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Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion

Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 10:28 pm
by Huang
Jeremy Gibbs Free Energy in the above link wrote:In writing high school questions where the answer is a country to try and maximize conversion, I usually try to find a way to link the capital (most accessible clue, often) to whatever the topic is. So if you were asking about Oe's country, you might say "Oe is an author from this country, and he set his novel "A Personal Matter" in its city Tokyo." There are lots of ways to pull in a capital the same way, and I think it makes the argument about how its a cross category clue somewhat weaker since I just made the obvious link between Tokyo and Oe's literature.
This is what I will do next time. But, as is obvious to everyone, this is essentially the same thing because the capital of the country will still be dropped except in a less explicit fashion.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion

Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 10:34 pm
by jonah
Another strategy that keeps the question even more tightly in literature while making a pretty good easy part (often) is to say something like "Oe is from this country, which also produced the Tale of Genji as well as authors such as Yasumari Kawbata and Haruki Murakami."

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion

Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 10:46 pm
by Huang
jonah wrote:Another strategy that keeps the question even more tightly in literature while making a pretty good easy part (often) is to say something like "Oe is from this country, which also produced the Tale of Genji as well as authors such as Yasumari Kawbata and Haruki Murakami."
I mean that strategy just drops more inherently cross-disciplinary linguistic clues but I do see the point. Kawabata and Murakami sure do "sound more Japanese" than Oe. But this strategy also leads to the problem of repeated clues/answers.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion

Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 10:47 pm
by Boeing X-20, Please!
jonah wrote:Another strategy that keeps the question even more tightly in literature while making a pretty good easy part (often) is to say something like "Oe is from this country, which also produced the Tale of Genji as well as authors such as Yasumari Kawbata and Haruki Murakami."
If they know the Tale of Genji, that's great they get the points for knowing knowledge. If they don't, is encouraging linguistic fraud really better than giving a really easy cross-category clue that actually requires you to know capitals/countries?

EDIT: Sandy beat me to it.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion

Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 10:53 pm
by wd4gdz
aarcoh wrote:This is is everything I wrote for this tournament

Chem (all tossups): phenolphthalein, glycine, priestly, halogens, hund's rule, gibbs free energy, teflon, nernst equation

Bio (tossups): porifera, ATP, thiamine, histones, prion, leprosy, bryophytes, cnidaria, alveoli bonuses: apoptosis/lysosomes/tay-sachs cell membrane/fluid mosaic/davson danielli rods/retina/purkinje effect cortisol/steroid/cushing's syndrome pituitary gland/hypothalamus/rathke's pouch

history: talbot v. seeman/marbury v. madison/marshall uss maine/hearst/weyler bay of pigs/castro/grayston lynch robert perry/treaty of kanagawa/fulton james iv/flodden field/scotland otto I/henry I/battle of lechfeld october manifesto/nicholas II/witte peasant's rebellion/wat tyler/richard II seventh crusade/saint louis/battle of taillebourg henry the navigator/order of christ/prester john wallachia/vlad the impaler/moldavia bonfire of the vanities/savonarola/alexander VI abbassid caliphate/baghdad/hulagu khan zulus/isandlwana/cetshwayo war of the pacific/treaty of ancon/atacama desert maximillian I/battle of puebla/war of reform

A lot of these bonuses seem very difficult, especially in history. Let me know if you have any comments.
I believe the bonus answers of davson danielli and rathke's pouch are too difficult for this level.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion

Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 10:57 pm
by jonah
MoCity02 wrote:If they know the Tale of Genji, that's great they get the points for knowing knowledge. If they don't, is encouraging linguistic fraud really better than giving a really easy cross-category clue that actually requires you to know capitals/countries?
Huang wrote:I mean that strategy just drops more inherently cross-disciplinary linguistic clues but I do see the point. Kawabata and Murakami sure do "sound more Japanese" than Oe. But this strategy also leads to the problem of repeated clues/answers.
I think the linguistic fraud is slightly better for two reasons. Firstly, I think there's more knowledge involved in linguistically frauding something than in knowing that Tokyo is the capital of Japan, even if it's not the "right" kind of knowledge. Moreover, suppose you fraud "Kawabata and Murakami are from this country" because those names sure do sound Japanese; you have just learned two things about Japanese literature. However, if you get "Japan" given "city of Tokyo", you have probably just learned nothing. (Unless that too was linguistic fraud, in which case maybe you should go learn that Tokyo is the capital of Japan.)

What about combining the two to get "Oe is from this country that also produced authors like Kawabata and Murakami and has its capital at Tokyo"? Well, that keeps the learning element. I would argue it's reminiscent of curved yellow fruit, though.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion

Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 10:59 pm
by Huang
jonah wrote:
MoCity02 wrote:If they know the Tale of Genji, that's great they get the points for knowing knowledge. If they don't, is encouraging linguistic fraud really better than giving a really easy cross-category clue that actually requires you to know capitals/countries?
Huang wrote:I mean that strategy just drops more inherently cross-disciplinary linguistic clues but I do see the point. Kawabata and Murakami sure do "sound more Japanese" than Oe. But this strategy also leads to the problem of repeated clues/answers.
I think the linguistic fraud is slightly better for two reasons. Firstly, I think there's more knowledge involved in linguistically frauding something than in knowing that Tokyo is the capital of Japan, even if it's not the "right" kind of knowledge. Moreover, suppose you fraud "Kawabata and Murakami are from this country" because those names sure do sound Japanese; you have just learned two things about Japanese literature. However, if you get "Japan" given "city of Tokyo", you have probably just learned nothing. (Unless that too was linguistic fraud, in which case maybe you should go learn that Tokyo is the capital of Japan.)

What about combining the two to get "Oe is from this country that also produced authors like Kawabata and Murakami and has its capital at Tokyo"? Well, that keeps the learning element. I would argue it's reminiscent of curved yellow fruit, though.
Again, I was agreeing with you (maybe the quotes around "sound more Japanese" threw you off, not sure). But the strategy causes problems with repeated clues/answers because Kawabata and Murakami could certainly come up in other parts of a set.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion

Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 11:06 pm
by Huang
wd4gdz wrote: I believe the bonus answers of davson danielli and rathke's pouch are too difficult for this level.
These were indeed too difficult.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion

Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 11:07 pm
by jonah
Huang wrote:Again, I was agreeing with you (maybe the quotes around "sound more Japanese" threw you off, not sure). But the strategy causes problems with repeated clues/answers because Kawabata and Murakami could certainly come up in other parts of a set.
Oops, I meant to address that. My response is twofold: first, if you mention "Murakami is Japanese" earlier, I don't think that precludes having a tossup on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, since there's no substantive overlap except that both questions have mentioned Murakami. You could probably even have a tossup on Murakami himself.

Also, maybe that just means you have too much Japanese lit (or lit from whatever single country) in your set. There's a LOT of Japanese lit going around lately, as everyone has surely noticed, and it's annoying. The problem is also self-perpetuating, because people go "Oh, Japanese lit sure does come up! I guess I should learn it. Well, what's the best way to learn stuff? Write questions about it!" and then those questions get used in a tournament and we're back where we started.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion

Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 11:14 pm
by Huang
jonah wrote:
Huang wrote:Again, I was agreeing with you (maybe the quotes around "sound more Japanese" threw you off, not sure). But the strategy causes problems with repeated clues/answers because Kawabata and Murakami could certainly come up in other parts of a set.
Oops, I meant to address that. My response is twofold: first, if you mention "Murakami is Japanese" earlier, I don't think that precludes having a tossup on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, since there's no substantive overlap except that both questions have mentioned Murakami. You could probably even have a tossup on Murakami himself.
Yeah, it's certainly a minor thing to worry about. But I guess I just feel "safe" avoiding it. I'll certainly consider using this strategy but, as mentioned already, it hardly deviates from what Dees proposed in that one thread.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion

Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 11:23 pm
by Tanay
I don't necessarily think that repeated clues or answers should be an issue. There are more than enough authors from Japan to still write a good bonus. Furthermore, if you somehow run out of authors for, like, Japan, then you can name a work from a previously-mentioned author that wasn't mentioned in the question about the author itself. Let's say that at some point in the tournament, there is a tossup on Murakami with four works in the question: 19Q4, Dance, Dance, Dance, Norwegian Wood, and Kafka on the Shore. As a writer, you still have some Murakami works to insert in a bonus. You could then write a bonus like this:

"Oe hails from this country, famous for authors who have written The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, The Pillow Book, and The Tale of Genji."

Such a line is not a significant linguistic giveaway (I would assume Genji doesn't just sound Japanese), has a variety of diverse clues, allows you to recycle an author (to an extent), and is more appropriate for the third part of a bonus.

I'm not sure you can avoid linguistic giveaways entirely. At some point, no matter how hard you try, a good tossup on Tagore or Mahfouz will have an Indian or Egyptian-sounding name, usually by the middle of the question. Literature questions where the answer is "India" or "Egypt" will have similar problems as well, unless you go out of your way to write a weird tossup, and to eliminate or move clues just because they're somewhat linguistic would be to skew certain parts of the canon (World Literature, certain European histories) and make them substantially more difficult.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion

Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 11:27 pm
by Huang
tk447 wrote: I'm not sure you can avoid linguistic giveaways entirely.
I'm not claiming that I can avoid them entirely. Since I notably used a linguistic "clue" in that bonus.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion

Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 11:30 pm
by Tanay
Huang wrote:
tk447 wrote: I'm not sure you can avoid linguistic giveaways entirely.
I'm not claiming that I can avoid them entirely. Since I notably used a linguistic "clue" in that bonus.
Agreed. I know you're not claiming that. This was just my own two cents on why and how they were an inevitable part of quiz bowl.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion

Posted: Tue Dec 08, 2009 2:33 am
by jonpin
Huang wrote:
jonah wrote:
Huang wrote:Again, I was agreeing with you (maybe the quotes around "sound more Japanese" threw you off, not sure). But the strategy causes problems with repeated clues/answers because Kawabata and Murakami could certainly come up in other parts of a set.
Oops, I meant to address that. My response is twofold: first, if you mention "Murakami is Japanese" earlier, I don't think that precludes having a tossup on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, since there's no substantive overlap except that both questions have mentioned Murakami. You could probably even have a tossup on Murakami himself.
Yeah, it's certainly a minor thing to worry about. But I guess I just feel "safe" avoiding it. I'll certainly consider using this strategy but, as mentioned already, it hardly deviates from what Dees proposed in that one thread.
Instead, however, you wound up with more significant repeats: a lit bonus whose third part asked for the the country with capitals Pretoria, Cape Town, and Bloemfontein, followed a few rounds later by a geography bonus the first two parts of which asked for capitals of South Africa.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion

Posted: Tue Dec 08, 2009 2:36 am
by Huang
jonpin wrote:
Huang wrote:
jonah wrote:
Huang wrote:Again, I was agreeing with you (maybe the quotes around "sound more Japanese" threw you off, not sure). But the strategy causes problems with repeated clues/answers because Kawabata and Murakami could certainly come up in other parts of a set.
Oops, I meant to address that. My response is twofold: first, if you mention "Murakami is Japanese" earlier, I don't think that precludes having a tossup on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, since there's no substantive overlap except that both questions have mentioned Murakami. You could probably even have a tossup on Murakami himself.
Yeah, it's certainly a minor thing to worry about. But I guess I just feel "safe" avoiding it. I'll certainly consider using this strategy but, as mentioned already, it hardly deviates from what Dees proposed in that one thread.
Instead, however, you wound up with more significant repeats: a lit bonus whose third part asked for the the country with capitals Pretoria, Cape Town, and Bloemfontein, followed a few rounds later by a geography bonus the first two parts of which asked for capitals of South Africa.
And I've already explained how this was caused by me trying to lower the difficulty of such bonuses so Nadine Gordimer and such authors wouldn't end up being the easy parts.

Edit:
Big Long Post I Made wrote:Bonus difficulty was very hard to fix after I realized just how absurd some of my early answer choices were. About 95% of the questions were already written before I realized this. When I broadened the topic of some bonuses, I ran into problems with repeats and cross-disciplinary clues.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion

Posted: Tue Dec 08, 2009 3:06 am
by AlphaQuizBowler
Huang wrote:
jonpin wrote:
Huang wrote:
jonah wrote:
Huang wrote:Again, I was agreeing with you (maybe the quotes around "sound more Japanese" threw you off, not sure). But the strategy causes problems with repeated clues/answers because Kawabata and Murakami could certainly come up in other parts of a set.
Oops, I meant to address that. My response is twofold: first, if you mention "Murakami is Japanese" earlier, I don't think that precludes having a tossup on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, since there's no substantive overlap except that both questions have mentioned Murakami. You could probably even have a tossup on Murakami himself.
Yeah, it's certainly a minor thing to worry about. But I guess I just feel "safe" avoiding it. I'll certainly consider using this strategy but, as mentioned already, it hardly deviates from what Dees proposed in that one thread.
Instead, however, you wound up with more significant repeats: a lit bonus whose third part asked for the the country with capitals Pretoria, Cape Town, and Bloemfontein, followed a few rounds later by a geography bonus the first two parts of which asked for capitals of South Africa.
And I've already explained how this was caused by me trying to lower the difficulty of such bonuses so Nadine Gordimer and such authors wouldn't end up being the easy parts.

Edit:
Big Long Post I Made wrote:Bonus difficulty was very hard to fix after I realized just how absurd some of my early answer choices were. About 95% of the questions were already written before I realized this. When I broadened the topic of some bonuses, I ran into problems with repeats and cross-disciplinary clues.
Did you not edit the set before the Bergen mirror based on feedback?

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion

Posted: Tue Dec 08, 2009 3:07 am
by Huang
AlphaQuizBowler wrote: Did you not edit the set before the Bergen mirror based on feedback?
I edited the set all the way up to the 10/24 date. I didn't receive any further feedback after that date.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion

Posted: Tue Dec 08, 2009 9:08 pm
by gyre and gimble
Cheynem wrote:One non specific criticism I have is the preponderance of quotes in bonus parts. These are tedious for moderators to read and rarely offer anything helpful for teams. There are a number of bonus parts where the prompt is like "Name this author who wrote ____, and who also once said (quote)."
Mike said this on October 21, but every author/writer bonus in this set pretty much still has this problem.

And it probably doesn't matter, but I've been finding several factual errors in this set that I haven't really kept track of, but off the top of my head there was a tossup that said Napoleon lost at Austerlitz, and another tossup that said the Immaculate Conception happened at the birth of Christ.

Some other comments I had on this set were:

There were confusing issues with anachronistic clues. Let me explain: In the tossup on Pan, clues state that he was a son of Hermes, but that he was also raised next to the young Zeus by Amalthea. But Hermes was a son of Zeus, right? I don't think this happened too much, but it did happen more than I am used to seeing in sets. Just something to watch out for in the future, I guess. And not too big of an issue at all.

Yeah, yeah, there were difficulty issues with the bonus questions, but that's already been addressed enough, I think.

Overall I enjoyed reading this set. I'm really impressed that you produced much more than half of all this, Sandy. Good work and hopefully if you clear up all the issues brought up in this thread DAFT 2010 will be really, really good.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion

Posted: Tue Dec 08, 2009 9:13 pm
by Huang
gyre and gimble wrote: Mike said this on October 21, but every author/writer bonus in this set pretty much still has this problem.
Oh heh. I didn't think this was too big of a problem so I didn't go back and fix them. Let me know if I'm underrating the issue.
gyre and gimble wrote: And it probably doesn't matter, but I've been finding several factual errors in this set that I haven't really kept track of, but off the top of my head there was a tossup that said Napoleon lost at Austerlitz, and another tossup that said the Immaculate Conception happened at the birth of Christ.

There were confusing issues with anachronistic clues. Let me explain: In the tossup on Pan, clues state that he was a son of Hermes, but that he was also raised next to the young Zeus by Amalthea. But Hermes was a son of Zeus, right? I don't think this happened too much, but it did happen more than I am used to seeing in sets. Just something to watch out for in the future, I guess. And not too big of an issue at all.
Yeah, I'll definitely make sure this won't happen too much in the next set. Probably could've been prevented if I had playtested these more.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion - Set Cleared

Posted: Tue Dec 08, 2009 9:30 pm
by Scott
Personally, I believed that this set was one of the better ones I have played on.
I preferred the longer tossups greatly to the short, buzzer race prone NAQT IS and A sets.

Really the only packet that Grayson had difficulty issues on was #10.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion - Set Cleared

Posted: Wed Dec 09, 2009 1:19 am
by jonpin
Let my potential nit-picking not hide the fact that by and large this was a good set, especially for someone still in high school.
Round 7 Bonus 17 wrote:17. Worship of this deity included animal sacrifice, as he was said to oppose the sacrifice of humans. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this god, twin of Xolotl and one of the four sons of Ometeotl. This patron of priests and giver of maize was sometimes known as Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli.
ANSWER: Quetzalcoatl
[10] Also a son of Ometeotl was this deity of the jaguar. He lost his foot in a battle with the earth monster Cipactli during creation, only to have it replaced by an obsidian mirror.
ANSWER: Tezcatlipoca
[10] Both Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca are deities of this people, who were led by Huitzilopochtli to Lake Texcoco, where they founded Tenochtitlan.
ANSWER: Aztecs
I've seen and heard Quetzalcoatl and could verify that what was said for Tezcatlipoca seemed right, but stared blankly for several seconds at Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli. I know they are a point of contention on the boards and I'm not sure what the current consensus is, but if you're going to throw a name like that out there, please throw the moderator a bone and include a pronunciation guide.

EDIT: For clarification, there were a few places where I wished for a pronunciation guide, this was just the most obvious and memorable one.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion - Set Cleared

Posted: Wed Dec 09, 2009 1:20 am
by Huang
jonpin wrote: I've seen and heard Quetzalcoatl and could verify that what was said for Tezcatlipoca seemed right, but stared blankly for several seconds at Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli. I know they are a point of contention on the boards and I'm not sure what the current consensus is, but if you're going to throw a name like that out there, please throw the moderator a bone and include a pronunciation guide.
Ah yes, my fault. My old retired coach complained about this too. I'll make sure to include pronunciation guides for next year's set where needed.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion - Set Cleared

Posted: Tue Dec 15, 2009 11:22 pm
by The Kid Who Collects Spider-Man
You should never say "titular event" in the first line of a toss-up on The Lottery. Just Sayin'.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion - Set Cleared

Posted: Wed Dec 16, 2009 12:59 am
by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN)
What should you say instead?

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion - Set Cleared

Posted: Wed Dec 16, 2009 1:05 am
by Mechanical Beasts
Yeah, there are doubtless other titular events. Crying of Lot 49, for one. Death of Artemio Cruz? Murder in the Cathedral? Accidental Death of an Anarchist?

Surely there are less morbid examples, too. So that's actually a pretty lucky guess!

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion - Set Cleared

Posted: Wed Dec 16, 2009 1:18 am
by Rococo A Go Go
der_ubermensch wrote:You should never say "titular event" in the first line of a toss-up on The Lottery. Just Sayin'.
If you buzzed in and got the tossup off of "titular event" than I have two things to say:

1) Great job.
2) Don't make a habit of that.

As someone who used to be way too buzzer drunk, I can assure you that doing things like that will come back to bite you in the backside more often than it will ever really help you.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion - Set Cleared

Posted: Wed Dec 16, 2009 1:34 am
by Huang
der_ubermensch wrote:You should never say "titular event" in the first line of a toss-up on The Lottery. Just Sayin'.
Not really, though I guess it could've been left out.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion - Set Cleared

Posted: Wed Dec 16, 2009 2:11 am
by Irreligion in Bangladesh
Huang wrote:
der_ubermensch wrote:You should never say "titular event" in the first line of a toss-up on The Lottery. Just Sayin'.
Not really, though I guess it could've been left out.
That lateral is a lot easier to pull when you see The Lottery at the bottom of the question, because you immediately start thinking about the event itself. I remember skimming that question before moderating it, thinking it was a bad idea, then after reading it realized it played out well because they didn't already know it was The Lottery when they heard "titular event."

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion - Set Cleared

Posted: Thu Dec 17, 2009 12:41 am
by New York Undercover
Hopefully this is not petty criticism, but I was surprised to see both
Packet 2 wrote:19. Gay-Lussac’s law states this quantity is proportional to temperature. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this quantity calculated by dividing force by area and which also indicates the stress of a system.
ANSWER: pressure
and
Packet 3 wrote:[10] This scientist redesigned the lead chamber process of producing sulfuric acid and formulated a namesake law claiming pressure is proportional to temperature.
ANSWER: Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion - Set Cleared

Posted: Thu Dec 17, 2009 7:07 pm
by The Kid Who Collects Spider-Man
Sorry, you probably should never put the phrase, "prepared for this titular event" in the first line of a toss-up on The Lottery because it occurs in the first line of basically every high school toss-up on it. Not really a big deal, though.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion - Set Cleared

Posted: Thu Dec 17, 2009 8:27 pm
by The King's Flight to the Scots
der_ubermensch wrote:Sorry, you probably should never put the phrase, "prepared for this titular event" in the first line of a toss-up on The Lottery because it occurs in the first line of basically every high school toss-up on it. Not really a big deal, though.



There are lots of titular events...

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion - Set Cleared

Posted: Thu Dec 17, 2009 8:32 pm
by Mechanical Beasts
der_ubermensch wrote:Sorry, you probably should never put the phrase, "prepared for this titular event" in the first line of a toss-up on The Lottery because it occurs in the first line of basically every high school toss-up on it. Not really a big deal, though.

PROJECT: the next ten high school tournaments should have a moderator note to read the first five words of every tossup on some given answer line in a really dramatically rising tone. Then the eleventh should do the same on a different answer line. Count the negs with the first answer, and then you'll have identified all the people who are playing quizbowl the wrong way.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion - Set Cleared

Posted: Thu Dec 17, 2009 9:14 pm
by JackGlerum
Crazy Andy Watkins wrote:
der_ubermensch wrote:Sorry, you probably should never put the phrase, "prepared for this titular event" in the first line of a toss-up on The Lottery because it occurs in the first line of basically every high school toss-up on it. Not really a big deal, though.

PROJECT: the next ten high school tournaments should have a moderator note to read the first five words of every tossup on some given answer line in a really dramatically rising tone. Then the eleventh should do the same on a different answer line. Count the negs with the first answer, and then you'll have identified all the people who are playing quizbowl the wrong way.

Sure, Alex was quick to jump the gun and is of course wrong here, probably because he doesn't have a good grasp of the canon, but is mocking his post the right response? It's his fifth post.

Alex, a quick lookup on Carlo's website shows that your assertion is wrong. Buzzing on anything as vague as "titular event" isn't a good idea, even if the only questions you've heard on "The Lottery" have started in a similar manner.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion - Set Cleared

Posted: Thu Dec 17, 2009 9:37 pm
by jonah
JackGlerum wrote:Alex, a quick lookup on Carlo's website shows that your assertion is wrong. Buzzing on anything as vague as "titular event" isn't a good idea, even if the only questions you've heard on "The Lottery" have started in a similar manner.
Well, that doesn't really address his comment, since ACFDB is college questions. Better would be to look at the questions that say "title event" or "titular event", which together produce 15 results, only 2 of which are about The Lottery.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion - Set Cleared

Posted: Thu Dec 17, 2009 9:45 pm
by Cheynem
I read for Alex several times at a tournament, and he is a very good player with strong literature knowledge. I think he was probably making a mistake which we've all made before where we think a tossup is too "easy" to figure out.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion - Set Cleared

Posted: Thu Dec 17, 2009 10:00 pm
by Mechanical Beasts
JackGlerum wrote:
Crazy Andy Watkins wrote:
der_ubermensch wrote:Sorry, you probably should never put the phrase, "prepared for this titular event" in the first line of a toss-up on The Lottery because it occurs in the first line of basically every high school toss-up on it. Not really a big deal, though.

PROJECT: the next ten high school tournaments should have a moderator note to read the first five words of every tossup on some given answer line in a really dramatically rising tone. Then the eleventh should do the same on a different answer line. Count the negs with the first answer, and then you'll have identified all the people who are playing quizbowl the wrong way.

Sure, Alex was quick to jump the gun and is of course wrong here, probably because he doesn't have a good grasp of the canon, but is mocking his post the right response? It's his fifth post.

I'm just drawing the obvious analogy: phrasing is, or should be, irrelevant to good quizbowl, and buzzing on phrasing is a poor idea 100% of the time; so is the moderator's tone. It's not really mocking, it's just pointing out the futility of that playing strategy in a terribly amusing way. And yeah, I think it is, in fact, productive to illustrate why things are bad ideas as clearly as possible no matter one's post count--for the benefit of newer players than this kid, many of whom don't post on these forums at all (but still read them).

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion - Set Cleared

Posted: Thu Dec 17, 2009 11:34 pm
by AKKOLADE
It's cool, be cool.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion - Set Cleared

Posted: Fri Dec 18, 2009 3:50 pm
by gack1224
DAFT wrote:9. This leader defeated Jozsef Alvinczi at the Battle of Arcole and had previously defeated Johann Beaulieu at the Battle of Lodi. Fourteen articles resulted from this leader’s attendance of the Congress of Erfurt after the Duke of Brunswick died as a result of this leader’s victory at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt. At the Convention of Alessandria, this leader forced Michael von Melas to evacuate after the Battle of Marengo. He signed the Treaty of Pressburg after being defeated at the Battle of Austerlitz. For 10 points, name this French leader who was defeated at the Battle of Trafalgar and the Battle of Waterloo.
I don't think Napoleon lost that one.

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion

Posted: Fri Dec 18, 2009 5:00 pm
by Huang
gyre and gimble wrote: And it probably doesn't matter, but I've been finding several factual errors in this set that I haven't really kept track of, but off the top of my head there was a tossup that said Napoleon lost at Austerlitz

Re: DAFT 2009 Discussion - Set Cleared

Posted: Fri Dec 18, 2009 5:32 pm
by gack1224
Sorry; missed that.