The Quizbowl Resource Center

adamsil

A question for local Evanston/Chicago folks: Friday night I'll be interested in hitting a local brewpub or two. It looks like Sketchbook is definitely interesting, and maybe Smylie Brothers and Temperance (the last of which looks to be further away?). Are those good calls, and if not, other suggest...

adamsil

I finally managed to submit room requests in for 15 rooms in Kresge for both Saturday and Sunday this year. Assuming they go through (and they should), this year's CO should actually be air conditioned! :grin: If you anticipate needing more than that many rooms for your event, please let me know ASA...

adamsil

In 2013, we discovered that Andy Watkins is human scum who cheated 3 ICTs worth of people out of a fair contest , including his own teammates. Worse than any other cheater before or after him (Baselius, Cam, Amit Bilgi, Steven Hines, Lane Silberstein, Josh Alman, Scott Putzig, and Joe Brosch), Andy...

adamsil

I enjoyed this tournament and think that it did a particularly good job, especially relative to last year, of sticking with answerlines that were accessible to new-ish teams. Our B team was answering most of the tossups by the end. The science had a lot of good clean tossups on solid answerlines (ex...

adamsil

cornfused wrote: ↑Sat Nov 24, 2018 10:05 pm
Geriatric trauma wrote: ↑Sat Nov 24, 2018 8:40 pm
cornfused wrote: ↑Sat Nov 24, 2018 8:22 pm Adam Silverman lives in Andersonville these days, so, uh, you're missing someone.

EDIT: possibly Edgewater or Rogers Park
oh really i thought he lived in the lab
valid

can confirm that both of these things are true (even though I suck at history)

adamsil

This was a mostly quite good set of novice science questions, I can think of very little to nitpick! -It is generally not a very good idea to write a tossup on "photosynthesis" that mixes clues from the light-dependent reactions and the Calvin cycle--in practice that causes a lot of peopl...

adamsil

Yeah, I was trying to evaluate why this tournament was much longer than the last few years. I think the game rooms were spread out more (up stairs and in an adjoining building), which didn't help. I liked Evanston as a location--if they could get rooms that were sufficiently cooler that would be ni...

adamsil

Do we know yet if we are meeting in Fisk, Locy, or somewhere else? My room request for a large meeting room was unfortunately never confirmed, but I'm hoping it'll still be open to us early in the morning, so we're going to plan on meeting in Kresge 2380 tomorrow morning regardless, and if that's n...

adamsil

Do we know yet if we are meeting in Fisk, Locy, or somewhere else? My room request for a large meeting room was unfortunately never confirmed, but I'm hoping it'll still be open to us early in the morning, so we're going to plan on meeting in Kresge 2380 tomorrow morning regardless, and if that's n...

adamsil

Paul Ryan Center for the Musical Arts : Anyway, so has a building location been announced? Will it be in one of those (Kresge or Locy?) that Mike mentioned? The tournament itself will be in Locy (and one room in Fisk, which is adjacent to Locy). I'm still hoping to get confirmation from the adminis...

adamsil

I think it would be interesting for writers to get a sense of the questions that quizbowl players enjoyed the most and why. So, what is your favorite question that you didn't write? I'm hoping that people don't just respond with questions that they got good buzzes on, but ones that were executed so...

adamsil

Was furious with myself for negging the S. cerevisiae question with E coli on the first clue despite having actually done amber codon suppression. Moderator kind of mangled the names in the first sentence, recognised the sequences, then just assumed that at least one of the names was Peter Schultz'...

adamsil

Thanks for the response. Overall, I thought you did a good job. We can agree to disagree about the chromatography thing (if you check archives though, you'll notice that it is pretty standard to accept chromatography for column chromatography, so this may not be a hill worth dying on). One thing I'l...

adamsil

For the most part, I enjoyed this set, and it was a good effort by relatively inexperienced editors. I have just two general comments I'll make here: Answerlines, particularly in science, particularly in chemistry, were not extensive enough. Things like hydroxyl/alcohols have been extensively confla...

adamsil

In quantum mechanics, operators corresponding to observables must have eigenvalues with this property, meaning the operators must be self-adjoint and Hermitian. Aren't self-adjoint and Hermitian the same thing? I didn't write this one, but yes. (I guess one technically refers to the operator and on...

adamsil

Pascal Plays Poker wrote: I appreciated the mosquitoes tossup; They are underrepresented in quizbowl.

People gotta learn about gene drives at some point!

adamsil

Hey all, I wrote a large number of exclusively science questions for this set, essentially the bulk of the bio, chem, and physics. Many thanks to a few people, especially Eliza Grames and Shan Kothari, for their excellent contributions in areas of bio at which I'm not so competent, and Auroni, Eric,...

adamsil

I'm not sure you could pick either me or Dylan as Northwestern's MVP this year--we traded being the top scorer in games all year long, and I think he generally fared better than I did in games against good teams. He also improved a lot between last year and this year, whereas I got worse in every su...

adamsil

To be less hyperbolic--Max and I split science this year pretty much 50-50, and he took a mostly-chemistry-tiebreaker tossup against us in the ICT playoffs, so Dylan's high praise isn't totally true, and my best game at Nats was the one against Yale, so that might color Jacob's opinion too. I also d...

adamsil

Could I see the Rd. 2 tossup on clay tennis courts? I only started paying attention when I heard the name of an actual tennis tournament and am curious to see what the first sentence was going on about. As an aside, I thought the Z^N/N! was a great hard part and the only part that was confusing abou...

adamsil

If anyone wants feedback on their bio and chem submissions, email me at adsilverman627 at gmail dot com and I will do my best to respond quickly. The submissions tended to cluster very heavily toward a few areas (especially organic functional groups and elements), so if you wrote a question that got...

adamsil

Can I see the exact phrasing of the "vibrations" tossup, especially the lead-in about PQR branches? I might be remembering wrong, but I think that part was more applicable to transitions between vibrational states than to the act of vibrating itself. I'm not sure there's really a fundamen...

adamsil

Can I see the albinism question please? In case it's unclear, the second sentence is referring to the OCA2 gene, one of the proteins that gets lost/mutated in Prader-Willi, so I think the clue is fine as it reads. Perhaps it's unclear because albinism isn't the most famous symptom of Prader-Willi, ...

adamsil

Can I see the exact phrasing of the "vibrations" tossup, especially the lead-in about PQR branches? I might be remembering wrong, but I think that part was more applicable to transitions between vibrational states than to the act of vibrating itself. I'm not sure there's really a fundamen...

adamsil

For the gram negative bacteria bonus (don't remember which packet, sorry), I'm pretty confident that "injectisome" should have been acceptable, or at least promptable, for the part on the Type 3 Secretion System. Yep, that's totally my bad. I added that late to the list of acceptable answ...

adamsil

Well, your experiences trump my claims, so I'll concede these specific examples. :) More than a lot of writers, I value concise clues when writing--I find simple sentences to be the most effective in quizbowl settings. So I stylistically oppose clarifying or flowery language if it's at all avoidable...

adamsil

Another thing I wanted to note, and which was mentioned (with different examples) by Adam in the Terrapin general discussion: Players can gather context from clues outside of the specific content you are cluing. For example, in a tossup on yeast, describing an obscure metabolic pathway characterize...

adamsil

I don't have much to add other than thanks for a really great set, especially to Sam, Billy, and others for a very well-executed science distribution. I also thought the literature was excellent. There was one packet that seemed to have two CS bonuses (I think it was round 10? The first round of pla...

adamsil

Just wanted to chime in to say that I thoroughly enjoyed this set, but especially the science; Andrew + others, you did a tremendous job to keep it real but also accessible. There were a lot of hard parts in this set that would be in a gray area between middle and hard at Regionals, but worked great...

adamsil

I'm a little disappointed that several clues were added to the Trypanosoma tossup that I had specifically avoided because they were non-unique -- there seems to have been a conflation between kinetoplastids or trypanosomatids and Trypanosoma , despite important other kinetoplastid genuses existing ...

adamsil

so like 50% of the chem I played this tournament was orgo, in particular 4/5 of the playoff rounds I played had orgo tus for chem I don't think there was a single tu on inorganic chem? What's wrong with 50% orgo? That seems to be about standard in most college tournaments I've played (ACF Nats this...

adamsil

1) The bio was very, very biochemistry heavy and had almost no questions on human/medicinal bio (the only things that I can remember off the top of my head were the biochemistry-heavy tossup on osteoclasts and the bonus on antibiotics). Also there were a ton of "this organism" questions. ...

adamsil

(To further clarify my stance on the original question to Ike): It's easier for me to write a very hard question on something "real" that I know than a very hard question on something "fake" that I don't. That's a natural consequence of having specialists write quizbowl questions...

adamsil

(Before I ramble: I take full blame for the questions in these categories, and it's not like people were submitting questions with these perceived "barbarisms". I'm not exaggerating when I say that re-wrote every submitted question in my categories, with the exception of a single bonus in ...

adamsil

several science questions that seemed to be on unnecessarily hard answerlines for the material ("specific volume"). I think a lot of the difficulty of this tournament came from the science. My impression was that the "engineering slant" (I'm not saying that every question was wr...

adamsil

Pichia was really hard. It's not even mentioned in the 1500+-page Alberts textbook (which talks about S. pombe -- what Eric and I negged with -- multiple times), or even on the Wikipedia list of model funguses... It's mainly used in pretty specific circumstances for protein expression, more like a ...

adamsil

I want to thank Matt and John for giving me the opportunity to work on this set. Editing CO is a blast just for the opportunity to ask about a lot of things that you simply can't do at an ACF tournament. Also, many thanks to Shan for his invaluable advice on the non-molecular bio, and to my brother ...

adamsil

The Superfluous Man wrote:Combined stats are here but the scoresheet for the round 15 game between "Just what is it" and "Golgari Glenn Ross" is missing. Did anyone pick it up, or keep their own score during that game?

I've got it--emailing it to you now.

adamsil

It appears to be up on the archive now.

adamsil

In the fall, I will be starting a one-year medical laboratory science program on the North Shore of Chicago, and do not intend to return to Georgia. I look forward to witnessing Illinois high school quizbowl firsthand. Continuing the Georgia to Illinois exodus--I'm starting a PhD in Chemical Engine...

adamsil

We've finished our last planned mirror for the semester. I'll leave this announcement up for another week or so in case anyone is still interested in planning a late-semester tournament, and if not, I'll submit the set to the archive.

adamsil

Hey, I'm not our team contact anymore, but is there info about time/place for tomorrow? Emma has been having trouble posting here and is wondering if she missed an email somewhere along the line. Thanks!

adamsil

I hope everyone enjoyed this tournament. Please access the private discussion forum from your User Control Panel if you'd like to offer feedback on the 2015 BISB set, or feel free to send me an email. Thanks!

adamsil

We've got a private usergroup set up for set discussion now; you can join it from your User Control Panel. Feedback is much appreciated!

adamsil

We've got a private usergroup set up for BISB set discussion now; you can join it from your User Control Panel. Feedback is much appreciated!

adamsil

I've sent a couple requests to get a private usergroup for the set arranged, but until that happens, please email me at adsilverman at bellsouth dot net if you've got any immediate general criticisms/fact-checks/requests to see a specific question. Thanks!

adamsil

Betsy: I've sent a couple of messages to Enloe with no response, and I haven't heard anything from them since we started the calendar over the summer. I'll assume if we don't hear anything by the end of this weekend, the tournament on September 26th is not happening. I received an email from Celia ...

adamsil

The set is completely written, edited, and packetized. We'll be working on playtesting it for the next few weeks. Still looking for mirrors, particularly in New England; shoot me an email if you're interested.

adamsil

This set is now 80% complete, so we are right on track to finish in early August. The questions will be extensively play-tested during August and early September as well. We don't have too many interested mirrors this year compared to previous years. I encourage you, if you're hesitating on which se...

adamsil

List of mirrors to be updated here: September 19, Germantown HS, Germantown, TN (contact Keith Mattix) September 26/October at Enloe HS, Raleigh, NC (contact Celia Rowland) October 10: Earlybird at UIUC, Champaign, IL (contact Tristan Willey) October 24: California Cup 1, Varsity Division, UC Berkel...

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