ACF Fall 2011 Discussion

[Kwang the Ninja]

I hate to be that guy, but when will the set be posted?

[Cheynem]

I think the first post said after the Oxford mirror.

[Kouign Amann]

Two things:

1. This tournament had a helluva lot of tossups that didn't start with "This X." Really, this isn't usually that hard to do, and it makes things much easier for players.

2. I forget whether this tournament was exactly guilty of this offense, but it's something writers and editors should know: Arup is the world's most prominent structural engineering firm. They work on tons of great stuff all the time. In the packet archives, I've seen some examples that indicate that people love writing opera house/SOH/Utzon questions that mention Arup's work, and that's fine, because their involvement in that project was a big deal. However, writers need to be very careful with how they phrase such clues. Saying "this project was constructed by Arup" or "this man collaborated with Arup" isn't even close to uniquely identifying. I've noticed that the SOH Wikipedia page spends a lot of time talking about Arup compared to pages of similarly famous structures they've worked on, so maybe that's the source of the error. Again, I forget the exact wording used at this tournament, but it's something people should keep in mind for the future. Arup did some really important stuff to make sure the SOH actually got built in the face of a huge engineering problem and impossible government interference, so I encourage writers to delve into those aspects of their work.

[cornfused]

The whole Graham's Law clue in the Georgia Tech A packet refers to both the answer (diffusion) and a thing that is not the answer (effusion). From my experience, chemistry classes treat Graham's Law as a Law of Effusion.

While this is correct, who actually buzzes in at ACF Fall with an answer line of "effusion"? I didn't consider this negbait just because of that.

I was attempting to, but I was beaten by a fraction of a second and an opposing player who answered "diffusion". I don't think "people aren't likely to give this answer" is any kind of reason to allow an ambiguous clue.

I, for lack of knowledge, negged a player who answered "effusion" after that clue.

[jekbradbury]

People often complain, probably too often, about how bonuses at some tournament or another were too variable. But sometimes it really is pretty egregious.

Tereus guides two characters in this play to the land of the title creatures. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this play in which Peithetairos and Euelpides live with the title creatures in Cloudcuckooland.
ANSWER: The Birds
[10] In this play by the author of The Birds, Dionysus travels with his slave Xanthias to recover Euripedes from the underworld. The title creatures of this play repeatedly chant “Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax.”
ANSWER: The Frogs
[10] This Greek comic playwright of The Birds and The Frogs wrote of a group of women who withhold sex in order to end a war in Lysistrata.
ANSWER: Aristophanes

I have a feeling that a bonus like this is a result of a desire to fill in the best-known clues for every part, even if they were left out intentionally.

This experiment was designed to examine prejudice towards socially undesirable groups. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this experiment that involved distributing four groups of 100 of the title objects, addressed to medical research associates, friends of the Nazi party, friends of the Communist party, and Mr. Walter Carnap.
ANSWER: lost letter experiment
[10] This experiment by the same psychologist was designed to quantitatively determine degrees of separation in social networks. It involved 160 people in Omaha, Nebraska being instructed to send a package to a man given only his job title and other basic information.
ANSWER: small world experiment
[10] Those two experiments were performed by this psychologist, whose most famous experiment saw people administer electric shocks when ordered to by an authority figure.
ANSWER: Stanley Milgram

Both of these bonuses can be answered based entirely off of basic high school stock clue knowledge. I can't point to a hard part in either one.

Compare those to, say:

He wrote a collection of essays about Anglophone philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century called The Linguistic Turn. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this American philosopher and literary theorist most famous for Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
ANSWER: Richard McKay Rorty
[10] Michael Dummett identified the work The Foundations of Arithmetic by this philosopher and mathematician as the beginning of the linguistic turn. This man also wrote the paper “On Sense and Reference” and invented contemporary formal logic.
ANSWER: Gottlob Frege
[10] This other mathematician and philosopher wrote On the Concept of Number, but he is more famous as the founder of phenomenology.
ANSWER: Edmund Husserl

This one is a bit absurd. If a bonus comes in entirely without an easy part, the editors should add one or use a different bonus.

[Cheynem]

That philo bonus is definitely too hard, sure. I don't see anything egregious about that Milgram bonus--lost letter and small world are frequently clues for Milgram, but if you don't know what they are, you're not going to get them, and I would have no problem with lost letter as an ACF Fall hard part.

[Grams's Go-Go Boots]

Both of these bonuses can be answered based entirely off of basic high school stock clue knowledge. I can't point to a hard part in either one.

I really disagree with the Milgram being "stock" or lacking a hard part with the lost letter part. As for the Aristophanes bonus, I don't think something asking for the 2nd and 3rd best known works of, at best, the 3rd best known ancient Greek playwright, qualifies as that stock.

[Dr. Timothy Tebow]

Some errata after going through the packets and my notes:

• I'm pretty sure Dogberry doesn't say anything about being made to /look/ like an ass, nor does he have his sexton write it down. As I recall, the whole spiel is about how he can't (for some reason) have his sexton write down that he's been called an ass, culminating in the immortal line "O that I had been writ down an ass".
• Polymers are chains. It isn't the best idea to drop a model that contains the word "chains" in the lead-in.
• Hair follicles is dropped halfway through the skin tossup. That's a problem.
• In the GR TU, you mean Einstein ring, not Einstein cross.
• Isn't the human telomere sequence TTAGGG? Is this interchangeable with GGGTTA?
• Boron has atomic number 5, not 6.

Albeit inconsequential, but as regrettable as sometimes I wish it were not so, Florida is indeed not a nation despite a TU that claimed otherwise.

Also, an example of anti-prompt: can one seriously claim that Ajax committed seppuku?

On a more serious note: someone with more time or familiarity with the packet set than myself, is there a statistic for the number of references and/or answers associated with Jewish holidays and/or Judaism (in the religious context) that came up available? It seemed this area may have been represented more heavily than other religions and observations, but then again I could be completely wrong.

As it is, I thought this set was more or less fine. The umbrella answer was notably amusing, so kudos to whomever wrote that.

[Vernon Lee Bad Marriage, Jr.]

People often complain, probably too often, about how bonuses at some tournament or another were too variable. But sometimes it really is pretty egregious.

Tereus guides two characters in this play to the land of the title creatures. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this play in which Peithetairos and Euelpides live with the title creatures in Cloudcuckooland.
ANSWER: The Birds
[10] In this play by the author of The Birds, Dionysus travels with his slave Xanthias to recover Euripedes from the underworld. The title creatures of this play repeatedly chant “Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax.”
ANSWER: The Frogs
[10] This Greek comic playwright of The Birds and The Frogs wrote of a group of women who withhold sex in order to end a war in Lysistrata.
ANSWER: Aristophanes

I have a feeling that a bonus like this is a result of a desire to fill in the best-known clues for every part, even if they were left out intentionally.

This experiment was designed to examine prejudice towards socially undesirable groups. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this experiment that involved distributing four groups of 100 of the title objects, addressed to medical research associates, friends of the Nazi party, friends of the Communist party, and Mr. Walter Carnap.
ANSWER: lost letter experiment
[10] This experiment by the same psychologist was designed to quantitatively determine degrees of separation in social networks. It involved 160 people in Omaha, Nebraska being instructed to send a package to a man given only his job title and other basic information.
ANSWER: small world experiment
[10] Those two experiments were performed by this psychologist, whose most famous experiment saw people administer electric shocks when ordered to by an authority figure.
ANSWER: Stanley Milgram

Both of these bonuses can be answered based entirely off of basic high school stock clue knowledge. I can't point to a hard part in either one.

Compare those to, say:

He wrote a collection of essays about Anglophone philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century called The Linguistic Turn. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this American philosopher and literary theorist most famous for Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
ANSWER: Richard McKay Rorty
[10] Michael Dummett identified the work The Foundations of Arithmetic by this philosopher and mathematician as the beginning of the linguistic turn. This man also wrote the paper “On Sense and Reference” and invented contemporary formal logic.
ANSWER: Gottlob Frege
[10] This other mathematician and philosopher wrote On the Concept of Number, but he is more famous as the founder of phenomenology.
ANSWER: Edmund Husserl

This one is a bit absurd. If a bonus comes in entirely without an easy part, the editors should add one or use a different bonus.

Yes, if you cherrypick literally the hardest bonus in the set and compare it to two perfectly fine bonuses, there will be a difference. Not sure what this is supposed to prove.

I do think that some categories ended up harder than others, which was unfortunate. The RMP in particular seemed to be pushing it a lot sometimes. On the other hand, it's just not useful at all to claim that noted hard thing the "lost letter experiment" is not a hard part.

[Madagascar Serpent Eagle]

The tossup on kinetic energy seemed to me to have a very easy lead-in. Most people that has taken physics or chemistry beyond the first year level (should) know that kinetic energy equals 3/2 times Boltzmann's constant times temperature. Worse yet, I remember having nearly the exact same lead-in at a past tournament.

While that may be true, I think its obscure enough to a general audience that its a fine leadin. I'd honestly have some trouble remembering that fact.

This comment is probably invalidated by the fact that I'm taking a class that's partially thermodynamics, but I actually didn't buzz there because I thought that it was too obvious for a lead-in and it had to be something more complicated I was misremembering.

The general feeling I got from people on my team and others yesterday was that this set was somewhat disappointing. A huge amount of source material (62 packets) and yet we still had to sit through repeats and an occasional lousy question. It seemed like every round there would be some sort of mistake in several questions (grammar, punctuation, that kind of stuff) that caused every moderator to stop and figure out how to correctly read the question. Also it seemed like a good deal of questions (example: the sun) were written in a way that nearly everyone would hesitate to answer on an obvious clue because they couldn't imagine it coming at that point in the question.

Personally I didn't feel the set was terrible or anything, I would even say it was good although not as good as past versions. I think going into the tournament most people figured this would be an excellent set, but for whatever reasons, it underwhelmed a bit. Things like this happen though, I'm not going to sit in this thread and bitch about every imperfection, just generally hope that 2012 ACF Fall is better.

This is pretty much how I feel. This should have been a great tournament: a huge amount of raw material and a strong editing team. In fact, it was a mediocre tournament, with the later rounds full of repeats and frequently multiple clunkers per packet. I was hoping for one of the best events of the year, and got probably the most decidedly mediocre college tournament I've played yet.

Also, I feel like there was some pretty big inter-packet difficulty variation: some packets were practically regular high school difficulty, while others were closer to what I expected. I'm not saying the tournament was too easy, it should be an easy tournament, but packets within the tournament weren't very consistent.

[OctagonJoe]

1. This tournament had a helluva lot of tossups that didn't start with "This X." Really, this isn't usually that hard to do, and it makes things much easier for players.

I actually tried to make sure every tossup I saw had some clearly defined thing-that-it-was-going-after be stated in the first sentence and in every sentence thereafter, so I'd be curious to know how often this was not the case. I know for a fact that I failed miserably to make the Book of Jonah tossup do this, but outside of that example I thought most tossups made it pretty clear.

[Cheynem]

I feel like this year's Fall discussion and last year's Fall discussion seem to feature a lot of comments from people expecting Fall to be this magical tournament which will be, no matter how much quizbowl you have played, the bestest tournament ever that will blow your mind.

ACF Fall is an easy tournament that is intended to be played by relatively new collegiate quizbowl players. It is constructed the same way every college tournament is constructed, which means it will probably have some of the same problems that plague every tournament--occasional bonus variability, a few clunker questions, etc. I have played about four years of collegiate tournaments and felt like this tournament was a good, solid tournament. I write this not to declare by fiat that I'm right and you can't complain about this tournament, but that I think people should be comparing Fall to other similar college tournaments and not over idealized expectations.

Also, I really don't think having more submissions is any guarantee for like a great tournament. Many Fall submissions are not very good.

Finally, it's very easy (and I've done this) to get hung up on certain questions that were undeniably clunkers or mistakes and use them as like an example as to why the tournament was bad, but every tournament has these. Yes, that sun tossup was unfortunate, but it was clearly a bad typo of "solar," for instance. I remember after my first college tournament complaining to Mike Sorice about a bonus being a repeat and he (politely) told me that when I began to edit tournaments I would understand more how these things happen. And he, as he usually is, was right. My point here is that the OMG PROBLEMS that people are talking about regarding this tournament appear in every college tournament, and that it would be more worthwhile to focus on what can be correctable for the future. For instance, if you wanted to talk about overall bonus variability between categories and make the point that the editors should have communicated more, I think that would be neat. (I apologize if I'm backseat modding)

[RyuAqua]

Yeah, the Milgram bonus doesn't have the problem you pointed out, James - you're good at quizbowl and remember those things because you're good at quizbowl. The problem is that it actually has two hard parts unless you're someone like James, since most people know nothing more about Milgram than his far-and-away most famous and most taught experiment (you know, the one with a teacher and a learner and a switch going up to XXX and two-thirds of the people moving it all the way up ad so on and so forth). I was disappointed that that bonus didn't reward much knowledge of that experiment and made the middle part unnecessarily hard by not having the Milgram part come before it. But I don't want to descend into the individual question maelstrom much further.

On the whole, I think this was a flawed, but on the whole good, set. I can second that this set needed another round of proofreading, which I now know is actually a much larger expenditure of time and effort than I once thought (as I learned due to my own failures to successfully proofread MAGNI).

[Sulawesi Myzomela]

Also it seemed like a good deal of questions (example: the sun) were written in a way that nearly everyone would hesitate to answer on an obvious clue because they couldn't imagine it coming at that point in the question.

It does seem like a lot of people have been saying something along these lines, so I do feel obligated to respond to this. Specifically, that tossup on "the sun" had other issues, but come on. You, someone who has been playing quizbowl for years now, kept hearing early clues that you knew but "couldn't imagine" them coming up early at a novice tournament? The examples people have been bringing up (Borges' seventh most famous story as a lead-in clue) make me question how valid these complaints are. Your point about grammar is one thing, but yes, if lots of good teams play a novice set they are going to answer questions early. Maybe the early clues should have been a little harder, but please take a step back and consider whether using easy early clues at ACF Fall is such a bad thing.

I think my use of the phrase "a good deal" was in hindsight an incorrect description of how many times this happened, it wasn't like every other question had this problem. A lot of people felt that a few of the questions were too easy, although the set itself was an appropriate difficulty. However you are correct that having played quizbowl for a while now, I should probably be prepared to hear things I know earlier in a question.

On another subject: The only question I want to bring up specifically is the Piaget/Kohlberg/Erikson bonus. Did anybody else think that didn't have a hard part?

[Ethnic history of the Vilnius region]

On another subject: The only question I want to bring up specifically is the Piaget/Kohlberg/Erikson bonus. Did anybody else think that didn't have a hard part?

Like the Milgrim bonus, the Piaget/Kohlberg/Erikson bonus was plenty challenging for novices.

[Papa's in the House]

Overall this tournament did a good job of hitting intended difficulty. There were a few packet to packet swings, but that's to be expected. I agree that the RMP (+ the SS tossups) was slightly harder for the intended difficulty (the Myth especially rewarded more non-Greco/Roman knowledge; great for me but bad for the intended audience).

For those of you complaining that the Milgram and Piaget bonuses were easy, good for you, you know things. The lost letter experiment is usually the first or second clue for a Milgram tossup (and even then, you have to know what the experiment is about rather than simply knowing it exists). Most people won't know or remember Kohlberg and his six stages of moral development, so it's a fine third part.

[cvdwightw]

This is your friendly neighborhood reminder that just because something is not hard to you does not mean that it is not hard to the target audience of this tournament. Don't say "this bonus lacked a hard part" or "this clue was too early;" state why you think so and let others debate whether or not you are right.

One of the things that I keep picking up from these kinds of discussions is that people who have been playing for a while but have not done a lot of editing work seem to think that a bonus in one subject should have an equal "quizbowl" difficulty to a bonus in any other subject. At the novice level, this just isn't the case. Difficulty compression works differently in different subjects. For instance, I would expect most novice teams to have a good baseline knowledge of Greco-Roman mythology. This means that I should be able to keep my easy parts roughly the same as a regular tournament, and do difficulty compression on my middle and hard parts, with the middle part being slightly easier than standard and the hard part being significantly easier than standard. On the other hand, I would expect most novice teams to have a poor baseline knowledge of philosophy. This means that I need to do not only the same kind of difficulty compression as with Greco-Roman mythology, but I then need to shift all of my parts down in difficulty to get the same kind of scores I would get with Greco-Roman mythology, since these teams are likely going to find even a standard easy part hard. A similar kind of difficulty compression is used on tossups - in areas where newer teams likely have decent knowledge, you can write slightly harder lead-ins and have a steeper pyramid than in areas where newer teams likely have poor knowledge. Sometimes the editors swing the pendulum too far - "solar" appearing anywhere before the giveaway, for instance - but for these novice tournaments, somewhere around 80-100% of the difficulty complaints should be that a given subject/question/clue was too hard.

[Sulawesi Myzomela]

Most people won't know or remember Kohlberg and his six stages of moral development, so it's a fine third part.

This might be the case, but I remember spending at least a week on Kohlberg's stages of moral development in my Psychology 100 class a couple years ago. I've just always assumed that Piaget was fairly easy and that Erikson and Kohlberg were about the same difficulty. If that's not the case, then that's fine, I was simply mistaken.

[bt_green_warbler]

Some NAQT conversion stats:

Piaget is converted at a 50% rate for high school varsity play.

Erickson about 35%.

Kohlberg has not been tossed up at any level below ICT. His only appearances as an answer in NAQT high school sets have been as the hard part of HSNCT bonuses (often with Piaget as the middle part).

[Sulawesi Myzomela]

Some NAQT conversion stats:

Piaget is converted at a 50% rate for high school varsity play.

Erickson about 35%.

Kohlberg has not been tossed up at any level below ICT. His only appearances as an answer in NAQT high school sets have been as the hard part of HSNCT bonuses (often with Piaget as the middle part).

Well I guess I've learned something new today.

[Kenneth Widmerpool]

Another thing that should be mentioned and repeated in these discussion thread is that most of you are in college, so you get exposed to widely different course materials depending on your major. For this tournament, "we spent a week talking about X in psych class" is irrelevant because the majority of people playing have never taken a psych class. When writing easy parts and choosing tossup answers, this tournament's editors went with an approximation of the general knowledge of a decently educated undergrad who is new to quizbowl, taking into account basic stuff that recurs in many classes to fill in the blanks. Thus if you had some endocrine lectures, the lack of clues in that gnrh part notwithstanding, then you were meant to 30 that bonus.

[The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus]

Thus if you had some endocrine lectures, the lack of clues in that gnrh part notwithstanding, then you were meant to 30 that bonus.

So I just looked up this bonus. I took an undergrad endocrine class, and obviously learned endocrine in medical school, and I wouldn't have gotten that bonus part until last year. I understand this was a mistake, but even the person submitting this bonus should realize there's no possible way that anyone without a relative with Kallman's syndrome or a medical education could get this question.

[Kenneth Widmerpool]

Thus if you had some endocrine lectures, the lack of clues in that gnrh part notwithstanding, then you were meant to 30 that bonus.

So I just looked up this bonus. I took an undergrad endocrine class, and obviously learned endocrine in medical school, and I wouldn't have gotten that bonus part until last year. I understand this was a mistake, but even the person submitting this bonus should realize there's no possible way that anyone without a relative with Kallman's syndrome or a medical education could get this question.

Sorry, I had meant to say "gnrh with all of its best known clues"

[Kenneth Widmerpool]

Another thing that should be mentioned and repeated in these discussion thread is that most of you are in college, so you get exposed to widely different course materials depending on your major. For this tournament, "we spent a week talking about X in psych class" is irrelevant because the majority of people playing have never taken a psych class. In fact, at ACF Fall, that's adequate justification to make something a middle and a hard part. We want teams that know their stuff to get 30s and early buzzes as opposed to just circuit regulars and packet readers doing the same.

When writing easy parts and choosing tossup answers, this tournament's editors went with an approximation of the general knowledge of a decently educated undergrad who is new to quizbowl, taking into account basic stuff that recurs in many classes to fill in the blanks. Thus if you had some endocrine lectures, and that gnrh part had the best known clues, then you were meant to 30 that bonus.

[The Laughing Cavalier]

Also, an example of anti-prompt: can one seriously claim that Ajax committed seppuku?

I decided to make that part on _suicide_ and accept seppuku, since I preferred to include an easier world lit clue rather than a culture clue. Motive-wise, though, Ajax's actions are pretty similar.

[itsthatoneguy]

I wish there was more film in the tournament.

Yeah, that was my fault again. Definitely could have put a bonus or two in the set.

Also sort of weird was the presence of both art and history questions on George Washington, although obviously I haven't been around long enough to know if there's any precedent to something like that.

I think art tossups on George Washington are pretty common. I was not aware that there was a history tossup of him until the day of the tournament.

[RyuAqua]

Also sort of weird was the presence of both art and history questions on George Washington, although obviously I haven't been around long enough to know if there's any precedent to something like that.

I think art tossups on George Washington are pretty common. I was not aware that there was a history tossup of him until the day of the tournament.

The editorship system that allowed this to happen should be changed in the future, so that editors are aware of used topics across categories in addition to just theirs. The eminent possibility of something like this happening isn't a disaster, but in a tournament that's receiving 62 packets I'm dead certain an art answer (or history answer) other than George Washington would have been available to replace one of those questions.

[Nun's puffs]

Oh yeah, there's definitely enough idolatry of certain political leaders to warrant art toss-ups on them.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

There's nothing inherently wrong with answers being repeated, as long as clues aren't repeated or they're not in the same packet. But yes, subject editors should be aware of what other people are writing.

[Vernon Lee Bad Marriage, Jr.]

Also sort of weird was the presence of both art and history questions on George Washington, although obviously I haven't been around long enough to know if there's any precedent to something like that.

I think art tossups on George Washington are pretty common. I was not aware that there was a history tossup of him until the day of the tournament.

The editorship system that allowed this to happen should be changed in the future, so that editors are aware of used topics across categories in addition to just theirs. The eminent possibility of something like this happening isn't a disaster, but in a tournament that's receiving 62 packets I'm dead certain an art answer (or history answer) other than George Washington would have been available to replace one of those questions.

Frankly, I don't see how this matters, and even if I had known about this I wouldn't have changed it.

EDIT: "This" being the art and history tossups on GW, not the editorship system, which should indeed be fixed in the future.

[theMoMA]

Agreed with Matt (Bollinger). For some reason, high schoolers and recent high school graduates seem to hold the nearly uniform opinion that it's always unacceptable for the same thing to come up twice in a tournament, even in a way that tests for two completely separate bodies of knowledge (such as history and art tossups on George Washington). This opinion does not line up with the common practice at college tournaments.

[Kenneth Widmerpool]

Also sort of weird was the presence of both art and history questions on George Washington, although obviously I haven't been around long enough to know if there's any precedent to something like that.

I think art tossups on George Washington are pretty common. I was not aware that there was a history tossup of him until the day of the tournament.

The editorship system that allowed this to happen should be changed in the future, so that editors are aware of used topics across categories in addition to just theirs. The eminent possibility of something like this happening isn't a disaster, but in a tournament that's receiving 62 packets I'm dead certain an art answer (or history answer) other than George Washington would have been available to replace one of those questions.

Frankly, I don't see how this matters, and even if I had known about this I wouldn't have changed it.

EDIT: "This" being the art and history tossups on GW, not the editorship system, which should indeed be fixed in the future.

It's only a problem if the two George Washington questions ended up in the same packet.

[Cheynem]

The second Guerrilla tournament (which obviously, being guerrilla, was not planned) had three tossups on George Washington--I THINK they were history, art, and religion?

[DumbJaques]

Also, an example of anti-prompt: can one seriously claim that Ajax committed seppuku?

I decided to make that part on _suicide_ and accept seppuku, since I preferred to include an easier world lit clue rather than a culture clue. Motive-wise, though, Ajax's actions are pretty similar.

I mean, Ajax DOES kind of commit seppuku, really. . .

Anyway,it shouldn't matter, because the whole idea of the anti-prompt is that you shouldn't be required to address a previous clue that by definition nobody knew.

[Kyle]

Agreed with Matt (Bollinger). For some reason, high schoolers and recent high school graduates seem to hold the nearly uniform opinion that it's always unacceptable for the same thing to come up twice in a tournament, even in a way that tests for two completely separate bodies of knowledge (such as history and art tossups on George Washington). This opinion does not line up with the common practice at college tournaments.

I remember a tournament where there was a geography tossup on Ghana that I had written and then, in another packet, a history tossup on the Ghana Empire. People complained about those answer lines occurring in the same tournament even though modern Ghana and historical Ghana don't even overlap territorially.

[Khanate]

The Taxonomy bonus that went Platyhelminthes/Annelida/Mollusca was frustratingly easy. Other than that and the tossup on Nazi Gold, I don't think there was much wrong.

[Cheynem]

What was wrong with the tossup on Nazi gold?

[grapesmoker]

I mean, Ajax DOES kind of commit seppuku, really. . .

He really doesn't. I know this may come across as pedantic, but that word has a special ritual meaning. Yes, he falls on his sword; he does not commit seppuku. I understand Sarah's motivation for using those clues, but still, this word has a specific meaning and it doesn't apply to Ajax.

[Bartleby]

What was wrong with the tossup on Nazi gold?

I suppose it might depend on the leniency of the underlining and the reader. This struck me as a question about things that have names, but for which a wide variety of acceptable answers existed (mine of "Gold", followed by "Gold that Nazis stole from Jews and various other groups in the 1930s and 1940s" was accepted for the clear knowledge that it was).

[tiwonge]

What was wrong with the tossup on Nazi gold?

I suppose it might depend on the leniency of the underlining and the reader. This struck me as a question about things that have names, but for which a wide variety of acceptable answers existed (mine of "Gold", followed by "Gold that Nazis stole from Jews and various other groups in the 1930s and 1940s" was accepted for the clear knowledge that it was).

Some sort of pointer on what to do with a "Jewish gold" answer would have been helpful. I ruled that incorrect in my room.

[cornfused]

What was wrong with the tossup on Nazi gold?

I suppose it might depend on the leniency of the underlining and the reader. This struck me as a question about things that have names, but for which a wide variety of acceptable answers existed (mine of "Gold", followed by "Gold that Nazis stole from Jews and various other groups in the 1930s and 1940s" was accepted for the clear knowledge that it was).

Some sort of pointer on what to do with a "Jewish gold" answer would have been helpful. I ruled that incorrect in my room.

Gold, (I prompted), Jewish gold, (I prompted again)... (I called time, neg five).

[Inkana7]

As the writer of the Nazi Gold question, I apologize for not thinking through acceptable answerlines enough, especially if that caused you to neg. In hindsight "Jewish gold" probably should have been acceptable, but the tossup dealt entirely with Jewish gold that the Nazis had stolen or dealt with in some way, so I felt that that distinction had to be made.

[jonah]

As the writer of the Nazi Gold question, I apologize for not thinking through acceptable answerlines enough, especially if that caused you to neg. In hindsight "Jewish gold" probably should have been acceptable, but the tossup dealt entirely with Jewish gold that the Nazis had stolen or dealt with in some way, so I felt that that distinction had to be made.

I, for my part, tried an answer of "gold stolen from the Jews", which was not accepted. (Though it was after the neg Greg just mentioned of "Jewish gold", so perhaps if the answer line had been better written my answer would have been irrelevant.)

I like the idea of the question, but I fear it may be one of those things that just don't translate very well to quizbowl. Perhaps just making the answer "gold", using essentially the same clues, would have been better?

[Bartleby]

In this case, I think the Nazi part was significant, because the gold wasn't stolen solely from Jews (though primarily from them).

[tiwonge]

In this case, I think the Nazi part was significant, because the gold wasn't stolen solely from Jews (though primarily from them).

Yes, this was my understanding when I ruled it wrong.

[Inkana7]

Yeah, that's how I wrote it. It was about Nazi-stolen gold, not Jewish gold. But in hindsight, ANSWER: _Gold_ would have worked much better.

[theMoMA]

But in hindsight, ANSWER: _Gold_ would have worked much better.

Very much so. It's an interesting idea hamstrung by the fact that the answer line required the players to x-ray the writer's head.

[Kyle]

I un-underlined "Nazi" in "Nazi gold." I am happy to report that, at least in my room, an answer of "gold" was given and accepted without incident. I think the person who answered gold exhibited plenty of relevant knowledge and deserved his ten points. I tried to adopt most of the fixes suggested in this discussion for frustrating questions. For the most part, I think they were either successful or not applicable to what happened in our tournament.

I do have a variety of factual errors to add to the growing list in this thread before Carsten posts the final version of the set for posterity. In particular:

* The UAR was formed in 1958, not 1956 as the bonus on Nasser claims.

* The Russians did not beat the French in the Battle of Borodino; in fact it was the other way around. The French all died after the battle on the way home.

* "Alawite" should be acceptable for "Alawi," who are more aptly described as a "Shi'ite offshoot" than a properly "Shia denomination" (nor, for that matter, can anybody be a "Shia denomination," since "Shia" is a plural noun rather than a singular adjective).

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

Whatever its grammatical function in Arabic, "Shia" is often used as an adjective in English. That's why we also say "shi'ite" and "shi'ites" when we want to refer to one (or multiple) adherents of that branch of Islam. Common usage in English should trump foreign rules.

[Kyle]

Whatever its grammatical function in Arabic, "Shia" is often used as an adjective in English. That's why we also say "shi'ite" and "shi'ites" when we want to refer to one (or multiple) adherents of that branch of Islam. Common usage in English should trump foreign rules.

Common usage in English is "Shi'ite," which is likewise not an Arabic word. That's what it should say. We really don't use Shi'a as an adjective in English. Anyway, that's not really what I was complaining about; the point is that I am questioning whether it is correct to refer to the Alawis as an orthodox Shi'ite group. They would technically consider themselves Shi'ites, but they do not follow many mainstream Shi'ite beliefs. Hence "Shi'ite offshoot."