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MOO Discussion

Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2011 10:26 pm
by The King's Flight to the Scots
Thanks will come in another thread when I have time. For now, use this thread for general comments about the set.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2011 1:21 pm
by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN)
Yeah the tossups were too long. That was the only real criticism I've heard about the substance of the tournament. My main minor critique is that it needs to be gone over again for proper grammar, missing words, and incorrect words being used.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2011 1:34 pm
by 1992 in spaceflight
I thought that the questions were very well-done (I really liked this question set). My main criticism has been what Charlie already said about the editing.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 12:03 am
by 49-Mile Scenic Drive
I had quite a fun time playing the tournament and thought the toss-ups were a bit too long.

As a question to the quizbowl community, concerning the toss-up on 1001 Nights. Growing up in Alabama in the crapfest that is ASCA, and even upwards in High School we always said 1001 Arabian Nights and always been ruled correct. However at MOO on Saturday my teammate Justin, who played for Hoover, buzzed in and said "1001 Arabian Nights." Initially the moderator ruled it incorrect and a neg 5, but both teams, which were comprised of former Alabama High School players, agreed that 1001 Arabian Nights had always been accepted in their past experiences. My question is will moderators still accept 1001 Arabian Nights, specifically at SCT or ICT, or should we stick to saying 1001 Nights?

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 1:43 pm
by The King's Flight to the Scots
49-Mile Scenic Drive wrote:I had quite a fun time playing the tournament and thought the toss-ups were a bit too long.

As a question to the quizbowl community, concerning the toss-up on 1001 Nights. Growing up in Alabama in the crapfest that is ASCA, and even upwards in High School we always said 1001 Arabian Nights and always been ruled correct. However at MOO on Saturday my teammate Justin, who played for Hoover, buzzed in and said "1001 Arabian Nights." Initially the moderator ruled it incorrect and a neg 5, but both teams, which were comprised of former Alabama High School players, agreed that 1001 Arabian Nights had always been accepted in their past experiences. My question is will moderators still accept 1001 Arabian Nights, specifically at SCT or ICT, or should we stick to saying 1001 Nights?
I thought I had a note in there to accept any reasonable combination of those things. If I forgot to put that in, it's my mistake and I apologize. Personally, I think that answer should have been accepted.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 1:51 pm
by Cheynem
On a similar note, the "Lady with a Dog" bonus part also lacked several commonly accepted answers for that (like "Lady with a Lapdog").

The set seemed strong. Most of the tossups answers were well chosen and there were a number of exciting ideas in the bonuses. I felt (although the stats don't seem to bear me out) that powermarking was a bit stingy sometimes. My one consistent complaint with a bit of the literature was that it seemed to reward surface level knowledge more of lesser known titles than deep knowledge of well known titles on a consistent basis. One example is the John Osborne tossup--I've read Look Back in Anger and know a bit about The Entertainer, but no clues from either of these works appears until near the end and then they are kind of thrown at you in a very cursory matter (i.e., the Entertainer clues don't overly distinguish between Entertainer knowledge). While there's something to be said for a tossup rewarding knowledge of other Osborne works, I question the need for such a tossup at a regular difficulty tournament. I could raise similar complaints about other author tossups.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 3:28 pm
by The King's Flight to the Scots
Cheynem wrote:On a similar note, the "Lady with a Dog" bonus part also lacked several commonly accepted answers for that (like "Lady with a Lapdog").

The set seemed strong. Most of the tossups answers were well chosen and there were a number of exciting ideas in the bonuses. I felt (although the stats don't seem to bear me out) that powermarking was a bit stingy sometimes. My one consistent complaint with a bit of the literature was that it seemed to reward surface level knowledge more of lesser known titles than deep knowledge of well known titles on a consistent basis. One example is the John Osborne tossup--I've read Look Back in Anger and know a bit about The Entertainer, but no clues from either of these works appears until near the end and then they are kind of thrown at you in a very cursory matter (i.e., the Entertainer clues don't overly distinguish between Entertainer knowledge). While there's something to be said for a tossup rewarding knowledge of other Osborne works, I question the need for such a tossup at a regular difficulty tournament. I could raise similar complaints about other author tossups.
I can't really agree with this. For one, I count 27 author tossups out of 56 lit tossups in the set. Ten of those author tossups are on poets, and many others do start out with clues from a major work. I'm pretty surprised this is what you took away from the set, since I edited more or less every author tossup in my categories so that most of the clues were from major works: the Asturias tossup only has one or two clues in the middle that aren't from El Senor Presidente, the Mann tossup leads in with a clue from Buddenbrooks, the Capek tossup leads in with a hard work but then has a second clue from R.U.R., etc. The Osborne tossup could spend a bit more time on those plays (although it does lead in with stuff from Luther, which I think is fine to ask about), but I think it's in the minority here.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 3:53 pm
by Cheynem
Perhaps it was in the minority--there were certainly tossups that did a nice job in this manner, such as the Strindberg tossup and the Mann tossup.

I don't want to turn this into a poodle dee poodle doo attempt to count them all, but some other tossups I thought were in a similar vein included the Saki tossup (almost no clues on "The Open Window" and "Srendi Vashtar," the two stories I would expect most people to be familiar with Saki about), Katharine Mansfield (one clue on "The Garden Party"), Anthony Burgess (two clues on "A Clockwork Orange," all back-ended after many titles), and Harold Pinter (the tossup's clues are his poetry, his novel, the plays Celebration, The Dwarfs, and the Room, followed by a cursory giveaway on The Dumb Waiter)--I'm not familiar enough with some of the poets in the poetry tossups to provide similar analysis. Perhaps the problem seemed to be more in the British/English language lit tossups on authors. I'm not saying that these are all bad questions (I've certainly written worse), but I think cumulatively they're a little frustrating for regular difficulty, with so few clues on the works I would expect the majority of people who have experience reading these authors to know (and in some cases, very cursory clues at that). On the one hand, you reward people who have knowledge of lesser known works, which is cool, but on the other, it's a little annoying to see title bowl trump deeper knowledge of more notable works. I'm not trying to indict the lit here, just suggest that it's something to consider for other regular difficulty tournaments.

I actually liked the lit on the whole--the works tossups were interesting and well chosen and as you pointed out, I think the Euro and world lit sections did a better job at going for major work clues.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 4:50 pm
by crobbins52
I wanted to say that our teams, which consist mostly of very new players, and myself, really enjoyed this set.

Also, whoever wrote the "mark-recapture" tossup - that was really, really cool and I loved seeing that as an answer.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 4:57 pm
by 1992 in spaceflight
I want to thank whoever wrote the tossup on Kievan Russia (even though a teammate negged it). I'm in history of Russia right now, and was ecstatic to see a tossup about Kievan Rus. Also, the Stanley Kubrick bonus was amazing.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 5:15 pm
by Ringil
crobbins52 wrote:I wanted to say that our teams, which consist mostly of very new players, and myself, really enjoyed this set.

Also, whoever wrote the "mark-recapture" tossup - that was really, really cool and I loved seeing that as an answer.
I wrote that tossup, but the tossup idea was Will Butler's. I felt like I had trouble making it not super transparent heh.
MickeyR0urke wrote:I want to thank whoever wrote the tossup on Kievan Russia (even though a teammate negged it). I'm in history of Russia right now, and was ecstatic to see a tossup about Kievan Rus. Also, the Stanley Kubrick bonus was amazing.
I'm glad you enjoyed the Kievan Rus tossup; I liked it too :)

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 5:49 pm
by Papa's in the House
I (and my teammates, for the most part) greatly enjoyed playing this set. Some of the powermarks seemed a little stingy, but that was far less important to me than seeing working capital defined as a clue for the tossup on "capital" and the other accounting/finance related questions that showed up in the set (which were, by far, the best written accounting/finance questions that I've seen at a tournament where a non-business major wrote those categories). My only remaining recommendation would be moving the clue about how emotions change when a person sees a female on a bridge (or whatever the wording is) from the "emotions" tossup out of power. If you were anywhere near the playoff game between Illinois A and Yale A at ACF Nats this past year, you'll have heard about the argument Sorice and Matt Jackson had about this clue and you'll proceed to power this tossup on meta knowledge alone (this particular questions produced a buzzer race between every member of my team at that clue).

Can someone please post the "rooster" tossup from Round 10?

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 5:57 pm
by Jeremy Gibbs Paradox
I would like to see a repost of the First Amendment bonus that went "NY Times Co. v. Sullivan"/"Near v. Minnesota"/First Amendment as well as the Gibbons v. Ogden Tu. While we're at it if I could also see the Fourth Amendment tu, I'd appreciate it. I know (or think I know) I had some quibbles with some of the phrasing/presentation in each of those but since I was moderating I couldn't really take notes as I went.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 5:58 pm
by kdroge
Cheynem wrote: I don't want to turn this into a poodle dee poodle doo attempt to count them all, but some other tossups I thought were in a similar vein included the Saki tossup (almost no clues on "The Open Window" and "Srendi Vashtar," the two stories I would expect most people to be familiar with Saki about), Katharine Mansfield (one clue on "The Garden Party"), Anthony Burgess (two clues on "A Clockwork Orange," all back-ended after many titles), and Harold Pinter (the tossup's clues are his poetry, his novel, the plays Celebration, The Dwarfs, and the Room, followed by a cursory giveaway on The Dumb Waiter)--I'm not familiar enough with some of the poets in the poetry tossups to provide similar analysis. Perhaps the problem seemed to be more in the British/English language lit tossups on authors. I'm not saying that these are all bad questions (I've certainly written worse), but I think cumulatively they're a little frustrating for regular difficulty, with so few clues on the works I would expect the majority of people who have experience reading these authors to know (and in some cases, very cursory clues at that). On the one hand, you reward people who have knowledge of lesser known works, which is cool, but on the other, it's a little annoying to see title bowl trump deeper knowledge of more notable works. I'm not trying to indict the lit here, just suggest that it's something to consider for other regular difficulty tournaments.
Personally, I don't understand the direction that this is going in. I'll focus on the Brit Lit (since this seems to have been a couple of the tossups that you picked out, and, since I edited it, I actually worked with the questions). To me, a tossup with answer line Saki, Pinter, Burgess, or Osborne should provide a good survey of the author's works rather than focusing in on the more well-known ones. I don't get the trend of having tossups on authors that only focus in on one or two major works of that author; if a tossup wants to talk so much about one work, why just not write with the answer line on that work instead? All the tossups that I mentioned spend a little less than 2 lines, give or take, on description of the best known work(s) and names of those works at the end. I can understand how this might appear cursory, but my personal preference is to have middle clues that reward knowledge of the middle level works of an author rather than deeper knowledge of the best known work. I also think that the majority of the works talked about in those tossups aside from maybe the first sentence are quite important (Luther / Inadmissable Evidence for Osborne, Celebration / The Dwarfs / The Room for Pinter, Clovis Sangrail /Toys of Peace for Saki, etc.). I guess the point that I'm trying to make is that I felt that there were many tossups on works that rewarded deep knowledge of specific, major works of authors (pretty much every other Brit lit tossup in the set aside from poetry), and I wanted to use the space in tossups with answer lines of authors to talk more about mid-level and secondary works that could not show up as tossup answers. Given a mix of tossups on authors and works, I think that having a few tossups, even at regular difficulty, that focus on deeper knowledge of authors' works rather than spending the vast majority of the time talking about their one or two most important works is okay, and, moreover, actually a healthy thing. Again, this is just my personal preference showing through.

I'm glad that most people did seem to enjoy the set overall, though, both content-wise and difficulty-wise. I agree that a few bonus parts should have been trimmed length-wise. Some of these I know are my fault, since I have trouble cutting clues from a bonus part if I feel like they are all potentially helpful and/or important. For tossup length, we had an 8 line cap before powermarking, with many tossups being significantly shorter than this (the minimum was around 6 full lines). Would people have preferred a 7 line cap instead?

Also, we are working to try and clean up some grammar issues for next week; if anyone has anything specific that they'd like to post about, please do so to help us out. Thanks!

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 6:02 pm
by kdroge
The end of the majority opinion in this case warns about the Constitution being made useless
through “metaphysical reasoning” that would “entangle and perplex” a natural mind. Tom Clark cited this
case in the Heart of Atlanta Motel ruling, saying that, combined with Katzenbach v. McClung, it constituted
sufficient cause to uphold the law in question. The concurrent opinion in this case diverges in the issue of
coasting licenses, saying that labeling something as “American” does not make it any more American that it
would be of its own character, and was written by William Johnson. The majority opinion attempts to define
the word power before going on to enumerate how (*) navigation has always been included in the scope of
commerce. For 10 points, name this 1824 case in which a steamboat license granted to Robert Fulton by the state of
New York was ruled unconstitutional.
ANSWER: Gibbons V. Ogden
<KD>

15) A Pegasus-like beast with the wings of one of these creatures can be seen on some early Athenian vases.
In Greek myth, Ares turns Alektryon into one of these creatures because he let Helios peep on him and
Aphrodite. In Norse myth, although not a falcon or an eagle, one of these birds perches atop the world tree,
and another golden one will toll the onset of (*) Ragnarok. Those birds are Vidofnir and Fjalar. In Japanese myth,
several of these birds were used to trick Amaterasu into leaving her cave by making her think it had dawned outside.
For 10 points, name these barnyard birds, of which Chaucer’s Chanticleer is an example, which typically mate with
hens.
ANSWER: Roosters [accept cocks; prompt on chickens; do not accept “hens”]
<Ben>

The defendant in this case ran an ad entitled “Heed Their Rising Voices,” which solicited funding for Martin Luther
King Jr. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this Supreme Court case in which the Warren court overruled an Alabama court’s decision because
newspapers were protected from printing false information regarding public officials provided that the statements
were not knowingly false or printed with disregard for the truth.
ANSWER: New York Times Co. v. Sullivan [accept names in either order]
[10] The court’s decision in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan partially relied on this prior Hughes court case that
incorporated the constitution’s protection of freedom of the press. Howard Guilford was a partner of the plaintiff in
this case.
ANSWER: Near v. Minnesota [accept names in either order]
[10] Both New York Times v. Sullivan and Near v. Minnesota are important court cases dealing with this amendment
to the Constitution. In addition to protecting the press, it includes the Free Exercise clause and the Establishment
clause.
ANSWER: First Amendment
<Hothem>

I'm not sure that there was a tossup on the fourth amendment in this set; maybe I'm being an idiot, though. Could you post which packet it was in if you could remember?

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 6:36 pm
by Cheynem
Kurtis, I see your argument and I think this is sort of an aesthetic difference between us in how to construct author tossups (although I'm probably just being grumpy). Again, I liked the vast majority of the lit.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 6:56 pm
by Jeremy Gibbs Paradox
kdroge wrote:The end of the majority opinion in this case warns about the Constitution being made useless
through “metaphysical reasoning” that would “entangle and perplex” a natural mind. Tom Clark cited this
case in the Heart of Atlanta Motel ruling, saying that, combined with Katzenbach v. McClung, it constituted
sufficient cause to uphold the law in question. The concurrent opinion in this case diverges in the issue of
coasting licenses, saying that labeling something as “American” does not make it any more American that it
would be of its own character, and was written by William Johnson. The majority opinion attempts to define
the word power before going on to enumerate how (*) navigation has always been included in the scope of
commerce. For 10 points, name this 1824 case in which a steamboat license granted to Robert Fulton by the state of
New York was ruled unconstitutional.
ANSWER: Gibbons V. Ogden
<KD>

<Ben>

The defendant in this case ran an ad entitled “Heed Their Rising Voices,” which solicited funding for Martin Luther
King Jr. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this Supreme Court case in which the Warren court overruled an Alabama court’s decision because
newspapers were protected from printing false information regarding public officials provided that the statements
were not knowingly false or printed with disregard for the truth.
ANSWER: New York Times Co. v. Sullivan [accept names in either order]
[10] The court’s decision in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan partially relied on this prior Hughes court case that
incorporated the constitution’s protection of freedom of the press. Howard Guilford was a partner of the plaintiff in
this case.
ANSWER: Near v. Minnesota [accept names in either order]
[10] Both New York Times v. Sullivan and Near v. Minnesota are important court cases dealing with this amendment
to the Constitution. In addition to protecting the press, it includes the Free Exercise clause and the Establishment
clause.
ANSWER: First Amendment
<Hothem>

I'm not sure that there was a tossup on the fourth amendment in this set; maybe I'm being an idiot, though. Could you post which packet it was in if you could remember?
Re: 4th Amendment, I honestly don't but I might have conflated it with ACF Early Fall. I've read 20 rounds the last two weekends and it all sort of blurs.

I'll start with "Gibbons." The first sentence is just somewhat vague even though it's a direct quote of the opinion. It mainly repeats phrases that find their way into many Supreme Court opinions if not in those words than in synonymous forms. More pressingly, the second sentence is incredibly problematic. QUOTE: "Tom Clark cited this case in the Heart of Atlanta Motel ruling, saying that, combined with Katzenbach v. McClung, it constituted sufficient cause to uphold the law in question. " First of all the Katzenbach reference implies that Gibbons combined with Katzenbach leads to the ruling in Heart of Atlanta (which is a case consolidated with Heart of Atlanta). And secondly, while Gibbons is the start of Clark's inquiry into whether the commerce clause is the proper use of prohibiting segregation in motels, it is never stated as "sufficient cause" but rather cited along with a long line of progeny and related cases. This is an incredibly "Cliff Notes" reading of that case and in the interest of economy probably best deleted. The third sentence refers to the "Concurrent" opinion. This made me wince to read. In none of the over 500 volumes of the United States Reports will you see it presented this way. Not only that, the grammar is just terrible. The phrase "and was written by William Johnson" modifies the noun "character" which makes no sense. It would have been better to say "William Johnson's concurring opinion states that ..." The next sentence flips back to the Opinion of the Court, stating that it "attempts" to define the word power. Well either it did or it didn't. My understanding (and evidently Justice Clark's understanding in Heart of Atlanta) is that it does. This question overall is just littered with vague clues, imprecise, often confusing, language and tries to build all the clues out of the opinions. I would suggest including more facts about the case's background, its immediate effects, public reaction to it, anything. A Supreme Court opinion almost a century and a half later that is poorly presented as a clue does not really do it.

The First Amendment bonus goes a touch better. The first part states: "the Warren court overruled an Alabama court’s decision because newspapers were protected from printing false information regarding public officials provided that the statements were not knowingly false or printed with disregard for the truth." Minor style point, the word "reversed" should be used not "overruled." The newspapers aren't protected from printing false information. The newspapers are protected from LIABILITY for printing false information regarding public officials. The second part is very very vague. The only thing I have that you are referring to Near is the fact that it incorporates Freedom of the Press via the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause. To say that NY Times Co. is "partially based" on Near is highly misleading. I just reread Justice Brennan's majority opinion and Black and Goldberg's concurrences and Brennan only cites Near as part of a string cite with a half dozen other cases in his sixth footnote. It would be more accurate to say that Near is merely "referenced." I think a better way to write that entire part would be "New York Times Co. is part of a long line of cases involving state actions against the press including this Hughes Court case which incorporated the Freedom of the Press against the states. This case dealt with a Minnesota law that prevented the publication of "malicious" or "scandalous" newspapers and is often cited in cases dealing with the doctrine of "prior restraint."" Near would need to be the only answer acceptable since you really only need the appellant's name anyway. The third part of the bonus is fine although a little "find the seat of your pants" compared to what previously transpired.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 7:08 pm
by The Ununtiable Twine
I thought some of the packets could have been randomized a little better - for example I think there was a packet with 3 consecutive science bonuses if I'm not mistaken, and maybe even a point where literature was jumbled together too.

I enjoyed this set for the most part, although I'll note the relative absence of math theory. Computer science questions are fine, I just think if you're going to have 1/0 or 0/1 math or computer science in your distribution you should try to have about an equal amount of both instead of strongly favoring one over the other.

The only math tossup I can recall was on finding roots, although I might be mistaken. Could you post that one please?

There seemed to be some bonuses that were very easy to convert when compared to others in the tournament. I'd have to have a look at the set to point out the specific examples, though.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 7:09 pm
by The King's Flight to the Scots
For reference, here's who edited what, to the best of my knowledge.

Kurtis: American History, Social Science, British Literature, Geography
Libo: European history, Physics, Chemistry
Bryan: Fine Arts
Will: Biology, Other Science
Sarah: American Literature, Mythology
Me: European Lit, World Lit, Religion, Philosophy

I don't think that that emotions clue is too easy just because it was a minor detail of a not-especially-famous meta occurrence.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 7:19 pm
by Jeremy Gibbs Paradox
I will say that quite a few of the q's I read were really good but there were some tu's (like the one I just went through above) that seemed to be mainly wordy non-clue leadins that mainly prolonged the question. And I'm not someone who objects to question length. If you have a 9 or 10 line tossup, it's fine with me, just make sure there are clues there that adhere to the pyramidal structure. One note, please take care to read your questions out loud either as you edit them or write them. Three lines of an introductory sentence I find hard as a moderator because I can't find a natural place to pause (which periods allow) and the attention of the players tends to get lost on what the establishing pronoun actually is. This happened quite a few times in both tu's and very long bonus parts on Saturday. Overall I commend you guys for providing a set for college teams to play on. We need more tournaments on this model.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 7:26 pm
by The Toad to Wigan Pier
Serious Games Showcase and Challenge wrote:I thought some of the packets could have been randomized a little better - for example I think there was a packet with 3 consecutive science bonuses if I'm not mistaken, and maybe even a point where literature was jumbled together too.

I enjoyed this set for the most part, although I'll note the relative absence of math theory. Computer science questions are fine, I just think if you're going to have 1/0 or 0/1 math or computer science in your distribution you should try to have about an equal amount of both instead of strongly favoring one over the other.

The only math tossup I can recall was on finding roots, although I might be mistaken. Could you post that one please?

There seemed to be some bonuses that were very easy to convert when compared to others in the tournament. I'd have to have a look at the set to point out the specific examples, though.
There was 4/3 CS and 3/4 Math in the tournament. I do admit that the math/cs distro had more application than theory. The finding roots tossup:

One computational robust algorithm for doing this has no shift, fixed shift, and variable shift stages. For complex values, the Lehmer-Schur algorithm does this. In addition to the Jenkins-Traub method, a common false position approach is Ridder's algorithm. Using Horner scheme to quickly evaluate a polynomial via synthetic division and Rufini’s algorithm to deflate the polynomial is helpful in this task. Laguerre’s method can do this for polynomials, but in general this can be achieved by a (*) fixed point method where the function and its derivative are subtracted from the function variable. The simplest method is based on the intermediate value theorem and repeatedly divides and interval in half to see where the function changes sign. For 10 points, name this task that can be achieved by bisection method and Newton’s method and involves finding where a function is equal to zero.
ANSWER: root finding [accept solving for a root of a function; accept finding a zero of a function or word forms before mention; accept word forms; accept accelerating the convergence of a sequence before Horner scheme, prompt after; prompt on anything involving a fixed point]

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 8:59 pm
by Papa's in the House
Serious Games Showcase and Challenge wrote:I thought some of the packets could have been randomized a little better - for example I think there was a packet with 3 consecutive science bonuses if I'm not mistaken, and maybe even a point where literature was jumbled together too.
Please fix this because it was really aggravating in a couple of close games.
kdroge wrote:In Japanese myth, several of these birds were used to trick Amaterasu into leaving her cave by making her think it had dawned outside.
ANSWER: Roosters [accept cocks; prompt on chickens; do not accept “hens”]
<Ben>
Every source I've read (which does not include the Kojiki) claims that Uzume is responsible for luring Amaterasu from her cave (specifically that she danced in such a way that all the kami started laughing, which piqued Amaterasu's curiosity, at which point she left the cave and so on). Can you point me to your source?

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 9:45 pm
by Ringil
Serious Games Showcase and Challenge wrote:I thought some of the packets could have been randomized a little better - for example I think there was a packet with 3 consecutive science bonuses if I'm not mistaken, and maybe even a point where literature was jumbled together too.

I enjoyed this set for the most part, although I'll note the relative absence of math theory. Computer science questions are fine, I just think if you're going to have 1/0 or 0/1 math or computer science in your distribution you should try to have about an equal amount of both instead of strongly favoring one over the other.

The only math tossup I can recall was on finding roots, although I might be mistaken. Could you post that one please?

There seemed to be some bonuses that were very easy to convert when compared to others in the tournament. I'd have to have a look at the set to point out the specific examples, though.
As far as I can tell, the math tossup were rootfinding, integrable, and Chinese Remainder Theorem. The bonuses were closed/Arzela-Ascoli/finite, Carmichael/Fermat/Lehmer, rings/groups/kernel, and variance/Cramer-Rao/chi-squared. This seemed like a reasonable amount of math theory, though some of it was obviously a bit more applied.

Also, if you can tell us which packets have this poor randomization, that'd be quite helpful.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 9:58 pm
by kdroge
I have updated the Gibbons tossup and the First Amendment bonus to reflect some of the comments in this thread. Particularly, I implemented the wording changes that were mentioned; I think that most of them would be glossed over when read in a match setting and wouldn't influence how people would buzz or be able to parse the question, but I agree that it's important to be as precise as possible. I changed the description of how Gibbons was referenced by Heart of Atlanta. The Near V. Minnesota bonus part also now mentions prior restraint, which does appear to be a significant reason for its importance.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 10:12 pm
by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN)
Papa's in the House wrote:My only remaining recommendation would be moving the clue about how emotions change when a person sees a female on a bridge (or whatever the wording is) from the "emotions" tossup out of power. If you were anywhere near the playoff game between Illinois A and Yale A at ACF Nats this past year, you'll have heard about the argument Sorice and Matt Jackson had about this clue and you'll proceed to power this tossup on meta knowledge alone (this particular questions produced a buzzer race between every member of my team at that clue).
What a strange complaint. The fact that you happened to watch a notoriously argumentative teammate of yours argue about that clue during a game which a total of 2 teams were playing should have absolutely nothing to do with how the editors make their set. Sometimes odd external factors cause clues to be emblazoned in your memory, that's the nature of the game, and those are things you should gladly take rather than complain about in a way that would unduly effect the amazingly overwhelming bulk of other teams who didn't see that particular match.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 10:37 pm
by The Ununtiable Twine
Ringil wrote:
Serious Games Showcase and Challenge wrote:I thought some of the packets could have been randomized a little better - for example I think there was a packet with 3 consecutive science bonuses if I'm not mistaken, and maybe even a point where literature was jumbled together too.

I enjoyed this set for the most part, although I'll note the relative absence of math theory. Computer science questions are fine, I just think if you're going to have 1/0 or 0/1 math or computer science in your distribution you should try to have about an equal amount of both instead of strongly favoring one over the other.

The only math tossup I can recall was on finding roots, although I might be mistaken. Could you post that one please?

There seemed to be some bonuses that were very easy to convert when compared to others in the tournament. I'd have to have a look at the set to point out the specific examples, though.
As far as I can tell, the math tossup were rootfinding, integrable, and Chinese Remainder Theorem. The bonuses were closed/Arzela-Ascoli/finite, Carmichael/Fermat/Lehmer, rings/groups/kernel, and variance/Cramer-Rao/chi-squared. This seemed like a reasonable amount of math theory, though some of it was obviously a bit more applied.

Also, if you can tell us which packets have this poor randomization, that'd be quite helpful.
There was a tossup on CRT later in the tournament? Integrable, yes. I forgot about that one. I only heard root-finding and integrable tossups and the closed/Arzela-Ascoli/finite and rings/groups/kernel bonuses during our matches so maybe that's why I thought there was less math theory in the set.

I can't remember off-hand which rounds had randomization problems but if I had access to the packets I could look through them and find the randomization issues.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 11:00 pm
by Blackboard Monitor Vimes
Papa's in the House wrote:
Serious Games Showcase and Challenge wrote:I thought some of the packets could have been randomized a little better - for example I think there was a packet with 3 consecutive science bonuses if I'm not mistaken, and maybe even a point where literature was jumbled together too.
Please fix this because it was really aggravating in a couple of close games.
kdroge wrote:In Japanese myth, several of these birds were used to trick Amaterasu into leaving her cave by making her think it had dawned outside.
ANSWER: Roosters [accept cocks; prompt on chickens; do not accept “hens”]
<Ben>
Every source I've read (which does not include the Kojiki) claims that Uzume is responsible for luring Amaterasu from her cave (specifically that she danced in such a way that all the kami started laughing, which piqued Amaterasu's curiosity, at which point she left the cave and so on). Can you point me to your source?
I have no idea what Ben used, but I fact-checked this using my Illustrated Encyclopedia of World Mythology. Different versions of myths exist, so I apologize if you were confused, the clue's as "correct" as a myth clue can be.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 11:06 pm
by Jeremy Gibbs Paradox
College Park Spyders wrote:
Papa's in the House wrote:My only remaining recommendation would be moving the clue about how emotions change when a person sees a female on a bridge (or whatever the wording is) from the "emotions" tossup out of power. If you were anywhere near the playoff game between Illinois A and Yale A at ACF Nats this past year, you'll have heard about the argument Sorice and Matt Jackson had about this clue and you'll proceed to power this tossup on meta knowledge alone (this particular questions produced a buzzer race between every member of my team at that clue).
What a strange complaint. The fact that you happened to watch a notoriously argumentative teammate of yours argue about that clue during a game which a total of 2 teams were playing should have absolutely nothing to do with how the editors make their set. Sometimes odd external factors cause clues to be emblazoned in your memory, that's the nature of the game, and those are things you should gladly take rather than complain about in a way that would unduly effect the amazingly overwhelming bulk of other teams who didn't see that particular match.
Tend to agree with Charles. :)

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 11:10 pm
by Jeremy Gibbs Paradox
kdroge wrote:I have updated the Gibbons tossup and the First Amendment bonus to reflect some of the comments in this thread. Particularly, I implemented the wording changes that were mentioned; I think that most of them would be glossed over when read in a match setting and wouldn't influence how people would buzz or be able to parse the question, but I agree that it's important to be as precise as possible. I changed the description of how Gibbons was referenced by Heart of Atlanta. The Near V. Minnesota bonus part also now mentions prior restraint, which does appear to be a significant reason for its importance.
It does not appear, it simply IS. See NY Times v. United States. That is the sole basis for the prior restraint doctrine.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 11:15 pm
by Jeremy Gibbs Paradox
Further Kurtis this is a subject I have actual knowledge on, and while reading the question (noting I was not trying to parse it while hearing it which would have placed me at a further disadvantage) I had no clue what you were really trying to say in that Gibbons question. If you are so unclear to where someone who has a JD and has studied constitutional law at length cannot understand what you are saying or knows what you are saying is wrong, then maybe "glossing over it" is not the way to write/edit a q to reward knowledge no?

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Thu Oct 06, 2011 8:30 am
by Papa's in the House
The Laughing Cavalier wrote:
I have no idea what Ben used, but I fact-checked this using my Illustrated Encyclopedia of World Mythology. Different versions of myths exist, so I apologize if you were confused, the clue's as "correct" as a myth clue can be.
At this point I just wanted to get the source used so I can read it and learn that (and other) clues for the future. Thanks for pointing me to one.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Thu Oct 06, 2011 12:52 pm
by Blackboard Monitor Vimes
Papa's in the House wrote:
The Laughing Cavalier wrote:
I have no idea what Ben used, but I fact-checked this using my Illustrated Encyclopedia of World Mythology. Different versions of myths exist, so I apologize if you were confused, the clue's as "correct" as a myth clue can be.
At this point I just wanted to get the source used so I can read it and learn that (and other) clues for the future. Thanks for pointing me to one.
Aha. I definitely recommend it; it's got a lot of great stuff on myth systems that can be frustrating to find legitimate-looking sources for online (Celtic, Japanese, etc). Being an illustrated encyclopedia, it also has lots of pretty pictures that make it pleasant to use.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Sat Oct 08, 2011 10:08 pm
by touchpack
Can you post the special relativity tossup? I remember being confused as to what exactly it was asking for--although I think I missed the pronoun.

I also recall a tossup on capacitors that perhaps would have been more suited to a high school tournament, dropping dielectrics in the second or third clue.

On the whole, I thought this set was very enjoyable and the only major problem was the distribution of questions through a packet making categories clump together.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2011 11:54 am
by Red-necked Phalarope
Yeah, I really enjoyed this tournament, and particularly enjoyed the efforts to make sure each bonus had a significantly easy and hard part. This didn't always work (e.g. the Ash Wednesday/Palm Sunday bonus), but most deviations tended to be towards making bonuses too easy rather than too hard.

The tossups in packet 6 (or what was read 6th at UMich) seemed to be really prone to transparency, but I'm afraid I don't have any examples of this on hand.

The small amount of trash was a bit disappointing, but what there was was pretty great. Great set on the whole, which I think worked well for teams of varying strengths.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2011 1:18 pm
by Steeve Ho You Fat
I enjoyed this tournament. I too noticed the randomization issues - I don't recall which packets, but I felt like there were several times when there were two or three questions from the same category in the first five or six tossups.
touchpack wrote:Can you post the special relativity tossup? I remember being confused as to what exactly it was asking for--although I think I missed the pronoun.
Same for me, I knew what it was talking about three or four lines before I buzzed either because I missed the pronouns or because there weren't any.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2011 2:42 pm
by 1992 in spaceflight
Could you also post the tossup on Peasant Wars? At the Missouri site, someone buzzed in with Peasant wars and that wasn't acceptable. I'm just curious as to why.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2011 3:19 pm
by Cody
- That capacitor tossup was really, really awful. You talk about it having an electric field and storing energy and then it having a dielectric, and you're not even halfway through the question! There are plenty of good middle clues that could have been used if you'd ventured outside of pure Physics.
- For the tides tossup, the Rossby number is the ratio of inertial to Coriolis forces and characterizes the importance of the Coriolis acceleration compared to horizontal acceleration. As far as I know, it has nothing to do with tides in specific but more with ocean and atmospheric dynamics in general. I can't find a reference to the clue as stated in the tossup so am curious where it came from.
- The root finding tossup struck me as "transparent" (yes, yes, I know)--about halfway through, it's very obvious the question is looking for "this thing you do to polynomials", and I can't really think of anything else that you'd do to them.

The above are just minor quibbles, though; overall, disregarding the prevalent grammar issues, I really enjoyed this tournament. I particularly liked the saying the Rosary (and the Catholicism in general), piano trios and protein folding tossups, as well as a lot of the Astro, so props to whoever wrote those.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2011 4:48 pm
by The Toad to Wigan Pier
SirT wrote: - The root finding tossup struck me as "transparent" (yes, yes, I know)--about halfway through, it's very obvious the question is looking for "this thing you do to polynomials", and I can't really think of anything else that you'd do to them.
You can multiply them, find minimal/maximal values, evaluate them(the naive method isn't the fastest), approximate, find powers of, fit to data, integrate/find Gaussian quadrature, etc. Those are all things that could come up in a set like this. Heck, one could write a polynomial factorization tossup that doesn't allow "finding roots" as an allowable answer line.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2011 4:55 pm
by touchpack
The Toad to Wigan Pier wrote:
SirT wrote: - The root finding tossup struck me as "transparent" (yes, yes, I know)--about halfway through, it's very obvious the question is looking for "this thing you do to polynomials", and I can't really think of anything else that you'd do to them.
You can multiply them, find minimal/maximal values, evaluate them(the naive method isn't the fastest), approximate, find powers of, fit to data, integrate/find Gaussian quadrature, etc. Those are all things that could come up in a set like this. Heck, one could write a polynomial factorization tossup that doesn't allow "finding roots" as an allowable answer line.
For what it's worth, when I played that tossup the two things I was thinking about as possible answers for most of the tossup were factorization and min/max. So I don't think it's a transparent tossup at all.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2011 4:59 pm
by Adventure Temple Trail
I had fun playing this set, which definitely did not seem objectively "too easy". If anything, the existing bonus and ppg statistics bear out that this set was quite challenging for teams below the top 20 or so - something more akin to THUNDER II's "Regionals+" level than Regionals 2011 itself. Though I'm pretty immune to tossup length at this point, I think many teams would have appreciated a tournament with fewer nine-liners. In addition to complaining about length, this post can't help but it echoes the aforementioned sentiment, to grammar-checking need to be happen.

I don't want to add many long-winded editorial thoughts to the discussion until MAGNI is released, since my thoughts about this set are intertwined with an editorial process of my own in which I'll be expressing lots of opinions about quizbowl through the questions of that set. Instead, I'll offer a few brief comments that I jotted down while playing.

-Round 3 had a bonus that said "Islams" instead of "Muslims."
-A la recerche de le temps perdu needs to be an acceptable answer in the Proust bonus in Round 4.
-The Jews bonus part in round 6 seems to imply that the Jews actually did kill Jesus; that's a pretty sensitive topic (not to mention something that most churches in this country won't believe anymore). Perhaps reword it so it's clearer that the Crusaders think the Jews killed Jesus, but the question author doesn't.
-In the Peasant's War tossup, "to abolishment of" should read "an abolishment of" or "the abolishment of"
-The Vera bonus part should be reworded - right now it says "sees the title character stabs herself". Verbal conjugation doesn't work that way in English. Furthermore, plays aren't capable of vision.
-We had a B-teamer neg the Augustus question with "Hadrian" on the Pantheon clue. It appears through some cursory research that Augustus had the first Pantheon built, but the Hadrian rebuilding is what we see today. Perhaps it's possible to add a little "Hadrian rebuilt one structure this man commissioned" as appropriate.
-The "roosters" tossup caused some trouble with the bird-on-top-of-Yggdrasil clue; for one thing, it makes it clear that the question's asking for a bird even if the players don't know anything, and for two, it needs to rule out "hawks" as well. Hawks aren't actually the same things as falcons.
-The "poetry" tossup is straight up wrong whenever it uses clues from Aristotle's poetics; while Greek drama was technically in verse, the stuff about mimesis and catharsis primarily applies to drama, and at that point in the tossup that's not promptable.
-Daoism information repeats in a Round 11 bonus; Round 11 also has a Romance of the Three Kingdoms tossup and a Confucianism bonus, so one way to reduce the Chinese overload might be to cut/replace the Daoism bonus altogether and replace it.
-Phenomenology of Spirit has informational repeats in rounds 6 and 11.
-Rousseau repeats informationally from a Round 7 tossup to a Finals 2 bonus.
-The Ba'ha'i bonus in Finals 2 is gave us the idea that Shoghi Effendi was Baha'ullah's son; this is not true (he's Baha'ullah's grandson).
-Is it really accurate to say that neutrino oscillation is a "property", rather than a process they undergo?


Also, note to everyone in the future: stop writing finals packets that are harder than the rest of your sets.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2011 5:25 pm
by ThisIsMyUsername
I really enjoyed this tournament. Difficulty struck me as slightly above what I would call regular difficulty, but none of the tossup choices seemed anything other than reasonable. Hard parts on bonuses were often really hard, and often stuff that I've never heard of in my life, but the fact that the hard parts in the subjects I know well were stuff I've heard of in real life but not in quizbowl leads me to suspect that my knowledge is simply not real enough in other subjects.

Thank you for tossing up Brahms' First Symphony and Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto. These two are among the most famous and performed works in their respective genres and I hope quizbowl manages to move towards comfort with writing about ultra-famous pieces of music like these that do not have catchy nicknames. I'm also happy to see common-links on instruments from jazz clues. This strikes me as the best way to slowly work in a lot of major jazz musicians ignored by quizbowl into the canon, as I think this tossup did well.

Regarding the diverging aesthetic approaches to literature questions (choosing hard works as lead-ins / middle clues vs. hard moments from easy works), I agree that both approaches have validity. However, I think the Saki and Pinter questions represent the former approach being well executed and poorly exectued respectively, and the Strindberg and Capek questions represent the latter approach being well executed and poorly exectued respectively.

Saki is someone who has a lot of stories that are fairly widely anthologized but cannot be tossed up individually, and I think the tossup did a good job of drawing from those stories. Pinter, on the other hand, is an author whose first- and even second-tier works are regularly tossed up. I can think of at minimum five plays (Betrayal, The Homecoming, The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, Old Times) that are more widely read and performed than the penultimate play clued (The Room). Inclusion of clues from or a description of one of these plays is probably necessary to make this anything other than a massive cliff when we drop from The Room to The Dumbwaiter. Another way of saying this is that while it's a good idea to give Pinter's non-tossupable works some air time, making them seven lines of an eight-line tossup is a bad idea.

The other approach (hard clues being drawn from easy works) works well in the Strindberg tossup where the hard clues from Miss Julie require more knowledge than the main plot of The Father. However, Radius is a too well-known character from RUR to be lead-in material: in our match, this led first to a game of chicken-for-power and then to a buzzer-race on the words "title creatures". I think this kind of cluing is better if character names are omitted or if only genuinely peripheral characters are chosen.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2011 5:45 pm
by The King's Flight to the Scots
ThisIsMyUsername wrote:I really enjoyed this tournament. Difficulty struck me as slightly above what I would call regular difficulty, but none of the tossup choices seemed anything other than reasonable. Hard parts on bonuses were often really hard, and often stuff that I've never heard of in my life, but the fact that the hard parts in the subjects I know well were stuff I've heard of in real life but not in quizbowl leads me to suspect that my knowledge is simply not real enough in other subjects.

Thank you for tossing up Brahms' First Symphony and Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto. These two are among the most famous and performed works in their respective genres and I hope quizbowl manages to move towards comfort with writing about ultra-famous pieces of music like these that do not have catchy nicknames. I'm also happy to see common-links on instruments from jazz clues. This strikes me as the best way to slowly work in a lot of major jazz musicians ignored by quizbowl into the canon, as I think this tossup did well.

Regarding the diverging aesthetic approaches to literature questions (choosing hard works as lead-ins / middle clues vs. hard moments from easy works), I agree that both approaches have validity. However, I think the Saki and Pinter questions represent the former approach being well executed and poorly exectued respectively, and the Strindberg and Capek questions represent the latter approach being well executed and poorly exectued respectively.

Saki is someone who has a lot of stories that are fairly widely anthologized but cannot be tossed up individually, and I think the tossup did a good job of drawing from those stories. Pinter, on the other hand, is an author whose first- and even second-tier works are regularly tossed up. I can think of at minimum five plays (Betrayal, The Homecoming, The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, Old Times) that are more widely read and performed than the penultimate play clued (The Room). Inclusion of clues from or a description of one of these plays is probably necessary to make this anything other than a massive cliff when we drop from The Room to The Dumbwaiter. Another way of saying this is that while it's a good idea to give Pinter's non-tossupable works some air time, making them seven lines of an eight-line tossup is a bad idea.

The other approach (hard clues being drawn from easy works) works well in the Strindberg tossup where the hard clues from Miss Julie require more knowledge than the main plot of The Father. However, Radius is a too well-known character from RUR to be lead-in material: in our match, this led first to a game of chicken-for-power and then to a buzzer-race on the words "title creatures". I think this kind of cluing is better if character names are omitted or if only genuinely peripheral characters are chosen.
I think this is an entirely reasonable critique. I wrote those two music tossups, as well as editing the Strindberg and Capek tossups. Sorry about the Capek thing. I wouldn't have been able to buzz on Radius, so when I found that clue, I thought it was fine to put it early. In retrospect, he does seem to be the primary antagonist of the play, so I should have double-checked that with other editors.

I agree that the hard parts in some categories got out of hand, mine not excepted.

After reading it out loud, I think this tournament's biggest weakness was its prose. I'm a bit embarrassed that my categories had so much of this (I didn't write "Islams," but somehow I failed to catch it). Problems with using "In addition to" and "sees" were fairly prominent too.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2011 7:32 pm
by Matt Weiner
Cernel Joson wrote:After reading it out loud, I think this tournament's biggest weakness was its prose. I'm a bit embarrassed that my categories had so much of this (I didn't write "Islams," but somehow I failed to catch it). Problems with using "In addition to" and "sees" were fairly prominent too.
Yeah this. I think comparing this tournament to the stuff that passed for a regular event a couple of years ago will reveal that it did many things right (tossup length is at least moving in the right direction and answer selection, outliers aside, was pretty much on target). But, as always, made-up quizbowlese needs to be purged. I imagine the Michigan people just sitting around a room yelling out "in addition to!", "titular!", and "saw!" at random intervals as some sort of bizarre secret language. Make sentences shorter, and make them use real words that mean real things.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2011 10:43 pm
by Whiter Hydra
1. Angola is in southwest Africa, not southeast Africa. That clue ended up making me neg with Mozambique.
2. The second part of that Liberia bonus was awfully contrived. If you need an easy part, why not make a part on "Liberia" instead of randomly mentioning the Underground Railroad?

Other than that, it seemed to be a fairly decent set, if a bit hard for its advertised difficulty.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2011 11:27 pm
by 1992 in spaceflight
CelebriDucks wrote:1. Angola is in southwest Africa, not southeast Africa. That clue ended up making me neg with Mozambique.
2. The second part of that Liberia bonus was awfully contrived. If you need an easy part, why not make a part on "Liberia" instead of randomly mentioning the Underground Railroad?

Other than that, it seemed to be a fairly decent set, if a bit hard for its advertised difficulty.
I believe that bonus was asking for a leader of Liberia, and his last name was Tubman. Hence the clue about a famous conductor of the Underground Railroad whom he shares his last name with.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2011 1:26 am
by Whiter Hydra
MickeyR0urke wrote:
CelebriDucks wrote:1. Angola is in southwest Africa, not southeast Africa. That clue ended up making me neg with Mozambique.
2. The second part of that Liberia bonus was awfully contrived. If you need an easy part, why not make a part on "Liberia" instead of randomly mentioning the Underground Railroad?

Other than that, it seemed to be a fairly decent set, if a bit hard for its advertised difficulty.
I believe that bonus was asking for a leader of Liberia, and his last name was Tubman. Hence the clue about a famous conductor of the Underground Railroad whom he shares his last name with.
Right. What does Harriet Tubman have to do with a president of Liberia other than a shared last name? It seemed that the only reason she was even mentioned was so that bonus could have an easy part.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2011 7:33 am
by Ringil
touchpack wrote:Can you post the special relativity tossup? I remember being confused as to what exactly it was asking for--although I think I missed the pronoun.

I also recall a tossup on capacitors that perhaps would have been more suited to a high school tournament, dropping dielectrics in the second or third clue.

On the whole, I thought this set was very enjoyable and the only major problem was the distribution of questions through a packet making categories clump together.
One experiment that confirmed this theory saw no frequency shift in the Zeeman effect due to mass anisotropy. Another experimental test of this theory measured the charge to mass ratio of an electron and concluded that the two theories of Abraham along with Bucherer and Langevin were more likely to be correct. In addition to the Hughes-Drever and Kaufmann experiments, another experiment drastically decreased the size of one (*) arm in an apparatus in an attempt to detect a fringe shift. An earlier experiment used a half-silvered mirror to split a ray of light and later recombined that light. The Kennedy-Thorndike experiment modified the interferometer used by Michelson and Morley, whose results helped influence this theory with the idea the speed of light is constant. For 10 points, name this theory which uses Lorentz transformations, developed by Einstein.
ANSWER: special theory of relativity [prompt on partial answers; prompt on SR]
<Libo>

Looking back, I did a poor job of using pronouns near the end.
MickeyR0urke wrote:Could you also post the tossup on Peasant Wars? At the Missouri site, someone buzzed in with Peasant wars and that wasn't acceptable. I'm just curious as to why.
During this conflict, Rohrbach forced Duke Helfenstein and his company to run the gauntlet in an event termed the Weinsberger Blood Vengeance. Florian Geyer led a heavy cavalry unit called the “Black Company” during this conflict. This war inspired Michael Gaismayr to draw up a new Territorial Constitution in Tyrol. One side in this conflict demanded to abolishment of the Todfall, an inheritance tax, as part of their Twelve Articles. One leader dubbed himself the “sword of Gideon” and his use of Biblical language was analyzed by Engels. The battle of (*) Frankenhausen saw the defeat of Thomas Munzer’s forces decimated by Philip of Hesse. It was partly sparked by the teachings of Martin Luther, who decried its instigators as “Murderous, Thieving Hordes.” For 10 points, name this 1524 uprising of the lower classes in the Holy Roman Empire.
ANSWER: German _Peasants’ War_ [or Deutsche Bauernkrieg]
<MB>

I've never heard it called as Peasants' Wars.

SirT wrote:- That capacitor tossup was really, really awful. You talk about it having an electric field and storing energy and then it having a dielectric, and you're not even halfway through the question! There are plenty of good middle clues that could have been used if you'd ventured outside of pure Physics.
- For the tides tossup, the Rossby number is the ratio of inertial to Coriolis forces and characterizes the importance of the Coriolis acceleration compared to horizontal acceleration. As far as I know, it has nothing to do with tides in specific but more with ocean and atmospheric dynamics in general. I can't find a reference to the clue as stated in the tossup so am curious where it came from.
- The root finding tossup struck me as "transparent" (yes, yes, I know)--about halfway through, it's very obvious the question is looking for "this thing you do to polynomials", and I can't really think of anything else that you'd do to them.

The above are just minor quibbles, though; overall, disregarding the prevalent grammar issues, I really enjoyed this tournament. I particularly liked the saying the Rosary (and the Catholicism in general), piano trios and protein folding tossups, as well as a lot of the Astro, so props to whoever wrote those.
The capacitors tossup was probably too easy. I had a lot of trouble finding middle clues, but this is just my lack of knowledge of engineering disciplines.

The Rossby number clue came from my tidal notes. It was also called Rossby radius of deformation (which my professor didn't mention, so I just called it number). Here's a source: http://stommel.tamu.edu/~baum/paleo/pal ... ode38.html
RyuAqua wrote: Also, note to everyone in the future: stop writing finals packets that are harder than the rest of your sets.
We didn't set out to write finals harder than the set, but a lot of the really hard stuff just got pidgeonholed there.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2011 12:46 pm
by kdroge
CelebriDucks wrote:1. Angola is in southwest Africa, not southeast Africa. That clue ended up making me neg with Mozambique.
2. The second part of that Liberia bonus was awfully contrived. If you need an easy part, why not make a part on "Liberia" instead of randomly mentioning the Underground Railroad?
The Angola thing is almost certainly my fault; there's really no excuse for that other than my poor sense of direction and it was not caught during proofreading. For the Liberia bonus, the idea was that Tubman could be made the easy part by linking William Tubman to Harriet Tubman and then asking for the last name. I agree it's a little gimmicky, but I wanted to write a bonus that rewarded knowledge of Taylor and Jenkins-Roberts, and I think that asking for Tubman is an appropriate easy part difficulty wise, even if it's a little bit of a groaner for better teams (it strikes me as equivalent to some chem bonuses that asked for elements from symbols as the easy part; not ideal in how they play out, but those types of parts have to be there to make the bonus accessible to people without knowledge of the discipline). I suppose that the bonus could have been restructured as Liberia / Jenkins-Roberts / Taylor or something like that, but I thought that that would make Taylor stand out in that he's late 20th Century while the other two parts are mid-19th Century.
Ringil wrote:
RyuAqua wrote: Also, note to everyone in the future: stop writing finals packets that are harder than the rest of your sets.
We didn't set out to write finals harder than the set, but a lot of the really hard stuff just got pidgeonholed there.
To echo this, the questions were distributed in a purely random way (part of why there have been so many complaints about the randomization from the first sites) and then we swapped around a few questions that we thought were difficult into the finals packets. Offhand, I don't think that this was more than 5 tossups and 5 bonuses per packet, and probably somewhat less than that- I know that I only requested one tossup in the stuff I edited be put specifically in the finals. Even reading through them, while I agree that there were a couple of harder tossup answers, I don't think that the contrast between the finals and the prelims was very pronounced, and, seeing finals 1 play out, granted, between two of the better teams at the site, they seemed to have no problems getting many tossups early on and thirtying a decent number of bonuses.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2011 3:33 pm
by MLafer
Overall a good tournament. Though it is supposed to be 'regular' difficulty, I did like the occasional inclusion of a harder answer, as well as easier ones. The major problems seemed to be the middle parts of bonuses, which ranged from free points to essentially having two hard parts.

Some errata, suggestions and complaints:

Packet 1 - The 'Ferdinand' tossup seems to be a hose for 'Alfonso', since in the first line it's already apparent that this is a Spanish monarch, and there is an Alfonso the Learned (Alfonso X)
Harold in Italy - for some reason, the phrasing in the comparison to the Italian Symphony seemed to imply that this piece was also by Mendelssohn. Maybe just change that to 'Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony'? Also this question sure says Italy a lot considering Italy is part of the answer.
Spear tossup - pretty transparent, not that many things are generally thrown.
The Iran nuclear facility is 'Natanz', not Nantaz. This was the answer we gave but I didn't bother protesting at the time.

Packet 2 -

The bonus part on 'Phenomenology of Perception' is pretty vague. I know it's sometimes hard to summarize works, but that description sounds like any work by Kant or a Kantian. Even just a date would help here.

Packet 3

just 'Chaco War' should be acceptable for Gran Chaco.
The 'Huslemann' letter of Daniel Webster should be 'Hulsemann Letter'. Bizarrely, we protested that this answer was indeed Hulsemann, asking the moderator to go to Google for the answer, and the moderator claimed that the first two results said 'Huslemann'!

Packet 4

Mr. Flood's party is quite early in the Robinson tossup.

Packet 5

I'm glad there was a tossup on routing, but that was an awfully stingy power mark for something that really never comes up.
Just 'Pico' should be acceptable for Pico della Mirandola.
The gluons bonus is kind of silly in that it gives 'glueballs' when asking for gluons and mentions several colors in the part on 'color'.

Packet 8

Edgard Varese called 'Paul' in the flute tossup.

Packet 9

pontifex maximus - the lead-in is practically a giveaway, as there's only one title famously used by both popes and in ancient Rome

Packet 10

Miss Marple - it's clear that this is a female detective while still within power. Not good.
'Bruce Peninsula', not Bruch, in the Manitoulin Island bonus.
'Tories' should be acceptable/promptable for the British Conservative Party.

Finals 1

I wish as much attention was paid to making the Mao tossup pyramidal as was paid to the proper placing of accent marks on the various Chinese names (which the players will never see). Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao, both of whom have had several tossups of their own, are still in power, and there's still somehow four clues after mentioning the Long March. It's also a pretty transparent question. I was dismayed to see this in a finals packet.

Finals 2

'Otzoists' in Russia tossup should be 'Otzovists'.
In the Rousseau bonus the name 'Julie' needs to be removed from the clues and added to the answer line, since the book is in fact called Julie.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2011 6:06 pm
by The King's Flight to the Scots
Finals 1

I wish as much attention was paid to making the Mao tossup pyramidal as was paid to the proper placing of accent marks on the various Chinese names (which the players will never see). Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao, both of whom have had several tossups of their own, are still in power, and there's still somehow four clues after mentioning the Long March. It's also a pretty transparent question. I was dismayed to see this in a finals packet.
Yeah I'm not really sure what happened here. I thought I sent an edited version to Libo that didn't end up in the final set. I didn't send it to Bryan, though, so maybe that's why it didn't end up there.

Sorry about the Phenomenology of Perception thing: that was an attempt to describe a philosophical work that apparently didn't end up being too helpful. Maybe it would have been better just to make the hard part on Merleau-Ponty so that I could have said he was a phenomenologist. Are there more experienced philosophy writers who can tell me how I could better summarize something like that in the future?

Evidently if you google Huslemann letter, the first two results do use that spelling...although there are only 100 or so hits.