Scobol Solo Set Discussion

[Stained Diviner]

Thanks for joining us here. If you want to be able to see the questions, send me an email with the email address you use for Google Drive, or send me an email saying that you don't use Google Drive. If you do get access to the questions, remember that they are not for public consumption yet (though they will be in a few months). Feel free to talk about anything you want to talk about, and feel free to ask me to post specific questions.

If you want to discuss aspects of the tournament that don't involve specific questions, feel free to use the public forum, where more people will see your post.

[Stained Diviner]

Here's a spreadsheet matching answers with conversion data.

[heterodyne]

What was up with that Mack the Knife question? It was a definite outlier in terms of conversions, and I couldn't pull it myself.

[Sniper, No Sniping!]

Franz Kafka was the least converted European/World Lit tossup?

[Stained Diviner]

That one was all on me. I know it doesn't come up much, but it is a commonly played jazz standard with an interesting story, so I thought people might answer it. I was wrong.

This song is used as the subtitle for the album ''Ella in Berlin''. This song mentions Louie Miller and Jenny Diver, and it is loosely based on the life of Jack Sheppard. Sung by a very minor character to open an opera about the husband of Polly Peachum, its first verse compares white shark teeth to red billows of blood. This song, which was originally in German, was popularized in America by Bobby Darin and Louis Armstrong, and it was composed by Kurt Weill [“vile”]. Name this song with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht that was written for ''The Threepenny Opera'' to introduce the criminal Macheath.

ANSWER: “Mack the Knife”

[Emil Nolde]

I disagree, the field is too dumb. But in all seriousness, Brecht is an undeniably canon individual, and Mack the Knife is one of the most culturally significant things he ever worked on. I'd like to shake the hand of the other person that got it.

Conversion data isn't the be-all-end-all of difficulty. Sinclair Lewis got answered by less than ten percent. Is that a hard answerline?

Also, I think the Other FA category was poorly organized. Just because they aren't paintings or orchestral works doesn't mean it's a good idea to mash them together with questions they have even less to do with than the main visual/audio arts distribution. Besides, while I haven't heard it, for example, I doubt the Verdi question used only operatic clues, or more specifically, operatic clues relating to plot, characters, aria titles, famous performers, or other primarily thematic, rather than musical, elements.

*gets off of soapbox*

The question on 'Hajj' was somewhat vaguely worded. When I heard it, it sounded like the implication was that Eid al-Adha was only celebrated by pilgrims, which is not true. Additionally, I know this is a moderator discretion area, but I heard 'protestants' get accepted for 'Huegenots'. Was that in the packet?

[Stained Diviner]

On the holiday that ends this event, a third of a slaughtered animal’s meat is donated to the poor. A sheep is sacrificed after the ritual shaving of one’s hair in an optional variant on this event. Male participants don two white sheets of cloth to prepare for this event. In one of its rituals, adherents throw stones at three walls and rapidly walk back and forth between two hills. The Feast of Sacrifice, or Eid al-Adha, ends this event, during which participants make seven counter-clockwise trips around the Kaaba. Name this pillar of Islam which requires Muslims to make a pilgrimage to Mecca.

ANSWER: Hajj [prompt on pilgrimage to Mecca or Eid al-Adha; do not accept “hijra” or “hejira”]

These people were responsible for the Affair of the Placards, and a war that these people fought in was started by the Massacre of Vassy, which targeted this group. The name used for this group was originally used for opponents of Charles III of Savoy in Geneva. Thousands of these people were massacred by order of Catherine de Medici on Saint Bartholomew’s Day in 1572. Their churches were ordered destroyed by Louis XIV in Fontainebleau, though this group’s religious freedom was ensured by Henry IV’s Edict of Nantes. Identify these French Calvinist Protestants.

ANSWER: Huguenots [accept Protestant Reformed Church of France or French Protestants before the last two words]

It's probably more common to prompt on French Protestants rather than accept it, but I don't feel bad giving a point to somebody who realizes that the question is talking about French Protestants before his/her opponent.

The Other Fine Arts category is a bit of a conglomeration, so it is a bit strange to give (or receive) an award for it. Keep in mind that we set up the categories to allow us to write what we consider to be a good set with a good distribution. If we eliminate Other Fine Arts and just use Visual and Audial Fine Arts, then we'll drop Fine Arts from 15% to 10% of the distribution. The current system allows us to write a healthy amount of painting questions, a healthy amount of classical music questions that don't involve opera plots, and have some space for fine arts questions that don't fit into either of those two categories.

[Stained Diviner]

I'd like to shake the hand of the other person that got it.

Blade Parrish of El Paso Gridley

[thrillhouse]

James:

If the aforementioned person was the one who got the question correct, I would not shake his hand. Not because he is from EPG (yeah central IL), but more because he sounds absolutely dangerous(-ly awesome).

Blade? Obviously, since he was at the meet, he must be a Daywalker.

This name rivals that of Sam Blizzard.

Seriously, though, props to him.

[Southern Double-collared Sunbirb]

Yeah fun! the tournament was great. Just remind Michael Steele not to make tasteless "jokes" about art majors going to Starbucks.

In the finals, what was the rest of the "nodes" tossup?

Also names are great and all, but Batman bin Suparman just got arrested for drugs and theft. (http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_vall ... e_law.html) So not everything.

[Stained Diviner]

This term is applied to the points where an orbital path crosses a plane such as the ecliptic. This term also describes the lines on Chladni plates. The angular momentum quantum number determines how many planar, or angular, types of these things that an electron orbital has, and some electron orbitals also have radial types of these. In a ripple tank, these are the points where destructive interference is maximized. These do not exist at the end of an open-end air column, but one of these is at a closed-end. Name this location on a standing wave where there is minimal motion.

ANSWER: nodes

[Emil Nolde]

Yeah fun! the tournament was great. Just remind Michael Steele not to make tasteless "jokes" about art majors going to Starbucks.

Yeah, he's kinda a jerk. Sorry, I probably should have warned you.

Also names are great and all, but Batman bin Suparman just got arrested for drugs and theft. (http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_vall ... e_law.html) So not everything.

According to the San Diego Convention and Visitor's Bureau the convention has an annual regional economic impact of $162.8 million, with $180 million economic impact in 2011.

You know, you'd think they'd be able to subsidize some of that revenue to help this guy out, since in a admittedly-dumb way, it could be considered partly their fault. At the very least it'd be nice if someone was willing to bail Batman out of jail. It seems like the right thing to do.

[Stained Diviner]

Thanks to Victor Kluck, here is a blow-by-blow spreadsheet of the championship.

[Stained Diviner]

Here is the review from PACE:

After going through the set, we have decided to award the set a "Satisfactory" rating.

For a tournament targeted towards the top players in Illinois, we felt it still did a good job of keeping the difficulty of answer lines under control. Tossups were also kept to a consistent and reasonable length, which can sometimes be an issue with tournaments aimed at top players/teams. The grammar and copy editing in this set were also very good.

The main issue holding it back from an exemplary rating was around clue selection in tossups. The later rounds especially had some very difficult clues in the first couple of sentences in the tossups. The tossup on Cezanne in Round 11 exemplifies some of these issues. As far as I can tell, the Portrait of Duranty is a very minor work by the artist, and would be quite difficult to buzz on with the description clues about putting his fingers on his head. I don't expect even the top players to be on the right track of this question until the skull still-life clue. The tossup on Wallace Stevens in this same packet similarly used clues that would be quite challenging even for top high school players.

There were other instances with clue placement in relation to other clues in the tossup. For instance, the Napoleon I tossup in Packet 8 mentions that he staged a coup and was a First Consul in the first line, which is very early in comparison to other history questions in that packet such as the Saudi Arabia tossup, which is quite difficult for most of the tossup.

That being said, this tournament does many things well and definitely meets the bar for a "Satisfactory" tournament. Thanks for the hard work you and your team put into writing and editing it.

Here is the checklist. I have added extra stars to the items that this tournament does well.

1. Difficulty control – is this set at the announced difficulty or easier? Does it avoid excessively hard material? Regardless of its stated difficulty can a wide range of teams score points on it (with most averaging several tossups per game and 10 or more points per bonus)?

***These questions are sufficiently answerable for low-level local teams. - (With the caveat that we're keeping the target audience of this tournament in mind--a "low level team" means "the best player on a low level team in Illinois").
*These questions are sufficient to distinguish mid-level local teams.
*These questions are sufficient to distinguish many of the best eligible teams on a game-by-game basis without sacrificing the playing experience of other teams.

2. Length control – Do these questions have enough clues to properly distinguish teams without being longer than the announced length or violating reasonable expectations?

***Tossup questions have multiple clues arranged in descending order of difficulty.
***Individual clues are expressed succinctly without excess verbiage.
***Few to no tossups exceed 650 characters or six lines of 10-point Times New Roman.

3. Pyramidality and clue quality – Do these tossups use significant, uniquely-identifying, factually correct clues that high schoolers can know, in the order that high schoolers are likely to know them? Do these bonuses have an easy, middle, and harder part which are all possible and significant? Does it show through this set’s questions that more went into this set than cursory searches of previous packets and Wikipedia?

***Clues uniquely refer to the desired answer on a consistent basis.
***Clues have few to no factual errors or misleading ambiguities.
***Some clues across the set are new, creative, and/or capable of presenting important, knowable material in a new way without increasing the difficulty level of the tournament.
*Clues are grounded in the realm of information that intellectually-curious high school students are likely to discover in venues other than college quizbowl tournaments.
***There is no plagiarism from previous question packets or outside sources, and questions render basic definitions and information in newly-written words whenever possible.

4. Comprehensibility and legibility – Does this set use complete, grammatical English sentences? Do these questions make sense to a normal English speaker when read aloud?

***The set is written in grammatical, proofread English with minimal typographical errors
***The text of questions avoids confusing turns of phrase or wordings that are common in quizbowl questions but not common outside quizbowl questions ("quizbowlese")

[Stained Diviner]

Here are the questions referred to:

One work by this artist showing a man with his head leaning against his left hand, which has two fingers by his eye, is his Portrait of Duranty. A similar work showing a man with many open books is this painter’s Portrait of Gustave Geffroy. In the late 1880s, this painter painted Harlequin four times, including one with Pierrot [pyair-aw]. A decade later, this painter included skulls in several still lifes. This painter’s sister owned a house named Bellevue located in Provence from which this artist painted Mont Sainte-Victoire [sawnt veek-twar]. Name this artist who in the early 1890s made a series of works showing card players, considered the father of cubism.
ANSWER: Paul Cézanne

A work by this poet describes how the title object “took dominion everywhere” and “did not give of bird or bush”. Another of his poems tells how one must “have been cold a long time / To behold the junipers shagged with ice”. In another work, this poet does “not know which to prefer, / The beauty of inflections / or the beauty of innuendos”. His poem “The Snow Man” is included in a collection whose two verses begin “Take from the dresser of deal” and “Call the roller of big cigars.” Name this poet whose collection Harmonium includes “Anecdote of the Jar”, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, and “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”.
ANSWER: Wallace Stevens

This person rose to power in a coup along with Roger Ducos and Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès [s’yeh-yess] and quickly became First Consul. This leader issued the Milan Decree in a failed attempt to enforce the Berlin Decree, his failed attempts to economically isolate the United Kingdom from the rest of Europe. This general beat Tsar Alexander the First at the Battle of Austerlitz after this man’s navy was decimated by Horatio Nelson at the Battle of the Nile, and he was eventually defeated by the Duke of Wellington. Name this French Emperor who lost the Battle of Waterloo and was exiled to St. Helena.
ANSWER: Napoleon I [or Napoleon Bonaparte]

Herodotus claimed that people who lived in what is now this country gathered cinnamon after it broke from birds’ nests. This country set its southern border in 1934 by signing the Treaty of Taif [ty-EEF], while its northern border through much of the 20th century had two neutral zones. In 1975, its king was assassinated by his nephew, and this country has been run by a series of half-brothers since 1953. An earlier version of this country was created with the support of theologian Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab, while the modern version was started by Abdul Aziz. Name this kingdom that contains the Muslim holy cities of Medina and Mecca.
ANSWER: (Kingdom of) Saudi Arabia [prompt on The Kingdom or Arabia]