The Quizbowl Resource Center

UlyssesInvictus

Since I've last posted, we've picked up mirrors at Solon and Marist. In addition, I've officially announced the main site at Harvard (for which teams are already signing up!). I'm very excited about some of the stuff we're writing, so get those mirror requests in!

UlyssesInvictus

If you tried emailing me and it didn't work, it was because I was a dum-dum and switched harvard and college. It's fixed now.

UlyssesInvictus

This post reserved for field list. Registered Teams (If you're not on here in 24 hours, but should be, let me know!) School/Number of Teams Wilmington Charter/3 Bishop Guertin HS/1 Lexington HS/4 Bethlehem Central/1 Hunter HS/2 Acton Boxborough/2 "Team Andy Huff"/1 AMSA/2 Paul Laurence Dun...

UlyssesInvictus

Hello, everybody! :D I'm sorry it took a while, but I'm very excited to announce the main site for the 10th annual Harvard Fall Tournament. In a similar date to last year, HFT X will be happening on November 14th, 2015. To register, please email me at "raynorkuang AT college DOT harvard DOT edu...

UlyssesInvictus

Will (and our access to the radio station) is gone this week, so we'll be taking the opportunity to get a loverly skyline view of Boston at the Business School. Practice will be at One Western Avenue, in the Court, about a 15 minute walk from Central Square and a 10 minute walk from Harvard Square. ...

UlyssesInvictus

It'd be cool if more people attached their packets here once they're played. I don't know if it's Chrome's fault (I did try IE, too, though) or me being really stupid, but I couldn't successfully get attachments to work--the attachment tab is just empty. Is there a minimum posts requirement before ...

UlyssesInvictus

I also recommend finding the reading lists your local high school provides....Typically these are very "Great Canon" works, and pretty enjoyable Your mileage may vary depending on your district , however. I'm not saying that some of these aren't worthwhile, but as for books that come up ,...

UlyssesInvictus

If you're interested in an answer that doesn't start its flow from quizbowl, I also recommend finding the reading lists your local high school provides (such as the summer ones they give you on transitioning from MS to HS) and just browsing the titles, maybe choosing a few to read. Typically these a...

UlyssesInvictus

Here is a comment in this thread with which I quite strongly disagree: First, Virginia Woolf: I concede that this is a subjective point, but I don't believe the majority of the body of her work incorporates gay themes. I don't believe that these gay themes obviously manifested themselves in her mos...

UlyssesInvictus

I know you expressly denied it's what you want, but I can't see a better analogue to minority status than precisely writing questions like "A person with this...status (yeah, I'm at a loss for a better word)...wrote about a character with this status in Giovanni's Room ." In fact, to use ...

UlyssesInvictus

The interesting thing is that quiz bowl already empirically acknowledges the relevance of a detail like "Where _x_ person was from". Tossups on countries or cities based on important people who live there abound in nearly every subject, because it's acknowledged that living in a certain p...

UlyssesInvictus

If writers are going to try to emphasize this, they need to make sure not to let it get in the way of writing good, playable questions. A clue like "This philosopher, whose own sexuality helped enable his fascination with conformity and society" is quite vague. I guess it's okay for bonus...

UlyssesInvictus

I actually disagree, but about half-and-half. I agree with one-half of your thesis--hopefully I'm not misconstruing you, please let me know if I am--which seems to be that minority status, when relevant to a person's life, body of work, and significance in their relative discipline, isn't adequately...

UlyssesInvictus

This is a great write-up--are you planning on doing D.C. and Puerto Rico as well? (Or even Guam, or our Northern Neighbors, as Joe and Ben already mentioned.)

UlyssesInvictus

To clear up some confusion, practice is in the WHRB Station at the basement of Pennypacker again tonight (and will be as long as it remains the most feasible solution). I'm actually missing practice tonight, but if you have trouble finding the place, PMing me remains as always a good way to get in t...

UlyssesInvictus

Capistrano Valley High School is mirroring HFT X in the SoCal region! (Sometime around January). The set is proceeding along nicely, so get those mirror requests in!

As always, definitely send me an email or private message if you have any questions at all about mirroring.

UlyssesInvictus

Practice is cancelled for today, and Thursdays forevermore--Monday will be our regular time. (We only have access to a meeting place on Mondays anyway.)

UlyssesInvictus

Hey, I have a packet of Zelda tossups if anyone wants to hear them. I have a lot more answer-lines, so if people are interested I could expand it to ~70 questions. Out of boredom waiting for this happen, I wrote my own 20/20 packet on Legend of Zelda. I'll read it at NSC informally (slap-bowl, prob...

UlyssesInvictus

We've moved to the headquarters for WHRB, which is in the basement of Pennypacker Hall. Ring the doorbell and someone will let you in. If you're having trouble with directions, PM me.

UlyssesInvictus

Starting tomorrow, we're having practice on Monday from 8-10, with the same location and time details. Whether or not this is a switch from Thursday or an additional practice per week is up to people.

UlyssesInvictus

Hey guys, I've cut the most important section of the All Star game for ringtone purposes here RIP in peace headphone users :| On a more significant note--and I'm not sure if this should go in the discussion thread instead since it doesn't apply specifically to this one NSC--is it possible to record...

UlyssesInvictus

List
--------
New England: Harvard main site (11/14/15)
SoCal: UCSD (4/16/16)
Southeast: Marist School (1/23/16)
Midwest (Ohio): Solon High School (2/6/16)
Midwest (Illinois): Rockford Auburn (12/5/15)
Mid-Atlantic: Richard Montgomery (4/9/16)
UK: Oxford (5/14/16)

UlyssesInvictus

Good news everybody! The 10th annual Harvard Fall Tournament (HFT X) will be available for high school tournament mirrors starting November 14, 2015, and until two weeks before the 2016 HSNCT . I (Raynor Kuang) will be head editor, with contributions from Mark Arildsen, Will Holub-Moorman and the re...

UlyssesInvictus

Hey, I have a packet of Zelda tossups if anyone wants to hear them. I have a lot more answer-lines, so if people are interested I could expand it to ~70 questions. Out of boredom waiting for this happen, I wrote my own 20/20 packet on Legend of Zelda. I'll read it at NSC informally (slap-bowl, prob...

UlyssesInvictus

The door at the bottom of the steps in the entrance facing the plaza and the door at the head of the gravel path are both locked, but you can use the wooden door that faces the road. If you still can't manage to get in, PM me and I'll come and find you.

UlyssesInvictus

A reminder that this is happening tonight! Time and location are as stated above. Post here or PM me if you can't get in. There's a chance we won't have access to the room--I'll try to get there early and post here if that's the case. Practice is open to anybody and everybody. Please come so it's no...

UlyssesInvictus

Just in case you weren't already, I recommend keeping these questions short--there's a time and place for pyramidality. I agree about the popular culture. Current events also seem to work well, firstly because I guess older people tend to be more news aware, and secondly because in my experience peo...

UlyssesInvictus

Glad you like it :) This is my personal favorite of the strips: http://existentialcomics.com/comic/58

UlyssesInvictus

http://existentialcomics.com/ (don't be misled by the URL, it's about all philosophy) I recently found this webcomic--I guess it's not particularly odd in that obviously it's trying to teach you philosophy, but it's too cool not to share and not academic enough to share in the "Quizbowl books&q...

UlyssesInvictus

I actually don't think too much of his work, but he's well associated with China. A description involving his work would have served the same purpose. That being said, it wasn't an egregious mishap or anything. I don't really agree that merely hearing "Thomas Friedman wrote an article about th...

UlyssesInvictus

A brief history of quizbowl might be interesting, just from a consumer point of view, since it increases the air of legitimacy and tradition, in addition to just being an interesting read.

UlyssesInvictus

Hey, I have a packet of Zelda tossups if anyone wants to hear them. I have a lot more answer-lines, so if people are interested I could expand it to ~70 questions. Out of boredom waiting for this happen, I wrote my own 20/20 packet on Legend of Zelda. I'll read it at NSC informally (slap-bowl, prob...

UlyssesInvictus

Or should I put our competition results under awards/honors and emphasize the club and community aspect under extracurriculars? Also, should I send in past videos/internet article links to show that its a legitimate activity that many people put a lot of time into with very stiff competition; not j...

UlyssesInvictus

We'll be having practices from Thursday 8-10, starting June 11th, in room 28 of Memorial Hall (in the basement). These are open to anyone who can make them.

This post will be updated if that room info ever changes.

UlyssesInvictus

Harvard will be hosting weekly practices in Memorial Hall near the beginning of the summer, and then potentially in the business school if summer school takes our location. More details to come.

UlyssesInvictus

Ken Jennings wrote:I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.

UlyssesInvictus

The reason the data set is relatively small is that I had to manually read and categorize 60 packets worth of questions. In R, I used the total number of words in each category as a variable. Unfortunately, I won't have much time to work on this for some time, but hopefully I'll get around to it so...

UlyssesInvictus

The first is the import process. In Quinterest, this has to be carried out manually by cutting and pasting; I have a whole pipeline which does it about as near-automatically as it can be done. That's not a database feature per se, but it does make getting stuff into the db pretty easy; adding a new...

UlyssesInvictus

So I spent a couple weeks on and off trying to make a quick and dirty question classifier using multinomial logistic regression. Using a fairly small dataset (3 HSAPQ tournaments in the training set, 1 HSAPQ tourney in the test set), I was able to get around 80% overall accuracy, which seems tolera...

UlyssesInvictus

The Herb wrote:Hey, I have a packet of Zelda tossups if anyone wants to hear them. I have a lot more answer-lines, so if people are interested I could expand it to ~70 questions.

HYAH! HYAH! HYAAAAAH!

[trans: yes i would love this so much]

UlyssesInvictus

I'd love to play and/or staff this at NSC, though I'm not very familiar with the schedule of side-events at NSC.

UlyssesInvictus

Despite being a fairly academically competitive middle school, my middle school (Rachel Carson) never had a quizbowl club in any form; so when I went to Thomas Jefferson, I had no idea what quizbowl was. TJ has a good club system, so I zeroed in quickly on the description of a trivia-like club (whic...

UlyssesInvictus

I once lost a match to Dylan Minarik partially because I said "triwizard tournament" for a tossup on what I think was the ryder cup. So there's that. we ended up winning our quarterfinal match against LASA at HSNCT, but my team has never stopped giving me shit for negging a tossup on &quo...

UlyssesInvictus

and in the afternoon, I remember being whooped so thoroughly by Raynor's TJ team that I asked my coach to sub me out at half-time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I guess I can take credit for creating the behemoth that is Eric Xu then...? So that I'm actually on topic, I can offer up TJ's final game at the 2013 (?) HSNC...

UlyssesInvictus

I am bad at literature and powered exactly zero literature tossups at this tournament since the questions consisted of actual substantive clues about plots. This is probably a good thing. And conversely, I liked the lit a lot for this reason, since my substantive buzzes felt really rewarding. OTOH,...

UlyssesInvictus

I thought the set was pretty great, had a lot of fun playing it. I didn't have any overwhelmingly specific concerns, but I want to echo the concerns about tossups like games, pilgrimage, and Greenpeace that felt a little too transparent. I guess I felt like they used real clues, so you were rewarded...

UlyssesInvictus

Ah, thanks--Will's not coming, but I'll get him to forward me those details.

UlyssesInvictus

If the field remains as it is, what schedule would presumably be used? (along with a guess for finish time, if you can)

UlyssesInvictus

Someone in the foreign language quizbowl thread mentioned possibly using Spreeder or similar one-word displaying programs (in case you're not familiar, they just mow through the text flashing one word at a time). In the context of the thread, this was an idea of making qb accessible to the deaf, but...

UlyssesInvictus

There was another thread about this. I think this is the relevant forum post?

viewtopic.php?p=282149#p282149

edit: woops, posted to the wrong thread. hopefully somebody's helped the other guy by now? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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