The Quizbowl Resource Center

ProfessorIanDuncan

Hi Michael, It's great to see that there are players from Westchester who want to get more involved in pyramidal quizbowl and I'm sorry that you've hit a few roadblocks along the way. Speaking as someone who also played in Westchester, I know that getting yourself and your teammates involved isn't p...

ProfessorIanDuncan

Does this metric factor in negs? Would that be a useful feature? It seems that adding a negative value, namely the difference between the minimum of question length and correct answer buzz point and the neg point, could shed some insight on how negs affect how much of the tournament is heard. I supp...

ProfessorIanDuncan

SNIP And I couldn’t tell u how many times I’ve had in my lifetime people in those lines tell me to “fuck off” (any sport applies). So I think the current system although chaotic is better at its heart Good grief, where did you grow up? (Sees Austin is from the Detroit area) All right, story checks ...

ProfessorIanDuncan

So I've seen a few posts saying that this year's Regionals was harder than usual. This puzzles me a bit, because I actually felt that Regs was actually slightly easier than normal this year. I don't plan on presenting anything more than an anecdotal opinion, so if the stats bear out that this year t...

ProfessorIanDuncan

In fairness, I presume one of the tournaments that Eliza is referring to is Sectionals at Yale where 36 teams are registered. When is the last time that a college tournament had a field of that size (excluding Nats obviously)? I looked back through the NAQT website and over the past 7-8 years no Sec...

ProfessorIanDuncan

Thank you, I appreciate the clarification.

ProfessorIanDuncan

Fine Arts (3/3) 1/1 – Auditory Fine Arts 1/1 – Visual Fine Arts 1/1 – Other Fine Arts (1 each on Other Visual and Other Audio) Can we get some elaboration on this? It doesn't make sense to me to have 1/1 Audio and 1/1 Visual and then have the last 1/1 be Other Audio and Other Visual. Am I to assume...

ProfessorIanDuncan

I will be replacing Sameen on Michael's team.

ProfessorIanDuncan

that awful system that makes a sound like a dying bird Is that our buzzer system you're talking about? I just put myself down as a staffer on the spreadsheet and it looks to me as if I'm the only one staffing so far. I don't know if there are other people who have otherwise signaled intent to staff...

ProfessorIanDuncan

That system seems like the best approach so far, though I'm a little leery of that kind of value judgement in general, unless there's something like a large benefit of the doubt. I think pretty much all the reforms (save getting rid of UG bids and forbidding teams from going to different sites, whi...

ProfessorIanDuncan

First let me say that, as far as I'm concerned, splitting teams is no different than sending a team to a different site. I suppose if people want to argue that it may stunt the growth of certain regions (an argument that, judging from the comments of people who actually run tournaments in such regio...

ProfessorIanDuncan

I know this thread has extended quite a bit past the OP, but I'll try to answer the original two questions from my own experience. 1. What keeps you doing quizbowl? Rather, what keeps you going, even in the face, say, getting slaughtered in a game? I never think about quizbowl as solely about winnin...

ProfessorIanDuncan

I can only think of a couple reasons a distribution exists in quizbowl 1. People know what's going to be asked about 2. The games stay fair and there is less packet-to-packet variance If there are a bunch of other reasons that I'm missing, I'm happy to abandon the forthcoming argument I'm sure this ...

ProfessorIanDuncan

One thing I would suggest when writing bonuses is to use the lead in prompt to clue something as opposed to just stating "answer some questions about [insert topic here]". You only have a couple of lines for a bonus part and especially at ACF Fall you want to pack as many clues as possible...

ProfessorIanDuncan

From your signature, I'm assuming that you either a freshman or sophomore and by your statement about your teammate doing something for college that they are older than you by at least 1 or 2 years. If you are a JV player, and by far the teams top scorer, your time to be captain will come. If it rea...

ProfessorIanDuncan

I disagree with Cody about the prompting on DeWitt Clinton example, because George Clinton is a major figure in New York politics at more or less the same time period in American history. I would definitely confuse these two in a tossup. I dont think its impossible that someone would end up saying s...

ProfessorIanDuncan

Thank you to everyone who came to this tournament, I hope you all enjoyed yourselves. Thank you to everyone who brought buzzers, everyone who came out to read especially Richard Yu, York Chen, and Jason Lai. Thank you to Will Alston and his team of writers for producing an enjoyable set. Congratulat...

ProfessorIanDuncan

A member of the NYU quizbowl team received an email saying that we would have 8 rooms until 9 PM. I dont know how long the 3 events planned are going to run, but we do have plenty of time. The registration spreadsheet (which you can get access to by email columbia quizbowl, email address on the firs...

ProfessorIanDuncan

Regarding repeating answer lines: Obviously some answer lines are broad and well known enough to use completely different clues (for example something like a country like France/UK/US/Germany). However, something I saw at least once was that there were questions whose answer lines were people or eve...

ProfessorIanDuncan

Is there a field cap for this and is it likely to be increased if necessary?

ProfessorIanDuncan

Awesome. Thanks for the verification.

ProfessorIanDuncan

Is this still a thing? If so, am I just not finding it?

ProfessorIanDuncan

This thread makes no sense to me. I would understand if the general idea of thread was "ACF Fall is too expensive, if it remains at this price we wont play". But that's not what I'm getting as the general vibe here. This thread (or at least that part of the thread) seems to just be about c...

ProfessorIanDuncan

I wrote a packet of (mostly art) film tossups, which I'll read tonight at 11:00 Eastern in #film.

Will this packet be posted at any point?

ProfessorIanDuncan

Arrggh. I wish I saw this earlier today.

ProfessorIanDuncan

but a number of teams weren't there on time Teams: show up on time! I will say that in defense of Columbia and NYU that we waited 15 minutes for a bus that never came so we ended up walking from the station to campus. Ultimately, we could (and probably should) have arrived 15 minutes earlier. On th...

ProfessorIanDuncan

The Kurt Cobain Suicide note was a great idea for a tossup.

ProfessorIanDuncan

Maybe this is just bias because I knew the answer, but didn't the C. Kirchner question seem relatively easy? I'm pretty sure that the lead-in was the same clue as a clue in the middle of an SCT tossup on Argentina and that seemed a bit off.
Also can I see the Wong Kar-Wai tossup?

ProfessorIanDuncan

STIMPY is going to be used well into April, so you guys might be able to ask the people in charge of that if no one plans on playing it. It would be best to get a list of interested people as soon as possible for the reasons Marianna outlined. That way it will be possible to see if an in person tryo...

ProfessorIanDuncan

Can I see the Dirichlet tossup? Am I correct in assuming that question was in this set? I think I may have missed the clue, but it seems weird that a tossup on him at regular difficulty wouldn't mention his function.

ProfessorIanDuncan

Can I see the Honduras tossup? I want to see the exact wording on one of the clues

ProfessorIanDuncan

Last year, I seem to remember a massive list of graduating seniors and where they were going to college being compiled. Is something similar going to manifest itself this year?

ProfessorIanDuncan

The French New Wave tossup from IS126 please.

ProfessorIanDuncan

Another note: the mutations toss-up was uncharacteristically easy for this tournament. Easy might not be the right word, though--transparent maybe? I didn't know all of the early clues, but "mutation" was what kept coming to mind because of the phrasing of the question. You want transpare...

ProfessorIanDuncan

This exercise in game thoery would probably lead to a more conservative gameplay. If you keep a -5 for negging, then the opposing team gets an extra 5 points for just waiting till the end of the question. Most players wouldn't wait to get a few extra points, but people would probably sit on question...

ProfessorIanDuncan

I am curious as to how many players Livingston is returning. They put up good bonus conversion numbers and held their own against some good teams. West WIndsor Plainsboro should also be strong next year; I think that most of their players are juniors and this is a team that beat Irvington and Ridgew...

ProfessorIanDuncan

Ok. So i was gonna post the top five playoffs seeds for varsity in DC if anyone cares, because that is probably more fitting to go under 2013 NAC than yelling at John about the Baltimore-DC circuit and Its Academic. 1. Hastings 2. Ardsley 3. Irvington 4. Horace Greeley 5. Booker T. Washington The to...

ProfessorIanDuncan

Is the Briarcliff Middle School that came to this from Briarcliff, NY? Like in Westchester?

ProfessorIanDuncan

It's not well run because there's less teams, it's because those teams play 6 prelim games over the space of 2 days which (barring hotel fire drills, which happened last year to us) is pretty easy to manage.

ProfessorIanDuncan

I'm interested to hear how Sameer's attempt to transport his NHBB hardware went.

He curled himself up in the bowl trophy while clutching the other one and had someone mail it back to California

ProfessorIanDuncan

Saturday in our OAC regional we knocked a local public school out twice (by overwhelming margins, no less) to eliminate them from states contention. Their coach, right in front of us in the hall-way after the game, exclaimed "this is what happens when we have to play private schools". Goo...

ProfessorIanDuncan

thank you. and yes the berlin school removes all ambiguity from the third part as i had suspected.

ProfessorIanDuncan

I was preparing to leave mortified at how awful the trash was, but I enjoyed the trash esp. the pokemon biology bonus. A number of them had very good easy medium hard structures. Also can i see the trash bonus from round 1, on serial/cereal or whatever? EDIT: Woops misinterpreted that. The R.E.M For...

ProfessorIanDuncan

what is the discrepancy in the Gestalt bonus? because i think there might be vagueness in the part where it asks about the city where it was developed. A bunch of the psychologists who founded it worked together in frankfurt as well as berlin so i'm not sure if its vague or not.

ProfessorIanDuncan

NY States cannot be hosted by Irvington. Apologies to anyone who wanted to do this.

ProfessorIanDuncan

If I end up going to NJ States and that ends up being the venue, could I do this just to see how I'd compare?

ProfessorIanDuncan

Honestly, it's just Hunter A. It really is up to them if they want to go to NASAT.

ProfessorIanDuncan

I did not know that.

ProfessorIanDuncan

I'm pretty sure we have like no money to host a tournament. I can double check this week.

ProfessorIanDuncan

Fair enough. Maybe that's just my opinion because the de Broglie equation is legitimately the only formula i seem to know.

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