The Quizbowl Resource Center

Carlos Be

CPiGuy wrote: ↑
Fri Jul 10, 2020 11:44 pm
it is in general a good idea to have at least one trusted adult (and "adult" can mean a college player here) on the staff

I think the key word here is "trusted," not "adult." There's no reason that a trustworthy high schooler can't perform the role you are describing.

Carlos Be

physicsnerd wrote: ↑
Fri Jul 10, 2020 10:57 pm
So to sum up - yeah this needs to be addressed, and not side-stepped with questions over whether this is actually occurring.

The reason I asked "How frequently does misconduct occur" was because I think it occurs a lot more than people think. It's not sidestepping the issue to discuss its scope.

Carlos Be

Not related to this specific incident Can we actually discuss this issue as a community? I think a general discussion about misconduct warrants its own dedicated thread or threads. This is a sensitive and important topic, so a discussion about it should have more structure than a typical forums dis...

Carlos Be

For a quick, incomplete answer, this online encyclopedia is a pretty good resource for ancient stuff.

Carlos Be

Justice William Brennan wrote: ↑
Wed Jul 01, 2020 12:45 pm

Zealots of Stockholm wrote: ↑
Tue Jun 30, 2020 8:52 pm
Does this mean that all of the mirrors are delayed as well, or just the main site?
All of the mirrors as well, though no mirrors actually exist as of yet because of the COVID uncertainty.

Would you be willing to allow regional online mirrors in the fall if there is interest?

Carlos Be

Saturnalia is now 90% written and 55% edited. The original post has been updated to reflect the following announcements: We will be offering a $5 per team discount (so that the mirror fee is $15 per team) for hosts which record individual question stats. For tossups, this means counting the number o...

Carlos Be

Io Saturnalia is now 90% written and 55% edited. The original post has been updated to reflect the following announcements: We will be offering a $5 per team discount (so that the mirror fee is $20 per team) for hosts which record individual question stats. For tossups, this means counting the numbe...

Carlos Be

To clarify, I don't think tossup/bonus cycles should be intentionally of the same category (that does indeed help extreme specialism too much, as Alistair has said), but I don't think they should be intentionally different categories either. It's very discouraging if you're a team that's relatively...

Carlos Be

Justine, I hate to sound dismissive since I greatly respect you as a writer and player, but I think one reason people take issue with your posting style is that far too often, it comes across as nitpicky and critical of flaws that have already been recognized by the people who are actually implemen...

Carlos Be

[*] Please remember that a webcam is required to play this tournament. If you do not currently own a webcam, please work on getting one. [/list] I'm assuming that this is intended to prevent cheating, but how would it do that? If someone is googling, the webcam won't pick that up. The webcam will p...

Carlos Be

Smuttynose Island wrote: ↑
Sun May 17, 2020 9:43 pm
[*] Please remember that a webcam is required to play this tournament. If you do not currently own a webcam, please work on getting one.
[/list]

I'm assuming that this is intended to prevent cheating, but how would it do that? If someone is googling, the webcam won't pick that up.

Carlos Be

Adding to Eric's points, paired bonuses would make tracking conversion data a lot easier. Currently, moderators often skip bonuses (either by mistake or misunderstanding), making it difficult to tell what bonus was read in a given tossup/bonus cycle, therefore making it difficult to read bonus conve...

Carlos Be

7:00 am pacific is very early. Assuming that most people wake up between 8 and 10 am, you're asking west coast people to wake up over an hour before their usual wakeup time. On the other hand, if the tournament starts at 8 am pacific, then even if it lasts 10 hours it will still end at 9 pm eastern,...

Carlos Be

ramblinwreck wrote: ↑
Wed Apr 22, 2020 1:01 pm
invite you to play IKEA

Will the questions be packetized already, or will hosts have to assemble them?

Carlos Be

I'm not sure I understand what you hope to achieve with this oddly antagonistic line of questioning. What sort of response to the question "what if the target difficulty of ACF Winter is not easy enough?" could possibly satisfy you? What do you even expect possible responses to be? The only reasona...

Carlos Be

I am not at all associated with either of these sets, but I do want to say I completely trust William's ability to hit the advertised difficulty, which is "two dots" or EFT 2017 difficulty. I cannot speak to the rest of your concerns, but I think the concern that ACF Winter will not be easy enough ...

Carlos Be

Previously, ACF only had one tournament to fill the "easier than Regs" difficulty window, which is a very large window. Fall had to serve the dual functions of trying to attract brand new players to the game and providing more seasoned ones with a regs-minus experience. By adding Winter, we are eff...

Carlos Be

Because of the addition of ACF Winter, the target difficulty for this year's ACF Fall will be lower than in years past. We are intending for the set to be a hyper-accessible introduction to college quizbowl for people with little to no previous playing experience, comprable to the Early Autumn Coll...

Carlos Be

I'm not sure exactly what harsh measures would entail- certainly, a 12-month ban from all quiz bowl activities, a publicly-accessable post to a person google searching their name (to be taken down after 3 years) detailing the cheating, and a formal letter to whoever is in charge of academic integri...

Carlos Be

I guess my main point is that earth science and astronomy are more closely related to chem, physics, and bio than they are to math and CS, and we should rethink how we are grouping these subjects together to ensure that everything is being represented properly. I think grouping math alongside compu...

Carlos Be

whether or not Tejas cheated (5 powers on FO to 17 powers on TO????) Are you accusing Tejas of cheating? I hope this is a joke—Adam is clearly referring to the high threshold we have to have when looking in "power gaps" to avoid a huge number of false positives. There is nothing clear about Adam's ...

Carlos Be

Daedalus wrote: ↑
Mon Apr 13, 2020 8:00 pm
whether or not Tejas cheated (5 powers on FO to 17 powers on TO????)

Are you accusing Tejas of cheating?

Carlos Be

Elsewhere Ike has stated his interest in informing NAQT and ACF of the details of his investigation I would hope there be a formal recommendation on this from perhaps the tournament directors or ACF or...somebody I don't believe this will actually happen, but I would be strongly opposed if ACF make...

Carlos Be

I think the main problem is that 1/1 other science is not large enough to ask all of the categories that get put in it. Statistics has to compete for space with pure math, astronomy, computer science, and the Earth sciences. As a writer, I've found 1.5/1.5 sufficient for lower levels, but that has t...

Carlos Be

In addition to things mentioned above, cheating accusations should probably belong in one of the forums sections that you need an account to view.

Carlos Be

Contra my esteemed colleague Prof. Boyd, I think this is a reasonable middle ground when there's suspicion but no concrete proof... Saying "someone at TO online cheated" is really saying "someone on this list of people cheated." Rather than throwing suspicion on one person, you're throwing suspicio...

Carlos Be

I’m all for discouraging cheating, but writing a few bad questions to catch potential cheaters seems unproductive. Actually, this has worked in the past (although inadvertently). A question clued an artist who doesn't exist except as metadata on an obscure image on wikipedia, and a middle schooler ...

Carlos Be

I don't want to to turn this thread into the cheating tribunal, but if it's an open secret that some people cheat...why are they allowed to play? Why aren't they being publicly shamed or called out? I'm not in the know here, so if there's some open secret list of known or suspected cheaters, I'd li...

Carlos Be

If I may paraphrase an argument originally made by someone else, it's worth noting that these arguments by and large seem to come from people whose primary engagement with the quizbowl community is by being active on quizbowl Discord. Perhaps these people represent a great silent majority that has ...

Carlos Be

For me, this makes college quizbowl a lot more like the NBA, with high school quizbowl being something akin to college basketball. The NBA is much, much more challenging, and you have players with a wider range of experience. I find this to be a feature of the college game, not a bug. It's enjoyabl...

Carlos Be

I have volunteered to spearhead the "advanced stats for moderators" project. Writers and editors have to make a lot of guesses with regards to difficulty, often with very little information. I envision this project as a series of steps that will allow future writers to evaluate their questions with ...

Carlos Be

Some of greatest players of our age got to where they are within the four-year span of an undergraduate degree. I counted the number of players marked UG, DII, or equivalent in the top 10 prelim scorers of several ACF Nationals. 2012 ACF Nats: 6 UG 2013 ACF Nats: 7 UG 2014 ACF Nats: 5 UG 2015 ACF N...

Carlos Be

WAIT Online is $60 per team BHSAT Online (TU only) is $75 per team JBB Online is $65 per team BLAST Online is $60 per team Island Cup Online is $75 per team RAFT Online is $60 per team The mirror fee of WAIT is $10 per team The mirror fee of BHSAT is $10 per team The mirror fee of JBB is $10 per te...

Carlos Be

Unfortunately due to CALISTO's insistence on having "regional online mirrors", attempting to get irl events hosted during a pandemic, and possibly opening the set to be mirrored for the saturated 2020-21 season These claims are false. 1. We are not opposed to a general online mirror. We are opposed...

Carlos Be

From a perception perspective, people generally feel better about getting thrashed by their "equals" than by people with a perceived advantage - whether real or not (and it could very well be real). Is this true? I have always felt better about losing to people with more experience than me, because...

Carlos Be

13.This object was designed to generalize the positive Grassmanian. For 10 points each: [10] Name this theoretical geometric object from particle physics introduced by Nima Arkani-Hamed in 2013. Scattering amplitudes can be calculated by finding the ‘volume’ of this object. ANSWER: amplituhedron [1...

Carlos Be

Is this not already true? A UG team has finished in the top bracket of Nationals every year since 2009 (at which point the stats don't list if a team is UG or not and I didn't feel like cross-referencing the results), not to mention the many other teams (including several overall champions) that ha...

Carlos Be

I argue that the point of quiz bowl is to learn important and interesting things, not hard things. It is very difficult to learn clues when they are so hard that you can barely recognize anything about them, even in categories you know. Would you care to provide an example? ... What I'm trying to s...

Carlos Be

I've said this elsewhere, but I'd like to note that the chance to play the best people in school was quite attractive to me when I started college quizbowl. Playing better opponents is more fun, I think. Why limit it to the best people in school? Surely open tournaments are more fun, by your logick...

Carlos Be

Goofy Evanescence Vine wrote: ↑
Fri Mar 13, 2020 7:39 pm
Of course, grad students having been involved in quizbowl for longer does give them an advantage, but it is by no means insurmountable

There is no reason that an advantage needs to be insurmountable to be discouraging or unfair.

Carlos Be

I whole-heartedly agree with this post. The difficulty of ACF Nats is absurd. Hard bonus parts and early tossup clues are essentially wasted in distinguishing teams. There's no reason to expect writers to write lines and lines of clues that maybe 3 people are going to get any information out of what...

Carlos Be

(Someone may have made a post along these lines already, but I can't find one.) Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, many spring mirrors have been cancelled. As a result, a lot of spring sets have extended mirrors to fall. This could lead to fall becoming overcrowded. What should editors do to prevent this...

Carlos Be

Is there a particular justification for why all of religion, mythology, philosophy and social science are all reduced for this event? This doesn't seem to align with recent college events. Having pop culture be almost as present as social science is not in any way indicative of what the college can...

Carlos Be

One problem with quiz bowl writing is that we cannot see how our tossups play every time they are read. To (partially) resolve this issue, some sets collect data on buzz-points. Unfortunately, collecting buzz-point data takes a lot of work, and the data is rarely analyzed in depth. Luckily, there is...

Carlos Be

SATURNALIA and its twin, IO SATURNALIA, have been announced!

Carlos Be

(post reserved for list of mirrors)

Carlos Be

I am pleased to announce IO SATURNALIA , an easy college set that will be available for mirrors beginning September 12, 2020 . Difficulty-wise, IO SATURNALIA will be within the range of recent iterations of ACF Fall. IO SATURNALIA will be converted from the high school set SATURNALIA . By expanding ...

Carlos Be

(post reserved for list of mirrors)

Carlos Be

I am pleased to announce SATURNALIA , a hard ("regs+" difficulty) high school set that will be available for mirrors beginning September 12, 2020 . Writers/Editors I, Justine French, will be head editor. The set will be produced by a diverse group of high school and college writers who were selected...

Carlos Be

Thank you for everyone who applied. A set announcement will be up shortly.

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