The Quizbowl Resource Center

Cody

This may be slightly unrelated, but for those working on housewrite sets: Don't use Google Drive. Use a proper system like QEMS or Packetizor. It's much harder for a rogue writer or editor to retaliate by leaking a massive majority of a set using a question management system. If someone wants to le...

Cody

I got the yahoo-group-archive-tools figured out and was able to do some validation using Windows Mbox Viewer. Unfortunately, all messages before June 5, 1999 @ 8:30pm (the first 301 messages) are lost. The downloads do not have a message body, and trying to access these posts in the group yields a b...

Cody

Thanks to Colin, I have archived the jucoqb (public and overrun with spam so will require some fixing), qb-canada, qbtrash, quizbowl, and quizbowl-announce groups using IgnoredAmbience's yahoo-group-archiver (-t -r -f -i -l -p -a -m) recommended by the Archive Team . (I also have plain email message...

Cody

Ebay is a good place to look for buzzer parts.

Cody

I have updated the OP with a fully implemented master copy of an answer spreadsheet, which I didn't realize wasn't publicly available (sorry!). It's used for most (all?) ACF tournaments in the past 3 years and is pretty great.

Cody

My concern for some of those schedules is that NAQT (and several other housewritten sets) only have 12 packets. If you assume you need 2 for finals, that leaves only 10 rounds to do everything else in. Sure, there are no universal parameters that work with all field sizes and number of packets. A 1...

Cody

The tournaments I directed for high schools aimed for schedules with a minimum of 9 games, a maximum of 12 non-finals rounds, around 5-7 prelim games (but as many as 9 for certain field sizes such as 19 and 20), and -- if I recall correctly -- around 25% - 40%+ remaining in contention beyond the pre...

Cody

My understanding is that the majority of the set had to be written and edited in a month. This doesn't seem ideal and is caused by the packet submission model. I don't mean to discount the rest of your post, which I think raises a number of valuable points for consideration. However, I did want to ...

Cody

VCU would like to claim March 28 for a HS tournament TBD.

Cody

Cheynem wrote: ↑
Mon Sep 09, 2019 1:48 pm
Wait, I thought you actually were supposed to write it as "cf." not "c.f."

Yeah, I wrote it backwards; edited.

Cody

Has this confused anyone ever? I don't know if it's confused anyone, but it is a noticeable error and easily avoided. It's similar to writing "cf." as "c.f." -- the meaning may still be clear but it's also extremely obvious to observers that you've written it incorrectly. (And I personally fondly r...

Cody

Nah, the problem* with the "oozes" tossup is that the specific term is too hard -- almost no one in the field knows that specific term or will be able to pull it even if they figure out what's going on. It's pretty easy to figure out (especially after diagenesis) that it's talking about a type of se...

Cody

I agree with Naveed. The UMD/UVA/VCU triangle has among the highest mutual tournament attendances of any 3 collegiate programs. It really makes no sense for Virginia and Maryland (& DC) to be considered different regions given the prolific hosting and attendance histories between the programs in the...

Cody

#1 is mooted by proper underlining: acceptable answers are bolded and underlined, promptable answers are underlined, and unacceptable answers do not have any formatting. This makes it more difficult for moderators to mess up when quickly scanning the answerline, and is more effective than retooling ...

Cody

The program used to generate these stats (Intermezzo?) does not create a compliant SQBS web report and cannot be navigated conventionally. (e.g. (a) it does not include the necessary links in the standings.html and team_detail.html files, and (b) the anchor links it creates in the individuals.html f...

Cody

Where is "The Judge" buzzer system in this? I feel like it's the best choice for a school hoping to make a solid, long-term investment in a buzzer system. It's very hard to order a Judge and difficult to repair or replace. Arguably the best long-term investment is an Anderson, replacing parts over ...

Cody

The eligibility rules for VHSL Scholastic Bowl are defined in Section 28A of the VHSL Handbook (see attached) and are the same for other atheltic and nonathletic events sponsored by VHSL. (There are more restrictions in 28B for athletic activities.) Since it's the Virginia High School League, it mig...

Cody

As noted, bouncebacks are extremely opponent-dependent and won't tend to average out over a large sample size like other statistics such as PPG because there isn't a large sample size as compared to the variability in getting the bounceback correct. Another consideration is that (iirc) SQBS reports ...

Cody

Cody wrote: ↑
Thu Apr 18, 2019 3:09 pm

Fucitol wrote: ↑
Thu Apr 18, 2019 2:48 pm
http://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/57 ... no_finals/
Can you implement divisions (Upper/Lower)?

Cody

A small note on the adjustments to Rule H.3: the change only shifts where & how certain language is used in the rule text for clarity and specificity. There are no substantive changes in applying the rule. A smaller note on the adjustments to Rule H.12: there are no substantive changes (clarity only...

Cody

Please see this thread for a note about some rule changes for the NSC this year.

Cody

It absolutely should have been accepted, because the answerline communicated that putative synonyms for "diner" are acceptable (see the phrase "the notion of" below), but unfortunately "bar" was not listed among them, so it seems some moderators quickly scanning the answerline did not pick up on th...

Cody

At the end of the day, any ranking is just an imperfect correlation of team strength and ability across a large, large number of high school tournaments. They are not, and are not intended to be, definitive. The rankings can be useful, but they don't have any bearing once you've secured a finish at ...

Cody

Wouldn't a player poll just for people enrolled in Canadian universities solve almost all of these eligibility problems? These rules aren't that much better than the Ontario circuit poll.

Cody

Muriel Axon wrote: ↑
Thu May 02, 2019 2:20 pm

frasier wrote: ↑
Thu May 02, 2019 2:17 pm
things which virtually no one uses or studies like earth science
wait, what?

no one studies or uses the most important, pressing, and relevant scientific topics of our time, more at 11 on hsquizbowl.org

Cody

I think people are overlooking just how much you can do with the current distribution without even getting to 1/1 math. 0.5/0.5 math is completely acceptable in the standard distribution and I have done it multiple times because I think math is important (specifically, math used in applied contexts,...

Cody

Thank you, Naveed, for going back 3 years to find a poll that had substantially different eligibility requirements to prove a point that is clearly not true. (Not sure exactly, how quoting works on HSQB, but this is from the post you cited.) The rules are simple: vote for your top 25 of active coll...

Cody

Field Update (11 Teams / 2 buzzers): Norfolk Academic Guild (3/1) Jamestown (1/0) NKA Homeschool Collective (2/0) TC Williams (1/1) Maggie Walker (2/0) Dinwiddie (2/0) At this time we are closing the field to new registrations as we seek to get more commitments from capable readers. If your team is ...

Cody

Packet submission was not mandatory last year and 16 packets were submitted. This year, 21 packets were submitted. In 2017, with mandatory packet submission, only 21 of 36 packets were submitted prior to 4 weeks before the tournament. (Although 6 of those 15 late packets were used*.) In any case, pa...

Cody

Fucitol wrote: ↑
Thu Apr 18, 2019 2:48 pm
http://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/57 ... no_finals/

Can you implement divisions (Upper/Lower)?

Cody

I agree with Chris and Jack that this year's crossover playoff felt less complete than a full round robin in the top bracket. In addition to the point about playoff losses not carrying over, we should remember that this year's format can also erase playoff wins against higher finishing opponents (e...

Cody

I'm not sure if this belongs in the Nationals discussion thread or not, but, like John Lawrence, I would like a little more clarity about ACF's rule on players changing their answers before a moderator says anything. Especially at a tournament where moderators may be unfamiliar with many of the ans...

Cody

To dive in a bit: For a figure like Heracles, I'm not sure we need to go out of the way and put the Etruscan "Erkle" in all our answerlines unless we're diving into Etruscan myth, but for something like this, where people from different living cultures know the figures in question under different n...

Cody

Auks Ran Ova wrote: ↑
Tue Apr 16, 2019 6:34 pm

TheIronLadyOfQuizbowl wrote: ↑
Tue Apr 16, 2019 6:15 pm
What is the rationale between not using head-to-head as a tiebreaker?
Doing so double-counts the game in question.

For a longer discussion, refer to this post.

Cody

If we want question sets to be accessible to middle school teams and young high school teams, we should consider the fact that they have spent at least as much time in math class as in science class, and significantly more time in math class than any subset of science such as physics. At the top en...

Cody

The intended difficulty is somewhere approximately halfway between “regular difficulty” and Chicago Open, or very roughly on par with VCU Open 2015. I would describe VCUO 2015 roughly as halfway between Regionals and Nationals difficulty (i.e. the classic conception of Regs+); Regionals to CO is mu...

Cody

The result of this tournament is that, until my memory of it fades, I have no desire to play any quiz bowl tournament or to have anything to do with more than a few small facets of quiz bowl. If I'm the only one that feels this way, then so be it, but I doubt that's the case. The fact that I, forme...

Cody

The proscription against "mineralbowl" and "programming language" questions is a proscription against choosing a random thing of dubious importance to fill out your category. Neither Rust nor olivine fit that in my opinion. I have (or have thought about) tossing up olivine myself because it's import...

Cody

Speaking specifically for MSU and other teams with long drives, we appreciated the early end of rounds on Sunday; getting back home before midnight was delightful. Oh, yes, I don't know why I forgot to mention this. You can expect some teams to have up to 10 hour drives (and sometimes more) after a...

Cody

Purely format-wise stuff: As a player, I would like qb to move away from the "superplayoff" model at national tournaments. With only three games on Sunday I believe prelim games were done around 11:30AM. The format from 2018 ACF Nationals would have required three more games (not counting tiebreake...

Cody

There is : here or on the Academic Competition Federation facebook page.

Cody

Alphabetizing works well for local tournaments, but national tournaments should use seed order so they can easily identify games between top seeds (& similar seeds) and make sure they occur later in the prelims. (This is constrained, of course, you can't do this for every seed.) As long as the teams...

Cody

I think it's a bit strange that in a field where the middle bracket teams are stronger than ever, we're still using a schedules that privilege the best teams in the game. I think it was a really good thing that lower bracket teams got an equal number of games as upper bracket teams as last year , a...

Cody

As far as I remembered, the NSC stats program allows for near-instantaneous determination of the tiebreaker scenario after the final scoresheet goes in since you didn’t have enter add individuals scoring. It seems especially concerning since ACF is removing games from last years schedule to save ti...

Cody

This is a terrible decision. Why is the top bracket the only bracket worth playing a tiebreaker for? The difference between playoff brackets is significant not just for final placement (which I suppose you could argue matters less for weaker teams)— it also determines the quality of opponents that ...

Cody

I think a 6x6 to 2/2/2 crossover format is the better format for the future given this year's format. (It is better than 3x12 because of the location of lunch / tiebreakers.) In 2018, using superplayoffs saved 2 packets because there was no tiebreaker from the playoff to superplayoff stage. In 2019,...

Cody

I think that NAQT should be held to a much higher standard because of its position in the community, and instead it is often let off the hook when changes that need to happen do not happen. The discussions we are having about overall record should not be happening because NAQT should have changed it...

Cody

Room 1 - DaVinci A
Room 2 - DeGaulle
Room 3 - Malpensa
Room 4 - Tegel
Room 5 - Capital
Room 6 - Mirabel

Cody

I expect all questions to be shorter than 850 characters, or 7 lines of 10-point TNR 850 characters is still quite long— for comparison NASAT has a maximum of 900 characters. 24 tossups of 850 characters is about the length of 22 tossups of 900 characters, and 24 bonuses will take substantially lon...

Cody

Since we currently have 10 teams signed up (leaving us with a single round-robin format), we are closing the field. Other teams will only be added if we can ensure that the field reaches an even number. Make sure, however, to register as teams or as free agents for ACRONYM, which we've reduced in p...

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