2023 Chicago Open - Specific Question Discussion

[Shorts are comfy and easy to wear]

Please use this thread for comments/questions on specific questions.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

As usual, CO social science delivered a wide range of fresh and interesting concepts.

Somehow I don't think I've heard a tossup on portfolios before in quizbowl, so that was a nice approach to well-trodden financial topics; I do think it could have spent a bit more time describing the portfolio separation theorem, though, since you didn't get a lot of time to parse that clue before the name-drop of "efficient frontier." The tossup on autoregressive was a cool attempt to tap into serious econometric techniques, even if I stupidly negged with "dynamic" after thinking "what's a common linkable econ adjective you can put in front of some kind of autoregression model."

Two of the more standard tossups, The Shock Doctrime and Mary Douglas, tipped their hand a bit early in my opinion. My teammates and I were a bit faked out by the mention of Jeffrey Sachs (probably the most notable economist involved in shock therapy) in the second line of the former. For the latter, the name-drop of the cultural theory of risk (one of Douglas's most famous ideas) triggered a frustrating buzzer race out of nowhere.

Asking about the nationalization of politics was an excellent idea, but the early clues in that tossup seem like negbait for partisanship/polarization. Most of Larry Bartels's most widely-cited work is primarily about those topics, while the series of Donald Stokes papers referenced in the early clues and by the paper from the leadin seem like they're "about" party loyalty as much as nationalization of politics - for example, one of the Stokes papers is titled "Party Loyalty and the Likelihood of Deviating Elections." Andrew Hart voiced a similar opinion during our game.

As for non-social science, thanks to David for writing that Out of Africa tossup. I have absolutely no background in genomics, but have always found human genetic history and early migrations fascinating topics to read about; it was nice to see a question that rewarded this sort of non-expert engagement with the subject. Also, it let me beat Eric to a bio tossup, which was pretty sweet.

[modernhemalurgist]

I will stick to providing overly specific feedback on the 0.5/0.5 I'm confident in and say that I thought this set had some of the best math content of any set I’ve ever played (aside perhaps from Illinois Open). My only general criticism is about the distribution: the math had so much analysis and probability theory. This was to my benefit (and might be part of the reason why I enjoyed the math overall), and more analysis is something I’ve always wanted in quizbowl. But when 4/3 out of the 6/4 math questions I played that day are analysis/probability/statistics, that’s too much. Granted, I haven’t looked at the finals packets yet so maybe there’s some balance there.

Thoughts on particular questions:

Weierstrass Approximation Theorem - great idea, great execution; maybe dropped “subalgebras” a little early

Uniform convergence - should really have had “convergence in L-infinity” and “convergence in the uniform norm” in the answerline. Did feel a bit like “what kind of convergence is this” the whole time, which is tough because most kinds of convergence are really the same from the right perspective

Braids - feels hard but very cool

Lattices - would have loved a directed prompt on “spheres.” Also heard others complain about being too crystallographic rather than mathematical, but not sure how easy it is from that perspective

Borel - fun. Surprised at the breadth covered given how many things Borel names in analysis, but given how much analysis content there was overall this makes sense.

Surgery/genus/Whitney trick - works much better as a bonus than a tossup. I’m told surgery was originally the easy part, which is wild.

Entire - really solid idea for an answerline. It does seem like one of those that gets slightly harder at the giveaway because it takes away the opportunity of a description instead of giving the name

[touchpack]

I'll have more to say about this set later, but for now I wanted to nitpick the bonus part on somatic symptoms, specifically the sentence:

"Hypochondriacs are diagnosed with a disorder named for this type of symptom due to their distress over bodily sensations."

Hypochondriac/hypochondriasis is an outdated term in psychiatry due to the stigma it places on patients. There's an implicit vibe to labeling someone a "hypochondriac" where you think they're just making it up, and they're not worthy of medical attention/resources. This can lead to discompassionate healthcare where people who do really need help are brushed aside. Rather than brush people off as hypochondriacs, it's better to use "illness anxiety disorder" to describe someone with excessive worry about their health but an absence of physical symptoms (the most common use of the word "hypochondriac" in typical usage), and "somatic symptom disorder" to describe someone with physical symptoms with no apparent medical cause (and thus, a presumed psychiatric cause), and treat them accordingly.

Here's an example of a better way to word this:

"This term describes the physical symptoms that can arise from mental distress in a psychiatric condition that is grouped with illness anxiety disorder in the DSM-5."

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

Lattices - would have loved a directed prompt on “spheres.” Also heard others complain about being too crystallographic rather than mathematical, but not sure how easy it is from that perspective

the crystallographic restriction theorem is probably one of the easiest clues in that tossup (not sure about others but I embarassingly didn't even parse it as being about crystallographic point groups but I"m also space group pilled )


EDIT: as a nice bit of unhelpful bit of errata complaint, round 8 bonus 19 claiming uranium was a "radioactive ore" was not appreciated by a player/team who stupidly tried to play the bonus part in good faith by giving an "ore"

[Asterias Wrathbunny]

I divided the 18/18 other fine arts into the following:

Jazz 3/3
TU: trombone, four, Joe Henderson (all Pavao)
Bonus: flamenco/violin/Ginger Baker (Pavao), Basie/Hefti/1am Jump (Pavao), Machine Gun/Hampton/Coltrane (Perumalla)
World/Folk/Other Audio 3/3
TU: South Africa, harmonica, “Good Vibrations” (all Pavao)
Bonus: gamelan/jegog/monkey (Perumalla), electric guitar/kumbengo/Cuba, La Esmaralda/Vaganova/Delibes
Musicals 1/1
TU: the Kennedys (Zhou)
Bonus: Marcos/Salonga/Evita (Zhou)
Ballet 1/1
TU: Joffrey Ballet (Sheena Li)
Bonus: Kenneth MacMillan’s version of Romeo and Juliet/Royal Ballet /Liszt (Aseem Keyal)
Architecture 2/2
TU: Amiens Cathedral (Aseem Keyal), national parks (Pavao)
Bonus: ornament/Art Nouveau/Tribune Tower (Atkins), “Minnette da Silva” La Corbusier/mats/regionalism (Perumalla)
Film 4/4
TU: Uncle Boonmee (Morrison), movie camera (Morrison), Peter Greenaway (Morrison)
Bonus: Robby Müller/lighting/Paris, Texas, Baldwin/Riggs/Columbine, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp/Technicolor/The Red Shoes
Photography 2/2
TU: Hungary (Du)
Bonus: “Wolfgang Tillmans” Turner Prize/trees/The Cock (Perumalla), Salgado/Magnum Photos/vulture (Fernandez)
Design 1/1
TU: Louis Tiffany (Bentley/Pavao)
Bonus: Vignelli/chairs/airlines (Perumalla)
Other Visual Uncategorized 1/1
TU: David Wojnarowicz (Bentley), Rothko Chapel
Bonus: Frederick Hundertwasser/flags of New Zealand/Gaudí (Perumalla)

As you might have noticed, I swapped out one film tossup for the Rothko Chapel question, which I wanted to include in the set along with Wojnarowicz. I also included a second ballet bonus in with the other audio questions.

In terms of the audio, I think most would agree that the jazz is more challenging than past COs. Seeing the buzz distributions, I think I could have made trombone less difficult, but four and Henderson went as expected. Count Basie [e] only getting 50% sticks out, and One O’Clock Jump [m] getting 80% is a little baffling, given how I tried to make Basie as easy as possible. Otherwise, I’m mostly satisfied without how the bonuses played. Unfortunately, I don’t have a buzz distribution of “Good Vibrations” since it was played in finals, but I thought it was a great idea, as people have mentioned wanting popular music studies and related fields to be included more in sets. Sheena’s and Aseem’s ballet submissions were also great.

I definitely missed the mark on the Hungary photography question, as almost everyone buzzed on the last sentence of power. Sorry about that. The original version of the question had that sentence after power and I should have kept it there. I also am aware that there was a lack of core architecture content, both Amiens and national parks are difficult questions and lie outside core quizbowl architecture knowledge. I fortunately had a lot of film questions to work with, and Tim and Ani did an awesome job balancing eras, countries, etc. I regret that I couldn't include all the great film questions that were available (almost like we should expand the amount of film in quizbowl ).

I hope everyone enjoyed playing the questions and learned something new. I'm receptive to any constructive feedback, it really helps a newer editor like myself.

[Sima Guang Hater]

The stats bear out that the science for this tournament was brutally difficult, and this field wasn't particularly lacking in good science players (modulo Adam Silverman and John Settle, who probably would have significantly raised our power total). In addition to being difficult, there were a few pervasive problems in the cluing and construction of the questions.

Particularly for the difficulty, the bonuses often had punishing easy or medium parts for no reason. It seems like a lot to ask to know the full statement of the Cramer-Rao inequality in order to get 10 points on a bonus (knowing that it's one over the Fisher information on one side), or rate constants entirely from the Eyring equation (especially compared to knowing the difference between endo and exothermic, though amusingly people seemed to fumble this). The medium parts overshot quite a bit also - they asked you to distinguish alpha-2-adrenergic receptors from all the others, to remember which Hamburger-Hamilton stages correspond specifically to neurulation, to get gastrulation from just epiboly, etc.

Additionally, the hard parts seemed to really overshoot, though they're harder to get right. I haven't formally run a test, but from eyeballing, it seems like the hard parts in literature and history, in particular, have higher conversion than the hard parts in science. In chemistry, exactly 2 hard parts in the first 13 packets were converted all day, and the only hard part converted in the non-CS other science was the Borel-Cantelli lemmas (oddly with Borel being a TU elsewhere). At least part of this is the choice of answers - somehow despite all of us having written a ton of questions on van der Waals/virial adjacent content, you managed to find a hard part in the Boyle temperature bonus which had zero hits on aseemsdb before this tournament.

Part of this is a content issue, but part of it is that many of the bonus parts would unnecessarily gatekeep you by asking to solve something in order to get points (which is suboptimal in a 5-second bonus situation over a 12-hour day - the worst offender of this, of course, is that old CO question that asked you to read an EKG from a verbal description) or to ask for two answers when asking for one is enough. The Cramer-Rao one was the worst offender among the easy parts (as one doesn't expect 90% of teams to know the Cramer-Rao inequality in order to get there, and I'm guessing at least some teams guessed zero for points), but the one on tritium also really sucked for this, especially because you didn't specify whether it was beta-plus or beta-minus decay so you don't know whether to add or subtract one from the atomic number (and I'm fairly convinced the simple fact of "where helium 3 comes from" isn't easy enough a clue to make that a real easy part at this level). This also affected a bunch of the hard parts - reorganization energy is probably sufficient for a hard part, rather than requiring you to say reorganization energy over 4, there's no reason to ask for both the SMA and the aorta (SMA syndrome is a thing, and knowing the existence of the superior mesenteric artery and its associated syndrome is certainly hard enough at this level), etc.

In addition to the difficulty issues, there were several issues with ambiguous or unforgiving clues. An example is the tossup on amino acid starvation. The stringent response is activated by multiple forms of stress - I can see what you're hinting towards when you call an uncharged tRNA an "unligated molecule", but since ppGpp is synthesized in response to, e.g. heat shock in a Rel-dependent manner[1], that clue doesn't necessarily get you there. Then when you explicitly name the stringent response, the prompt you give is "starvation of what?", which is entirely not useful (maybe "starvation caused by deficiency of what metabolites" or something would have been ideal). Another is the tossup on rogue waves - the clues seem to be unique, but the Peregrine breather is frequently called the Peregrine soliton[2]. While it does have rogue-wave-like properties, it seems difficult to get to rogue waves from solitons on a prompt, and it seems like the question would work just as well as a question on solitons (also accepting rogue waves) with the same clues. The tossup on splicing names the part of the bioinformatics pipeline that's used for differential gene expression (CuffDiff) and then later says "count-based" with no prompt on transcription or gene expression. Furthermore, splice isoforms are also products of transcription, meaning that several of these clues are correct for transcription. For the itching tossup (the one I took the most personally, for obvious reasons), primary biliary cholangitis (the disease with anti-mitochondrial antibodies) can present with jaundice (a neg made by at least two players in the field), and the polymorphic eruption of pregnancy itches but I don't think the way that's clued really gets you there (the clue about aquagenic pruritis is quite good, though, since it's in the name of the disease).

There were also a handful of cases where a clue is pinned by a very specific technicality, or by clues that the field isn't going to have any hope of actually knowing. The tossup on esters is pretty bad here - the clue about ester anesthetics only distinguishes them from amides with the words "more often", which is not only incredibly specific, but ambiguously phrased (do you mean if I inject an equal number of people with lidocaine and benzocaine, the latter will get LAST more often, or is the total incidence of LAST from ester anesthetics higher?). The bonus part on population structure throws a chaff grenade full of paper clues at you, with the only real nucleus of a clue being that the answer increases the genomic inflation factor - I said linkage disequilibrium, which also does this, and which is a key part of the test outlined in the paper in the bonus leadin (the null hypothesis is no LD in that test). The bonus on codon bias, while an excellent topic and one that I had to wrestle with a lot during my PhD, was clued in such a way as to be very difficult to get there - just tell us what it is, you don't have to use a bunch of math.

Worse, there were at least a few examples I caught of outright incorrect clues. The twin-arginine translocator moves molecules across the thylakoid membrane (presumably because of that whole endosymbiosis thing), though the question doesn't accept membranes of specific organelles[3]. Guy Bertrand's lab explicitly has synthesized gold(I) complexes with CAACs, though the question says they're gold(0) complexes[4]. The adverse effects listed of anesthetics aren't an allergy[5]. Uranium isn't an ore - the ore is pitchblende.

Also linear momentum should have been prompted for 4-momentum, and wobble should have been prompted for codon degeneracy. I think the prompts could have been better overall, but those are the only ones I can think of at the moment.


[1]PMID: 32176689
[2]Kibler, B., Fatome, J., Finot, C. et al. The Peregrine soliton in nonlinear fibre optics. Nature Phys 6, 790–795 (2010).
[3]PMID: 11331909
[4]PMID: 19343084
[5]It's not Ig-mediated

APPENDIX: More comments

More specifics:
BIOLOGY:
- Cilia tossup had no powers, probably could have added clues about ciliates or something
- Already mentioned the amino acid starvation TU. I like this halofunginone clue, though
- Already mentioned the splicing TU, but looking up all the clues seems to indicate to me that transcription should at least be a prompt
- Endometrium TU was fantastic
- Richard Yu tells me the leadin to this substantia nigra TU is unbuzzable, though if I remembered any neuroanatomy I should have had something on the second clue. You're asking a lot at game speed though
- The microtubules question is good. At game speed when you say Ndc80 the instinct is to buzz with kinetochore, I'm glad I didn't
- Esophagus+Stomach tossup is solid
- Already mentioned the ambiguity in the esters TU, but the rest of the clues are really excellent content.
- PRDM9 is way too difficult, unless you actively study that field
- PNES should accept pseudoseizures, even though its a deprecated term

CHEMISTRY
- I like this enolates TU, though I'm not sure how useful that leadin is
- The deprotection TU is my favorite chemistry TU I heard all day, still kicking myself for not processing the TFA clue correctly. The solvent-free and cubane TUs were also very interesting.
- The allyl TU could have used a little massaging. The Claisen rearrangement clue seems kind of obfuscated, and it seems better to just say that BLANK vinyl ethers undergo the Claisen rearrangement
- Ireland's dropped too early in this Claisen TU
- The Stork-Eschenmosher clue in the terpene TU was well-chosen. The rest of that TU was also very good
- Part on freezing should accept vitrification, since that's what you do in cryo-EM

PHYSICS
- I thought the second and third clues of the Thomas/Fermi TU were harder than the first, and in fact this probably prevented me from buzzing
- anyons bonus part needed a prompt on two-dimensional

OSCI
- Probably should have just accepted control systems for controllers (unfortunate neg for Billy there)
- Braids was very difficult, also dropping the name Alexander tempts negs with "polynomial"
- Borel showed up twice

[modernhemalurgist]

To add another example of the "solve something" part, the bonus which essentially asked for the lowest non-prime power other than 1 and 6 felt really hard to come up with on the spot. Between the time it took to process that's what it wanted, and to search through the first 10 numbers and set aside those that were excluded, I would never have gotten to 10 in 5 seconds (at least that late in the day). Seems like just asking for prime powers would have been essentially the same question but without the gimmick.

[rdc20]

At least after the Padre Pio clue, I think that stigmata should have been an acceptable answer for the tossup on the wounds of Jesus, rather than just being promptable.

[gyre and gimble]

A few scattered thoughts:

This tournament did a great job of indicating when specific terms were required, but the myth question on "thralls" notably did not. Most translations of the Grottasongr, as far as I can tell, refer to Fenja and Menja as either maids or slaves (the two answers I gave, before and after a prompt). I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for "thralls," and I might have remembered that term if I gave myself enough time before buzzing. The problem was that the question didn't warn me about it. I think it's best practice for writers to tell players that something specific is required if rough equivalents to the answer are not going to be accepted.

I loved the tossup on Melusine. Bummer that it was in the finals packets.

Thank you to whoever clued Joanna Newsom in the Lola Montes question.

Can we not write questions like this?

A painting by this artist inspired the title of a Norman Bryson history that opens by analyzing its usage of a minister’s daughter as a model. Margaret Oppenheimer correctly attributed a painting originally believed to be by this artist and which depicts a couple through a broken window. This artist started a craze for “ancient style” dresses with a painting whose foreground is dominated by a figure modeled on Greek (*) spear throwers. A female student of this artist hunches over a cardboard folder in a painting once thought to be by him. The book cover for My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a portrait attributed to this artist’s workshop of a woman in a white gown. The correct attribution of Marie-Denise Villers’s (“vee-LAYR’s”) The Portrait of Charlotte du Val d’Ognes (“DUN-yuh”) came after MET curators realized this artist boycotted the 1801 Paris Salon. For 10 points, name this Neoclassical artist of The Intervention of the Sabine Women.

I think there are a lot of things wrong with this question, and they seem symptomatic of an instinct to overcorrect for an easy answerline by using overly difficult clues.

• First, the two leadin clues are about obscure art historians that no one is going to buzz on. It seems like a huge stretch to expect anyone to remember the opening of a Norman Bryson book (one that isn't even listed on his Wikipedia page). And I'd be shocked if anyone in quizbowl has heard of Margaret Oppenheimer.

• Second, the visual descriptions are not very precise. The description of the work in the second sentence makes it seem like the couple in the window are the subject of the painting, when in reality they are tiny figures in the background. In the next sentence, "modeled on Greek spear throwers" seems like a meaningless phrase. What does a Greek spear thrower look like? What does it mean for a figure to be modeled on one? For example, does that imply that the figure is holding a spear? Why not say "a figure holding a spear on his finger tips, ready to throw"?

• Third, the late clues are obscure. Marie-Denise Villers has never come up in quizbowl before, at least based on a quick search on QBReader.

• Fourth, based on the buzzpoint data, the only clue people were able to buzz on before the cliff on the final title was the Mossfegh book cover. It seems non-ideal that a quasi-literature clue is the only buzzable thing in a painting tossup.

• (The "ancient style" clue seems OK, although it still seems hard to connect that to "a la antique" at game speed.)

Quizbowlers--even the CO field--are not that good at David. In the future, I'd love to see us ease up on the hyper-difficult questions on core topics and make sure we aren't obfuscating unnecessarily by eschewing precise visual descriptions, even if it's not a visual element-oriented question.

[Borrowing 100,000 Arrows]

Can we not write questions like this?

A painting by this artist inspired the title of a Norman Bryson history that opens by analyzing its usage of a minister’s daughter as a model. Margaret Oppenheimer correctly attributed a painting originally believed to be by this artist and which depicts a couple through a broken window. This artist started a craze for “ancient style” dresses with a painting whose foreground is dominated by a figure modeled on Greek (*) spear throwers. A female student of this artist hunches over a cardboard folder in a painting once thought to be by him. The book cover for My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a portrait attributed to this artist’s workshop of a woman in a white gown. The correct attribution of Marie-Denise Villers’s (“vee-LAYR’s”) The Portrait of Charlotte du Val d’Ognes (“DUN-yuh”) came after MET curators realized this artist boycotted the 1801 Paris Salon. For 10 points, name this Neoclassical artist of The Intervention of the Sabine Women.

I think there are a lot of things wrong with this question, and they seem symptomatic of an instinct to overcorrect for an easy answerline by using overly difficult clues.

• First, the two leadin clues are about obscure art historians that no one is going to buzz on. It seems like a huge stretch to expect anyone to remember the opening of a Norman Bryson book (one that isn't even listed on his Wikipedia page). And I'd be shocked if anyone in quizbowl has heard of Margaret Oppenheimer.

• Second, the visual descriptions are not very precise. The description of the work in the second sentence makes it seem like the couple in the window are the subject of the painting, when in reality they are tiny figures in the background. In the next sentence, "modeled on Greek spear throwers" seems like a meaningless phrase. What does a Greek spear thrower look like? What does it mean for a figure to be modeled on one? For example, does that imply that the figure is holding a spear? Why not say "a figure holding a spear on his finger tips, ready to throw"?

• Third, the late clues are obscure. Marie-Denise Villers has never come up in quizbowl before, at least based on a quick search on QBReader.

• Fourth, based on the buzzpoint data, the only clue people were able to buzz on before the cliff on the final title was the Mossfegh book cover. It seems non-ideal that a quasi-literature clue is the only buzzable thing in a painting tossup.

• (The "ancient style" clue seems OK, although it still seems hard to connect that to "a la antique" at game speed.)

Quizbowlers--even the CO field--are not that good at David. In the future, I'd love to see us ease up on the hyper-difficult questions on core topics and make sure we aren't obfuscating unnecessarily by eschewing precise visual descriptions, even if it's not a visual element-oriented question.

Ganon can address this more thoroughly, but I'll just say that this tossup started off life as a somewhat ill-advised tossup on The Portrait of Charlotte du Val d’Ognes, which everyone agreed was too difficult post-playtesting. I think this tossup was an attempt to keep the kernel of that tossup idea, while improving conversion. It certainly could have used some more middle clues, but I think this was probably just a product of Ganon having to downgrade the difficulty of this tossup within a few weeks of the tournament.

[Krik? Krik?! KRIIIIK!!!]

Can we not write questions like this?

A painting by this artist inspired the title of a Norman Bryson history that opens by analyzing its usage of a minister’s daughter as a model. Margaret Oppenheimer correctly attributed a painting originally believed to be by this artist and which depicts a couple through a broken window. This artist started a craze for “ancient style” dresses with a painting whose foreground is dominated by a figure modeled on Greek (*) spear throwers. A female student of this artist hunches over a cardboard folder in a painting once thought to be by him. The book cover for My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a portrait attributed to this artist’s workshop of a woman in a white gown. The correct attribution of Marie-Denise Villers’s (“vee-LAYR’s”) The Portrait of Charlotte du Val d’Ognes (“DUN-yuh”) came after MET curators realized this artist boycotted the 1801 Paris Salon. For 10 points, name this Neoclassical artist of The Intervention of the Sabine Women.

I think there are a lot of things wrong with this question, and they seem symptomatic of an instinct to overcorrect for an easy answerline by using overly difficult clues.

• First, the two leadin clues are about obscure art historians that no one is going to buzz on. It seems like a huge stretch to expect anyone to remember the opening of a Norman Bryson book (one that isn't even listed on his Wikipedia page). And I'd be shocked if anyone in quizbowl has heard of Margaret Oppenheimer.

• Second, the visual descriptions are not very precise. The description of the work in the second sentence makes it seem like the couple in the window are the subject of the painting, when in reality they are tiny figures in the background. In the next sentence, "modeled on Greek spear throwers" seems like a meaningless phrase. What does a Greek spear thrower look like? What does it mean for a figure to be modeled on one? For example, does that imply that the figure is holding a spear? Why not say "a figure holding a spear on his finger tips, ready to throw"?

• Third, the late clues are obscure. Marie-Denise Villers has never come up in quizbowl before, at least based on a quick search on QBReader.

• Fourth, based on the buzzpoint data, the only clue people were able to buzz on before the cliff on the final title was the Mossfegh book cover. It seems non-ideal that a quasi-literature clue is the only buzzable thing in a painting tossup.

• (The "ancient style" clue seems OK, although it still seems hard to connect that to "a la antique" at game speed.)

Quizbowlers--even the CO field--are not that good at David. In the future, I'd love to see us ease up on the hyper-difficult questions on core topics and make sure we aren't obfuscating unnecessarily by eschewing precise visual descriptions, even if it's not a visual element-oriented question.

Thanks for the feedback, Stephen. As Caleb mentioned, this question first was a really cool submitted tossup on ~The Portrait of Charlotte du Val d’Ognes~. I had encountered the painting before when reading about Neoclassical art, and I read about Marie-Denise Villers being one of the leading female Neoclassical artists of the time, so I wanted to give it a shot as it was. The tossup played really tough, and the only way I could downconvert it without losing some of the clues there was doing David, Neoclassicism (which I was less enthusiastic about because of how easily a movement can be nailed down from vibes or how loosely a movement is defined), or France (which I didn't like). Because David was so prolific in his time, I wanted to write a question that focused on his relationship with women in art and as coworkers as well as his (mis)attribution in art.

David is a very idiosyncratic artist, and I struggled to balance "meaningful descriptions of the scene at hand" with "not being transparent. Take Intervention of the Sabine Women for instance. I struggled to describe the scene without getting to "women stopping two armies from attacking each other" - which is just the story of the myth. I tried to choose clues that would show up if you read an academic papers and criticism of the painting while trying to blend in visual clues where I could. For instance, the main woman in white in the painting is one of the Bellegarde sisters who were frequent models of David. I thought dropping a French name super early should have been avoided, so I used the Bryson clue to lock it down. I thought the story of a prominent Met painting being attributed and the art historian who did would be cool second-line material.

Similarly, the main male figure of the painting is someone I thought people would remember most about the painting, but is hard to describe without immediately revealing who he is: he has a shield with the wolf suckling the twins on it, but I thought that got to "Roman origin story painting" too quickly. David modeled the painting on bronze Greek statues like this one of spearthrowers. I thought that the statues were pretty iconic and could be visualized with the phrase "spear thrower."

I try to be as conservative with visual clues as possible because sometimes they don't land relative to how much space they take up. You're right I could have specified the couple in the broken glass more, but I thought it was evocative enough to pass. It's something I've gotten feedback on for other questions recently that I'm going to try and do better with. In general, I try to weave visual clues together with their context to make sure I'm not writing detailbowl, but that's hit or miss sometimes.

I like to clue paintings in the context that people see them. I thought that the Mossfegh clue was really iconic - and fit the theme since it was also a painting that has long been misattributed. In hindsight, Villers wasn't as canon as I thought she was and so the middle of the question wasn't good.

The feedback I got from playtesting was that the VFA tossups actually skewed somewhat tough, so this question along with the Spain and Washington Crossing the Delaware TU's were written to try and balance that out with more deep cuts on core topics. I think these two other questions had a good pyramid, but I admit this one could have been better.

[touchpack]

Two more specific comments:

-Please don't use words like "important" or "famous" in questions in lieu of actual, buzzable clues. Specifically, I'm talking about the bonus part on the hydroxyl radical that says "Name this most important oxidant in the Earth's atmosphere". I have no idea what "most important" is supposed to actually mean here. On the clock, I guessed "oxygen", since that's a chemical important in a huge fraction of all oxidation reactions on the planet. While obviously the lead-in makes it wrong, it's much, much better to give concrete clues instead of subjective/ambiguous ones.

Count Basie [e] only getting 50% sticks out, and One O’Clock Jump [m] getting 80% is a little baffling, given how I tried to make Basie as easy as possible.

This is entirely unsurprising to me, as quizbowl seems to have decided that One O'Clock Jump is by far the easiest thing to know about Basie--which has always been a big personal disconnect for what I learned/knew about Basie before quizbowl and what I learned after starting to play quizbowl. People who play jazz music in school tend to learn much more about later Basie arrangements than his original 1930s stuff, and it was awesome to see my personal knowledge of Sammy Nestico and Basie - Straight Ahead come up.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

Marie-Denise Villers has never come up in quizbowl before, at least based on a quick search on QBReader.

She's definitely someone who could, based on growing recognition -- she, e.g., has a chapter in art museum gift shop book Broad Strokes: 15 Women who Changed Art and History (In That Order). Though I agree her best-known painting is still not well-known enough for a tossup even at CO, using it to clue a man who overshadowed her also doesn't sit quite right with me; perhaps a hard part asking to name the painting's subject or its artist could have worked at this difficulty level (though that'd require "bonus-ifying" the submission and bumping off a submitted bonus or two).

[gyre and gimble]

Marie-Denise Villers has never come up in quizbowl before, at least based on a quick search on QBReader.

She's definitely someone who could, based on growing recognition -- she, e.g., has a chapter in art museum gift shop book Broad Strokes: 15 Women who Changed Art and History (In That Order). Though I agree her best-known painting is still not well-known enough for a tossup even at CO, using it to clue a man who overshadowed her also doesn't sit quite right with me; perhaps a hard part asking to name the painting's subject or its artist could have worked at this difficulty level (though that'd require "bonus-ifying" the submission and bumping off a submitted bonus or two).

I'm not saying she should never come up. The bonus hard part approach seems fine. To me, the issue here was that half the tossup was about her, including the entire pre-FTP sentence, at the expense of more buzzable clues and better pyramidality.

Separately, I think we could view a David tossup that clues women artists charitably as subverting the standard tossup on David; this question, for example, succeeded in properly attributing the painting in question and drawing attention to the idea that David's reputation was built in part on the work of women.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

With the exception of "Marguerite" (which I stand by, both because it's in the title of an Arnold poem, and because I think it is only respectful to remember the actual names of the ""muses"" of notable male authors)

I think this could have played better if it didn't go out of its way to contravene the ACF rules by outright rejecting "Margaret"; the pronunciations are similar enough in enough accents/dialects (the IPA broad transcription ['maɹ.gə.ɹɪt] would fly for either name in most conversations I'd have in Mid-Atlantic American English) that the spirit of the ACF vowel rule (a thing I generally dislike) seems applicable. Is there a different person named "Margaret" in the works clued, such that the contrast must be made, a la Monet/Manet in Visual Arts? If so, a "spell it" directive might have worked better?

[etotheipi]

With the exception of "Marguerite" (which I stand by, both because it's in the title of an Arnold poem, and because I think it is only respectful to remember the actual names of the ""muses"" of notable male authors)

I think this could have played better if it didn't go out of its way to contravene the ACF rules by outright rejecting "Margaret"; the pronunciations are similar enough in enough accents/dialects (the IPA broad transcription ['maɹ.gə.ɹɪt] would fly for either name in most conversations I'd have in Mid-Atlantic American English) that the spirit of the ACF vowel rule (a thing I generally dislike) seems applicable. Is there a different person named "Margaret" in the works clued, such that the contrast must be made, a la Monet/Manet in Visual Arts? If so, a "spell it" directive might have worked better?

There is someone named Margaret in an Arnold poem ("The Forsaken Merman") that was tossed up as part of the Margaret commonlink at ICT this year. I thought it plausible that people would neg with that, but you're right about the "spell it" directive. I'm sorry that I didn't think that fully through.

[meebles127]

I'll have more to say about this set later, but for now I wanted to nitpick the bonus part on somatic symptoms, specifically the sentence:

"Hypochondriacs are diagnosed with a disorder named for this type of symptom due to their distress over bodily sensations."

Hypochondriac/hypochondriasis is an outdated term in psychiatry due to the stigma it places on patients. There's an implicit vibe to labeling someone a "hypochondriac" where you think they're just making it up, and they're not worthy of medical attention/resources. This can lead to discompassionate healthcare where people who do really need help are brushed aside. Rather than brush people off as hypochondriacs, it's better to use "illness anxiety disorder" to describe someone with excessive worry about their health but an absence of physical symptoms (the most common use of the word "hypochondriac" in typical usage), and "somatic symptom disorder" to describe someone with physical symptoms with no apparent medical cause (and thus, a presumed psychiatric cause), and treat them accordingly.

Here's an example of a better way to word this:

"This term describes the physical symptoms that can arise from mental distress in a psychiatric condition that is grouped with illness anxiety disorder in the DSM-5."

Hard agree with this.

Mod edit: Please note that, as per board rules, "[Q]uoting another post and providing no additional information ("empty-quoting") is forbidden. - JP