The Quizbowl Resource Center

Kyle

Can you post the questions and conversion statistics for Geertz (round 15), David Foster Wallace (round 15), Portrait of Doctor Gachet (um, round 16?), Cleveland Browns (round 4, Ohio (round 1) and Stephen Decatur? I'm sure Jeff will post the questions for you, but you do realize that the only way ...

Kyle

I realize that teams may not have heard the "eight principles" part depending on moderator speed/quality, but how on Earth could you convince yourself that maybe the Fourteen Points had eight principles? Because, of the Fourteen Points, roughly half (mostly the first half) are general pri...

Kyle

Hello, I'm just stopping by to say that mixed impure academic questions should, in fact, be kept at the HSNCT because it is downright hilarious to hear a bonus segue from short story collections to former baseball players without any warning. Half of the MI, MI:PC, and GK questions were written bef...

Kyle

Staaaaaaaaaaaats

Round robin: http://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/992/stats/prelims

Including the final: http://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/99 ... all_games/

Kyle

The comparative fortunes of British and American high school quizbowl can pretty accurately be summed up with the observation that four of the eight finalists of this competition were schooled in the USA. And three of the four finished in the top ten of the HSNCT at least once. Perhaps if Britain h...

Kyle

Here are stats from the Warwick mirror: http://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/990/stats/all/ I wasn't there, so I can't explain them to you. EDIT -- Oh, since it is not clear from the stats, I should specify that Oxford A, the team with the third-best record, won the tournament. Manchester, the team ...

Kyle

Oxford A defeated Oxford C 520-175 in the first game of an advantaged final. Oxford C won the UG title. Sheffield was third at 8-2, followed by Imperial A at 7-3 and Oxford B at 6-4.

Kyle

We did well against Manchester. We had our backs to the window and they were seated facing it. Across the street, a nude woman was fixing her hair. This took the entire game.

Kyle

My plan to be really nice didn't get off to a great start. I got into a sort of physical altercation when I was refused a schedule, and I had to hold it at arm's length to play keep away long enough to look at which team we would play first. We have a bye now and then I will break out the brownies t...

Kyle

The eighth annual British Student Quiz Championships are being held today at Imperial College, London. The tournament will be held on a modified version of the 2012 ICT D2 set, heavily Briticized by Edmund Dickinson. I thought I should create a thread for it now because I am likely to have some thin...

Kyle

David Riley wrote:Just curious...given their stature in college quizbowl, has Brown tried any outreach with the Providence area?

NAQT's newest writer is a high school faculty member from Providence.

Kyle

Among the metropolitan areas that are not on the list is New York City. This makes sense, since that area has a bunch of dedicated teams, including one of the absolute best teams. It also has no shortage of tournaments, including one of the best high school housewrites. But we all ought to keep in m...

Kyle

I really like the latest comment expressing surprise that the game has changed since 1998. I could probably read an ACF packet from my playing days and it probably would still hold up today at most ACF tournaments. I think the part of this comment we should find enlightening is that a current colle...

Kyle

dtaylor4 wrote:
Kyle wrote:Perhaps one's font decision ought to depend whether the packet is being read from paper or a computer screen?
The only time a computer screen is an issue is if packets are .pdf, and Acrobat does have a zoom feature.

I meant because of the serifs.

Kyle

Perhaps one's font decision ought to depend whether the packet is being read from paper or a computer screen?

Kyle

Chris Chiego and I have joined forces. Does that mean that Chris Chiego and I are not joining forces? EDIT -- I have talked to Chris and confirmed that he is going to be in attendance, so he'll be playing rather than redacting. Consequently, I think I'm going to do this by myself (because I love th...

Kyle

I just edited Mike's original post to say what to do with your packets (i.e. email them to me).

Kyle

I think there are schools for which the opportunity to do something as a group of many rather than as a group of four can be a valuable experience. Lots of times newer players, especially underclassmen, don't get to do play alongside better and more experienced players. We used to have quite enthusi...

Kyle

Andrew Hart recently went to Europe and when he came back he gave me a souvenir, a postcard with a picture of Joseph Wright of Derby's painting about the bird and the air pump. Now I had written on that dude/painting before, but hadn't really thought of it in a while, so this reminded me of what it...

Kyle

Just for the record -- Bruce wrote me an email in February and asked whether I would write him some history, particularly Middle Eastern, so that there could be different styles of history questions in the editors' packets. I responded with one tossup on Iraq using clues solely from the early mandat...

Kyle

The only reason I can think of to avoid very high PPBs is that a bunch of teams getting very high PPBs does not distinguish between them. That didn't happen here. In fact, there was a decent spread between the best teams, which is a good thing. 20-25% of teams had over 20 PPB, which again isn't a b...

Kyle

Any advice for those of us taking the train from New York to Boston on how to get to the MIT campus? I just approved this post and I figure I'm more likely than actual MIT students to be awake at the moment, so I'll just answer. Take the Red Line from South Station four stops to Kendall/MIT. From t...

Kyle

If the masses clamor for a repeat of last year, I would be happy to reprise the extremely small amount of work that I did on co-organizing the guerrilla history tournament and writing half the editors' packet. If Chris isn't attending the tournament, it would be good to work with him again on it. Ma...

Kyle

On the plus side, a tournament that has awarded a neg prize will post stats promptly because they will have entered the stats in order to determine who negged most. Maybe we should encourage Princeton to give one. We stopped giving any kind of individual prize in the UK (for college tournaments) for...

Kyle

One of the interesting things about this thread is that people expressing similar points of view are demonstrating a general sense of ambivalence toward the subject editors. Joe wants an easier way to check up on the work of subject editors, while Gautam wants to expand their role. I think a lot of ...

Kyle

The problem arises when this happens after you have already cut 50 characters off and it's still 2 characters too long. It's incredibly frustrating, and makes you just not want to write (at least that's what happens to me). But...don't write a 477-character tossup if the character limit is 425. Ins...

Kyle

As a gen-ed elective, I took a comparative myth class that covered almost all of the common Non-classical Proto-indoeuropean mythologies. One thing that I would like to see is a few more questions on the mythic history of Rome, and an expanded answerline for Celtic myth beyond Cu Chulain, and the S...

Kyle

This is probably the #1 thing that's made me write very little for NAQT. It's the most annoying thing in the world to write a good tossup and then get a message that it's 2 characters over the limit and have to spend a while figuring out how to fix it without completely rewriting the question or ta...

Kyle

The power totals for the quads rounds offer a really wonderful example of what happens when one person writes questions about pet topics he has shared with his friends. I don't think you're talking about me (Hugh), but I'm paranoid and I need to assure you that that certainly wasn't the case on my ...

Kyle

1. There aren't really any formal assignments for writing questions. R. typically sends out an e-mail like 2 weeks before the tournament saying "there are 150 SCT questions to write, please sign up to write some", but I haven't seen NAQT go out of its way to contact people and say, "...

Kyle

Is there contact info for someone at Princeton? The website looks like it hasn't been updated since 2009. Has the team been active this year? They hosted Region 3 SCT this spring, so yes: http://hsquizbowl.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=12466 I believe the person you should contact is Jamie Din...

Kyle

I made the videos available here , here , here , and here with a Flip camera that I was given as a gift. Since the Flip flopped, as it were, you can get one online now for something in the vicinity of £60. I think there should be more quizbowl games available online, in part because they are fun to ...

Kyle

Stats are here: http://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/944 Singles: Oxford 27 South 10 North 9 Cambridge 8 Doubles: South 24 North 22 Oxford 21 Cambridge 5 Quads: Oxford 23 North 22 South 9 Cambridge 0 Total: Oxford 71 North 53 South 43 Cambridge 13 The power totals for the quads rounds offer a really...

Kyle

Sorry, Joey -- I have edited the answer to your question into the top post above. I should have made that clear from the beginning. So, uh, yeah. The questions were pretty hard in the afternoon. It was jarring to me to play on them because it has been three years since I have heard sets like that, a...

Kyle

Yes, also if you hear "this football team" and Thomas Grinyer is among the people editing the tournament, you should just buzz in and say Southampton and get it over with.

Kyle

Oxford 1st quads are 3-0 and 2nd quads are 2-1, so we've won assuming we give up and don't play three more rounds. A very exciting game last game. Question begins: "With his second wife, he fathered Edward of Woodstock." Alison and I both buzz in (in different rooms) to say Edward III. We ...

Kyle

Doubles:

South 27
Oxford 21
North 19
Cambridge 5

Singles:

Oxford 27
North 13
South 10
Cambridge 4

Overall:

Oxford 48
South 37
North 32
Cambridge 9

Kyle

Confusion over rosters. Don't get to see quads until afternoon. Nobody wants to make any changes. North has put excellent players on second doubles, which I deem a strange strategy. Cambridge has compelled their fill-in high school student to play first singles. He says he is thrilled to get to play...

Kyle

It's about to happen. I figure it's worth having a thread so I can post some results. Cambridge isn't here, a fact complicated by the fact that nobody has ever met a single one of the players on their team. Why has Oxford gone 13-0 in the Varsity Match? This is why. Speaking as a moderator -- I see ...

Kyle

We hilariously got Vinson and not the other parts. Since I wasn't there, I can't say how hilarious this was when it happened, but I can say Vinson is the only part I would have gotten. The USS Carl Vinson is in the news all the time. Osama Bin Laden was dumped into the Indian Ocean off of it, and t...

Kyle

List of villages in West Virginia wrote:27 negs in round 1 by the combined 10 teams at this tournament. Neat.

Simultaneously, the final game of the Oxford Intercollegiate Quiz produced 11 combined negs. Perhaps it is a bad day for everybody?

Kyle

The original question actually had a verb in it, so "riding dogs"/"riding beagles" is probably a better analogy for it then an answer line consisting only of "dogs" (yeah, the real one makes a lot more sense). So the tossup consisted of a bunch of references to "p...

Kyle

I think that in the case of the conferring, the fact that they are used to seeing University Challenge where Jeremy Paxman says "You may not confer, one of you must buzz," and are still allowed to answer is the problem. If they enforced the rules better on the British quiz shows they're u...

Kyle

The one thing that people really have trouble understanding regarding conferring is when the other team has negged or when the question is over. In my experiences reading, I rarely see teams begin conferring as soon as I start reading, but it frequently happens after a neg or the question ends. It ...

Kyle

Regarding examples -- I'm not convinced that that would necessarily help. Things in the UK are complicated by the popularity of University Challenge, which is sometimes a positive thing for the quizbowl circuit (but usually not). In this case, the rules for UC are almost exactly the same (and the ru...

Kyle

Yesterday was an interesting day in the Oxford Intercollegiate Quiz. All of the teams still competing at this point have played at least three games to make it to the knockout stages. But that doesn't mean that the participants have learned the rules. I moderated one game in which I had to award a t...

Kyle

Eliza -- on the topic of mirrors, the University of Warwick wants to host one in Coventry on April 28. They are supposed to contact you this weekend.

Kyle

My understanding has been that you should not be able to learn something in one round that would allow you to score points in another round.

Kyle

I mean, just looking at geography bee and spelling bee champions, who also receive huge monetary prizes at the end, it's pretty clear that they have a fierce dedication to learning geography/the English language that transcends the mundane scholarship they receive at the end, which they would treat...

Kyle

On the mountain issue, I basically agree with Kyle, and can never get much of a mountain question going above level 3 where you need fewer clues. That said, in addition to sitting there, they also block rain and affect invasion routes. Mountain ranges can. If there is only one mountain, the armies ...

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