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Gautam

In general I thought most of the questions were decent and I had a good time playing them. However, I agree with my teammate when he says that questions were written with little idea of how they would play to a more general field. I was miffed when things like "the winter of our discontent"...

Gautam

Could you please post the Hinduism tossup? 4. One sacrament in this religion is a naming ceremony which takes place on the twelfth day after birth, and adherents of this religion also celebrate a baby’s first intake of food other than milk. In one ritual performed by practitioners of this religion,...

Gautam

It's entirely possible that I'm remembering a round that we read in practice, or making it up altogether, but was there a round in which there was a tossup on cytokines and a bonus that dealt with cytokinesis? And one of the clues for the cytokine tossup had to do with cytokinesis? If so, that shou...

Gautam

"Beta" shouldn't have said it's contrasted with alpha or whatever the heck it said. I don't really know anything about finance, but I do know that there's a lot of Greek letters that mean things (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeks_(finance) ), so I don't think that was a binary choic...

Gautam

The Richard Florida tossup seemed immediately obvious Mike Cheyne was reading on our room, so he knows that I buzzed in right before the power mark. I'd figured it out right away, too, but I figured if anybody in the room had known, they'd have buzzed in as well. Mike Cheyne has also seen me rant a...

Gautam

I submitted the options bonus as "finance" question under the 1/1 whatever category - didn't consider it an Econ bonus. It thought of writing it more from an Econ perspective (risk/risk-aversion, or interest rates) but settled for what you saw in the packet While we're talking about econ: ...

Gautam

I had a fun time at CO 2012. Many thanks to the editors, staffers, and other awesome people who made the tournament happen. Lots of cool and interesting things were asked about at this tournament - it's time to expand those intellectual horizons and read up! Congratulations to Mukherjee et al for th...

Gautam

Registration will be from 8:00-8:30 AM in Cobb (exact room TBA). We are imposing a $40 per team late fee if you arrive later than 8:30 AM. Do your fellow competitors and your wallet a favor and get there with plenty of time to spare. I suspect there may also be a popular revolt if you take the too ...

Gautam

I see where Ted is coming from with the "12 rounds of quality vs 19 rounds of Guerilla." That said, the formation of the current schedule now has about 3 months of deliberation attached to it - that of no Friday/Saturday night games ( Late April ), WELD being announced for Sunday post Hist...

Gautam

Can't play this tournament anymore.

--GK

Gautam

If we do the 19 team round robin (or however many submit packets as long as it's more packets than the 12 WELD packets), it seems like it might be a better idea have WELD be played in the morning and History Doubles in the afternoon/night. It seems possible to finish playing WELD before lunch, whic...

Gautam

How long do we think this tournament will take? Because I imagine that will have a direct impact on when the lit tournament begins.

Gautam

Signing up for this goodness. I'm interested in playing with people I haven't played with before. So if that fits your description, you know where to find me.

Gautam

Of the folks not mentioned already, I am a fan of some of the folks who were regulars on the Minnesota leagues circuit. Ted Salk comes to mind, the others I can't recall too well. Other people I remember from various tournaments - Margo, Miriam, Jonah, Wes Eddings, Ken Mitchell. Ken, Wes, and Jonah ...

Gautam

I haven't had the opportunity to write questions for this. Hereby withdrawing from this tournament.

--GK

Gautam

I will note that I went from not being able to answer ANYTHING at MO in 2008 to editing it two years later. What I noticed in my writing (and that I guess I still do) is when you write from an outside the circuit approach (as I was doing my first few years of writing things), if you understand mate...

Gautam

I wrote the following questions for this tournament: TU on capacitors - finals 1 Bonus on endogenous growth/real business cycle/samuelson - Finals 2 tossup on "money" - Eds 6 tossup on "trade" - Eds 8 tossup on "crude oil" - this was an econ-ish tossup. Mostly focused o...

Gautam

TU on technical analysis (finance/econ) Which packet was this in? Apologies for not answering earlier. Now that I have the packets... looks like Finals 2: 14. This theory sometimes invokes the use of “oscillators” such as Welles Wilder’s RSI or Gerald Appel’s MACD, both of which convey information ...

Gautam

I wrote the following: TU on technical analysis (finance/econ) TU on Ganesh (this was intended as Religion) Bonus on MIT economists (Acemoglu/Diamond/Samuelson) Bonus on full moons/Holi/Rakhi purnima Bonus on aggregation problem/capital/Joan Robinson Edit: Forgot to say that feedback is welcome and ...

Gautam

This discussion is purely academic Yeah all these specialist/generalist arguments tend to overestimate the actual knowledge of people, and assume homogenous ability among each class of player to parse clues, recall answers from memory, etc. May be true on the average, but I suspect the game-to-game...

Gautam

There has been no good tossup on endosymbiosis. Ever. was this one really that awful? Mereschowky’s hypothesis is the earliest formulation of this theory, and apicomplexans are organisms in which the product of this process is highly reduced due to transfer via EGT. The first group thought to diver...

Gautam

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...

Gautam

I don't know if NAQT does this already, but for last year's ACF Nationals (and this year's), I've had a fair amount of success targeting people who like specific subjects and asking them to write those subjects. People are usually happy to write subcategories that they know well and enjoy, especial...

Gautam

Correct me if I am mistaken, but this seems to indicate a bit of a double standard. After all, what about all those questions on Moses (who, if I may gently remind you, did some interesting stuff)? It just seems that if religion is really just "theology and practice," then we've been seei...

Gautam

I haven't submitted questions for NAQT in a bit... So out of curiosity: am I even allowed to submit questions that are greater than 500 characters long? No, but I remember that when I did write some questions in the past there were instances where I was indifferent between using two clues in a toss...

Gautam

2. Writing 425 or 500 character tossups is really hard and not overly rewarding. This isn't that big of a deal for bonuses, which are now largely the same as mACF bonuses, but NAQT tossups can be quite challenging to write. I'll respectfully disagree with you about it being rewarding: it is certain...

Gautam

I'll play this dealio.

Gautam

People in the money will be banking on tossups on Gunnar Gunnarson (have we broken the individual character from Njals saga barrier yet?) Wasn't Gunnar Gunnarson the recent writer, and Gunnarr Hamundarson the dude from the Njals saga? Or am I just confused? You're right. Its been hopeless to try an...

Gautam

Maybe this year the Valencias, Harvards, and UVA's of the world will still be the favorites, but unless our schools start taking ICT a lot more seriously, we are going to fall behind the Icelandic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IcelandicCompulsoryEducationPie.svg America will be fine as long as...

Gautam

Frater Taciturnus wrote:so wait who did the Brown team that finished third last year lose that makes people think they will be a second bracket team? Did Dan Klein get strangled by his girlfriend or something?

Classic quizbowl

Gautam

What on earth is the organometallics tossup doing naming several metals and using clues like "ones containing iron?" I think this tossup was a bit different originally had an answerline of "forming a _bond with carbon_" or something like that (George, please correct me if I'm wr...

Gautam

Speaking on the science part (really, only the biology, chem tossups, and about 60% of the physics, and earth sci/astro) as someone who only saw the production of the set, didn't see it get played: Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this was the first time writing for some of the sci...

Gautam

For me, learning things usually involves encountering the same topics in 3-5 different settings/application/contexts/etc. Nothing "odd" about it, I guess, just that I have to force myself to do a lot of problems/write a lot of questions/approach the same topic from different angles to trul...

Gautam

. So, for instance, I wrote a question on "trade" for Chicago Open that was 2/3 taken from recent giant steps in that field and 1/3 Heckscher-Olin or Ricardo or something. In the room where I read that, it was answered based on the old stuff. Maybe we rather need a tossup on "trade&q...

Gautam

You will notice, I hope, that when we talk about the distribution, the unit measure is an individual question (as opposed to relative weights or what have you.) Because of that, it is not exactly possible to fine tune the distribution to 4 decimal digits or whatever; we always talk about increments ...

Gautam

I think quizbowl willpower is probably not the most direct explanation of what people are talking about, although the underlying concept is sound. What is being described is when a good player is having sharper reflexes and thinking more clearly than normal, a player being "in the zone" s...

Gautam

What was the econ distribution for this tournament, by the way? I am sure there were a few questions, but I can only recall a tossup on Phelps... which, by the way, was hard. I unfortunately negged with Phillips, but it wasn't converted on the rebound.

Gautam

I had a great time playing this tournament. I thought some packets were significantly more difficult than others but, of course, such are the vagaries of submitted packets. I did notice that a couple of bonus parts had already come up as answers at previous MOs. I don't really have a problem with th...

Gautam

I am playing with Messrs. Malis, Donohue, and Shah.

Gautam

Due to potential changes in my Thanksgiving plans, I will be able to come to this tournament. Seeking teammates. So it looks like I will have to make some trips to customer sites over the next few months. I am not sure how the assignments for those trips work out, so I'm not 100% certain that I'll ...

Gautam

Magister Ludi wrote:I will say I come from the school of thought that you should try to say things that are interesting, even if controversial, in these kinds of predictions, rather than the typical chorus of "good teams are good."

They typical chorus is "I hear he's good at quizbowl."

Gautam

Due to potential changes in my Thanksgiving plans, I will be able to come to this tournament.

Seeking teammates.

Gautam

I'm not sure where this thread is headed, but to bring the topic back to human bio: Writers and editors often tailor questions with the intended field in mind. There are maybe 5 people currently in quizbowl who have any kind of exposure to "nutrition" or "nursing" classes, compar...

Gautam

The yves klein thing is not giveaway famous but probably a middle-ish clue at best. IIRC MO 2010 had a bonus part on Klein pretty much solely off International Klein Blue, and saw decent conversion.

Could I get a copy by the way? [email protected]

Gautam

SirT wrote: 1/1 Biology
1/1 Physics
.54/.54 Chemistry
~.5/.5 Math/CS
~.5/.5 Earth Science

Um, what? 0 astro in the whole tournament? no general "engineering" or other minor stuff like stats, systems analysis, etc?

Gautam

Dallas simons and I are now playing together.

Gautam

I don't think I can get the Wisconsin tournament together... so for now it won't happen. If somebody wants to do a post nationals tournament, feel free to claim that.

Gautam

Hello all, We know we owe the quizbowl community a detailed explanation about the protest resolution procedure that led us to overturning the decision in the Hunter v. Bellarmine game. As of a little while ago, Hunter and Bellarmine have been notified about everything, but we thought it would be app...

Gautam

All, I would like to reiterate the point Andrew made in the other post that the logistics issues that plagued the tournament were not caused by PACE as organization or by any members in PACE other than us central administrators, myself and Andrew. We made some wiggle room for some delays, but the co...

Gautam

I would like to piggy-back on Andrew's post and extend my apologies to the teams, staffers, and all others who were adversely impacted by the logistical issues that occurred at the NSC. I will reiterate that all issues that arose were the result of our inability to foresee them well in advance. We d...

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