The Quizbowl Resource Center

Sam

This set would have benefited from more thorough copy-editing. Moderators probably have a better sense of specific issues, but numerous times people had to stop reading to find a subject that wasn't there or to make the tenses agree.

Sam

While I understand why one might, in principle, have aesthetic objections to artificial common-links (I myself held such objections until about 2011), I think the rest of your statements about the dangers of artificial common-links are unfounded. A good tossup is a pyramidal arrangement of clues th...

Sam

To be clear, I didn't find CO particularly egregious in this regard. In fact, it seems to me that CO is one place where most of the audience appreciates a certain weightiness to the questions. Reading through the above, I didn't articulate quite what I wanted to say about regular difficulty, which ...

Sam

Masked Canadian History Bandit wrote:I can staff this if you still need staff.

I'm also available to staff if you need it.

Sam

I wrote much (but not all) of the economics and am curious what people thought, especially about the difficulty.

Sam

I'm a little confused about where the bottleneck exists that this program would get around. I can imagine them existing between:
1) Head editors and writers
2) Teams and hosts
3) Mirrors and editors

If I understand, the payroll organization would improve 1) but not 2) or 3). Is that correct?

Sam

Like Ryan, I also didn't get to this thread. What I was going to add was this: Edmund's post is interesting, because it reveals that often times, players have types of knowledge and thought processes that editors can't readily predict. And most of the time, that's an argument that the "one-to-...

Sam

Why is there no penalty for a third incorrect buzz once a question is over, while there is one if the question has not been finished? Doesn't this encourage buzzer races at the end of the question after two negs? It's traditional in quizbowl to not penalize wild guesses at the end of tossups. The b...

Sam

I will be studying economics at the University of Minnesota, and would like to be involved in quiz bowl as time permits.

Sam

This is not a "read," nor is it likely to help you in quiz bowl, but Peter Adamson's podcast History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps is great: http://www.historyofphilosophy.net/ It doesn't quite deliver on the promise of the name (where's India? China? Africa?) but it's great for geeking ...

Sam

ANSWER: _Plumbers_ [prompt on "Unmoved Mover"]

Sam

- [10] On the other hand, if there is a strictly dominant strategy for each player in a two-player game, then there is only one unique equilibrium of this kind, in which each player knows the strategies of the other. ANSWER: Nash equilibrium This definition seems to recur in several places, what wo...

Sam

Assuming we both can make it, Mik Larsen and I will be playing together.

Sam

I would like to play this.

Sam

These scores are roughly accurate:
Eric Mukherjee -- 5
Joe Nutter -- -5
Ankit -- -15
Rob -- 20
Auroni -- -5
Amol -- 5
Adam Perkins -- 30
Andrew Hart -- 20

Sam

I have a mercifully short number of questions on economics and things sort of related to economics.

Sam

Is there a plan to have an open online (or offline) mirror of this as there was last year?

Sam

I may have more to say later, but I'd like to thank the editors for their speedy rescue of this tournament. I hope it's not faint praise to say it was very good given the circumstances.

Sam

Looking to play this, if interested please email at firstnamelastname1729 at gmail.

Sam

People have sort of been referring to this implicitly, but it's worth noting that plenty of high school quiz bowl does not in fact get rid of computational questions, they get rid of computational tossups. A computational tossup will reward someone who can do the calculation half a second faster tha...

Sam

People certainly had idiosyncratic beliefs about the rankings of quiz bowl teams. If only there were some way to aggregate these opinions while at the same time canceling out the more extreme ones.

Sam

I can't speak to why people were making up their own protest procedures,. To clarify, we were scheduled to play the next game in the same room, which we did without any delay. At the end of that game Cody told us to stay put because he was about to read a new tossup to Chicago and us, not to quaran...

Sam

Especially in the earlier rounds, some of the subdistributions seemed a little uneven. A few had all "other science" astronomy or earth science, or history questions from the same region. I don't think it affected the outcome of any games, but it was the sort of thing that could have been ...

Sam

In case anyone is still planning travel, I would like to note that - unlike what we ran during the school year - we are not beholden to a 10am room reservation start time for either day of this tournament. Do expect each day to start registration well before 9am and plan your travel / hotels accord...

Sam

Excelsior (smack) wrote:
theMoMA wrote:Packets for this tournament are now available here: http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/questionsets/631/
I think (hope) you posted in the wrong thread.

The transition to collegiate quiz bowl is a lot easier if you know the questions in advance.

Sam

I'm looking for a team for the VCU site.

EDIT: Tejas Raje and I have joined forces.
EDIT2: Playing with Tejas, Ian Lenhoff, and Victor Prieto.

Sam

I've occasionally complained about writers like Chris Borglum who put left-leaning political commentary/snide remarks into current events or history questions they write, but this was certainly worse than anything Borglum has ever done. Suffice it to say, when I coined the term "modern world&q...

Sam

I guess I'll just say here, given what else may or may not be going on in other tournament discussion subfora, that the innovation of specifying "With his/her alphabetically-prior collaborator" rather than just "With a colleague" was ingenious and I hope it becomes common practi...

Sam

I totally agree. I'd be interested to hear how the writers/editors selected answers and found clues that focused on more modern research as opposed to well-worn and outdated works, because I think that might help people move beyond yet another tossup on The Affluent Society when it comes time to wr...

Sam

Can you please post the "private language" tossup? From what I can tell, every clue from the beginning of the second sentence to the word "Kripke" is not about the private language argument at all, but about the "rule-following problem," which appears elsewhere in Phil...

Sam

When writing questions, I think it's a good step to consider how people will have learned about the clues you're using. Sometimes in attempting to make "realer" clues, one can actually just make impossible ones. Here are some examples: 3. This man proposed a premise of transitivity of indi...

Sam

There was also a bonus in the Illinois B / Penn B packet that was on complex analysis and whose third part was something that sounded like "Rouche's theorem". This theorem is very much a thing, but I don't think it is given a name very often. Okay. I wasn't familiar with it so I trusted t...

Sam

Packet deadlines No packets before April 1, please. Packet submitted by May 1: $80 Packet submitted by June 4: $160 Packet submitted by June 15: $200 Packet submitted by July 1: $240 Packet submitted after July 1: +$10 per day (on top of $240) Is there any chance these deadlines could be altered so...

Sam

Lately, we've had a problem dealing with registrations. Tying registration to packet submission results in races to complete packets and thus poor-quality submissions. But having registration on a first-come-first-serve basis encourages teams that might not be serious about attending to register fi...

Sam

I'd be interested in doing this.

Sam

It is a mirror of a real-life activity that exists primarily and overridingly as a hub for discussion of that activity. The anime rule, like the related 4ch*n/no memes rule, serves as sort of a buffer that reminds people they're not just "on the internet", the idea being that those are ar...

Sam

One of the "potential errors" in the list talks about answers that apply to "all the clues up to a significantly deep point in the question." What does "significantly deep" in this case mean? Is it an instance of discretion ("anyone who knows more about Louis XVI t...

Sam

I actually really liked MAGNI. If I can be a dickhead for just a sec, I think there was a mild backlash against MAGNI (at least among me) when the MAGNI writers/editors seemingly kept over-praising their own work all the time. But it was a very good tournament, probably the best regular difficulty ...

Sam

Is there a list of officially registered teams?

Sam

But, at this point, they're a bit stale and why use the one history tournament where the scope for introducing new things is widest to rehash the same stuff? I'm not sure gettable clues and interesting but hard clues are mutually exclusive. You obviously don't want bonus parts to be six lines long,...

Sam

While I can't speak at all for what Marshall's philosophy towards difficulty is nor can I judge anything about American history, but surely there is a minimum amount of knowledge needed to acquire a 10? This isn't the tournament to be giving out 10s because you know that the first President of Amer...

Sam

My general philosophy in writing for this tournament was to write some unexplored common link tossups and in general write on things that have never shown up in quizbowl, which I hope succeeded. My goal for bonuses was to have the easy part be something that's pretty well known in the quizbowl cano...

Sam

EDIT: After posting a question it occurred to me this may not be clear yet. Is it?

Sam

Maybe a little late to ask, but do any of the people providing food (either for lunch or barbecue) want any sort of monetary reimbursement from those partaking?

Sam

I thought that maybe the rational function prompt was placed there for the synthetic division clue. The prompt doesn't apply elsewhere, but maybe it's a prompt for generosity's sake??? This is basically the reasoning. Synthetic division seemed a place where many teams would buzz, and I couldn't ima...

Sam

Is there any chance of a Minnesota Open 2012 type packet submission? Ten packets seems cutting it kind of close.

Sam

I believe us at Michigan are going to be running a tournament in the October timeslot that we've run MOO and QUARK in the past two years. This will probably involve packet submission to some extent. In terms of difficulty, it seems like there'd be room for either a regular difficulty event or a reg...

Sam

Thanks, Susan. How about NAQT? I take it that SCT will be two weeks before Regionals, as is traditional; will ICT be two weeks before ACF Nationals or two weeks after, given that after seems to be an option? And it seems like Fall did go for its traditional November spot. Does anyone have thoughts ...

Sam

EDIT: If the question was irredeemably bad or Bruce didn't think it would get converted, replacing it seems fine; I haven't seen the submitted question so I can't remark on whether or not Bruce made the correct editorial decision. However, it seems ill-advised to write questions based solely on wha...

Sam

[*] Tanzania (all mine. Columbia submitted a tossup on “Marxist Geography”, along with a warning telling me that if I replaced it with a tossup on Tanzania I was ignoring what academic geographers actually did. I took it as a challenge) A good choice! Why is this a good choice? EDIT: If the questio...

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