Science (2018 Sun God)

[a bird]

I decided to make this thread since I've heard some discussion of the science in this set (on Discord and in personal messages). I'm going to discuss the physics in detail, but I also put some thoughts about bio and chem in the general discussion thread. I've told Will some of my thoughts about the physics in this set already, but I'm sharing them publicly to help other writers.

Here's a summary: the science in this set was a very solid effort with some inconsistency. Difficulty swings were a serious issue that I've already brought up, and I think we need to have a larger scale discussion about 'regular' difficulty or 'medium' difficulty, or whatever this tournament was supposed to be.

Here are some specific comments about what was good and what could have been done better in physics.

Topic selection: I think the physics in this set covered a good range of topics, including relevant things from courses and modern research that people find interesting and important. This largely extends to specific clues; any issues I had with the clues were due to phrasing and buzzability rather than relevance. There was a lot of classical mechanics and E&M (two very important topics) as well as electronics; there was not a lot of course based quantum mechanics (not counting QFT, which is an advanced course or scattering, which is normally a grad quantum II topic). There was a fair amount of highly applied physics (for example radiation/fNIR/positrons) but this is not a big issue as those topics deserve to come up.

Next, execution: My main issue with the physics was the tossups on technical answerlines where it was hard to pin down the answer. The reason these question are frustrating is that as a knowledgeable player, you recognize the clues but don't know what to buzz with. Here are the most problematic instances:

Laser power: Many of these clues just made my think of intensity (which is what I ended up negging with) or amplitude (e.g. the amplitude of the RF pulse for the q switching clue). I know that Will tried to make the clues unique to power, but since the concepts are so connected it's hard to figure out which one is being asked for. I like the creativity here, but a tossup on lasers would probably work better at this difficulty.

Canonical ensemble: a large chunk of this question used clues that contrast the canonical ensemble with the grand canonical ensemble, relying on players to figure out that you were contrasting the answer with the grand canonical ensemble. It's pretty hard to make this kind of inference at game speed, especially if the moderators don't follow your emphasis instructions very well. I ended up waiting on this question to try to figure out which ensamble it was referring to, only to lose the tossup to someone who I'm pretty was just guessing.

I didn't play the _diamagnetism_ tu, but I think one of its clues suffers from a similar issue (referring to paramagnetism and asking for the opposite effect). In general, this seem like a much harder question/answerline than the wave-particle duality question in finals 2.

_Stephan-Boltzman_ suffers a bit from this since it's so closely related to other black body law (Planck).

Now some tossups that didn't have this issue:

_Cross section_ could suffer from this, but is somewhat better since it is the main quantity used to describe the scattering physics in the question. (It's a pretty hard answerline though.)

_Plasma_, _circuit_s, and _meson_s were all better because there's a lot less ambiguity about what you might be referring too with those clues.

Bonuses were pretty good with some fairly challenging hard parts. A few parts were kind of pedantic or easy to screw up even with a lot of experience (Boltzmann factor, pendulum period, electric susceptibility). As I said in the other thread, I enjoyed the bonuses on the whole, but in many cases the hard parts (and some medium parts) seemed like regs+. I can provide examples of what I thought was too hard for medium or regular difficulty.

[aseem.keyal]

Bonuses were pretty good with some fairly challenging hard parts. A few parts were kind of pedantic or easy to screw up even with a lot of experience (Boltzmann factor, pendulum period, electric susceptibility). As I said in the other thread, I enjoyed the bonuses on the whole, but in many cases the hard parts (and some medium parts) seemed like regs+. I can provide examples of what I thought was too hard for medium or regular difficulty.

This is a great post with a ton of very helpful feedback! I'll break up my response into the portions I agree, disagree, and am mixed on (big disclaimer: the entirety of my knowledge in any non-CS area was acquired through self-study for quiz bowl):

Agree:

Laser power

This tossup also strikes me as hard, and while Will did receive this feedback from Billy and tried to tone it down, both him and I think he probably didn't go far enough. We are going to try to rewrite this to be easier, possibly by using a different answer line.

diamagnetism

I agree that the clue about paramagnetism seems like a suboptimal clue, we are going to try to replace this.

Disagree:

Canonical ensemble, Stephan-Boltzman

In my opinion, this tossup does test the ability of the player to keep the different thermodynamic ensembles straight, which I think is a worthwhile enough topic. To be clear, do you think this answer line is unworkable because of this issue, or are just objecting to the specific clues used? In my mind, there's a fair amount of precedent in quiz bowl to ask about one topic/system/equation/etc in a closely related set (such as a tossup on particle in a box or another QM system).

pendulum period

I feel like this bonus part (which should be the middle part if I'm interpreting the bonus correctly), works fine at this level. Granted, I have only taken three physics courses (AP Physics and an intro), but this equation and other basic kinematic equations were basically rote memorization by the end (this might be easier because I have taken so few physics courses). Additionally, it's fairly easy to use dimensional analysis to answer this bonus part, since there are only two quantities involved, both with pretty simple units.


Mixed:

Boltzmann factor, electric susceptibility

These are more challenging computation/expression parts, and while I thought they seemed reasonable at the time, Will and I are willing to defer to expert opinion that they are too challenging.


Finally, some thoughts on the biology and chemistry. Empirically, it appears that several of the bonuses overshot the mark (molecular orbitals as an easy part, streaking as a medium part, aqueous and organic phases as a medium part, the list goes on). We're looking through each of these tough bonuses and are working to tone them down. Additionally, I've seen several people comment that they performed well on the chemistry tossups, but didn't do as well on the bonuses. I think this is a result of our flawed production process. Jason and I didn't edit many of the tossups on reactions and functional groups as rigorously as we wanted to, and as a result the tossups rewarded rote knowledge of reactions more than the bonuses did. As a whole though, I do think the biology and chemistry asked about a mix of topics with a decent amount of variation in approach. I think the biology was generally better in this regard, and that seems to be reflected in the slightly higher conversion that is more in line with the rest of the bonuses in the set.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

I've revised all of the questions Aseem discussed above. Thanks for the helpful feedback, Graham.

[a bird]

Disagree:

Canonical ensemble, Stefan-Boltzmann

In my opinion, this tossup does test the ability of the player to keep the different thermodynamic ensembles straight, which I think is a worthwhile enough topic. To be clear, do you think this answer line is unworkable because of this issue, or are just objecting to the specific clues used? In my mind, there's a fair amount of precedent in quiz bowl to ask about one topic/system/equation/etc in a closely related set (such as a tossup on particle in a box or another QM system).

I think the answer is fine, the lead-in is probably good and the last two lines are good. My issue is with the clues that reference the grand canonical ensemble, since I had a hard time figuring out which one was being asked about. I knew that the question was talking about the canonical and grand canonical ensembles, and I remembered that the grand canonical ensemble allows for particle exchange with its reservoir; I just wasn't sure which one the question was asking for. Maybe this happened because I'm not good at following questions at game pace, maybe it happened because my moderator didn't emphasize the correct works, I don't really know. I think all the clues are interesting, when I can read the question and digest everything, but at game pace the middle two clues didn't play well for me. This is especially problematic because someone who doesn't really know any stat mech can easy figure out that the answer is one of the ensembles, then gets points for guessing the most well known one.

pendulum period

I feel like this bonus part (which should be the middle part if I'm interpreting the bonus correctly), works fine at this level. Granted, I have only taken three physics courses (AP Physics and an intro), but this equation and other basic kinematic equations were basically rote memorization by the end (this might be easier because I have taken so few physics courses). Additionally, it's fairly easy to use dimensional analysis to answer this bonus part, since there are only two quantities involved, both with pretty simple units.


Mixed:

Boltzmann factor, electric susceptibility

These are more challenging computation/expression parts, and while I thought they seemed reasonable at the time, Will and I are willing to defer to expert opinion that they are too challenging.

I worded my last paragraph poorly. The too hard bonus parts and pedantic bonus parts should have been two seperate ideas. I don't think the three parts mentioned are too hard, I just had a negative experience missing all three for silly reasons. For the Boltzmann factor, I gave the whole thing instead of just the exponential,* and for the relative electric constant I gave 1-x remembering the formula backwards. For the simple pendulum period I flipped g and l (subconsciously thinking of frequency, I think). I don't think you need to remove these parts, but in future I would be careful with bonuses of this nature.

*I get that the instructions clearly state the exponential, but it's pretty easy to miss one word in a bonus, especially if the moderator is speaking sort of softly.

[vinteuil]

pendulum period

I feel like this bonus part (which should be the middle part if I'm interpreting the bonus correctly), works fine at this level. Granted, I have only taken three physics courses (AP Physics and an intro), but this equation and other basic kinematic equations were basically rote memorization by the end (this might be easier because I have taken so few physics courses). Additionally, it's fairly easy to use dimensional analysis to answer this bonus part

I worded my last paragraph poorly. The too hard bonus parts and pedantic bonus parts should have been two separate ideas. I don't think the three parts mentioned are too hard, I just had a negative experience missing all three for silly reasons. For the simple pendulum period I flipped g and l (subconsciously thinking of frequency, I think). I don't think you need to remove these parts, but in future I would be careful with bonuses of this nature.

I think that allowing 10 seconds for players to do a little dimensional analysis (whether to check their work or to figure it out) makes this OK, although you might question if that's how you want players to be getting points.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

pendulum period

I feel like this bonus part (which should be the middle part if I'm interpreting the bonus correctly), works fine at this level. Granted, I have only taken three physics courses (AP Physics and an intro), but this equation and other basic kinematic equations were basically rote memorization by the end (this might be easier because I have taken so few physics courses). Additionally, it's fairly easy to use dimensional analysis to answer this bonus part

I worded my last paragraph poorly. The too hard bonus parts and pedantic bonus parts should have been two separate ideas. I don't think the three parts mentioned are too hard, I just had a negative experience missing all three for silly reasons. For the simple pendulum period I flipped g and l (subconsciously thinking of frequency, I think). I don't think you need to remove these parts, but in future I would be careful with bonuses of this nature.

I think that allowing 10 seconds for players to do a little dimensional analysis (whether to check their work or to figure it out) makes this OK, although you might question if that's how you want players to be getting points.

In fact, we did do this for two of those bonuses (Boltzmann and pendulum)! We didn't do the same for the "x + 1" part since I think that one's a lot less complicated, but we might as well be consistent.

[vinteuil]

I think that allowing 10 seconds for players to do a little dimensional analysis (whether to check their work or to figure it out) makes this OK, although you might question if that's how you want players to be getting points.

In fact, we did do this for two of those bonuses (Boltzmann and pendulum)! We didn't do the same for the "x + 1" part since I think that one's a lot less complicated, but we might as well be consistent.

Yes, this is why I used the present tense and not the conditional.

[a bird]

I think that allowing 10 seconds for players to do a little dimensional analysis (whether to check their work or to figure it out) makes this OK, although you might question if that's how you want players to be getting points.

I think I agree with this—the main reason I missed those parts was not using the extra time very well. My problems with these parts are:
a) They play very differently from almost all other questions. It's hard to switch from quickly answering to carefully thinking about whether your answer fit the minutiae of the question.
b) Because they are easy to mess up with a small mistake, there will almost certainly be a fraction of players who know the content being tested pretty well but miss the bonus part because they made a minor mistake. It's pretty frustrating to be in this camp.

Quizbowl is not an exam; you don't have a chance to look at the questions a second time or check your work, and moderators can't give partial credit. The all or nothing nature of bonus parts made these questions unpleasant (at least for me).

[Wartortullian]

a) They play very differently from almost all other questions. It's hard to switch from quickly answering to carefully thinking about whether your answer fit the minutiae of the question.
b) Because they are easy to mess up with a small mistake, there will almost certainly be a fraction of players who know the content being tested pretty well but miss the bonus part because they made a minor mistake. It's pretty frustrating to be in this camp.

I generally agree with this argument, but in this case, I think it's fine---I say this as a physics major. Someone with a memory of the problem and enough physical intuition and should be able to see that (a) the period should increase with l and decrease with g, and (b) since this is a second-order system, the angular frequency should be the square root of the "feedback" term (g/l in this case). The only tricky part of this is remembering the factor of 2 pi, which is already given in the question. It shouldn't even require dimensional analysis (though that's a nice sanity check).

It sucks to miss something due to a small mistake, but I don't think this question poses any more of a risk than say, having to differentiate between "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" and "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding."

[a bird]

Matt, I agree with your reasons why someone should be able to get that question (though I'm not sure that makes it a good medium part), but you're talking past my point. In fact your solution (which is basically what I tried to do) requires two separate steps plus a check that the dimensions work. This introduces multiple points where a small mistake can get you the wrong answer, even if you have a good method to solve the problem. Even with 10 seconds time pressure can increase the likelihood of mistakes. In contrast, remembering the title of a work is a one step process—there's nothing to "work out" when deciding between "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" and "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding."

[Judson Laipply]

I'll only give more detailed comments about the astronomy because that's what I'm actually good at.


The velocity tossup desperately needs middle-late clues. Nobody who hasn't buzzed by "dispersion" is likely to buzz before km/s. Something about redshift or radial velocity or whatever.

Also the first clue really doesn't help. It's not used by... anyone that I can think of? And I know a lot of people into distance ladder stuff.

However, none of that excuses half the field being unable to convert "kilometers per second" into "velocity"


Jupiter tossup was mostly good. The migration clue might have been helped by dropping "Grand Tack" (unless god help me that is stock now in which case fuck quizbowl for ruining good clues). Also L4 and L5 swarms seems early.



The galaxy formation tossup has some very wrong clues.

The clue about it being the largest process treated by spherical collapse is wrong. Any sort of DM halo/structure formation thing can be treated like that (to varying degrees of accuracy, but this is a quizbowl question, not a debate).

Similarly, positive quantum fluctuations is where all of the interesting stuff happens. The negative ones just become voids as the positive fluctuations eat up their remaining matter to become DM halos, galaxy clusters, galaxies, stars, etc. "First Gravity bound structures" is so ambiguous that if you didn't specifically say quantum fluctuations, that might also be an acceptable answer for that clue.

Also I think the prompt instruction to not accept or prompt on large scale structure formation is a bit uncharitable since all structure formation is believed to be hierarchical and so anything that leads to small scale structure formation must have happened because of large scale structure formation.

Second clue in that tossup is great though because baryonic physics + Millenium (a DM-only sim) does point pretty clearly towards galaxy formation. I would remove SQL data from that clue though unless SQL isn't referring to the database. It would be like saying in the first clue that he used png images or something.

[wcheng]

To add on to this discussion on computational bonus parts, perhaps we could look at a bonus part that (in retrospect) I think accomplished its goal well? In particular, I am referring to the CS bonus part on implementing inorder traversal of a binary tree:

[10] Three answers required. Binary trees can be searched using three different traversals: pre-, post-, and in-order. Give the order of the three lines of pseudocode for an [emphasize] ​in-order traversal in terms of the two recursive calls on the left and right children and the printing of the current node.
ANSWER:​ left, current, right​​ [or recursive call to left​​ node, print ​current​​ node, recursive call to ​right​​ node; accept any answer that includes the underlined words in the correct order]

I think this was the first time I was asked to write pseudocode in a tournament and I was initially dismayed when I heard this bonus part, but I quickly realized that 1) it was something I had done very often in my introductory CS classes and 2) it is just a matter of putting three operations (which are given!) in the right order. Therefore, while this task definitely required some computational thinking (remembering what inorder traversal is and how it is defined in terms of these three operations), it seems pretty doable (and indeed, there was a healthy 23% conversion rate).

I really know nothing about physics beyond a small amount of mechanics that I've quickly forgotten since high school, so I won't comment on the content of the question itself, but it seems that these physical derivation questions (for example, this Boltzmann factor one) are much more difficult on a purely mechanical level even if you're just memorizing the formula, because the relationships between the different elements have many more potential variations (multiply or divide? add or subtract? negative sign? powers? etc. etc. etc.) than just giving three things in the correct order.

Personally, I'm somewhat skeptical of these kinds of questions because they can be quite a bit jarring to players after a long time spent thinking associatively, but I definitely see their value in terms of testing applied knowledge that one would gain in a classroom. The task we have as writers and editors is to exercise player empathy and consider these questions from the perspective of a player who has just spent a minute listening to your last tossup doing an entirely different kind of thinking and not as the writer staring at a formula on a computer screen. Reducing the complexity of the computational task (and limiting the number of things players have to juggle in working memory!) seems like a good way of doing this.

[touchpack]

Writing application-based science bonus parts strikes me as somewhat like the science equivalent of writing score clues in music tossups--it's incredibly difficult to do well for someone not versed in the field, but a tournament with none of them is, IMO, a bit lacking. It's important to walk the line between "players cannot do this at game speeds" and "the bonus part is easily guessable without specialized knowledge". In my opinion, that psuedocode bonus fails to walk this line, because there are only 6 permutations of possible answer, which is too guessable. Think of it this way: let's say the pseudocode is otherwise a perfectly calibrated hard part, and precisely 10% of the field has the knowledge to get the correct answer. Then of the other 90% of the field that's guessing, 1/6th of them will get the bonus part by pure luck for a total conversion rate of 25%--over 50% of the teams who get it right are literally just guessing! I find this unacceptably high. If there were 4 operations to be ordered (and thus 24 permutations), I think the bonus part would have been much better. (but I know nothing about computer science, and can't judge the substance of the exact situation chosen by the writer)

One thing I like to do from time to time is write in a "fill-in-the-formula" bonus part, where you can really only make a guess if you're scientifically literate and can think of things that might go in the answer space. Here's a recent example:

[10] Written in differential form using vector calculus, Faraday's law states that one operation applied to the
electric field equals the negative of another operation applied to the magnetic field. Give both operations in
order, starting with the one applied to the electric field.
ANSWER: the curl​ of the electric field AND the partial time derivative​ of the magnetic field [accept del cross
in place of "curl"; prompt on "partial derivative" in place of "time derivative"; do not accept or prompt on "del"
or "gradient"]

I think Weijia is spot-on where he says it's important to reduce the number of things the player has in their working memory--in this case, the player just has to imagine Faraday's law in their head, and spell it out.

[Sima Guang Hater]

Want to strongly concur with Billy above about the utility of application-based bonus parts, but will note that when you write application-based bonus parts, its important to understand how people actually absorb that information. The comparison to score clues is very apt. An example of such a part that's well done is the Faraday's law bonus part, since that's a well-known formula that people have to memorize and use.

An older tournament I played had this bonus part:

[10] The theorem in group theory named for Lagrange states what relation between the order of a group and the order of each of its subgroups?
ANSWER: the order of the subgroup divides the order of the group, or, the order of the group is divisible by the order of the subgroup; accept equivalents

Which I thought was also a great idea, because it requires a basic statement of a well-known theorem in a field.

However, sometimes this impulse can go a little bit too far, and unless you're in the field its hard to tell when that happens. The best example I can think of is this one from an old CO, which required you to diagnose someone based on a verbal description of an EKG. Unfortunately EKGs are never interpreted or discussed verbally in that manner, so its very hard for even someone who reads EKGs to get that answer.

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

To add on to this discussion on computational bonus parts, perhaps we could look at a bonus part that (in retrospect) I think accomplished its goal well? In particular, I am referring to the CS bonus part on implementing inorder traversal of a binary tree:

[10] Three answers required. Binary trees can be searched using three different traversals: pre-, post-, and in-order. Give the order of the three lines of pseudocode for an [emphasize] ​in-order traversal in terms of the two recursive calls on the left and right children and the printing of the current node.
ANSWER:​ left, current, right​​ [or recursive call to left​​ node, print ​current​​ node, recursive call to ​right​​ node; accept any answer that includes the underlined words in the correct order]

I think this was the first time I was asked to write pseudocode in a tournament and I was initially dismayed when I heard this bonus part, but I quickly realized that 1) it was something I had done very often in my introductory CS classes and 2) it is just a matter of putting three operations (which are given!) in the right order. Therefore, while this task definitely required some computational thinking (remembering what inorder traversal is and how it is defined in terms of these three operations), it seems pretty doable (and indeed, there was a healthy 23% conversion rate).

I really know nothing about physics beyond a small amount of mechanics that I've quickly forgotten since high school, so I won't comment on the content of the question itself, but it seems that these physical derivation questions (for example, this Boltzmann factor one) are much more difficult on a purely mechanical level even if you're just memorizing the formula, because the relationships between the different elements have many more potential variations (multiply or divide? add or subtract? negative sign? powers? etc. etc. etc.) than just giving three things in the correct order.

Personally, I'm somewhat skeptical of these kinds of questions because they can be quite a bit jarring to players after a long time spent thinking associatively, but I definitely see their value in terms of testing applied knowledge that one would gain in a classroom. The task we have as writers and editors is to exercise player empathy and consider these questions from the perspective of a player who has just spent a minute listening to your last tossup doing an entirely different kind of thinking and not as the writer staring at a formula on a computer screen. Reducing the complexity of the computational task (and limiting the number of things players have to juggle in working memory!) seems like a good way of doing this.

I don't know if other people had this experience but I had encountered pre post and in-order traversal exclusively in a high school math class that covered various discrete math topics and had no idea how to put things in pseudocode.

Additionally the Boltzmann factor example is a poor example in this case as the exponent can be done with basic/fundamental knowledge of thermo if you understand how some combination of units/the implication of kT/how to make exponentials worth less than one

[warum]

I really liked the science in this set! The "logistic function" tossup was one of my favorites. I also appreciated the clues on laboratory or computational techniques.
One minor issue about clue placement - I powered "crystal field theory" just because I know spinel is a mineral, but I know very little about crystal field theory. Maybe that clue could be moved later in the question.

[Bensonfan23]

Some comments on the science in this set, apologies if any of these have already been mentioned or discussed already. In general, I enjoyed the set, though some of the bio questions had non-unique clues or wordings that made them less than ideal. I'll list those and some other comments below.

Round 1:
Is there any reason that "dipole" is explicitly not prompted on? Graham buzzed with this and expected to be prompted before saying dipole moment, but was just negged. Looking at past tossups on this answerline, pretty much all of them prompt on "dipole" alone, and I don't see any others that explicitly say not to do so.

The keystone species tossup was a cool idea. I enjoyed it.

Round 2:
I was not a fan of this neurons tossup. The first clue seems perfectly fine and unique, although anecdotally I very nearly negged with T cells because of the similarly named (and I think more well-known?) FOX-P3 marker. The second clue though is problematic. Wnt is one of the most common morphogen gradients throughout an organism during development, playing a role in everything from axial patterning in embryos to stem cell differentiation in intestinal crypts, mediating the EMT in cancer cells, and numerous other prominent roles. So, while this clue may be true about neuronal projections, its almost un-buzzable. Cluing something like ephrin/netrin/semaphorin-3 signaling during axonal growth would be a much better clue instead of this one. The rest of the tossup seems fine, although the wording in the third clue could probably also stand to differentiate between astrocytes and neurons more concretely (at least reference Gage's specific 1998 paper).

Round 3:
The light in plant biology tossup was a pretty cool idea and seems pretty well-written, I enjoyed it.

Round 4:
The adsorption bonus seems bizarrely easy compared to the rest of the set.

The CS bonus in this round seemed to have two hard parts given the way heaps was clued.

Round 5:
The SYBR clue in the PCR tossup is a hose as currently worded. SYBR dyes like SYBR-Safe are commonly used in place of Ethidium bromide for visualizing gels. While yes, this is exactly how you visualize the results of PCR, this is done by performing gel electrophoresis, and if you buzz on the word "SYBR" like I did you don't really hear the key part saying that the tossup doesn't just want gel electrophoresis.

Similarly, the wording of the DIBAL clue in the aldehydes tossup doesn't really distinguish between nitriles and aldehydes and presumably just relies on nitriles being mentioned in the first reaction.

The canonical ensemble tossup was another cool idea that I enjoyed.

Round 6:
The powermarking on the kinases tossup seems really stingy. I get not wanting to give power at the name of the Philadelphia chromosome, but saying something about the Abl-Bcr kinase or acute myeloid leukemia couldn't hurt to at least give power to someone with a bit more knowledge on that subject than just the name.

The wording in the mesons tossup was really confusing. I get what the question was trying to do, but just saying "they're not quarks" before going on to describe multiple clues about prominent discoveries involving quarks may not be the best way to go about this.

This CS bonus on red-black trees seemed really difficult. We still 20'd it, but I'd argue that the first and last parts are both really hard for this level, especially the last part, which not only asks for 3 answers, but also has a really confusing pronoun.

Round 7:
The paramecium bonus in this round seemed pretty difficult relative to the rest of the biology in the set.

Round 8:
The pixels tossup seemed like a pretty interesting way of writing a question on this topic.
Bredt's rule is one of those rules that you learn in organic chem without it almost
ever being named. This bonus may be more friendly to people who have taken these classes if it just asked for "bridgehead carbons" or something similar. Not a major issue or anything, but just something worth considering going forward (the disparity in the amount of named things in organic vs. the amount of named organic chem things in quizbowl).

Round 9:
I really wasn't a fan of the only biology tossup in this round being an extremely basic tossup on giraffes. Furthermore, as for the specific clues in this tossup, I'm skeptical how many of these would actually be learned in a biology/zoology course versus just like watching an animal show/documentary/whatever. While this kind of animal science is obviously important and fine to ask about, this tossup as written seems like it would be better used as an other academic tossup and not entirely in place of the standard biology question.

I'm not sure I like the pronoun "molecules" for the radical tossup versus something like "these species". This was at least confusing for Graham and I in our match, though Graham still converted it.

I enjoyed the CpG islands bonus and it seemed pretty difficulty appropriate for this level.

[a bird]

Round 1:
Is there any reason that "dipole" is explicitly not prompted on? Graham buzzed with this and expected to be prompted before saying dipole moment, but was just negged. Looking at past tossups on this answerline, pretty much all of them prompt on "dipole" alone, and I don't see any others that explicitly say not to do so.

"Dipole" doesn't refer to a quantity, but rather an (idealized) object. The two answers are in different categories, so it doesn't make very much sense to prompt on "dipole" when the question is asking for a quantity. On the other hand, I can see why this would be frustrating, and there is a case to be made for being generous with prompts even when answers don't fit the logic of the question.

From a physical point of view, the question is talking about molecules and their vibrational modes. Molecules can have more complicated charge distributions than dipoles, but certain molecular transitions can be understood by looking at the dipole moment. The dipole moment of an arbitrary charge distribution is a different concept from a dipole.

[Bensonfan23]

Round 1:
Is there any reason that "dipole" is explicitly not prompted on? Graham buzzed with this and expected to be prompted before saying dipole moment, but was just negged. Looking at past tossups on this answerline, pretty much all of them prompt on "dipole" alone, and I don't see any others that explicitly say not to do so.

"Dipole" doesn't refer to a quantity, but rather an (idealized) object. The two answers are in different categories, so it doesn't make very much sense to prompt on "dipole" when the question is asking for a quantity. On the other hand, I can see why this would be frustrating, and there is a case to be made for being generous with prompts even when answers don't fit the logic of the question.

From a physical point of view, the question is talking about molecules and their vibrational modes. Molecules can have more complicated charge distributions than dipoles, but certain molecular transitions can be understood by looking at the dipole moment. The dipole moment of an arbitrary charge distribution is a different concept from a dipole.

This is fair, and I get that there's a difference. I was more just pointing out that negging an answer that was more "dipole... moment" seemed a bit harsh, and not quite on par with something like an "accept gravitational waves, do not accept or prompt on 'gravity waves'" scenario that deserves explicitly calling out something in the answerline.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

I really wasn't a fan of the only biology tossup in this round being an extremely basic tossup on giraffes. Furthermore, as for the specific clues in this tossup, I'm skeptical how many of these would actually be learned in a biology/zoology course versus just like watching an animal show/documentary/whatever. While this kind of animal science is obviously important and fine to ask about, this tossup as written seems like it would be better used as an other academic tossup and not entirely in place of the standard biology question.

I want to push back against the idea that the only biology that is worth asking about in the "biology" category is stuff you necessarily learn in a biology class. It's not like we filled the entire distribution with a bunch of "extracurricular" stuff, and even this lone tossup isn't exactly "Cat Facts" or what have you. Let's scrutinize it:

9. NASA studies of cerebral hemodynamics have compared the tight skin around the legs of these animals to a “gravity suit” for its properties of edema prevention. It is contested whether there are one or four species of these animals, but their subspecies rarely interbreed and all have distinct pelage patterns, such as the neighboring “reticulated” and “Rothschild’s” types. Among all animals with a four-chambered stomach, this one has the heart with the greatest mass. These animals frequently use their dental pads to consume (*) acacia (“uh-KAY-shuh”) leaves. A blacksmith strengthening his arms is analogized to these animals continuously stretching one of their body parts to reach leaves in a classic example of Lamarckian (“luh-MAR-kee-in”) theory. Because they are ungulates with spots, these animals were historically also called camelopards (“kuh-MEL-uh-pards”). For 10 points, name these African animals with very long necks.
ANSWER: giraffes [accept any subspecies of the genus Giraffa, such as reticulated giraffe or Rothschild’s giraffe; prompt on ruminants; prompt on ungulates before “ungulates”; prompt on camelopards before “camelopards”]
<Biology, WA>

Looking at this tossup, every single early clue - with the possible exception of the namedrop of Rothschild's giraffe - pertains to serious scientific research involving giraffes. The fact that giraffes have a gigantic heart in order to pump blood up their necks is, as the question notes, pretty important in research on hemodynamics. That's a niche subject, for sure, but I was confident enough that general knowledge about ruminants would be widespread enough that I'd be able to write some early-middle clues about this and get people to buzz. Lo and behold, they did - every single clue in this tossup was buzzed on. One player from Florida even buzzed on the lead-in about NASA research!

I'm sympathetic to the frustration that can come when a tossup in one of your main categories is something of a swerve from what you prepare for, but it seems unreasonable to have an expectation that every tossup is going to be a fastball on "core" things. This tournament had lots of tossups on important lab techniques, key concepts in ecology, and both human and molecular biology. Having a single question that isn't straight down the middle of the strike zone isn't unreasonable.

Also - come on, space giraffes!

[Bensonfan23]

I really wasn't a fan of the only biology tossup in this round being an extremely basic tossup on giraffes. Furthermore, as for the specific clues in this tossup, I'm skeptical how many of these would actually be learned in a biology/zoology course versus just like watching an animal show/documentary/whatever. While this kind of animal science is obviously important and fine to ask about, this tossup as written seems like it would be better used as an other academic tossup and not entirely in place of the standard biology question.

I want to push back against the idea that the only biology that is worth asking about in the "biology" category is stuff you necessarily learn in a biology class. It's not like we filled the entire distribution with a bunch of "extracurricular" stuff, and even this lone tossup isn't exactly "Cat Facts" or what have you. Let's scrutinize it:

9. NASA studies of cerebral hemodynamics have compared the tight skin around the legs of these animals to a “gravity suit” for its properties of edema prevention. It is contested whether there are one or four species of these animals, but their subspecies rarely interbreed and all have distinct pelage patterns, such as the neighboring “reticulated” and “Rothschild’s” types. Among all animals with a four-chambered stomach, this one has the heart with the greatest mass. These animals frequently use their dental pads to consume (*) acacia (“uh-KAY-shuh”) leaves. A blacksmith strengthening his arms is analogized to these animals continuously stretching one of their body parts to reach leaves in a classic example of Lamarckian (“luh-MAR-kee-in”) theory. Because they are ungulates with spots, these animals were historically also called camelopards (“kuh-MEL-uh-pards”). For 10 points, name these African animals with very long necks.
ANSWER: giraffes [accept any subspecies of the genus Giraffa, such as reticulated giraffe or Rothschild’s giraffe; prompt on ruminants; prompt on ungulates before “ungulates”; prompt on camelopards before “camelopards”]
<Biology, WA>

Looking at this tossup, every single early clue - with the possible exception of the namedrop of Rothschild's giraffe - pertains to serious scientific research involving giraffes. The fact that giraffes have a gigantic heart in order to pump blood up their necks is, as the question notes, pretty important in research on hemodynamics. That's a niche subject, for sure, but I was confident enough that general knowledge about ruminants would be widespread enough that I'd be able to write some early-middle clues about this and get people to buzz. Lo and behold, they did - every single clue in this tossup was buzzed on. One player from Florida even buzzed on the lead-in about NASA research!

I'm sympathetic to the frustration that can come when a tossup in one of your main categories is something of a swerve from what you prepare for, but it seems unreasonable to have an expectation that every tossup is going to be a fastball on "core" things. This tournament had lots of tossups on important lab techniques, key concepts in ecology, and both human and molecular biology. Having a single question that isn't straight down the middle of the strike zone isn't unreasonable.

Also - come on, space giraffes!

Okay, I admittedly included that commentary more to start a discussion on this than anything else because I stand by my opinion that in no round should a question like this be the only biology tossup. And I'm not saying its a bad question, its perfectly fine, in fact were I not having a really bad day all around, I'm pretty sure I would have also buzzed on the controversy about the number of species of giraffes, which I'm fairly confident I've read an article about a few years ago. I'm just saying it shouldn't be the biology question. To expound on this complaint, it seems more so that a different category would better reflect the way both in which giraffe's (and more generally, this kind of animal question) are studied and in which they are encountered non-academically (nature documentaries, Animal Planet-esque shows, etc.). As an example of what I'm talking about, take this tossup on parrots from round 8 of This Tournament is A Crime.

One of these animals named Sparkie Williams inspired an opera by Michael Nyman. Andrew Mack and Debra Wright discovered that one species of these animals, named for Pesquet, feeds entirely on the pulp of fig fruits. Irene Pepperberg started The Alex Foundation to study the cognition of these animals. Alwin Bully included one of these animals on his design for the flag of Dominica; that one of these is the (*)) siserou. One of the largest of these zygodactylous birds is unusually terrestrial and is called the kakapo. Another species of these animals, which have been filmed using Maori stone tools with their beaks, are called keas. These members of family Psittacidae include rosellas and cockatoos. Lorikeets and macaws are other examples of, for 10 points, what kind of birds, one of which was owned by Long John Silver in Treasure Island?

This was categorized as Geo/CE/Other, and yet more than half of this question were clues that could plausibly be called biology. I'm not saying this question is perfect either, but I'm saying that you could very easily reward the exact same knowledge as the giraffe question in a similar manner to this one by including the substantive clues that people are actually buzzing on, and replacing the more "niche" science with something like geography or even a non-biology science like physics in which people may also encounter giraffes. Questions like this are fun and can be interesting, but this way, you aren't cannibalizing the academic biology distribution with a non-standard topic that feels more appropriate elsewhere in distributions like OtherAcademic, General Knowledge, or OtherScience (which also has a precedence for including miscellaneous science questions like this and would probably be where I would put this in retrospect).

[Ike]

The argument against the question isn't that you don't learn this material from class, but encounter it in a pop culture way. For example, I would buzz on the clue about hearts since I have been to a bar trivia competition with Mike Sorice that includes this fun fact, not because I have read papers on hemodynamics. I suspect that is true for most people as well.

I agree that not all questions need to be fastballs on core subjects, but I think part of the problem here is that your proposed alternative method of learning something sounds terrible; you honestly come off as pretentious when you say "pretty important in research on hemodynamics" instead of just saying something more down to earth - ie, I just wanted to ask a question about animals-- which should tell you that, maybe it belongs in some place other than biology!

[naan/steak-holding toll]

I agree that not all questions need to be fastballs on core subjects, but I think part of the problem here is that your proposed alternative method of learning something sounds terrible; you honestly come off as pretentious when you say "pretty important in research on hemodynamics" instead of just saying something more down to earth - ie, I just wanted to ask a question about animals-- which should tell you that, maybe it belongs in some place other than biology!

I'm not going to pretend for a second that I think people are more likely to know things about giraffe hearts from research on blood flow as they are from, say, a more "popular science" encounter with the subject. That would be ludicrous, and indeed that's why the clues are arranged in the order that they are in. But I'm very curious as to what this "proposed alternative method of learning" that I have outlined" is. Is it reading articles about scientific research pertaining to unique aspects of anatomy, or to a controversy in species classification, or to animal behavior? I'm not going to pretend for a second that I'm a bio major, because I didn't even take AP Bio, but all of those sound like methods of engaging with "biology" knowledge, as generated by the scientific community, to both me and our head editor Jason, who is a biochem major.

I think this question could go in other science as well, for sure, but it seems to me that this is a question of whether you're taking a restricted or expansive view of what can be asked about in the category. Throughout this tournament, we've generally leaned toward the expansive view and this has meant there were a few questions in each category that leaned a bit outside the more restrictive purview of other tournaments (in this case, literally one in the bio distribution - unless someone is going to come and say my bonus part on pancreatic cancer isn't real science because I learned about the topic from reading medical news sites). I'll concede as editors that we probably shouldn't be particularly frustrated that there is some backlash about this decision of ours, but we'll definitely defend it and plan on sticking by it.

EDIT: Addendum - I should note that I find some of the criticisms here to be similar to points Ike made in this thread, and I'd like to think that we actually followed his advice: for every question on "giraffes" or whatnot, we had a raft of questions on things that academic biology majors do across a wide range of subject areas, from keystone species to PCR. I guess the MUT tossup on "camels" was other science and our question was in biology, but the general point stands.



(in any case, I'm not going to be doing any science for next year's EFT or head editing any "main event" collegiate tournaments after that, so nobody will have to suffer through my apparently bizarre, pretentious, and aggravating approach to tournament construction - unless you choose to suffer through one of my side events)

[Jason Cheng]

Aside from all this debate, I just thought that it was the same type of acceptable tossup as, say, one of those wacky tossups on tangrams in the math category of EFT 2016, except much more buzzable (with a much more fluid distribution of buzzes--every clue in this tossup was buzzed on at one mirror or another), and in a category which is more robust to consumption a single question slot (1/1 a round) than math (0.5/0.5 a round if you're lucky and get almost too much math).

[Mike Bentley]

(in any case, I'm not going to be doing any science for next year's EFT or head editing any "main event" collegiate tournaments after that, so nobody will have to suffer through my apparently bizarre, pretentious, and aggravating approach to tournament construction - unless you choose to suffer through one of my side events)

I hope this decision to stop head editing isn't based on criticism of your questions. I, for one, have very much enjoyed the sets you've edited in the past two years and would be sad to not play more of them.

[Carlos Be]

Aside from all this debate, I just thought that it was the same type of acceptable tossup as, say, one of those wacky tossups on tangrams in the math category of EFT 2016, except much more buzzable (with a much more fluid distribution of buzzes--every clue in this tossup was buzzed on at one mirror or another), and in a category which is more robust to consumption a single question slot (1/1 a round) than math (0.5/0.5 a round if you're lucky and get almost too much math).

In addition, everything in the EFT 2016 tossup on tangrams is much further removed from what could be considered mathematical or even scientific than anything in the tossup on giraffes.

[Ike]

Aside from all this debate, I just thought that it was the same type of acceptable tossup as, say, one of those wacky tossups on tangrams in the math category of EFT 2016, except much more buzzable (with a much more fluid distribution of buzzes--every clue in this tossup was buzzed on at one mirror or another), and in a category which is more robust to consumption a single question slot (1/1 a round) than math (0.5/0.5 a round if you're lucky and get almost too much math).

Yeah, but I, as the author of that tossup, had no pretentions about what he was doing with that tossup. If you are interested in hearing out my full rationale on why tournaments of difficulty between HS and college should have "recreational mathematics," and why it's okay to have recreational mathematics in general, I am more than willing to discuss that since I think it's a bit misapplied here. In any case, when your defense of a tossup involves saying "come on, space giraffes," it comes off poorly since it appears to the audience at large that the question writer is more interested in summarizing academic findings under catchy phrases than actually testing knowledge (that might be less, um, clickbaity than "space giraffes".) Furthermore, the defense of that blood clue just does not empirically line up with the evidence about blood in giraffes -- the blood pressure thing is a quizzing knowledge chestnut -- it's come up 6 times on Jeopardy, including once on Final Jeopardy, if you search the Jeopardy clue Archive, for example.

As an aside, just because "someone buzzed on every clue of a tossup" or similar doesn't mean the tossup is necessarily good. Yes, we want to have a smooth distribution of buzzes, but sometimes it's important to ask why those buzzes occurred. I really do believe that in this case the giraffes TU veered into the GK category way too much for its buzzes. Conversely, just because no one buzzed on the first three lines of a tossup at some Regionals doesn't mean it's necessarily bad either.

EDIT: for clarity

[Cody]

For what it's worth, I see no problem with rewarding zoo visits, animal shows from TV, and/or other methods of engagement in the biology distribution, all of which are legitimate. This is moreso fine at difficulties below ACF Regionals.

I can't speak to the lead-in, but I thought the rest of the clues were fine and on a descending gradient of difficulty.

[aseem.keyal]

Sorry for taking a while to respond to your criticism, Ryan. There's a lot of good stuff here:

Is there any reason that "dipole" is explicitly not prompted on? Graham buzzed with this and expected to be prompted before saying dipole moment, but was just negged. Looking at past tossups on this answerline, pretty much all of them prompt on "dipole" alone, and I don't see any others that explicitly say not to do so.

I disagree with this critique for the reasons Graham mentioned above, and also from a quick search, it seems most tossups on "dipole" (the system) accept "dipole moment" (the quantity) but not vice versa, for whatever reason.

Round 2:
I was not a fan of this neurons tossup. The first clue seems perfectly fine and unique, although anecdotally I very nearly negged with T cells because of the similarly named (and I think more well-known?) FOX-P3 marker. The second clue though is problematic. Wnt is one of the most common morphogen gradients throughout an organism during development, playing a role in everything from axial patterning in embryos to stem cell differentiation in intestinal crypts, mediating the EMT in cancer cells, and numerous other prominent roles. So, while this clue may be true about neuronal projections, its almost un-buzzable. Cluing something like ephrin/netrin/semaphorin-3 signaling during axonal growth would be a much better clue instead of this one. The rest of the tossup seems fine, although the wording in the third clue could probably also stand to differentiate between astrocytes and neurons more concretely (at least reference Gage's specific 1998 paper).

I agree with this criticism, we'll replace those clues.

The adsorption bonus seems bizarrely easy compared to the rest of the set.
The CS bonus in this round seemed to have two hard parts given the way heaps was clued.

This bonus was edited down from the original (which had aqueous and organic phases as a medium part). I personally don't think it's too easy, and the stats don't show it to be substantially easier than any other chem bonus. I also think that saying "contrasted with the stack" is enough to make heaps a medium part at this level, as that is something that in my experience is encountered by first year (at the latest, second year) computer science students.

The SYBR clue in the PCR tossup is a hose as currently worded. SYBR dyes like SYBR-Safe are commonly used in place of Ethidium bromide for visualizing gels. While yes, this is exactly how you visualize the results of PCR, this is done by performing gel electrophoresis, and if you buzz on the word "SYBR" like I did you don't really hear the key part saying that the tossup doesn't just want gel electrophoresis.

Similarly, the wording of the DIBAL clue in the aldehydes tossup doesn't really distinguish between nitriles and aldehydes and presumably just relies on nitriles being mentioned in the first reaction.

Round 6:
The powermarking on the kinases tossup seems really stingy. I get not wanting to give power at the name of the Philadelphia chromosome, but saying something about the Abl-Bcr kinase or acute myeloid leukemia couldn't hurt to at least give power to someone with a bit more knowledge on that subject than just the name.

These critiques seem valid to me, I'll try to pin down those clues and extend the power marking on the kinases tossup.

The wording in the mesons tossup was really confusing. I get what the question was trying to do, but just saying "they're not quarks" before going on to describe multiple clues about prominent discoveries involving quarks may not be the best way to go about this.

I disagree with this critique, I feel like the clues about Richter and Ting and those about Cronin and Fitch point fairly straightforwardly to the J/psi meson and kaons.

This CS bonus on red-black trees seemed really difficult. We still 20'd it, but I'd argue that the first and last parts are both really hard for this level, especially the last part, which not only asks for 3 answers, but also has a really confusing pronoun.

So for this bonus, the third part was actually intended to be the medium part. Tree traversals are learned in basically every data structure course, and I think testing knowledge learned by first year CS majors is fine as a medium part (however, as pointed out, the answer line wasn't fully fleshed out for some mirrors, and that was my mistake).

Round 7:
The paramecium bonus in this round seemed pretty difficult relative to the rest of the biology in the set.

This bonus is certainly one of the harder biology bonuses, but I don't think it's beyond the pale.

Round 8:
Bredt's rule is one of those rules that you learn in organic chem without it almost ever being named. This bonus may be more friendly to people who have taken these classes if it just asked for "bridgehead carbons" or something similar. Not a major issue or anything, but just something worth considering going forward (the disparity in the amount of named things in organic vs. the amount of named organic chem things in quizbowl).

Good idea, I'll change the answer line to "bridgehead carbons".

Round 9:
I really wasn't a fan of the only biology tossup in this round being an extremely basic tossup on giraffes. Furthermore, as for the specific clues in this tossup, I'm skeptical how many of these would actually be learned in a biology/zoology course versus just like watching an animal show/documentary/whatever. While this kind of animal science is obviously important and fine to ask about, this tossup as written seems like it would be better used as an other academic tossup and not entirely in place of the standard biology question.

This has been discussed a fair bit, I'm open to replacing it if we can write something more appropriate.

I'm not sure I like the pronoun "molecules" for the radical tossup versus something like "these species". This was at least confusing for Graham and I in our match, though Graham still converted it.

Sure, we can change this.

[Wartortullian]

I disagree with this critique for the reasons Graham mentioned above, and also from a quick search, it seems most tossups on "dipole" (the system) accept "dipole moment" (the quantity) but not vice versa, for whatever reason.

Perhaps because it's generally correct to say that, for example, a polar molecule "has a dipole moment," but not the revese (e.g. "the dipole of KBr is 10.5 D" rather than "the dipole moment of KBr is 10.5 D").

[Sima Guang Hater]

The SYBR clue in the PCR tossup is a hose as currently worded. SYBR dyes like SYBR-Safe are commonly used in place of Ethidium bromide for visualizing gels. While yes, this is exactly how you visualize the results of PCR, this is done by performing gel electrophoresis, and if you buzz on the word "SYBR" like I did you don't really hear the key part saying that the tossup doesn't just want gel electrophoresis.

2. Cross contamination between multiple runs of one type of this technique is prevented by using UNG. GAPDH and ACTB can act as endogenous controls in this technique. A step in this technique follows the general guidelines of a length just above or below 20 and a GC content of about 50 percent. In a variant of this technique, the chosen baseline and threshold affect C-sub-t, which is known as the crossing point or take-off point; that variant of this technique can use TAMRA or (*) SYBR dyes to report progress. Fluorescent reporter probes are used in a quantitative variant of this technique known as its “real-time” type. The high temperatures of the thermocycler used in this technique require an enzyme from Thermus aquaticus known as Taq. For 10 points, name this technique that uses stages of denaturation, annealing, and elongation to amplify DNA.

What that clue is describing is SYBR green fluorescing during real-time PCR (not visualizing the results at the end), which is entirely distinct from gel electrophoresis and isn't what that clue is describing.

[Bensonfan23]

The SYBR clue in the PCR tossup is a hose as currently worded. SYBR dyes like SYBR-Safe are commonly used in place of Ethidium bromide for visualizing gels. While yes, this is exactly how you visualize the results of PCR, this is done by performing gel electrophoresis, and if you buzz on the word "SYBR" like I did you don't really hear the key part saying that the tossup doesn't just want gel electrophoresis.

2. Cross contamination between multiple runs of one type of this technique is prevented by using UNG. GAPDH and ACTB can act as endogenous controls in this technique. A step in this technique follows the general guidelines of a length just above or below 20 and a GC content of about 50 percent. In a variant of this technique, the chosen baseline and threshold affect C-sub-t, which is known as the crossing point or take-off point; that variant of this technique can use TAMRA or (*) SYBR dyes to report progress. Fluorescent reporter probes are used in a quantitative variant of this technique known as its “real-time” type. The high temperatures of the thermocycler used in this technique require an enzyme from Thermus aquaticus known as Taq. For 10 points, name this technique that uses stages of denaturation, annealing, and elongation to amplify DNA.

What that clue is describing is SYBR green fluorescing during real-time PCR (not visualizing the results at the end), which is entirely distinct from gel electrophoresis and isn't what that clue is describing.

Fair enough, I get that. Still, without at least specifying SYBR green or rewording the clue a bit to make it clear you're reporting the progress of RT-PCR, I still maintain its ambiguous and could be helpful to players to at least change this a bit. Also, after looking at this tossup again in full, is the GAPDH and ACTB clue also not less than ideal given how common these two compounds are used as loading controls in western blots? I realize there was a tossup on western blots elsewhere in the set (one that I also enjoyed by the way), but that may be something else worth noting.
EDIT: After looking it up, the word endogenous may be significant enough alone to indicate you're talking about q-PCR, I just wasn't familiar with that term.

[Santa Claus]

Some of these natural features are called “moaning” due to the sound produced by water moving over them. These features name a member of genus ​​Carcharhinus t​​hat is often confused with the similar dusky shark. Fernanda Hoefel found that inward migration of these features is heightened by acceleration-induced transport during swell conditions. When one of these features is exposed, it may form a connecting formation called a (*) ​​tombolo (“tom-BOH-loh”). Buildup of these features may result in the formation of barrier islands. Shifting examples of these features in the Outer Banks cause the nearby area to be called the “Graveyard of the Atlantic,” as hidden examples of these features caused thousands of shipwrecks there. For 10 points, name these underwater ridges formed by deposits of the namesake material near the shore.
ANSWER: ​sandbar​​s [or ​shoal​​s or ​gravelbar​​s or ​sandbank​​s or ​sand ridge​​s; accept ​sandbar​​ shark or sand ​spit​​; prompt on ​barrier island​s before “barrier”; prompt on ​coastline​s or ​ridge​s; do not accept or prompt on “islands” or “reef” or “coral reef”]

This question is terrible. It is terrible from a strictly objective stance, having 2/32/28 stats across the 41 rooms of all mirrors of this tournament. This leaves it with a staggering 68% neg rate, with multiple sites having no correct buzzes before the end (and then there’s the UK site, which managed to do relatively well somehow; they must be used to it). It is also terrible from the subjective stance of almost every clue being either incredibly misleading, not appropriate for a science tossup, or both. I am very unhappy with it, so I am going to take some creative liberties in reporting its flaws - feel free to stop reading here and just replace the question for any future mirrors, because I don’t understand how that hasn’t already happened.

(Seriously, the following analysis is 80% jokes and 20% serious input)

The first line seems to be a veiled reference to renowned scientist Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “Crossing the Bar” - the bar, being, of course, a sandbar. This must be the case, because the vast, vast majority of the Google results for “moaning sandbar” are about the poem, with the remainder being articles about 19th century shipwrecks. Ignoring its appearances in literature, historical or otherwise, this clue feels akin to tossups on “sand dunes” that just namedrop types and parts of dunes - not good!

Following that is a clue about a shark in that oh-so-famous genus Carcharhinus. What’s that? You don’t know the genus of specific sharks? Well don’t worry, because this clue is about the most famous shark of all: the sandbar shark! There’s definitely no way you could confuse it for, say, its close relatives the blacktip reef shark, white tip reef shark, grey reef shark, or the Caribbean reef shark (all of which are more famous than the sandbar shark by virtue of their association with coral reefs and are also members of Carcharhinus) and accidentally neg with “reef”, another submarine body that ships can run aground on and are also often made of sand. (I am in fact amazed that Daoud was about to buzz on this clue, given how much more famous the other sharks are, and can only conclude it was a delayed buzz on Tennyson)

Then we follow with clues about publications by Fernanda Hoefel. Admittedly the migration of bars inland in stormy conditions is a fairly well-known and well-researched process that comes up in quiz bowl from time to time (see that VCUO 2015 tossup on “barrier islands”), but this specific clue is describing the most famous of Hoefel’s three papers, which has 262 of her 264 total citations in the heavily-read field of beach sediment morphodynamics. Also, anyone buzzing at this point would likely want to do so with “barrier islands”, which would be confusing considering that earlier in the question (and later on) the features are referred to as underwater, and because one would imagine that if “barrier island” were the answer, one would be prompted on “island”.

The tombolo clue isn’t great because any sandbar (or sand spit, as it were) that becomes a tombolo is by definition linked to an island. When presented with the choice between the potential answerlines of “island” or “sand spit”, I imagine most people would choose island.

This next clue isn’t actually that bad, but seems kinda intrinsically difficult.

The major flaw in this clue is the same as mentioned above with the sharks - you’re relying on people to know specifically that the Outer Banks are a series of shoals, and not some other nautical hazard like a reef. Yes, shoals are uniquely able to move, but it still is a very confusing clue, because that is a difficult distinction to parse at game speed and there’s the problem of reefs being much more commonly associated with shipwrecks.

FTP seems about as good as one can get considering the answerline.

(Fin)

I’m really surprised that nobody has mentioned the flaws in this tossup yet. It seems it played poorly at just about every site, but I guess people are so used to their earth science not being good that this passed without note. A lot of the flaws come from the fact that people really don’t know a lot about this subject, and the things that they do know are at direct contradictions with what the clues are attempting to point towards, which inevitably leads to negs. The tossup seems to have been inspired by the fact that sandbars are mentioned here and there in various places, but they’re just really not that important.

On a more positive note, I thought the CS in this set was cool: I especially enjoyed the pixels tossup and the machine learning clue in the logistic function tossup, as well as the bonus part of in-order tree traversal. It felt like they effectively tested aspects of my computer science education.

[aseem.keyal]

The SYBR clue in the PCR tossup is a hose as currently worded. SYBR dyes like SYBR-Safe are commonly used in place of Ethidium bromide for visualizing gels. While yes, this is exactly how you visualize the results of PCR, this is done by performing gel electrophoresis, and if you buzz on the word "SYBR" like I did you don't really hear the key part saying that the tossup doesn't just want gel electrophoresis.

2. Cross contamination between multiple runs of one type of this technique is prevented by using UNG. GAPDH and ACTB can act as endogenous controls in this technique. A step in this technique follows the general guidelines of a length just above or below 20 and a GC content of about 50 percent. In a variant of this technique, the chosen baseline and threshold affect C-sub-t, which is known as the crossing point or take-off point; that variant of this technique can use TAMRA or (*) SYBR dyes to report progress. Fluorescent reporter probes are used in a quantitative variant of this technique known as its “real-time” type. The high temperatures of the thermocycler used in this technique require an enzyme from Thermus aquaticus known as Taq. For 10 points, name this technique that uses stages of denaturation, annealing, and elongation to amplify DNA.

What that clue is describing is SYBR green fluorescing during real-time PCR (not visualizing the results at the end), which is entirely distinct from gel electrophoresis and isn't what that clue is describing.

Fair enough, I get that. Still, without at least specifying SYBR green or rewording the clue a bit to make it clear you're reporting the progress of RT-PCR, I still maintain its ambiguous and could be helpful to players to at least change this a bit. Also, after looking at this tossup again in full, is the GAPDH and ACTB clue also not less than ideal given how common these two compounds are used as loading controls in western blots? I realize there was a tossup on western blots elsewhere in the set (one that I also enjoyed by the way), but that may be something else worth noting.
EDIT: After looking it up, the word endogenous may be significant enough alone to indicate you're talking about q-PCR, I just wasn't familiar with that term.

While my original position was that the usage of the word 'endogenous' disambiguated this, me and Jason ended up deciding it was somewhat pedantic and added the disclaimer "It's not a blot" before 11/17 mirrors of the set.

[Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone]

This question is terrible. It is terrible from a strictly objective stance, having 2/32/28 stats across the 41 rooms of all mirrors of this tournament. This leaves it with a staggering 68% neg rate, with multiple sites having no correct buzzes before the end (and then there’s the UK site, which managed to do relatively well somehow; they must be used to it). It is also terrible from the subjective stance of almost every clue being either incredibly misleading, not appropriate for a science tossup, or both. I am very unhappy with it, so I am going to take some creative liberties in reporting its flaws - feel free to stop reading here and just replace the question for any future mirrors, because I don’t understand how that hasn’t already happened.

This continues a long trend of Americans asking earth science stuff which we all studied in geography when we were 13/14

[Ike]

Yeah the sandbars tossup is something I said should be removed "with extreme prejudice" from the tournament during playtesting, I'm surprised it's still in here, and I would priortize it's removal over the giraffe one.

[t-bar]

To backtrack a bit, I thought the three computational physics bonus parts in this tournament were all clear and straightforward ways of testing for important knowledge. Perhaps the wording has been fine-tuned a bit from the first mirrors, but I didn't find any of them confusing.

Tree traversals are learned in basically every data structure course, and I think testing knowledge learned by first year CS majors is fine as a medium part (however, as pointed out, the answer line wasn't fully fleshed out for some mirrors, and that was my mistake).

I also liked the idea of this bonus part, but I think the answerline should have been substantially more lenient (based on Aseem's comment, perhaps it's been changed), primarily for the sake of the moderator. We answered with something like "recurse left, print, recurse right," and our mod didn't want to give it to us because they thought it was necessary to say exactly the word "current." It's pseudocode--why would you not answer in terms of verbs?

EDIT: Oops, I see the above critique was already made in the other thread--sorry!

[aseem.keyal]

To backtrack a bit, I thought the three computational physics bonus parts in this tournament were all clear and straightforward ways of testing for important knowledge. Perhaps the wording has been fine-tuned a bit from the first mirrors, but I didn't find any of them confusing.

Tree traversals are learned in basically every data structure course, and I think testing knowledge learned by first year CS majors is fine as a medium part (however, as pointed out, the answer line wasn't fully fleshed out for some mirrors, and that was my mistake).

I also liked the idea of this bonus part, but I think the answerline should have been substantially more lenient (based on Aseem's comment, perhaps it's been changed), primarily for the sake of the moderator. We answered with something like "recurse left, print, recurse right," and our mod didn't want to give it to us because they thought it was necessary to say exactly the word "current." It's pseudocode--why would you not answer in terms of verbs?

EDIT: Oops, I see the above critique was already made in the other thread--sorry!

[10] Three answers required. Binary trees can be searched using three different traversals: pre-, post-, and in-order. Give the order of the three lines of pseudocode for an [emphasize] in-order traversal in terms of the two recursive calls on the left and right children and the printing of the current node.
ANSWER: left, current, right [or recursive call to left node, print current node, recursive call to right node; accept self or print in place of “current”; accept any answer that includes the underlined words in the correct order]
<Other Science: Computer Science, AK>

This is the current answer line based on the recent feedback, and while I believe it contains every answer that should have been correct that people have said thus far, it's hard to know whether teams in the future will answer in the same way. Also, the answer line has gotten fairly hard to read for the average moderator at this point, so this part might not have been the best idea.

[a bird]

I have a few things to refine from my earlier points about computational bonus parts. First, I do not think the computational parts at this tournament were way too hard, or particularly unfair.

I think Billy's post lays the groundwork for the different things to consider when analyzing this type of question. There are two types of errors when awarding points for these bonuses . Billy mainly focuses on awarding points for random guesses (false positive/type I error). These questions can also fail when knowledgeable people get confused and give wrong answers (false negative/type II error). My point is that the computational bonus parts in this set had a high potential for type II errors.

Since my I had a bad experiences on these questions for slightly different reasons, I'll elaborate a bit. The Boltzmann factor is very, very important, and asking about it is a good idea. Getting 0 points on that part for giving the Boltzmann factor (instead of just the exponential) was frustrating, and I stand by describing that as pedantic. Relative permittivity and electric susceptibility are different ways to keep track of the same physics (polarization induced in linear media), and in my opinion there's not much physical significance to their definitions. This doesn't make the bonus part bad, just somewhat uninteresting. Asking for the particular mathematical relationship between these quantities is prone to type II errors.

[Santa Claus]

Some more productive notes, which I’m basing mainly on 12/1 conversion stats since it’s a hassle to cross-reference:

Packet 1
The “dipole moment” question not accepting “dipole” is rough because numerical values for dipole moment are not often used in things like determining IR-active modes. Things like bond dipoles and molecule dipoles are often considered to exist or not exist, or equivalently be zero or non-zero. For instance, the handling of the subject in my inorganic textbook said dipole moment like twice and then immediately switched to using symmetry groups, where the change in dipole moment is implied by asymmetric modes. I get that dipole moment is the quantity, but considering that clues like those for IR spec refer to qualitative uses of the dipole it seems a little unfair.

The tossup on “keystone species” felt a little misleading to me because of its mention of rocky intertidal zones, the habitat of the keystone species Pisaster but also of the barnacle, whose occupation of upper and lower regions of rocks is a classic example of ecological niches. This might just be me though. If you did want to replace it, maybe a clue about sea otters and their role in regulating sea urchin populations and how that affects kelp forests would work?

Packet 3
Needing “elliptic integral of the first kind” felt like a lot (converted in 1/9 rooms).

Packet 5
I thought “canonical ensemble” was one of the harder science tossups. Anecdotally it got negged in my room with grand canonical ensemble at the clue where it tries to establish the difference between them, so watch out I guess? There’s already instructions to slow down so I don’t have any immediate solutions. I’m probably overblowing the problem, since I see that it went 0/7/3 at the 12/1 mirrors, but honestly I’m surprised it was converted that well at the end - maybe that’s just a gap in my knowledge.

hahaha oh man look at this

“Synaptobrevin” seemed quite hard (1/9 rooms).

Round 6
The tossup on “data centers” was, for lack of a better word, super jank. I get what it was going for but I know that everyone in my room was rather incredulous, and several of us were sitting on it as a result. This might just be a consequence of how out there the answerline was, but empirically this question was not good (1/5/5 in 9 rooms).

As already noted, it seems odd not to reward knowledge that the Philadelphia chromosomes encodes a tyrosine kinase with power on “kinases”. Also, I know that imatinib is a general tyrosine kinase inhibitor but I would have thought that it’s a harder clue than namedropping or even describing the Philadelphia chromosome. [Looking at the stats, no one buzzed earlier than Philadelphia chromosome at our site and there was one power total across all sites. So yeah]

Round 7
The tossup on “translation” seems to drop in difficulty pretty significantly in difficulty at amber, ochre, and opal, and then again right out of power. Maybe one of the earlier clues could be cut and replaced with something in that area to smooth that out. [turns out I just suck at bio haha]

Round 8
“Circulation models” felt very difficult, especially since it seemed to require knowledge of specific models (1/9 rooms). Albedo wasn’t clued very evocatively either (3/9).

Round 9
Uh these aren’t science, but “Pigou” (0/7/2 in 9) and “Simon Magus” (0/6/6 in 9) were really hard, and not converted very well. The first buzz on Pigou was mid-FTP, and for Simon Magus during the description of simony. The tossup on “Volsunga” should really accept “Nibelung” or whatever the Wagner-equivalent term is, since there’s not really any difference in the details. Just thought I’d mention these while I was putting this together.

The bonus part on “elliptic” was too likely too hard - I’d look at the conversation stats for other sites too, but at 12/1 sites it was never converted.

I’ll probably look through the rest at some point.

[zeebli123]

The tossup on “Volsunga” should really accept “Nibelung” or whatever the Wagner-equivalent term is, since there’s not really any difference in the details.

I believe Nibelung refers to a separate race? Unfortunately, I don't think Wagner's operas have any equivalent to Volsunga.

[Cody]

Round 6
The tossup on “data centers” was, for lack of a better word, super jank. I get what it was going for but I know that everyone in my room was rather incredulous, and several of us were sitting on it as a result. This might just be a consequence of how out there the answerline was, but empirically this question was not good (1/5/5 in 9 rooms).

I would like to see this tossup.

I think focusing too much on statistics can lead one to make serious errors in question judgement. Some questions do not play well because players did not play it well. This is not necessarily a fault of the question, and it likewise does not necessarily mean there is a problem with the question. (Whether this applies to the data center question is unknown, hence why I'd like to see it. Also, it's a cool answerline.)

[Jason Cheng]

The tossup on “Volsunga” should really accept “Nibelung” or whatever the Wagner-equivalent term is, since there’s not really any difference in the details.

I believe Nibelung refers to a separate race? Unfortunately, I don't think Wagner's operas have any equivalent to Volsunga.

Yeah while we’re on the topic of racial science, Nibelungs are a separate family/race/people used throughout Germanic myth (the Wagner opera cycle’s usage refers to dwarves)

[touchpack]

Round 6
The tossup on “data centers” was, for lack of a better word, super jank. I get what it was going for but I know that everyone in my room was rather incredulous, and several of us were sitting on it as a result. This might just be a consequence of how out there the answerline was, but empirically this question was not good (1/5/5 in 9 rooms).

I think focusing too much on statistics can lead one to make serious errors in question judgement. Some questions do not play well because players did not play it well. This is not necessarily a fault of the question, and it likewise does not necessarily mean there is a problem with the question.

1000% agreed, and I'd also add that frequently, the sample sizes given by advanced stats are too small to draw meaningful conclusions.

I've been considering making a more general thread about this, (and I still might) because it's become an annoying trend in quizbowl recently where people make extremely bad arguments by misinterpreting advanced stats. Advanced stats are NOT the ultimate tool for judging question quality!

[Jason Cheng]

Round 6
The tossup on “data centers” was, for lack of a better word, super jank. I get what it was going for but I know that everyone in my room was rather incredulous, and several of us were sitting on it as a result. This might just be a consequence of how out there the answerline was, but empirically this question was not good (1/5/5 in 9 rooms).

I would like to see this tossup.

I think focusing too much on statistics can lead one to make serious errors in question judgement. Some questions do not play well because players did not play it well. This is not necessarily a fault of the question, and it likewise does not necessarily mean there is a problem with the question. (Whether this applies to the data center question is unknown, hence why I'd like to see it. Also, it's a cool answerline.)

2. A sticky note detailing a plan to disrupt these facilities said “SSL added and removed here,” with a smiley face pointing to a box labeled “GFE,” and was leaked from the MUSCULAR program. Project Natick plans to build one of these facilities underwater in California. The largest one of these facilities, at over 3.5 million square feet, is the Switch SuperNAP in Las Vegas. The world’s highest concentration of the “colo” (“CO-lo”) type of these facilities, which are rented out, is in Ashburn, Virginia. In 2010, (*) Greenpeace began evaluating the energy efficiency of companies using these facilities in the #ClickingClean initiative. Transparency in the design of these facilities is advocated for by the Open Compute Project started by Facebook. For 10 points, name these facilities containing rows of cooled, rack-mounted servers that store large amounts of information.
ANSWER: data centers [or server farms or web farms or computer farms or cloud computing centers or server clusters; accept colo or colocation data center before “colo”; prompt on servers or server rooms or computer hubs or web hosts or web hosting providers or networks or data warehouses; do not accept or prompt on “farm” or “supercomputer” or “network operations center” or “NOC” or “NAP” or “IXP” or “ISP”]

I'm not sure this is necessarily "jank," and the buzzpoint visualizations show that a plurality of people who negged this tossup (please write down what people negged with, staffers! It's for science!) were negging throughout the tossup with things like "nuclear power facilities" and "solar energy farms." Whether that's a fault of the question (I didn't think so, having seen internal discussions of this topic with the question author and the playtesters, one of whom... works on data centers and said it was good) or a fault of people just buzzing with things, I don't know.

I agree in general with the stuff about advanced stats, though I still advocate their (judicious) use--they helped us see, for example, that "molecular orbitals" with "bonding and antibonding" as clues still had far too low conversion after the 11/10 sites to be a "good" easy part (and the low conversion for "streaking" for that matter). There's a balance to be had somewhere in between the two.

I defended the giraffes tossup with fluidity of buzzes not because I thought it proved it was "science" (I think zoo knowledge and Nature Magazine stuff is perfectly fine for 1 out of 15 bio tossups in a tournament, and I am at a loss to understand why I needed to cross-check my subject's clues against the Jeopardy database--the factoid does come up in non-"pub trivia" places, although I guess I don't do any pub trivia quizzing or watch Jeopardy), but to prove that, on top of all the arguments made for it being justifiably "bio," it was immensely playable.

[Ike]

Round 6
The tossup on “data centers” was, for lack of a better word, super jank. I get what it was going for but I know that everyone in my room was rather incredulous, and several of us were sitting on it as a result. This might just be a consequence of how out there the answerline was, but empirically this question was not good (1/5/5 in 9 rooms).

I think focusing too much on statistics can lead one to make serious errors in question judgement. Some questions do not play well because players did not play it well. This is not necessarily a fault of the question, and it likewise does not necessarily mean there is a problem with the question.

1000% agreed, and I'd also add that frequently, the sample sizes given by advanced stats are too small to draw meaningful conclusions.

I've been considering making a more general thread about this, (and I still might) because it's become an annoying trend in quizbowl recently where people make extremely bad arguments by misinterpreting advanced stats. Advanced stats are NOT the ultimate tool for judging question quality!

10000% agreed.

Speaking about data centers, I think it was a fine idea and well-executed tossup. Aseem playtested it on me, and I didn't buzz until somewhere near the end, and I think that's okay since it's not something I should have lots of knowledge of. I also think that this is the type of "fringe" or to use Kevin Wang's term, "jank," science I would like to see as opposed to the more giraffe-ish questions. People encounter this kind of material while reading about PRISM and Snowden, just reading a general history of computing, or a cultural history of Silicon Valley -- the point is, getting this question early requires you to be engaged with the material being asked in an academically relevant way.

Oh by the way, I don't care what the conversion data says for this question -- it's such a good idea that even if no one buzzed on the first three clues, I'm glad that Aseem gave it an attempt. There is certainly a possible world in which someone did buzz on those clues, and it opened up the possibility to ask about applied computer science in new ways.

[Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone]

As one of the people who negged it with nuclear power, I was (somewhat foolishly) buzzing on thinking it was describing Stuxnet, essentially lateralling from "what have people tried to disrupt in recent years", believing it to be some sort of CE question

[warum]

I agree with the criticism of the sandbars question. Looking at the stats, it just didn't seem to play well. Parts of it seemed more like a geography TU than science.
I think one problem with sandbars itself as a TU answerline is that "real knowledge of sandbars" is covered in a coastal processes or geomorphology class, which not even a majority of Earth science students take, much less any sizable number of quizbowlers. It's OK to ask questions like that sometimes, ones that are not rooted in the "core knowledge" of a category - but it's a bit frustrating when they're a tossup in a category like Earth science that only gets a few questions per tournament (people have expressed a similar sentiment about math in some tournaments). Asking about sandbars might work better in a bonus.

I thought the keystone species TU was fine. Putting "Robert Paine" at the beginning of the sentence clearly identifies it as being about keystone species, not the other things that were studied in the intertidal zone.

[Mike Bentley]

Round 6
The tossup on “data centers” was, for lack of a better word, super jank. I get what it was going for but I know that everyone in my room was rather incredulous, and several of us were sitting on it as a result. This might just be a consequence of how out there the answerline was, but empirically this question was not good (1/5/5 in 9 rooms).

I think focusing too much on statistics can lead one to make serious errors in question judgement. Some questions do not play well because players did not play it well. This is not necessarily a fault of the question, and it likewise does not necessarily mean there is a problem with the question.

1000% agreed, and I'd also add that frequently, the sample sizes given by advanced stats are too small to draw meaningful conclusions.

I've been considering making a more general thread about this, (and I still might) because it's become an annoying trend in quizbowl recently where people make extremely bad arguments by misinterpreting advanced stats. Advanced stats are NOT the ultimate tool for judging question quality!

10000% agreed.

Speaking about data centers, I think it was a fine idea and well-executed tossup. Aseem playtested it on me, and I didn't buzz until somewhere near the end, and I think that's okay since it's not something I should have lots of knowledge of. I also think that this is the type of "fringe" or to use Kevin Wang's term, "jank," science I would like to see as opposed to the more giraffe-ish questions. People encounter this kind of material while reading about PRISM and Snowden, just reading a general history of computing, or a cultural history of Silicon Valley -- the point is, getting this question early requires you to be engaged with the material being asked in an academically relevant way.

Oh by the way, I don't care what the conversion data says for this question -- it's such a good idea that even if no one buzzed on the first three clues, I'm glad that Aseem gave it an attempt. There is certainly a possible world in which someone did buzz on those clues, and it opened up the possibility to ask about applied computer science in new ways.

I think data centers are a fine answer. I think this tossup as written could have selected some better clues to fit more closely into the conventional definition of the science category. As is, it's a perfectly fine misc. or current events question. If you wanted to beef it up with software engineering clues, you could talk about things like the special hardware built for them, consensus algorithms, and MapReduce.

[a bird]

I'm really confused by the discussion of the data centers question, because it was categorized as other academic, not computer science. I think it was a good example of an interesting technology current events/general knowledge question, and I support the editors decision to include it in the other ac distribution. When viewed through this lens, the question doesn't seem very "jank" to me. I don't think the question had misleading clues, rather I think people were able to come up with plausible guesses at many points, leading to the high number of negs.

Mike is probably right that one could write tossup on that answer using primarily CS clues. The GitHub question (categorized as CS) also had technology current events clues, but balanced them with technical clues.