

• Purposefully integrate secondary sources/literary criticism. Along with this, exploring relationships between different texts and also between different authors

• Highlight important topics discussed in literature (mental health, disability, etc.)

• Clue contemporary works while keeping the difficulty reasonable, often this meant connecting contemporary works to more widely-known works from other time periods (eg. LaValle’s response to Lovecraft, Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias which discusses Susan Sontag and Nellie Bly)

• Represent marginalized writers who are often under-asked about in quizbowl

• Do all of the above while maintaining appropriate difficulty and keeping things accessible

I hope some of these intentions resonated with players, and while I think I did better on some points than others, I’m overall pleased with how my categories turned out. I’d love to hear people’s feedback and thoughts! I’d also like to note that I received many strong submissions that I really enjoyed reading; several of these introduced me to new authors and works that are now some of my favorites, so thank you! I’ll highlight these in another post soon.

Again, thank you to everyone who I worked with on this set (and those who encouraged me to apply in the first place, which I hadn’t previously considered doing!) It was a wonderful learning experience, and I hope players found my questions enjoyable!

[Abdon Ubidia]

The lack of jazz and architecture was something that was noticed at our site. I see from Krol's post above that it was intentional, but I don't think the idea should be replicated going forward. Unfortunately, these categories are just too small to really do this successfully, I think. Perhaps this serves as an argument for expanding the OFA distribution more than anything else, though.

As a reader, I thought the set was very solid. Thanks to ACF and all editors for producing it.

[Arabidopsis failiana]

Theresa was super helpful to me getting ready for our site of this tournament. Planning one site was hard by itself, and she was always responsive to my questions and helpful in dealing with the issues that we faced with preparing to host - and UVA was just one site out of a dozen that she was responsible for coordinating. I want to publicly recognize that so she gets deserved credit for helping make this tournament possible - thank you Theresa and everyone else from ACF who helped with the set and the logistics for this tournament.

[meebles127]

Theresa was super helpful to me getting ready for our site of this tournament. Planning one site was hard by itself, and she was always responsive to my questions and helpful in dealing with the issues that we faced with preparing to host - and UVA was just one site out of a dozen that she was responsible for coordinating. I want to publicly recognize that so she gets deserved credit for helping make this tournament possible - thank you Theresa and everyone else from ACF who helped with the set and the logistics for this tournament.

I'd also like to say thank you to Olivia Murton and others who helped us with some issues day-of.