The Quizbowl Resource Center

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Interested and available after June 30th or so

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If we treat "skill as a three- or four-dot player while still in high school" as a metric something like "most able to scale to arbitrarily high difficulties," Tommy Casalaspi was obviously on a different plane than everyone else when it came to reading, writing, and buzzing on a...

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In the era before mine (I started playing high school in 2007), the consensus was that Jacob Mikanowski was the best player of what passed as "good" quizbowl, or at least the best player for whom attestable records were kept by reputable organizations. (Dude was a champion of all four of t...

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1) Extremely yes, 2) as many packets as you feel capable of, 3) whenever you're ready -- don't rush if you need time to finish the set to your satisfaction, 4) yeah probably an online setup would get the widest and most competitive audience; in-person mirrors of audio tournaments tend to be pretty s...

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DavidB256 wrote: ↑Tue May 16, 2023 10:46 am Belvedere Torso at ICT off of painting knowledge.

As I recall the Cambyses buzz was a second line and he 10d this but yeah he good

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Glad to hear that this is moving. Thanks to all who are working on it! Amid some discussion of the archive on Discord earlier this week, I made a point I'd like to restate here: It might be good to raise the threshold for approving sets/packets for posting. E.g.: Add a checkbox for "These quest...

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Round two of the Festival of Rejects: ACF Nationals 2023 Edition will start a little after 8 ET/7 CT with unused questions from Chicago A, followed by Yale A. I've also been authorized to read from the unused submissions by Chicago B and C, which may happen later in the evening.

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Almost a year later, is there any update on this project? If not, is there at least a bare-minimum change that can be made from now forward , so that the major sections of the archive doesn't keep getting flooded with one-off vanity packets? Creating a "Standalone Packets" or "Vanity&...

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Tonight's installment of the "Festival of Rejects" will begin at 8 Eastern / 7 Central, with Mazin reading unused submissions from Harvard. After that, my hope is that people from other schools who are around tonight will queue up to read stuff.

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It looks like tomorrow, Thursday, May 4 , is the winner, so the first session of Festival of Rejects will start that evening in #packet on the main quizbowl Discord. However, due to some scheduling oafishness on my part, I won't be able to attend. If someone else would like to host / run the reader ...

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There's probably some more posts coming about What The Numbers Show as the data analytics roll out, but immediately Alex Akridge of Indiana A leapt out to me as having like the 3rd best science stats in the ACF Nats field, with tons of early buzzes in a pretty tough second bracket. I haven't seen Al...

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Be on the lookout for more advanced things from the UChicago Analytics Lab soon, but for now enjoy this spreadsheet of best buzzes by tossup, also featuring a histogram (binwidth=10 words) and by-team and by-individual leaderboards. Be aware that in some rounds played only in one room or a few rooms...

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Now that ACF Nationals is over in all but its psychological aftereffects -- and the set is posted -- I'd like people to have a chance to read unused questions from their submitted packets in #packet on the Quizbowl Discord. In the past, informal gatherings after some Nats and COs have led to a queue...

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For the past five years, people have wondered/argued about Itamar Naveh-Benjamin , who could only make it to 1-2 regional tournaments a year and missed many nationals on account of “learning to save lives at medical school during a global pandemic” or some trifle like that. Well, wonder no more: he ...

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Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 6:58 pm We are very much looking for American and Canadian hosts of COOT mirrors, so please get in touch with me if you want this to happen!

I will once again endorse COOT as a Barrel Of Fun.

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Does your club plan on writing these questions yourselves, and if so, do you have quizbowl question writing experience? Writing a tournament is very time-consuming and challenging; especially if you're all entirely new to it, I'd advise you to look into "mirroring" an existing set or joini...

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A few very small things I was reminded of when glancing over the packets: > In the Woodrow Wilson tossup, I found this sentence quite confusing: This person created an organization headed by a Colorado senator that employed “Four Minute Men” to influence public opinion. It's largely on me for not kn...

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This isn't really a gameplay moment, but: Being able to follow other brackets/games on Harry White's live results page definitely amped up the sense of possibility and excitement as the chaos unfolded. When we saw on our phones that Chicago B had just upset Cornell A in their prelim bracket, we star...

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It’s been tried (0.40/0.33), and the headache was not worth it. Granted, it’s a new decade... I think the existence of multiple distinctive all-film sets (and two more coming up this year!) suggests that it's possible to find .5/.5 per packet or so of non-repeating, sufficiently academic material. ...

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With apologies to Capt. Picard, my main reaction reading this is: Make it so! There's no reason in principle why the next set you (the general you) put together can't make room for more film. In general, when it comes to distributional tinkering, I think it'd be cool to see more people Just Go For I...

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I think a team was summarily negged for saying "aboriginal peoples", which is a term that some do use for people outside Australia. Thanks for the clarification on Muharram. It was probably the right call to just accept Ashura outright rather than try something like "this multi-day ob...

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I may have more systematic Thoughts later, but I'll start by saying: I found it very cool that this tournament had a larger-than-normal focus on "public health" content across multiple subcategories, including biology, other sci, social science, current events, and Your Choice. Off the top...

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Could I see the answer lines for "shear stress", "liquidity preference," "abolition of slavery in Brazil", and the public health-y tossup on "indigenous people"? From what I gathered in tournament-hallway conversations, these questions (and a few other example...

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Asking for both Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism seems extremely hard It is not; the notion of Africanfuturism as a Thing, and the conception of it as something distinct from U.S.-centric Afrofuturism, is an absolutely massive topic in science fiction discussion right now, and its main proponent, N...

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Jeff King's is surely up there; he had never before played quizbowl at any level when he put up 27.00 PPG on a challenging Illinois Open set. I believe Jeff did do speed-based buzzer competitions in high school, though the vast majority of his question-answering experience comes from years of dedic...

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Though he had played speed-based formats in icy New Hampshire, an unknown high school senior named Jordan Brownstein wowed a lot of people by reaching the semifinals of the 2013 National History Bee with little to no prior exposure to pyramidal questions. He hasn't really stopped wowing people since.

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It was kinda weird that there were two relatively deep-cut Walter Benjamin conceptual tossups (arcades and "aura") in back to back rounds. Similarly, teams in tiebreakers might have been a little confused that the second half of the day had two tossups on Colombia (though it seems like one...

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Don't.

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Jordan's points about the non-obviousness of purported "obviousness" in cluing, and the Actual Data on some of my examples, are well-taken. (And yes, very much a fruitful avenue for future quizbowl theorizing!) I think I can walk back my initial assessment somewhat, though select tossups m...

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https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/953485513271177306/1079814963515904010/image.png I believe I was one who negged with "non-rhoticity" on the clue "The high-prestige dialect in antebellum Charleston was marked by this feature" in this tossup (packet 5, tossup 18). Is it tru...

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Some tossups that I recall thinking narrowed down the answer space too quickly included: "wireless Internet" in Africa (what else are people delivering to rural areas by balloon?), the Dominican Republic dance tossup (it's not Cuba but in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and has musical genr...

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To kick things off with praise: I could tell the writing team had a great deal of fun putting this set together and put a lot of joy and love (of the game, of the subject matter, of each other's company) into it. And that radiated from every packet. The initial announcement promised "zany... i...

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Curious whether the Britons want to host an online mirror at some point in the future for this? Or even if someone wants to just have an open online mirror for the American and Canadian audience that wasn't able to make it over the pond. We would be interested in people hosting mirrors of COOT onli...

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I'm not gonna edit or freelance this year. Some suggestions I previously ventured on Discord: Split the field into Divisions, which would allow for shorter/simpler schedules and more matches between teams of similar skill level. (E.g. two divisons of 13 that each do a full round-robin.) Stricter len...

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Co-sign. Writing Yaphe-style parts where appropriate is a key skill for excellent question writing. You can always return to the material you cut in some future writing project :grin: In general, I'd contend that for non-NAQT college sets, "a bonus at a particular tournament should not have mor...

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This set is so good and full of fresh ideas, it makes me wonder why there hasn't been (at least!) a 1/1 Words distribution at every tournament this whole time. Future editors: consider adding dedicated Words content to your sets forever?

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At my Winter site last weekend, one moderator was "singing" the score clues as he read them, something I don't think I've ever had a mod do before...Obviously, not all moderators are going to be able to "sing" the this particular experience did strike me as somewhat problematic....

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A good note transcription clue has the following properties: It does not reward listening to music. I agree with the rest of these but: Huh?! I have definitely been rewarded for listening to music by "note-spelling" clues before, and I thought that was a major purpose of having them? (I w...

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These questions either invoke a pop-culture window into academia or examine pop culture through an academic lens. Aren't a lot of sets doing this already? And increasingly so over the past 4ish years? 2001 has been in the art film distribution for over a decade (there were multiple prior examples w...

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In recent years, it seems as though the term "score clue" has undergone semantic narrowing to the point that it almost always means "transcribed string of notes", and that kind of clue ("in this piece, the trumpet melody goes D-E-F-F-etc.") has also become significantly...

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This is pretty difficult to resolve, since it requires it either manually adding this formatting information into the database (pretty tedious) or somehow semantically deriving the correct answer based on the question identifiers (pretty hard). Fortunately, most packets do have proper formatting in...

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I also disagree somewhat with Caleb. Many people definitely do engage with historical primary source texts from philosophical traditions by reading them rather closely as-is (e.g. in "Great Books" type curricula/courses). I think different editors have wide latitude in where they set the s...

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What is the intended schedule for a 24-team event with 5 packets? (Power-matching?)

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I like that the tossup on Chekhov from his short stories just went ahead and used Russian names from close to the start, rather than obscuring character and place names to "hide the ball". At CO level, there are enough Russian authors in the answer space that you can do this, allowing for ...

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Now that people's return travel from CO is largely wrapped up, I'll be reading some unused submissions from my team around 8 PM Central (9 Eastern / 6 Pacific) in #packet on the Quizbowl Discord. There aren't very many, so I hope others will queue up afterwards with stuff from their own teams' packe...

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Is there an update on the progress of this effort? Would additional volunteers be useful?

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To what extent is QuizDB still being updated, and who is doing the updating? How comprehensive is it?

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I greatly enjoyed the history in this set, but I was wondering the rationale behind asking the 1640s as a bonus part. I'm not really an expert in Ming Dynasty history, but it seemed very arbitrary and hard to place, and I'm curious to hear how it played in other rooms. Very glad there were almost n...

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Thanks to John et al. for having me on board the writing team. Here’s the full list of what I wrote for ACF Nationals 2022 -- I've hidden the rounds that not everyone played, to facilitate later readings of those rounds: 1 Purdue: Istanbul (in Pamuk); Salò Republic; Soweto; stereotypes || Sula / Son...

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A more complete, but still non-exhaustive, list of thank-yous. Mom: for everything. David: for showing that one can be a “facts kid” and an “ideas kid” at the same time. NAQT, PACE, ACF, HSAPQ (rip), this website: for being core institutions that keep this community going. Sue Ikenberry, Stephanie S...

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