General Discussion

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Urech hydantoin synthesis
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General Discussion

Post by Urech hydantoin synthesis »

This is the thread for general discussion of the LIST IV set.
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Re: General Discussion

Post by Urech hydantoin synthesis »

Did anyone else feel that Packet 4 was perhaps easier to power than the other packets? The statistics seem to imply this, but I'm not certain if this is actually the case.
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Re: General Discussion

Post by jonah »

I thought the quality of the questions, from a quizbowl perspective, was good. It was on the easy side, but I gather that was intentional, and it wasn't unplayable for the best teams. (However, does anyone know what the highest PPB ever recorded over the course of a whole tournament was? IMSA's 27.76 has got to be up there, and it's 27.84 if you discount the round Anton wasn't there for.)

The proofreading left a lot to be desired, though, and the quizbowlese left…less to be desired, I suppose, by which I mean there was too much of it, especially of the variety where one uses language implying a relation between two things that doesn't actually exist (e.g. "The winner of the Battle of (*) Plassey was able to successfully perform this action, while a victory at the First Battle of Panipat allowed Babur to also do this.").

The only factual error I remember noticing (although there seemed to be a paucity of questions in the areas I know best) is the bonus part that, essentially, said that Newton's second law says force equals mass times acceleration. No it doesn't! It states that (net) force equals the derivative of momentum with respect to time; by the product rule, that's only equal to mass times acceleration if mass is constant. The next part of that bonus talked about integrating force to get impulse but didn't mention integrating with respect to what, so it didn't make sense.
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Re: General Discussion

Post by MorganV »

A few stylistic things that bothered me while reading:

I agree with Jonah on the quizbowlese in this set; in particularly WAY too much "identify this so-and-so". This might just be a pet peeve of mine but "name this so-and-so" will suffice in pretty much any situation and is easier on moderators who have to say this phrase 100+ times over the course of the tournament.

Many answerlines lacked promptable/alternate answers (one that stands out in my memory was a bonus part on the triboelectric effect that probably could have used a prompt on static electricity) and, importantly, titles and the like had their articles underlined, which led to a complaint after an inexperienced moderator negged a team who said "Doll's House" on the grounds that "A Doll's House" was underlined in the packet.

I'm not sure why it was necessary to put the word "bonus" at the beginning of every bonus in the packet.

Some questions are randomly in Arial instead of TNR which is rather unprofessional.
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Re: General Discussion

Post by jonah »

MorganV wrote:a bonus part on the triboelectric effect that probably could have used a prompt on static electricity
Yeah, this was really bad; sorry I forgot about it. That's a very hard bonus part, and I would put money on the assertion that every room said "static electricity" and had nothing further to say if they had been prompted. You can make it say "this type of static electricity" while retaining its status as the hard part but making people feel less screwed.
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Re: General Discussion

Post by Urech hydantoin synthesis »

Could you indicate which questions were in Arial? I'm combing through the packets that Ultima used and haven't found any yet. As for the use of "identify", (please correct me if I'm wrong), I don't believe it is much more than a stylistic choice, and I personally used it to introduce variety into the phrasing.

I'll certainly look in the set and correct the underlining issues that you brought up, but I don't believe that "static electricity" is promptable for the triboelectric effect since they are entirely different things. My analogy would be prompting on the "thermocouple effect" for a question that wanted the Seebeck Effect, which is not done. In addition, I don't think that prompting on "static electricty" would help teams get to the triboelectric effect if they didn't already know it, though I may be wrong here.

As for putting the word "Bonus:" in the beginning of each bonus, it has been done since the very first LIST and is mainly there to help the more inexperienced teams who may not be fully familiar with the flow of a match. As a moderator, I usually say it anyway, so there shouldn't be any harm in doing so.
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Re: General Discussion

Post by jonah »

Christ, I Know wrote:Could you indicate which questions were in Arial? I'm combing through the packets that Ultima used and haven't found any yet. As for the use of "identify", (please correct me if I'm wrong), I don't believe it is much more than a stylistic choice, and I personally used it to introduce variety into the phrasing.
For what it's worth, I don't remember noticing this, and that's the kind of thing I usually notice.
Christ, I Know wrote:I don't believe that "static electricity" is promptable for the triboelectric effect since they are entirely different things
I don't understand this at all. The triboelectric effect is one of several types of static electricity. Basically every google result (well, on the first few pages) for "triboelectric" corroborates this.
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Re: General Discussion

Post by Auroni »

The only factual error I remember noticing (although there seemed to be a paucity of questions in the areas I know best) is the bonus part that, essentially, said that Newton's second law says force equals mass times acceleration. No it doesn't! It states that (net) force equals the derivative of momentum with respect to time; by the product rule, that's only equal to mass times acceleration if mass is constant.
I'm going to single this out as a really unhelpful critique. Yes, you're technically right, but physics classes all over the country use "force equals mass times acceleration" in short hand all the time, and such a description is confusing or misleading to literally nobody.
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Re: General Discussion

Post by Urech hydantoin synthesis »

jonah wrote:
Christ, I Know wrote:I don't believe that "static electricity" is promptable for the triboelectric effect since they are entirely different things
I don't understand this at all. The triboelectric effect is one of several types of static electricity. Basically every google result (well, on the first few pages) for "triboelectric" corroborates this.
I understand static electricity to be the the phenomenon in which a surface has imbalanced charges, which can be achieved through the triboelectric effect. Is this not correct (or does it not warrant the distinction in the answerline of a question)?
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Re: General Discussion

Post by jonah »

Christ, I Know wrote:
jonah wrote:
Christ, I Know wrote:I don't believe that "static electricity" is promptable for the triboelectric effect since they are entirely different things
I don't understand this at all. The triboelectric effect is one of several types of static electricity. Basically every google result (well, on the first few pages) for "triboelectric" corroborates this.
I understand static electricity to be the the phenomenon in which a surface has imbalanced charges, which can be achieved through the triboelectric effect. Is this not correct (or does it not warrant the distinction in the answerline of a question)?
Okay, I suppose it would be more precise to say that the triboelectric effect is one way (and probably the most accessible way) of producing static electricity. And I think the distinction is inordinately hair-splitty. Certainly I don't see any reason why "static charging" ought not be promptable, and at that point I would say any reasonable answer mentioning "static" should be prompted.
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Re: General Discussion

Post by Urech hydantoin synthesis »

jonah wrote:"The winner of the Battle of (*) Plassey was able to successfully perform this action, while a victory at the First Battle of Panipat allowed Babur to also do this.").
The answerline to this question was inadvertently revealed in social media, so this will be replaced.
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Re: General Discussion

Post by RexSueciae »

Was it just me, or was there an extraordinary number of answerlines on colors? (Blue, red x2, white x2 if you count "white people," Black Sea, perhaps others.)

There were answerlines that came up in multiple categories but with different information. (I think I heard Egypt and maybe China, but I can't remember.) No outright repeats, to the best of my knowledge.

I haven't checked the stats so far, and I'm sure it depended largely on the strengths of the teams, but I saw a bunch of tossups that didn't get past the lead-in before being absolutely slaughtered by a frantic buzzer-race by half the room. I remember that the history question on the People's Republic of China had "princelings" in practically the first line, just to name one. Not sure if I agree with the powermarking on some of the questions, but that's a subjective thing.
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Re: General Discussion

Post by Urech hydantoin synthesis »

RexSueciae wrote:Was it just me, or was there an extraordinary number of answerlines on colors? (Blue, red x2, white x2 if you count "white people," Black Sea, perhaps others.)

There were answerlines that came up in multiple categories but with different information. (I think I heard Egypt and maybe China, but I can't remember.) No outright repeats, to the best of my knowledge.

I haven't checked the stats so far, and I'm sure it depended largely on the strengths of the teams, but I saw a bunch of tossups that didn't get past the lead-in before being absolutely slaughtered by a frantic buzzer-race by half the room. I remember that the history question on the People's Republic of China had "princelings" in practically the first line, just to name one. Not sure if I agree with the powermarking on some of the questions, but that's a subjective thing.
Unless I am to avoid asking about things named after colors, I don't believe "white people' or the Black Sea are symptoms of any problems, though the two tossups on "red" might be a stretch (though they are in European history and art, so clues are entirely distinct). As for the easy tossup clues, a lot of sites seemed to do a lot better on the bonuses than on the tossups, and unless you can provide me with more examples of tossups that had that problem, I don't know what I can do.
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Re: General Discussion

Post by marianna »

This set was pretty fun to play. I thought this set generally did a good job crafting creative and original bonuses that still were of reasonable difficulty (Quechua ponchos and Minoan bull-leaping come to mind). I'm not a math person, but I was also happy to see math functions being tossed up (e^x).

However, I do think there were bonuses that didn't have much of a gradient between easy and middle parts (eg the bonus with both Lord Byron and Shelley Bryant as parts). This perception might just be that I played on a fairly strong team mostly against other strong teams, but I'm curious what the conversion distribution is for something like the aforementioned Byron/Bryant bonus.

I thought certain common-link tossups (eg calendar and red) didn't play out well because abrupt general knowledge clues created difficulty cliffs. For an example, "year" was in power for calendar, and I think red mentioned that "carmine" was a type of this color in the lead-in.

This is a minor point, but it didn't seem like categories were spread evenly throughout a packet or subcategories throughout the set. I remember a chunk of consecutive literature tossups in rounds 1 and 2, and two architecture tossups in round 1.
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Re: General Discussion

Post by Urech hydantoin synthesis »

Could the mods make this thread and the question-specific thread public?
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