The Quizbowl Resource Center

Kyle

so taking the step of inviting the press to national championships can go a long way in increasing quiz bowl's cachet. When I did the liveblogs for HSNCT, I sent press releases and emails to all the media outlets in the Chicago/Atlanta areas that I could find. The only thing I got was a blogpost on...

Kyle

No Rules Westbrook wrote:I think the one thing we agree on in this case is that the Coral Castle tossup was immaculate. I mean, just immaculate.

What a great idea for a tossup -- was there a clue in it about how he'll record your answering machine message?

Kyle

Also: many national championship games have come down to final tossups. Endgame strategy is a legitimate thing to be asking about, especially if you're a newer player. So in other words, lets totally not encourage younger players to get better and instead teach them how to strategize like LASA and ...

Kyle

Here is a photo of the winning team at the 2012 British Student Quiz Championships. From left to right, it's Alison Hudson, Chris Savory, me, and Alex Bubb. Many of you may remember Alison for playing on several of the great State College teams from 2004-2007. http://i.imgur.com/eMU7tUj.jpg There's ...

Kyle

The following picture of the 2008-2009 Harvard quizbowl team appeared in the Boston Globe. What I've found most striking about this picture is how it appears that Adam Hallowell is either the primary source of light, or is in the process of either being abducted by aliens or ascending to a higher p...

Kyle

The fact that Wilmington Charter has participated in the discussion in a reasonable way makes them look better. I agree that the leadership of the Wilmington Charter club has looked better in this thread by being willing to apologize publicly for the behavior of some of its club's members. In the i...

Kyle

Madagascar Serpent Eagle wrote:For example, I wrote a bonus on la Quenelle that was in the DII packets several rounds after the DI bonus that had at least one, maybe two parts the same.

I wrote the D1 CE bonus without having seen the MI bonus you wrote for D2.

Kyle

Doesn't the [10] before every ACF-format bonus (and most housewritten bonuses) proscribe anything besides 10-point bonuses? (Except for when it specifies something like [5,5]) Right, but the argument was made earlier in this thread that adding powermarks constituted an editorial decision, in contra...

Kyle

Hypothetically, if somebody were to decide without permission to use the "British" scoring system of having five-point bonus parts rather than ten-point bonus parts, would that provoke the same ire as illicit powermarking? Or would that not be an "editorial" change to the questio...

Kyle

More important, Tris and Hugh wrote what was far and away the best submitted packet, and the editors would have had a much more difficult time getting the tournament ready but for their efforts. Thank you, but at the risk of sounding self-serving, I am going to point out that Tris didn't write any ...

Kyle

If I may, I'd like to avoid addressing any of the issues previously mentioned in this thread and instead focus on two very positive things that came out of this tournament. Tris Cole and Hugh Bennett were part of the Sheffield team that beat mine in the quarterfinals of University Challenge in 2011....

Kyle

I lied about the half-hour but I'm writing the email now. This was very frustrating for the UK site and happened last year as well. I'm confused -- did the extra half-hour really screw things up? I sent the British answerlines to Ewan earlier in the week so you guys could Briticize, and as I unders...

Kyle

You can get a similar effect to this if you play with poker chips and pause periodically in the question to place bets on whether you will be the first person to answer correctly, since it's better to buzz in after people have bet than when only the antes are in the pot. Actually, this is the chief ...

Kyle

fett0001 wrote:What was the overall neg rate for the tournament?

Year, Power Rate, Neg Rate

2013, 23.8%, 19.0%
2012, 25.7%, 17.4%
2011, 20.5%, 17.1%
2010, 15.7%, 17.3%

Kyle

Can I see the stats on the tossups for the Arabian Sea and the United Arab Emirates? UAE was read in 80 rooms. It was powered 5 times. 64 teams got 10 points on it. 37 teams negged. That's 86.3% total conversion, a 7.2% power rate, and a 46.3% neg rate. Arabian Sea was read in 79 rooms. It was powe...

Kyle

The only thing I might suggest on the South Island tossup is changing "the name of its most populous" to "the name of this island's most populous" just to drive in the point in every sentence "WE ARE LOOKING FOR AN ISLAND, DON'T SAY NEW ZEALAND", but again, given that ...

Kyle

Can you post the Mali/CAR/Guinea-Bissau bonus? I think I remember it saying that the MNLA's primary goal was to set up an islamic state. I thought they were mainly Tuareg nationalists. I believe I worded this bonus carefully enough to say that Azawad is an Islamic state, not that that was the goal ...

Kyle

The second Oxford Open is likely to run (under mostly new management) on January 25. I don't know if that will tempt anyone, but potentially it is a convenient date for any university whose spring semester begins on January 27.

Kyle

I am the person who is responsible for subject-editing the current events at this level. But, the night before the tournament went to press, I passed on the responsibility for the editing to another editor who very helpfully volunteered to do the conversions from D1 to D2, which had piled up. He end...

Kyle

As one of the many, many people who helped work on the ICT, I would like to wish good luck to all the participants. I'm sorry that I can't be there to watch this year.

Kyle

I'm angry too, because people will now inevitably associate the late 2000's Harvard team with cheating. This is unfair to the two-dozen some people who were part of Harvard quizbowl in that era, who strung together a number of accomplishments as both players and writers and didn't deserve to have t...

Kyle

That's way, way, way too much British content for both geography and current events. I know that you are only copying NAQT's sub-distribution, which skews both geography and current events way, way, way too heavily toward the United States, but in this case we're talking about an even smaller countr...

Kyle

I just wanted to chime in here because I'm still probably the only regular user of this board who actually played Washington State Knowledge Bowl (and, indeed, I am a two-time state champion!). Matt is totally correct that Knowledge Bowl is "terrible," but it is worth expanding on that ide...

Kyle

Regarding the Northeast, I have long thought that some order could be imposed fairly easily long in advance. Realistically, there are four New England colleges that have access to the rooms and staff necessary to host the SCT: Harvard, Brown, Yale, and MIT. Why don't you just come up with a four-yea...

Kyle

bmcke wrote:The airline merger thing got more famous today.

Yeah, that is going to play differently at the MIT site. I blame the snow!

Kyle

We can make CE harder and have regular difficulty questions that are basically only answerable by specialists such as myself. I hope it doesn't seem like I am advocating making current events questions harder. I am not. A quick perusal of the answer lines for the world current events tossups should...

Kyle

Writing current events questions with the goal of rewarding only those who make that expert-level "daily commitment" to following world events seems like the wrong approach. This was never my intention. But I do think that the converse of this statement is true; in other words, people who...

Kyle

"The largest country in Africa" + one of the single biggest international news stories of the year to date being asked about just a few weeks after it happened = an easy part at the SCT. I'm much more sympathetic to the idea that that particular bonus doesn't have a middle part. I knew tha...

Kyle

In 1987 this man {plagiarized} a speech by Neil Kinnock, ending his presidential campaign. He was elected to the Senate in 1972, at the age of 29, and oversaw Clarence Thomas' confirmation hearings as Judiciary Committee chair. In 2011 an (*) Amtrak station was named for him. During a 2012 debate, ...

Kyle

Just as a quick note I believe that the SEIU was a tossup at last year's ICT as well. While it is a good idea for a tossup, it is probably more appropriate at ICT than SCT. If I had known that it was a tossup at the ICT last year, I would not have let it into the SCT. This is a problem with changin...

Kyle

Plan Rubber wrote:Right, this was my point: I expect most people would either get it there or not know who she is at all.

Yeah, I really don't expect people to get it there unless they know what is going on.

Kyle

Michelle Rhee This was basically in the first line as "do you remember who this person who hasn't been in the news in a while is" since it started describing the stuff she's most famous for. Unless I am even more out of it than I think is the case, it is definitely not true that this ques...

Kyle

Andrew is too modest to say it, but it should be noted that he personally wrote 189 of the questions in this tournament. To say that this set could not have happened without him is a huge understatement.

Kyle

In my freshman year of college, I was once the third leading scorer at a tournament at MIT. Second place got a broken toaster, but I got a pink, yellow, blue, and purple sombrero. Thereafter, whenever I directed a tournament, I compelled one of that year's crop of freshmen to wear the sombrero and s...

Kyle

Reducing the total number of sets from 11 to 10 means that the numbering is more straightforward. Last year, IS sets switched from odd to even numbers at the end of the year (because 115 and 116 were both regular IS sets). I suspect that is part of the reason why you are confused.

Kyle

I feel like I ought to say something in this thread. Starting last year, after the last IS set but before the HSNCT, it became my job to edit these questions for NAQT at the high school level. Prior to that point, I didn't have particularly strong feelings about multi-subject questions, other than t...

Kyle

I took up a new hobby this year. Every Sunday morning, I go on Twitter and try to find people who tweeted answers to sets that aren't clear. Then I tell the editors of those sets and try to get them to email these people's coaches and get them in trouble. The getting people in trouble part is what I...

Kyle

Stats: Prelims: http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/1195/stats/prelims/ Playoffs: http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/1195/stats/playoffs/ The final exhibition game resulted in a 365-285 win for the combined second-place teams over my team. John had a very good game, although the biggest p...

Kyle

bag-of-worms wrote:The set is not yet clear for public discussion, for there is a mirror in the UK in late November.
Please e-mail us or request to join the private discussion to give specific comments.

Were we in fact the last mirror?

Kyle

Records for the top bracket:

Oxford Eliot 9-0
King's College, London 7-2
Open University 7-2
Oxford Suu Kyi 6-3
Manchester 5-4
Oxford Schrödinger 3-6

And the score of the final exhibition game, which was tied after 18 tossups, was 365 for the combined second-place teams over 285 for our team.

Kyle

As someone who's trying to do the same thing and basically in the same boat, I can completely sympathize. Looking at the NJ and Northeast boards would be a great start, and depending on how good your team is, going to a tournament that's a qualifier for NSC or HSNCT would probably be good so you gu...

Kyle

As a sophomore in college, I tried to book rooms for two teams of four to go to the ICT in Minneapolis. Naively, I assumed that the five male members of our team would require two hotel rooms. I was then berated by John Lesieutre, who is usually quite sedate, for having the audacity to spend so much...

Kyle

14 teams came to the tournament. They were divided into two brackets of seven teams each. After the initial round robin, it had become clear that four teams were the class of the field: Oxford B and Oxford D were both undefeated, while Oxford A and the two-man team from the Open University each had ...

Kyle

At the risk of starting off with a relatively minor point, I'd like to say that I think you need to be much more careful about putting full answer lines with all acceptable answers. One player from Oxford is a Singaporean of Chinese ethnicity who was educated mostly in Singapore, so he answered seve...

Kyle

Matt, I just emailed you last year's ACF Fall. I'll see what I can do regarding the extra questions from this year's.

Kyle

SmallerMegalomaniacalPandaOnAbsinthe wrote:Oh man, so much excitement. Here I was thinking I wouldn't be able to play much quizbowl in England.
Will questions be briticised in the same manner as past tournaments?

We have a real circuit. It's just kind of small.

Yes, they'll be Briticized.

Kyle

The Oxford University Quiz Society is pleased to announce that it will host a mirror of the Illinois Fall Tournament at St John's College and Balliol College in Oxford on Saturday, November 24, 2012. This tournament is open to all current students who meet ACF eligibility requirements, though we wan...

Kyle

Broadly speaking, we'll make the British history a bit harder and make sure there is more of it, mostly at the expense of the more difficult American history. Then we'll just swap out a couple of American literature questions and maybe arts on things that British people won't know for extra British ...

Kyle

Quizbowl history buffs: Do we know when the last time was that a team broke 25 points per bonus on a college set of regular or higher difficulty? Has it happened in living memory? I feel like Minnesota with Brendan had to have done so at some point. Minnesota got very close at ACF Regionals 2010 wi...

Kyle

So I guess that means Eric covered the spread; all the people who bet on Saajid +75 are going to be sorely disappointed this morning.

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