The Quizbowl Resource Center

QuizbowlPostmodernist

The key to improving the quality of social science questions is to have fewer questions on books and authors of books and a better awareness of concepts that straddle multiple fields. Nah. People and books are super-duper, they are identifiable things. Questions on interdisciplinary concepts are of...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

I did notice a few 30-20-10s (including one on the author of the book that Planet of the Apes was based on, which was the only truly absurd question of the tournament) over the course of the day. Not having seen it, was it absurd because of the clues used or because you think Pierre Boulle is too h...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

The key to improving Social Science, imo, is to expand the cannon horizontally, rather than vertically. That is, spread into other social sciences, not just deeper into already cannonical ones. The Social Science cannon seems to be entirely made up mainly of economics and psychology, with an occasi...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

One useful heuristic that might benefit writers would be to imagine chopping up a tossup into three parts and turning it into a 30-20-10 bonus. (Of course, you shouldn't really write many 30-20-10's, if any at all.) For the 30 and 20 parts, the clues should be such a knowledgeable team should have ...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

People are a bit quick to toss out the term "anti-pyramidal" in this regard: there's a difference between a question which doesn't have the pyramidal structure that some prefer because the of the author's ignorance of the relative difficulty of clues and one whose flaw is because of the au...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

Debate is incredibly successful at retention and expansion. 'Deis' debate team had about 30 tournament-going members, and 4-5 times that who were casually involved or who could staff at events on campus. There is a strong party element though. Before the last tournament I recall the two debate hous...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

Are people overestimating the feasible percentage of high school players who can be retained in college? How well do comparable activities such as Model UN retain HS participants in college? Are there any other activities that can also be compared to quizbowl? If you were in Model UN or on the chess...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

For a timed tournament, so long as the moderator corps isn't incompetently slow in bulk, I would favor shooting for the middle of the pack or slightly faster. If moderators are reading at roughly the same speed and getting through a legitimate number of tossups, then questions read per round doesn't...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

That's why I think that the best packets are the ones that cover as wide of a variety of topics as possible. The time periods covered is probably the most important aspect of question variety to examine. In other words, asking questions on as many different time periods as possible is a good thing....

QuizbowlPostmodernist

I found the excessive reliance on lyrics and albums for the music a little tedious, and would have liked to see some more creativity in tossups along the lines of what's being going on lately on the academic side of things. It can't possibly have been worse than Capital Punishment....2 I think it w...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

Also, I've not had much luck moving my Valencia players into the four-year game. Amy Harvey plays a little for UF, but other great players like Jim Baker and Elissa Caffery have mostly given up the game, again due to getting involved in different stuff. The reason they give is that they haven't fou...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

Matt Weiner wrote:Again, we can avoid this dilemma by caring about the quality of the tournaments we produce and having sufficient packets available to break ties.

Is this a vote for fewer games played to ensure having packets for tiebreakers vs. more games played but having to resort to paper tiebreakers?

QuizbowlPostmodernist

I don't think that not having enough packets for tiebreaking is necessarily lazy. I see people decide that they are capable of producing a tournment set with x packets and their idea of tournament design is to come up with a format that uses x-1 packets to maximize the number of games played, reserv...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

Let us start out by saying that a full round robin is the ideal tournament format, but is usually unpractical. This leads to other tournament formats, usually involving divisional round-robin plus some sort of playoff system. Occasionally, a tie in win-loss leads to the need in tiebreaking procedure...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

If you thought I was gone forever, sorry to disappoint you. A possible jumping off point for anyone who wants to discuss art history and the concept of canon. A possibly interesting New York Times article on an updating of Janson's History of Art , which seems to be one of a big three of art history...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

Since Andrew Yaphe is generally acknowledged as the best player, it would be interesting to see how you would rerank 2-20 if the criteria were changed to who would make the best two-person team with #1 against a national collegiate field.

QuizbowlPostmodernist

Go ahead, go to the library and try to find episode guides (or, better yet, videos) of Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place...but, I bet you can find a copy of Moby Dick. The internet is cool. I hear libraries have it these days. http://www.tvtome.com/TwoGuysandaGirl/guide.html Granted, it's user-su...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

I would not mind if someone actually came up with numbers on what is sufficient/deficient.

QuizbowlPostmodernist

My fearless prediction: Way too many hockey questions (read >1). I have suggested that NHL hockey questions should go on strike for as long as the NHL does. I don't think I am giving anything away for this weekend when I say that a majority of TRASH did not agree with me. Here's a smug Sklansky cli...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

While it may be difficult to compare older players to more recent players, given the change in question difficulty, it is still true that old school players prepared themselves for the particular difficulty of their day and would probably prepare themselves the way that more modern players do if the...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

There are three major art history texts, from what I have gathered, Gardner's Art Through the Ages, Stokstad's Art History, and Janson's book, whatever its title may be. As you may guess, I own the first two (tenth edition picked up for three bucks and revised edition, volumes one and two which I us...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

Go ask Lawrence Summers.

QuizbowlPostmodernist

Is going down something the yahoo group does occasionally, or is this perhaps something that could last a while? I'd feel terrible if I didn't get to read the post alluded to in the first post. All the regions now have the individual RR stats up. I saw three people with 70 plus for the RR: me, Kevi...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

I'd have to say the aforementioned song parody (#12181) was far worse than either the tornado message or the one from a couple of days ago. I can't get to the song parody at present, but I remember it being pretty cringeworthy. Folks, Since I'm not going to ACF Nationals but still wanted to contrib...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

Yahoo group archives seem to be down, but it should be noted that this is almost a year to the day that Jason Mueller wrote in message 13974: Ouch. It's times like these when you realize that there are more important things in life than quizbowl and that there are much worse things that could happen...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

Sample packets can be downloaded here: http://www.collegebowl.com/games/samples.asp Here are some examples culled from the first packet. An example of College Bowl thinking it is funny when it is not: The Marvel Comics tossup An example of College Bowl using rather broad answers: the tossup on Canada.

QuizbowlPostmodernist

it looks like maybe the stakes of this discussion are raising, since apparantly no one is declining invitations: http://www.naqt.com/ict/2005/invitations-di.html . Only six teams have yet to respond. Div 2 is a little more open, but still no declines. yikes. In the past, how many teams have accepte...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

The teams "on the bubble" are probably sufficiently close in ability that it may come down to who was feeling better that day. With so many SCT fields, I can't see a consensus ever being reached on exactly who should be at the ICT. There are two models here: the BCS statistical formula mod...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

So basically you posted a much longer, repetitive version of"it's easy to figure out the distribution and if you can't, you're dumb" after being told why that's a condescending and false way to address the question?. Actually, the relevant portion is why NAQT might not want to reveal its ...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

If NAQT doesn't want to reveal its distribution, then its members should have the stones to simply say so. If NAQT won't reveal even why it won't reveal its distribution, then just say that, too. The following was posted to the then-Yahoo quizbowl group back in 2002 by Eric Hilleman: Kelly asks why...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

Not to be contrarian, but despite being a piss-poor lit person, I actually did read The Jeweler's Shop before I had even heard of quizbowl. Not that I have any pull with NAQT, but I wouldn't mind if all of quizbowl went on strike with regards to the writing of hockey questions until the NHL returns.

QuizbowlPostmodernist

Would you trust a reference source to which I personally have contributed?

QuizbowlPostmodernist

Actually, I am in the process of writing one to mail to the author. I'm not expecting some sort of retraction or elaboration, but I think it's worth clearing up the facts. I don't see why you have to dismiss my opinion as contrarian, as I've provided a reasonable argument to defend my position in t...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

So if you haven't read it on Yahoo, here's the Washington Post article about QB... or at least NAQT's perspective of it, God forbid the Post actually seek other perspectives and not just write off a large segment of the community as "jealous" and "dismayed." If you disagree, you...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

There's no hard-and-fast you have to have x questions on topic y . There's an acceptable range, but you don't have to slavishly devote yourself to quotas. Anyone who tells you that you have to follow strict percentages is a fool. These days, I would tell you to start of by writing some drama, enough...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

That's not a bad idea. What the hell kind of reporters are they hiring? I have no idea. Seriously, CNN started going down the tubes when Turner sold out to Time Warner and really went to hell when AOL took over. I don't even bother to visit CNN any more except when someone links to something there.

QuizbowlPostmodernist

More on the pervasiveness of Wikipedia found via http://www.boingboing.net/ : From: http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/09/08/russia.basayev/ "Basayev tendered his resignation from all posts in Maskadov's rebel organization but continued to be involved in the reconnaissance and sabotage ba...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

Yup, if there's any underasked topic, its algebraic topology.

QuizbowlPostmodernist

I know some people love it.

See this Slashdot thread:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/0 ... =146&tid=1

Comments?

QuizbowlPostmodernist

Hmmm...none of the above isn't an option. Maybe it's just because I haven't heard of any of those people, but I feel like repeating my belief that literature is the area least in need of canon expansion.

--Anthony

QuizbowlPostmodernist

Why don't you require that the teams that are attending write questions? Why is UTC always begging for freelance questions? These two questions may be related. Charlie can correct me, but I think that the freelance packets he asks for tend to be used in playoffs or for teams at their first tourname...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

Hey, Chris, can you post the distribution you used?

QuizbowlPostmodernist

Bad grammar becomes more glaring in a chatroom because you actually see the text in front of you rather than hear them streamed by you in an actually game situation. For example, ACF tends to be criticized by people on the moderating side of questions for having bad grammar and typographical errors,...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

With the usual format, I don't think packet submission or question submission would work for a singles tournament. You'd really have to wrench the format around to make it work as a question submission tournament. Hopefully there'll at least be the science tournament. Well, with the usual format, n...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

On Sunday, it seemed that people were sick of Richard Reid's shit, as evidenced by the (albeit joking) offer on the part of the "Freeze Frame Award emcees" to give him a shirt if (and only if) he didn't say anything further. He started to speak, and everyone yelled at him and people had a...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

I'd like to do an impression of Dave Thorsley and offer a Shorterqb style summary of the above. "I don't want to defend Richard Reid's comments, so here's a defense of Richard Reid's comments. Seven years ago, before any of the people who applauded at CBI Nationals 2004 were involved in colleg...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

I guess my point is this: if NAQT DID decide to invite Columbia in order to justify inviting Maryland - and they did so in order to prevent Columbia from "pitching a fit," how would we ever know? Whatever the S-value is, we at Athens State had better stats across the board than Columbia. ...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

I hope Athens State gets a shot, but with the ICT in St Louis, I wouldn't expect nearly as many teams to decline bids this year. From the 2001 ICT which was held in St. Louis: Division I declined--Cambridge University (UK), Penn State University, University of California-Berkeley B, University of W...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

So why do schools seem to think that if a quiz bowl program exists, suddenly it has to pay the exorbitant CBI fee? In a nutshell, ACU-I. My guess is that the teams with great financial support from their schools are likely those teams who have acquired funding outside of whatever part of the admini...

QuizbowlPostmodernist

According to NAQT's host reporting requirements at http://www.naqt.com/official-reporting-results.html : ....the host must report full team statistics for each team; this consists of: division, institution, team name, team designation ("A", "B", etc.), coach name, coach (or repre...

The Quizbowl Resource Center

Search found 103 matches

The Theory of Tiebreakers

NY Times Article on Art History

Re: A blast from the past ...

On Art History

Since you're in Boston

Re: Is this the most pathetic post ever?

Representative College Bowl questions

As I am fond of mentioning

Writing questions out of Wikipedia