Re: ACF Fall 2011 Discussion
Posted: Mon Nov 07, 2011 4:05 pm
I hate to be that guy, but when will the set be posted?
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I, for lack of knowledge, negged a player who answered "effusion" after that clue.jonah wrote:I was attempting to, but I was beaten by a fraction of a second and an opposing player who answered "diffusion". I don't think "people aren't likely to give this answer" is any kind of reason to allow an ambiguous clue.fourplustwo wrote:While this is correct, who actually buzzes in at ACF Fall with an answer line of "effusion"? I didn't consider this negbait just because of that.Dwight wrote:The whole Graham's Law clue in the Georgia Tech A packet refers to both the answer (diffusion) and a thing that is not the answer (effusion). From my experience, chemistry classes treat Graham's Law as a Law of Effusion.
I have a feeling that a bonus like this is a result of a desire to fill in the best-known clues for every part, even if they were left out intentionally.Tereus guides two characters in this play to the land of the title creatures. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this play in which Peithetairos and Euelpides live with the title creatures in Cloudcuckooland.
ANSWER: The Birds
[10] In this play by the author of The Birds, Dionysus travels with his slave Xanthias to recover Euripedes from the underworld. The title creatures of this play repeatedly chant “Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax.”
ANSWER: The Frogs
[10] This Greek comic playwright of The Birds and The Frogs wrote of a group of women who withhold sex in order to end a war in Lysistrata.
ANSWER: Aristophanes
Both of these bonuses can be answered based entirely off of basic high school stock clue knowledge. I can't point to a hard part in either one.This experiment was designed to examine prejudice towards socially undesirable groups. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this experiment that involved distributing four groups of 100 of the title objects, addressed to medical research associates, friends of the Nazi party, friends of the Communist party, and Mr. Walter Carnap.
ANSWER: lost letter experiment
[10] This experiment by the same psychologist was designed to quantitatively determine degrees of separation in social networks. It involved 160 people in Omaha, Nebraska being instructed to send a package to a man given only his job title and other basic information.
ANSWER: small world experiment
[10] Those two experiments were performed by this psychologist, whose most famous experiment saw people administer electric shocks when ordered to by an authority figure.
ANSWER: Stanley Milgram
This one is a bit absurd. If a bonus comes in entirely without an easy part, the editors should add one or use a different bonus.He wrote a collection of essays about Anglophone philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century called The Linguistic Turn. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this American philosopher and literary theorist most famous for Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
ANSWER: Richard McKay Rorty
[10] Michael Dummett identified the work The Foundations of Arithmetic by this philosopher and mathematician as the beginning of the linguistic turn. This man also wrote the paper “On Sense and Reference” and invented contemporary formal logic.
ANSWER: Gottlob Frege
[10] This other mathematician and philosopher wrote On the Concept of Number, but he is more famous as the founder of phenomenology.
ANSWER: Edmund Husserl
I really disagree with the Milgram being "stock" or lacking a hard part with the lost letter part. As for the Aristophanes bonus, I don't think something asking for the 2nd and 3rd best known works of, at best, the 3rd best known ancient Greek playwright, qualifies as that stock.jekbradbury wrote:Both of these bonuses can be answered based entirely off of basic high school stock clue knowledge. I can't point to a hard part in either one.
Albeit inconsequential, but as regrettable as sometimes I wish it were not so, Florida is indeed not a nation despite a TU that claimed otherwise.SirT wrote:Some errata after going through the packets and my notes:
- I'm pretty sure Dogberry doesn't say anything about being made to /look/ like an ass, nor does he have his sexton write it down. As I recall, the whole spiel is about how he can't (for some reason) have his sexton write down that he's been called an ass, culminating in the immortal line "O that I had been writ down an ass".
- Polymers are chains. It isn't the best idea to drop a model that contains the word "chains" in the lead-in.
- Hair follicles is dropped halfway through the skin tossup. That's a problem.
- In the GR TU, you mean Einstein ring, not Einstein cross.
- Isn't the human telomere sequence TTAGGG? Is this interchangeable with GGGTTA?
- Boron has atomic number 5, not 6.
Yes, if you cherrypick literally the hardest bonus in the set and compare it to two perfectly fine bonuses, there will be a difference. Not sure what this is supposed to prove.jekbradbury wrote:People often complain, probably too often, about how bonuses at some tournament or another were too variable. But sometimes it really is pretty egregious.
I have a feeling that a bonus like this is a result of a desire to fill in the best-known clues for every part, even if they were left out intentionally.Tereus guides two characters in this play to the land of the title creatures. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this play in which Peithetairos and Euelpides live with the title creatures in Cloudcuckooland.
ANSWER: The Birds
[10] In this play by the author of The Birds, Dionysus travels with his slave Xanthias to recover Euripedes from the underworld. The title creatures of this play repeatedly chant “Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax.”
ANSWER: The Frogs
[10] This Greek comic playwright of The Birds and The Frogs wrote of a group of women who withhold sex in order to end a war in Lysistrata.
ANSWER: Aristophanes
Both of these bonuses can be answered based entirely off of basic high school stock clue knowledge. I can't point to a hard part in either one.This experiment was designed to examine prejudice towards socially undesirable groups. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this experiment that involved distributing four groups of 100 of the title objects, addressed to medical research associates, friends of the Nazi party, friends of the Communist party, and Mr. Walter Carnap.
ANSWER: lost letter experiment
[10] This experiment by the same psychologist was designed to quantitatively determine degrees of separation in social networks. It involved 160 people in Omaha, Nebraska being instructed to send a package to a man given only his job title and other basic information.
ANSWER: small world experiment
[10] Those two experiments were performed by this psychologist, whose most famous experiment saw people administer electric shocks when ordered to by an authority figure.
ANSWER: Stanley Milgram
Compare those to, say:This one is a bit absurd. If a bonus comes in entirely without an easy part, the editors should add one or use a different bonus.He wrote a collection of essays about Anglophone philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century called The Linguistic Turn. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this American philosopher and literary theorist most famous for Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
ANSWER: Richard McKay Rorty
[10] Michael Dummett identified the work The Foundations of Arithmetic by this philosopher and mathematician as the beginning of the linguistic turn. This man also wrote the paper “On Sense and Reference” and invented contemporary formal logic.
ANSWER: Gottlob Frege
[10] This other mathematician and philosopher wrote On the Concept of Number, but he is more famous as the founder of phenomenology.
ANSWER: Edmund Husserl
This comment is probably invalidated by the fact that I'm taking a class that's partially thermodynamics, but I actually didn't buzz there because I thought that it was too obvious for a lead-in and it had to be something more complicated I was misremembering.The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:While that may be true, I think its obscure enough to a general audience that its a fine leadin. I'd honestly have some trouble remembering that fact.Tom007 wrote:The tossup on kinetic energy seemed to me to have a very easy lead-in. Most people that has taken physics or chemistry beyond the first year level (should) know that kinetic energy equals 3/2 times Boltzmann's constant times temperature. Worse yet, I remember having nearly the exact same lead-in at a past tournament.
This is pretty much how I feel. This should have been a great tournament: a huge amount of raw material and a strong editing team. In fact, it was a mediocre tournament, with the later rounds full of repeats and frequently multiple clunkers per packet. I was hoping for one of the best events of the year, and got probably the most decidedly mediocre college tournament I've played yet.The Hub (Gainesville, Florida) wrote:The general feeling I got from people on my team and others yesterday was that this set was somewhat disappointing. A huge amount of source material (62 packets) and yet we still had to sit through repeats and an occasional lousy question. It seemed like every round there would be some sort of mistake in several questions (grammar, punctuation, that kind of stuff) that caused every moderator to stop and figure out how to correctly read the question. Also it seemed like a good deal of questions (example: the sun) were written in a way that nearly everyone would hesitate to answer on an obvious clue because they couldn't imagine it coming at that point in the question.
Personally I didn't feel the set was terrible or anything, I would even say it was good although not as good as past versions. I think going into the tournament most people figured this would be an excellent set, but for whatever reasons, it underwhelmed a bit. Things like this happen though, I'm not going to sit in this thread and bitch about every imperfection, just generally hope that 2012 ACF Fall is better.
I actually tried to make sure every tossup I saw had some clearly defined thing-that-it-was-going-after be stated in the first sentence and in every sentence thereafter, so I'd be curious to know how often this was not the case. I know for a fact that I failed miserably to make the Book of Jonah tossup do this, but outside of that example I thought most tossups made it pretty clear.Prof.Whoopie wrote: 1. This tournament had a helluva lot of tossups that didn't start with "This X." Really, this isn't usually that hard to do, and it makes things much easier for players.
I think my use of the phrase "a good deal" was in hindsight an incorrect description of how many times this happened, it wasn't like every other question had this problem. A lot of people felt that a few of the questions were too easy, although the set itself was an appropriate difficulty. However you are correct that having played quizbowl for a while now, I should probably be prepared to hear things I know earlier in a question.Cernel Joson wrote:It does seem like a lot of people have been saying something along these lines, so I do feel obligated to respond to this. Specifically, that tossup on "the sun" had other issues, but come on. You, someone who has been playing quizbowl for years now, kept hearing early clues that you knew but "couldn't imagine" them coming up early at a novice tournament? The examples people have been bringing up (Borges' seventh most famous story as a lead-in clue) make me question how valid these complaints are. Your point about grammar is one thing, but yes, if lots of good teams play a novice set they are going to answer questions early. Maybe the early clues should have been a little harder, but please take a step back and consider whether using easy early clues at ACF Fall is such a bad thing.The Hub (Gainesville, Florida) wrote: Also it seemed like a good deal of questions (example: the sun) were written in a way that nearly everyone would hesitate to answer on an obvious clue because they couldn't imagine it coming at that point in the question.
Like the Milgrim bonus, the Piaget/Kohlberg/Erikson bonus was plenty challenging for novices.The Hub (Gainesville, Florida) wrote: On another subject: The only question I want to bring up specifically is the Piaget/Kohlberg/Erikson bonus. Did anybody else think that didn't have a hard part?
This might be the case, but I remember spending at least a week on Kohlberg's stages of moral development in my Psychology 100 class a couple years ago. I've just always assumed that Piaget was fairly easy and that Erikson and Kohlberg were about the same difficulty. If that's not the case, then that's fine, I was simply mistaken.Papa's in the House wrote:Most people won't know or remember Kohlberg and his six stages of moral development, so it's a fine third part.
Well I guess I've learned something new today.bt_green_warbler wrote:Some NAQT conversion stats:
Piaget is converted at a 50% rate for high school varsity play.
Erickson about 35%.
Kohlberg has not been tossed up at any level below ICT. His only appearances as an answer in NAQT high school sets have been as the hard part of HSNCT bonuses (often with Piaget as the middle part).
So I just looked up this bonus. I took an undergrad endocrine class, and obviously learned endocrine in medical school, and I wouldn't have gotten that bonus part until last year. I understand this was a mistake, but even the person submitting this bonus should realize there's no possible way that anyone without a relative with Kallman's syndrome or a medical education could get this question.Blanford's Fringe-fingered Lizard wrote:Thus if you had some endocrine lectures, the lack of clues in that gnrh part notwithstanding, then you were meant to 30 that bonus.
Sorry, I had meant to say "gnrh with all of its best known clues"The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:So I just looked up this bonus. I took an undergrad endocrine class, and obviously learned endocrine in medical school, and I wouldn't have gotten that bonus part until last year. I understand this was a mistake, but even the person submitting this bonus should realize there's no possible way that anyone without a relative with Kallman's syndrome or a medical education could get this question.Blanford's Fringe-fingered Lizard wrote:Thus if you had some endocrine lectures, the lack of clues in that gnrh part notwithstanding, then you were meant to 30 that bonus.
Blanford's Fringe-fingered Lizard wrote:Another thing that should be mentioned and repeated in these discussion thread is that most of you are in college, so you get exposed to widely different course materials depending on your major. For this tournament, "we spent a week talking about X in psych class" is irrelevant because the majority of people playing have never taken a psych class. In fact, at ACF Fall, that's adequate justification to make something a middle and a hard part. We want teams that know their stuff to get 30s and early buzzes as opposed to just circuit regulars and packet readers doing the same.
When writing easy parts and choosing tossup answers, this tournament's editors went with an approximation of the general knowledge of a decently educated undergrad who is new to quizbowl, taking into account basic stuff that recurs in many classes to fill in the blanks. Thus if you had some endocrine lectures, and that gnrh part had the best known clues, then you were meant to 30 that bonus.
I decided to make that part on _suicide_ and accept seppuku, since I preferred to include an easier world lit clue rather than a culture clue. Motive-wise, though, Ajax's actions are pretty similar.Dr. Timothy Tebow wrote:
Also, an example of anti-prompt: can one seriously claim that Ajax committed seppuku?
Yeah, that was my fault again. Definitely could have put a bonus or two in the set.Ethnic history of the Vilnius region wrote:I wish there was more film in the tournament.
I think art tossups on George Washington are pretty common. I was not aware that there was a history tossup of him until the day of the tournament.Production of Watchmen wrote: Also sort of weird was the presence of both art and history questions on George Washington, although obviously I haven't been around long enough to know if there's any precedent to something like that.
The editorship system that allowed this to happen should be changed in the future, so that editors are aware of used topics across categories in addition to just theirs. The eminent possibility of something like this happening isn't a disaster, but in a tournament that's receiving 62 packets I'm dead certain an art answer (or history answer) other than George Washington would have been available to replace one of those questions.itsthatoneguy wrote:I think art tossups on George Washington are pretty common. I was not aware that there was a history tossup of him until the day of the tournament.Production of Watchmen wrote: Also sort of weird was the presence of both art and history questions on George Washington, although obviously I haven't been around long enough to know if there's any precedent to something like that.
Frankly, I don't see how this matters, and even if I had known about this I wouldn't have changed it.RyuAqua wrote:The editorship system that allowed this to happen should be changed in the future, so that editors are aware of used topics across categories in addition to just theirs. The eminent possibility of something like this happening isn't a disaster, but in a tournament that's receiving 62 packets I'm dead certain an art answer (or history answer) other than George Washington would have been available to replace one of those questions.itsthatoneguy wrote:I think art tossups on George Washington are pretty common. I was not aware that there was a history tossup of him until the day of the tournament.Production of Watchmen wrote: Also sort of weird was the presence of both art and history questions on George Washington, although obviously I haven't been around long enough to know if there's any precedent to something like that.
It's only a problem if the two George Washington questions ended up in the same packet.Cernel Joson wrote:Frankly, I don't see how this matters, and even if I had known about this I wouldn't have changed it.RyuAqua wrote:The editorship system that allowed this to happen should be changed in the future, so that editors are aware of used topics across categories in addition to just theirs. The eminent possibility of something like this happening isn't a disaster, but in a tournament that's receiving 62 packets I'm dead certain an art answer (or history answer) other than George Washington would have been available to replace one of those questions.itsthatoneguy wrote:I think art tossups on George Washington are pretty common. I was not aware that there was a history tossup of him until the day of the tournament.Production of Watchmen wrote: Also sort of weird was the presence of both art and history questions on George Washington, although obviously I haven't been around long enough to know if there's any precedent to something like that.
EDIT: "This" being the art and history tossups on GW, not the editorship system, which should indeed be fixed in the future.
I mean, Ajax DOES kind of commit seppuku, really. . .The Laughing Cavalier wrote:I decided to make that part on _suicide_ and accept seppuku, since I preferred to include an easier world lit clue rather than a culture clue. Motive-wise, though, Ajax's actions are pretty similar.Dr. Timothy Tebow wrote:
Also, an example of anti-prompt: can one seriously claim that Ajax committed seppuku?
I remember a tournament where there was a geography tossup on Ghana that I had written and then, in another packet, a history tossup on the Ghana Empire. People complained about those answer lines occurring in the same tournament even though modern Ghana and historical Ghana don't even overlap territorially.theMoMA wrote:Agreed with Matt (Bollinger). For some reason, high schoolers and recent high school graduates seem to hold the nearly uniform opinion that it's always unacceptable for the same thing to come up twice in a tournament, even in a way that tests for two completely separate bodies of knowledge (such as history and art tossups on George Washington). This opinion does not line up with the common practice at college tournaments.
He really doesn't. I know this may come across as pedantic, but that word has a special ritual meaning. Yes, he falls on his sword; he does not commit seppuku. I understand Sarah's motivation for using those clues, but still, this word has a specific meaning and it doesn't apply to Ajax.DumbJaques wrote:I mean, Ajax DOES kind of commit seppuku, really. . .
I suppose it might depend on the leniency of the underlining and the reader. This struck me as a question about things that have names, but for which a wide variety of acceptable answers existed (mine of "Gold", followed by "Gold that Nazis stole from Jews and various other groups in the 1930s and 1940s" was accepted for the clear knowledge that it was).Cheynem wrote:What was wrong with the tossup on Nazi gold?
Some sort of pointer on what to do with a "Jewish gold" answer would have been helpful. I ruled that incorrect in my room.Bartleby wrote:I suppose it might depend on the leniency of the underlining and the reader. This struck me as a question about things that have names, but for which a wide variety of acceptable answers existed (mine of "Gold", followed by "Gold that Nazis stole from Jews and various other groups in the 1930s and 1940s" was accepted for the clear knowledge that it was).Cheynem wrote:What was wrong with the tossup on Nazi gold?
Gold, (I prompted), Jewish gold, (I prompted again)... (I called time, neg five).tiwonge wrote:Some sort of pointer on what to do with a "Jewish gold" answer would have been helpful. I ruled that incorrect in my room.Bartleby wrote:I suppose it might depend on the leniency of the underlining and the reader. This struck me as a question about things that have names, but for which a wide variety of acceptable answers existed (mine of "Gold", followed by "Gold that Nazis stole from Jews and various other groups in the 1930s and 1940s" was accepted for the clear knowledge that it was).Cheynem wrote:What was wrong with the tossup on Nazi gold?
I, for my part, tried an answer of "gold stolen from the Jews", which was not accepted. (Though it was after the neg Greg just mentioned of "Jewish gold", so perhaps if the answer line had been better written my answer would have been irrelevant.)Inkana7 wrote:As the writer of the Nazi Gold question, I apologize for not thinking through acceptable answerlines enough, especially if that caused you to neg. In hindsight "Jewish gold" probably should have been acceptable, but the tossup dealt entirely with Jewish gold that the Nazis had stolen or dealt with in some way, so I felt that that distinction had to be made.
Yes, this was my understanding when I ruled it wrong.Bartleby wrote:In this case, I think the Nazi part was significant, because the gold wasn't stolen solely from Jews (though primarily from them).
Very much so. It's an interesting idea hamstrung by the fact that the answer line required the players to x-ray the writer's head.Inkana7 wrote:But in hindsight, ANSWER: _Gold_ would have worked much better.
Common usage in English is "Shi'ite," which is likewise not an Arabic word. That's what it should say. We really don't use Shi'a as an adjective in English. Anyway, that's not really what I was complaining about; the point is that I am questioning whether it is correct to refer to the Alawis as an orthodox Shi'ite group. They would technically consider themselves Shi'ites, but they do not follow many mainstream Shi'ite beliefs. Hence "Shi'ite offshoot."Skepticism and Animal Feed wrote:Whatever its grammatical function in Arabic, "Shia" is often used as an adjective in English. That's why we also say "shi'ite" and "shi'ites" when we want to refer to one (or multiple) adherents of that branch of Islam. Common usage in English should trump foreign rules.