The Quizbowl Resource Center

setht

It looks like I won't make it to any of the VCU Open sites, so I'd also be interested in playing a delayed online mirror of this event, or in playing this as a side event paired with some later (open) tournament, e.g. Missouri Open.

-Seth

setht

I would like to see a buzzer and hear a quizbowl question some time in the next week, maybe even twice in the next week. I would prefer to do this before Friday. I would also prefer not to do this on Monday, since John Lawrence isn't available then. Would people be interested in meeting up on one or...

setht

Is there a stated reason for this change? There are a couple things feeding into this, but I think the main impetus for the "18 years old + HS diploma" bit is that we've had to deal with some shenanigans involving inappropriate use of writer accounts, so we would like for our writers to b...

setht

Out of curiosity, why not consider powers per 20TH as tiebreakers if you want to still consider the value of tossups? Good teams will power questions against everybody, since they'll be attempting to beat teams to the question in competitive matches and certainly won't hesitate to buzz if they know...

setht

-natural variation in PPB (take any team's performance on bonuses, chop it up into 30-bonus segments, and I'm confident you'll find a typical variation of more than 1 part per 30-bonus segment). It occurs to me that this isn't quite the right comparison to make. We're talking about a difference of ...

setht

I arbitrarily picked two 7-3 teams with PPT/PPB inversion and looked at their strength of schedule: GNS went 7-3, 318.3 PP20, 18.75 PPB while playing a schedule that totaled 56-44 with 6 playoff teams and 1 winners' bracket team (La Jolla, who beat them by 300+). They lost their first game to 5-5 T...

setht

Thanks for writing and running the tournament, Selene and I thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.

-Seth

setht

The UC Berkeley club lexicon preserves three wacky formats we developed circa 2001: Fijian Modified Caprivian Modified Prussian These are all fun, but Modified Caprivian is.. favorite.. format.. playing.. old. Just.. sure.. avoid.. violations. On another note, there has been a sad decline in club le...

setht

The UC Berkeley club lexicon preserves three wacky formats we developed circa 2001: Fijian Modified Caprivian Modified Prussian These are all fun, but Modified Caprivian is.. favorite.. format.. playing.. old. Just.. sure.. avoid.. violations. On another note, there has been a sad decline in club le...

setht

Shan Kothari has joined the project to work on the Biology + Other Science I'll note further that I've tied my participation to whether there is demand/support/space for such a tournament, so that's something that I'd like feedback on. I demand and support this tournament, but have no space to offe...

setht

Feynmann's BONGOS , an all-science event I'll vote for running the HSNCT edition of BONGOS on Saturday evening before ACFNATIONALS, if possible. Or maybe at the same time? I don't know if there's overlap in the fields, or issues getting enough staff. I do know that I'm old and like sleeping. -Seth

setht

Selene and I had a really good time playing this. Thanks to everyone who wrote and edited the set, to Dan for organizing, to everyone who read, and to everyone who "showed up" to play.

-Seth

setht

I'm happy to write a large chunk of a packet for this. Doubles or maybe triples seems like a good option. The proposed tossups-only distribution seems good. I'd definitely play this if it somehow wound up happening on CO weekend (and in that case I'm pretty sure Selene would also play); if it's on V...

setht

The Nyx tossup claimed that she and her sister produced Hemera, and I was like, Erebus is a woman? Luckily I didn't neg with Erebus because the tossup asked for the counterpart to Hemera. This was caught and fixed in DI (I changed "sister" to "sibling") but I messed up and didn'...

setht

In addition to the usual thanks to the usual folks--Andrew, Jeff, Jonah, Seth, and several others--big thanks to Ike Jose, Matt Jackson, Aaron Rosenberg, and Billy Busse for chipping in lots of questions and helping look over some parts of the set. Seth will have more to say about this, but I would...

setht

Could I see the metamorphism tossup?

Thanks,
-Seth

setht

The matter of carrying over non-common games has been an issue since at least 2005, when it directly affected the result of the D-II ICT. Results C-O H C Wi T M Wa Y S Final RRR Sd Michigan 6-0 W W W W X L W W 12-1 6-1 3 Chicago 6-0 L X W W L W W L 10-3 4-3 x Harding 5-1 X W W W L L W W 10-3 5-2 1 ...

setht

I'll play.

-Seth

setht

From ACF Nationals 2009-2014, the only change I noticed (other than Viginia in 2012, which Cody mentioned) from carrying over all prelim games was in 2009: Instead of Brown, Chicago, and Stanford finishing in a tie for first, Brown and Stanford, each having lost to Chicago B, would finish a game an...

setht

Actually, it occurs to me that it might be useful to go back further. ACF Nationals 2008 used a format in which all prelim matches—including the match against the other team that made it into the same playoff bracket!—were wiped out. I think we all agree now that that is an overreaction to the "...

setht

that in 2012 Maryland would have been t3rd instead of 4th This isn't actually a change, from what I can tell -- Maryland and Yale both went 7-0 in the prelims, then each lost three playoff games; as such, Maryland was T-3rd in reality until Yale won a full-game tiebreaker to determine final standin...

setht

I took some time this morning to go through ICT results (DI, top bracket only) for 2009-2014 and examine what would have changed if only the one prelim game against a fellow top-bracket team carried over. For 2010-2014, the changes seem mostly cosmetic (e.g. a team switches from 7th to being tied fo...

setht

-Computational bonuses are much more difficult when the moderator can't slow down. I know the formula C =\frac{\kappa \epsilon _{0}A}{d}, as does anyone who's taken AP Physics, but I couldn't even hear that the question wanted to double the linear dimension of the plate; in an ACF-type setting, if ...

setht

I am interested in hearing more about what people did/did not like in the popular culture (and sports) questions in the set. The most useful thing for me as an editor would be the hsqb equivalent of a position paper, backed up with references to the set (actually, the most useful thing would be that...

setht

I would like to join Andrew in thanking all the writers and editors who chipped in on the sets. I thought Andrew did an excellent job coordinating the editing of the DI set, and I was very glad to have John and Matt as guest editors. I was also quite happy to have the DII set in R. and Matt Weiner's...

setht

Could I see the bonus on soil? We said topsoil for the first part, which was not accepted, and I was wondering if I should have been antiprompted or not. As best I can tell, there is no widely agreed upon, formal definition for topsoil, but I think that answer probably should have been accepted—&qu...

setht

Any updates on side event line-up and schedule?

-Seth

setht

NAQT has started developing "standard answerlines" for a bunch of topics, and we hope our writers will use those as a question-writing aid. I think that's fine, and I think copying an answerline from an old packet is okay. In both cases the writer has to think carefully about whether there...

setht

I'm playing on team KoLafTlerBrook (with Selene, Matt Lafer, Ryan Westbrook). We may come up with a better team name at some point.

-Seth

setht

I'm currently planning on playing on a team with Matt Lafer and Ryan Westbrook. If I'm needed to staff instead, I can do that. I assume the goal is an odd number of teams (and enough staff). If we can figure out soon-ish whether that means 1 open team or 2 open teams, we can figure out whether Ashvi...

setht

First, there is our team of namesake padawans who wrote most of the tossups for the set: Cameron Amini, Sameen Belal, Alston Boyd, Jason Cheng, Nick Collins, Alex Dzurick, Joey Goldman, Caleb Kendrick, Eddie Kim, Kay Li, Ewan MacAulay, Rohan Nag, Rohith Nagari, Graham Reid, Jacob O'Rourke, Ryan Ros...

setht

Could we see a side-by-side example of this plagiarism? Here's the question that was initially flagged as probably plagiarized: This scientist mistakenly assumed that phosphate groups are neutral in his theory that DNA has a triple-helix structure. This man proposed the concept of resonance in mole...

setht

Fat Teenage Love Brigade.

-Seth

setht

Hi all, based primarily on considerations of conversion rates, we've decided to make slight but noticeable decreases in the amount of required YA lit in our middle school and high school sets. We've also decided to make it so that questions coded as YA lit cannot appear in the "miscellaneous li...

setht

I've started a thread on this topic over here; I wanted to post in the college section in case there are people here who would like to participate in the discussion.

-Seth

setht

I've started a thread on this topic over here; I wanted to post in the MS section in case there are people here who would like to participate in the discussion.

-Seth

setht

Hi all, I wanted to alert you all to a policy change we are considering for NAQT questions: namely, to refrain from all prefatory "Description acceptable" warnings. I'm bringing this to your attention because it seems that there's a move toward including these warnings regularly in other s...

setht

I would love to improve my question skills, but would I be able to playtest these sets (just for the fun of helping out other new writers) without contributing any initial packet of my own? I'll check with the others, but my inclination is to keep any playtesting sessions "in-house"—I do ...

setht

How will playtesting work? If we do it, it'll be small sessions where the writers show up and play on each others' (unedited) questions. The idea is for writers to get a feel for where people buzz, what kinds of answers people give, etc. (and see typos or awkward phrasings they maybe didn't catch i...

setht

Hey, I appreciate the various offers of freelance questions, but I think there are good reasons for continuing to target a bunch of side events as the ultimate product of this project. To my mind, the main point of this project is providing writing experience and feedback to a bunch of interested wr...

setht

I sent an email expressing interest in this around two weeks ago. Is this upcoming logistics email going to be the first email sent out or did I miss some sort of conformation email? Seth received your e-mail and forwarded it to me. I was under the impression that he was going to respond to it to c...

setht

During the LASA B - Ladue game, there was a very nuanced protest on the neutrophils tossup. While it was handled correctly given the rules in place/facts of the question, it struck me (and some people I subsequently talked to) as rather concerning when it was brought to light that NAQT still has th...

setht

John Lawrence and I have cooked up another one of our harebrained schemes. We would like to oversee a project meant to provide inexperienced collegiate writers with an opportunity to practice writing some questions (probably collegiate regular difficulty), see those questions played on, and receive ...

setht

Could someone post the text of the nuclear envelope tu This structure is bridged by proteins containing SUN ["sun"] and KASH ["cash"] domains. A bipartite motif, a leucine [LOO-seen]-rich motif, or one found in the SV40 T antigen is sufficient for proteins to cross it. This stru...

setht

Some more questions mentioned over in the general discussion thread... This man worked with Roman Jackiw on an anomaly in neutral pion decay. Independently of Gerhard L\"uders, Wolfgang Pauli, and Julian Schwinger, he stated the CPT theorem. He extended David Bohm's work on pilot-wave theory to...

setht

A "Selective Translation" of this conflict's namesake "Chronicle" appears in H. Paul Varley's 1967 history of it. The "red monk" led one faction during this war, during which construction halted on the Silver Pavilion. Its aftermath saw uprisings by the ~ikko (*) ikki~...

setht

I agree with Andrew H.'s argument (over here ) that referencing other people's gut reactions is generally not a great idea for tournament discussion, but I wanted to note that I think the situation for "sifting through commentary in search of useful lessons for future sets" is rather diffe...

setht

I thought we'd already done this, but I can't find it anywhere, so: if you noticed any errors in the DI or DII set while reading or playing, or if you've noticed any since then, please post here (or in the specific questions thread), and/or email [email protected].

Thanks,
-Seth

setht

A couple quick corrections: EDIT: I don't think Seth was in fact a member of NAQT at that time. Again, I think your email was the only communication we received from anyone who was. It's certainly the only such communication the board and I discussed when we were making our decision. I became a memb...

setht

there were a number of tossups on answers I’m rather familiar with that consisted of four lines of things I didn’t recognize followed by an easy giveaway, often the basic definition of the answer. I really would like to get a better idea, if possible, of which questions seemed problematic. I unders...

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