The Quizbowl Resource Center

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There were a couple of questions that felt too easy and flat in difficulty (basalt ... ). I'd like to see these questions, since I may be misremembering. The majority of this substance is derived from a reservoir modeled by Workman as the product of a primitive source losing LREEs [“L R E Es”]. Sam...

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(Also, this is actually a more general form of Liouville's theorem -- the complex version is just a special case, because the conditions for being holomorphic are equivalent to the conditions for a real-valued function on two variables to be harmonic.) wouldn't the harmonic version be a special cas...

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Round 3 : -Rare earth metals was kind of a lame idea. I don't remember the category here but it felt silly because an acceptable answer was "rare earths" where you could buzz off of Chinese mining knowledge. My dislike of this idea is more aesthetic. Tailings from a refinery for these res...

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Garmisch-Partenkirchen is a former host of the Winter Olympics (all of which are eminently askable by any reasonable metric) and also remains important in the realm of winter sports: it's an annual feature in the Four Hills tournament and was part of the Munich bid for the 2018 Olympics (in the sam...

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I edited the biology, some chem, other science, and the mythology, with some help from Adam here and there. I'd like to thank my fellow editors for their camaraderie and their work throughout the process, as well as Will and Alex with their logistical prowess and Olivia for her proof-reading. I had ...

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We are anticipating a 2 PM ET start time again - the same invite will work, and anyone who has indicated interest on the sheet will be contacted (including those that did so after the previous playtest).

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Thank you to everyone who attended the playtest yesterday - we appreciate your feedback.

We will be playtesting the remainder of the questions this coming Sunday, beginning with Arts.

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This is happening now - we have just moved on to history. If you are still interested, just let me know - we expect to have additional categories play-tested next week as well, so if you want to do those let me know as well or sign-up on the sheet and we'll get you in before then. More reasonable sc...

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To clarify on the original post, this will be held at 2 PM Eastern Time . EDIT: it has been brought to my attention that I didn’t do math good and there isn’t enough time for each category, so I’ve updated them This is the order of categories and proposed itinerary of the playtest - this is not fina...

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We recently announced a closed Discord mirror of the tournament for 3/7 here; if you’re currently eligible to play the set with your school, consider attending that rather than the playtest.

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I would like to announce a playtest session for WORKSHOP to be held in a private Discord on 2/9. Initial plans are to begin at roughly 2 PM ET and see how much progress is made, with 2/16 functioning as a spillover date for any additional playtesting needed. This playtesting session will be free. Al...

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Earlier today I was alerted to the fact that [A., a player from C.] MS was attempting to leak unclear packets in the high school Discord. I banned him preemptively from both the high school and regular Discords and asked for proof of the allegation. I was given screenshots that I consider definitive...

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my notes rd 1 crypts are also in tonsils fiddling is very hard french too hard greg of tours namedropped to early 1972 bonus hard eakins slightly hard rd 2 pessoa hard kombu glacier (?!) - green boots already hard cut second part of mobius bonus part WHAT WWI THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD unreasonably dif...

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That scrabble class really paying dividends, huh

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We'll be mirroring Reel Knowledge , an academic film set, after the conclusion of Fall Open. Format will *probably* be a one- or two-room shootout, but this could change depending on how many people want to participate. Express interest here: https://forms.gle/j9fREezsZ4h8SBXt9 . There will be no c...

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Why can't clues that have appeared in tossups on the Spanish Civil War show up in a tossup on Barcelona? Are we assuming nobody ever bothers to go learn the substance of clues when they read them in packets? ... Knowing that Catalonia was a Republican base of power is very important as is the assoc...

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Went through and did some clue look-up for the Barcelona tossup. Obviously this is not an absolute statement of any individual clue’s difficulty, especially since it is very reasonable to say that the Barcelona angle of many of these clues hasn’t been put to good use, but I think it’s pretty clear t...

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I'm not sure why one needs to change a tossup on Barcelona to Spain - there's plenty of usable history clues on Barcelona. I didn't find that question too far above the rest of the tournament's history. Perhaps you, one of the top history players in the nation, should take your own stance on the di...

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Flipped through some later packets. sleep - the expression of c-Fos in the sleep-wakefulness flip-flop is not something intrinsic to what it does, it just means that there are action potentials, so that clue isn’t particularly helpful. Since most people aren’t memorizing specific point mutations, it...

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Scattered notes and errata I took while reading the set at Harvard - as time went on I got tired and took fewer things down but that doesn't mean there was less to comment on in the latter half. Rd1 B2: reword "American longest continuously running literary magazine" -> "longest conti...

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"Suppressor of white apricot domain" and "SWAP domain" are, respectively, the leadins to the 2015 NASAT and 2015 CO tossups on splicing. I think it was the second or third clue in the EFT tossup. That's some considerable drift! You’ll be pleased to learn that that clue was to re...

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At least one person buzzed on the Stalin leadin. Also, Robert Conquest's works are very famous and a lot of people buzzed on that clue as well. I take that back then! I apologize, it's simply a gap in my knowledge and it's cool/good to know I am wrong. I was the person who got the buzz. In fact, Co...

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In light of all my criticism of the set and all the nit-picking I’ve done, I want to just publicly affirm that I did greatly enjoy the set and that I think it did a very good job in providing interesting content accessible across different skill levels. A lot of the first clues felt rewarding when p...

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I don't understand why the tossup on "purple" remains. Many of the clues rely on subjective perceptions of color as opposed to things that are named for the color. A superficially similar problem I have is with the clues on the color of octahedral and tetrahedral complexes of cobalt, which...

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Anyways here's links to all the currently posted mirrors - I will not be updating this: Discord playtest: 9/21 New England: MIT (10/5) Northeast: Columbia University (10/5) Mid-Atlantic: UMD (10/5) Lower Mid-Atlantic: UNC (10/5) Southeast: Auburn (10/5) Florida: UCF (10/5 or 10/12) Texas: Rice (9/28...

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The post is up, and it seems to have been made before Justin made his comment, though presumably not made it through the mod queue before then. Regardless, there's very little I can personally do besides tell hosts to post their stuff, but in the future if there's an issue with asking for school fu...

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Cheynem wrote: ↑Sun Sep 08, 2019 9:02 pm Has this confused anyone ever?

I mean I imagine it would confuse ASU.

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As someone else who has been thinking about the problems with quiz bowl at small colleges, I'd like to second a lot of what Michael has been saying, as well as offer some comments of my own. (Issue #1): The best thing that happened to me when starting the Bowdoin team was meeting another very excite...

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Hey, so I wrote what was (as far as I can tell) the hardest science tossup in the set, judging from me asking around on the day of - the tossup on oozes , which made it in unedited from our team's submission. I intended for the tossup to link disparate pieces of knowledge about ocean science that I ...

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Ndg wrote: ↑Sun Jul 28, 2019 5:10 pm No one is going to begrudge a few friends playing packets at someone's house, but posting the stats publicly and posting a link to them in the thread about the actual event undermines the notion that that's all it was.

how else are people going to know I got 1 power

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Stats are done. Round 8 is a little iffy but eh.

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So when you say the editing of this set will be based on the feedback of various experienced players, most of whom I note do not have significant writing or editing experience, will they actually be performing the editing or will that also be undertaken by you? If you are indeed doing it on your own...

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With Saturday drawing near, could we get confirmation on when/where we will be meeting for the Super Acronym mirror/shootout?

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On average every question was negged 1.09 times.

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Cheynem wrote: ↑Thu Jun 20, 2019 9:49 am While I appreciate the commentary and the compilations, I'm confused how some of these are upsets. Eric Mukherjee leading a team to beat a Dylan Minarik team? A really good open team at Minnesota's PIANO (with a significantly better PPG and PPB) beating another good open team?

i sure was upset

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I'd like to present the following games as potential candidates for upset of the year: Sun God @ JHU: Robert Bork A 235 - JHU A 230 James Kuang/Kevin Wang/Benjamin Xu/Fred Zhang (8-3), the high schoolers of Naveed Bork Memorial High, beat Robert Chu/Eric Bobrow (8-3). Kevin Wang doesn't get any poin...

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DavidB256 wrote: ↑Mon Jun 10, 2019 8:04 pm I understand that P/BB is a function of both the skill of the team and the skill of the teams they play against (playing against better teams would decrease your P/BB because they are more likely to get all of the easier bonus parts)

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I hope everyone enjoyed the set.

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naah this is definitely 100% legitimate

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hey guys stats are up: here they are

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The last 5 packets + the replacement tossups were written in a shootout format. I took some stats. Kevin: 84.55 PP20TUH (21/21/12, 110 questions heard) Benji: 77.06 (15/25/11, 109) Ben: 60 (4/3/3, 25) Daniel: 30 (2/1/2, 20) Thomas: 20 (1/1/1, 20) Max: 10 (2/4/3, 110) Chandler: 8 (2/3/4, 100) Harris:...

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Are you planning on bringing on any outside help to deal with the consistent quality and difficulty problems that have plagued every iteration of this set?

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With the date of this mirror drawing near, I'd appreciate it if you guys could confirm that this tournament is, in fact, happening and provide some information on when/where we will be holding this. If you need help setting up a Discord server, I'd be willing to help out with that.

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Why is an open tournament being run on a novice-oriented set? It's a college-level novice set that's entirely appropriate for an HSNCT-level field, targeted at the 4-5 teams worth of national-qualified players from this area for whom it is appropriate. Also this same team ran a large, successful to...

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Congratulations to Harvard A for placing 1st place after beating MIT A in a one-game final to go 9-2!

Thanks to all the teams that came today, and I hope you enjoyed visiting Amherst for what I assume was the first time.

Stats can be found here: http://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/5682/stats/final/

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You should make sure that your coach/teachers/other authority figures are aware that this happening, because this is coming across like bullying. If you’ve made them aware and they aren’t willing to step in, perhaps question them why? It seems your experience is being directly affected by this. You ...

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We’ve decided to close the field at 8 teams. Please let us know if you are still interested in coming and I can put you on a waitlist.

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I'll just leave this here: ACRONYM Juliet is a top tier trash player, currently based in the Mid-Atlantic but frequently in the Northeast. Other highlights include getting literally all but one trash tossups at 2018 DI SCT, almost every trash tossup at 2018 DI ICT, and getting third in scoring at SH...

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I've taken a look through the first packet and found that the majority of questions have been taken almost verbatim from existing question sets. Considering that this set will certainly not be posted on the archives and did not charge a mirror fee, I don't think this warrants much more than a stern ...

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jonpin wrote: ↑Fri Apr 19, 2019 4:22 pm #2 you absolutely can't post someone else's questions to the packet archive.

2018 Glenwood Winter Teacher Quiz Bowl should probably be removed then, considering it directly rips questions from 2017 Prison Bowl, 2015 Potatoville Varsity, 2016 HFT, 2015 BISB, and 2012 Ohio State+VCU Housewrite.

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