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NAQT writers who wish to receive feedback can post lists of the questions that they authored in this thread. Because of the sensitive nature of lists of answers and the packets in which they appear, please be careful not to expose this thread to any players who are playing the tournament next weekend.

Since my contributions to DI were in Current Events, I'm wondering if that subject was any better than predicted. My DI tossups were Cato Institute, Michelle Rhee, Ukraine, Malaysia, SEIU, and AIG. My DI bonuses were Saudi Arabia/Sri Lanka/ILO, Wyden/Utah/Keystone, Lower Saxony/Merkel/Stasi, Illinois/Caterpillar/Wal-Mart, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed/Pakistan/Boumediene, and Michigan/emergency manager/Bing.

I'll also list my DII contributions in case they ring any bells, though they were more varied. I wrote tossups on saddle points, resonance, John Sherman, Secret Service, Lesotho, kites, Balzac, Walter Raleigh, Andrew Carnegie, Zimbabwe, Sarkozy, minimum wage, and Alabama. I wrote bonuses on Oregon/Wyden/Utah, Taylor Series/factorial/1, Cantor/cardinality/aleph, Italy/VE2/redshirts, and Rice/McCain/state.

Leucippe and Clitophon wrote:Michelle Rhee

This was basically in the first line as "do you remember who this person who hasn't been in the news in a while is" since it started describing the stuff she's most famous for.

Wyden/Utah/Keystone

I almost missed the first part since it implied that Wyden was newly elected. It also wouldn't have hurt to mention something about him being the only person to dislike murdering people as well, unless you thought that would have made it too easy.

Illinois/Caterpillar/Wal-Mart

This was actually kind of a cool idea.

Secret Service

Our B team told me this started off mentioning that it fights counterfeiting, which seems rather well known, especially since it was just in the news for catching those guys in Georgia.

Plan Rubber wrote:

Leucippe and Clitophon wrote:Michelle Rhee

This was basically in the first line as "do you remember who this person who hasn't been in the news in a while is" since it started describing the stuff she's most famous for.

Unless I am even more out of it than I think is the case, it is definitely not true that this question started out describing what she is most famous for. Consider the first three clues:

This activist was pictured on the cover of ~Time~ magazine holding a broom in 2008, the same year she was vociferously criticized by Diane Ravitch during a scandal about suspicious wrong-to-right erasures.

If you remember a Time cover from 2008, you deserve 15 points. If you know who Diane Ravitch is, you deserve 15 points. If you realize that "wrong-to-write erasures" refers to a particular academic scandal in which DC teachers were accused of artificially helping their students do better on standardized tests, then you, too, deserve 15 points, but not as much as the guy who knows who Diane Ravitch is.

Plan Rubber wrote:

Wyden/Utah/Keystone

I almost missed the first part since it implied that Wyden was newly elected. It also wouldn't have hurt to mention something about him being the only person to dislike murdering people as well, unless you thought that would have made it too easy.

I screwed up the leadin to the bonus. It says that he was elected in November 2012 to a seat vacated in 1995 by Bob Packwood. In fact, he was elected in 1996, and it probably would have been more newsworthy if Oregon had had an empty senate seat for 17 years. I don't know why I wrote both the correct date and the incorrect date, since I do in fact know when Wyden was elected, but I'm really sorry for all of you who were confused.

With that said, sometimes in quizbowl you don't get all of the easiest clues about a topic.

Plus, there was another tossup on drones (which I also screwed up and fixed, but not until after the packets had been sent out, sorry), so that would have made for a repeat.

Plan Rubber wrote:

Illinois/Caterpillar/Wal-Mart

This was actually kind of a cool idea.

Yeah, it was. This was a good bonus that I was pleased to see submitted.

Also, I fully approve of the idea that "business" current events questions can in fact be about labor.

Thanks for the feedback. The Rhee question was written for last year's HSNCT, but there must have been concern that its conversion would have been too low there. To anybody who follows Ed Reform that was an easy question, but I have no idea how many people that is.

The Secret Service question did in fact start out, "This agency was created in 1865 to suppress counterfeiting." I did write it with that leadin with this tournament in mind, so that's my fault if the clue is well known.

I wrote what would become the DII questions on Khrushchev / Hungary / Gary Powers (submitted as a tossup on Khrushchev), Pussy Riot / Cathedral of Christ the Savior / Vladimir Putin, point mutation / stop codon / transversion, and the CE tossup on India. Let me know what you think.

I think I edited all the PC:M: that made it into this set. Here's what I specifically wrote about:

DI TUs: Raymond Carver, Boogie Nights, White Noise, Apocalypse Now, Timothy, Elvis Costello, Jimmy Eat World

DI bonuses: Aalto/Sydney Opera House/Tadao Ando; Radiohead/Strokes/McCartney; Master Harold/Fugard/Blood Knot; In the Ghetto/Jailhouse Rock/That's All Right; JS Copley/Watson & the Shark/mezzotint; Pueblo/Rockefeller/Johnny Cash; DNS/ISC/Facebook

DII TUs: Lynyrd Skynyrd; Albert Camus; Battleship Potemkin; Jimmy Eat World

DII bonuses: Cider House Rules/Irving/Garp; Liberty Leading the People/Delacroix/Women of Algiers; Hello Dolly/grip/cloning; JS Copley/Watson & the Shark/Benjamin West; In Memoriam/Tennyson/Crossing the Bar; Man at the Crossroads/Rivera/Rockefeller Center; Once & Future King/TH White/Merlin; Krebs cycle/pyruvate/aconitase; Degas/Cotton Exchange/absinthe; Martel/Tours/Charlemagne; Gross Clinic/Eakins/horses; Kirby/Dedede/Game Boy; Dorr's Rebellion/Rhode Island/Taney; Fountain of the Four Rivers/Bernini/Nile; Toulouse-Lautrec/Moulin Rouge/Post-Impressionism

Div I

Tossups: roots; Petrushka; Giotto; The Frogs; Artemis; Porgy and Bess; Crustacea; Tristan and Isolde

Bonuses: indole/tryptophan/auxin; poppy/Beatrice/Gliere; Poussin/Dance to the Music of Time/Arcadia; Three-cornered Hat/de Falla/jota; SN2/ether/nitrile; leeches/parasite/Rotifera; mammal/temporal/Permian-Triassic; Praxiteles/Hermes and Dionysus/Apollo; Vesti la giubba/Pagliacci/Harlequin; bird/cuckoo/Pines of Rome


Div II

Tossups: roots; Spoon River; Portal; Giotto; The Frogs; Richard Strauss; Artemis; Porgy and Bess; Cnidaria; Primavera; plasmid

Bonuses: poppy/cross/Monet; Flight of the Bumblebee/Rimsky-Korsakov/chromatic; chromatography/stationary/capillary; HIV/Kaposi sarcoma/AZT; leech/parasite/parthenogenesis; cholesterol/lipoprotein/bile; mammal/temporal/Permian-Triassic; alkene/cis/Markovnikov; bird/Carnival of the Animals/Pines of Rome

Here are the questions I wrote, with the packet number in parentheses. Please feel free to comment and critique.

DI:
Bonus (9) - weak nuclear force, Steven Weinberg, Z-zero boson
Bonus (5) - Stark effect, potential energy, Lamb shift
Bonus (3) - selection rules, azimuthal quantum number, magnetic field
Tossup (16) - Scottsboro Boys
Tossup (5) - Ludwig Boltzmann
Bonus (13) - Teucer, Calydonian Boar, Jason
Bonus (6) - Fubini's Theorem, differentiation, Euler-Lagrange equation
Tossup (6) - Lev Landau
Bonus (2) - Egypt, ostrich feather, Ammit
Tossup (10) - radio astronomy (I'm especially interested in everyone's feedback on this question)
Tossup (7) - Aharonov-Bohm Effect

DII:
Bonus (10) - Octavian, Commodus, Hadrian
Bonus (9) - weak nuclear force, electromagnetism, Z-zero boson
Bonus (12) - The Taming of the Shrew, Katherina, Padua
Tossup (2) - Castle (the TV show starring lovable rogue Nathan Fillion)
Bonus (10) - Cartesian coordinate system, rotating reference frame, Lorentz transform
Bonus (10) - 2 constants, pressure, principle of corresponding states (Seth replaced the last two parts, I believe)
Tossup (6) - Wolfgang Pauli
Bonus (15) - matrices, eigenvalues, Jacobian (last two parts replaced)
Bonus (16) - Snell's Law, Pierre Fermat, calculus of variations
Tossup (5) - Ludwig Boltzmann
Tossup (15) - The Importance of Being Earnest
Tossup (11) - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Tossup (9) - bosons
Tossup (7) - The Music Man
Bonus (14) - Carnot cycle, entropy, heat
Tossup (1) - granite
Bonus (7) - operator, real number, momentum
Bonus (1) - Gracchi brothers, tribune, Scipio Africanus

Kyle wrote:

Plan Rubber wrote:

Leucippe and Clitophon wrote:Michelle Rhee

This was basically in the first line as "do you remember who this person who hasn't been in the news in a while is" since it started describing the stuff she's most famous for.

Unless I am even more out of it than I think is the case, it is definitely not true that this question started out describing what she is most famous for. Consider the first three clues:

This activist was pictured on the cover of ~Time~ magazine holding a broom in 2008, the same year she was vociferously criticized by Diane Ravitch during a scandal about suspicious wrong-to-right erasures.

If you remember a Time cover from 2008, you deserve 15 points. If you know who Diane Ravitch is, you deserve 15 points. If you realize that "wrong-to-write erasures" refers to a particular academic scandal in which DC teachers were accused of artificially helping their students do better on standardized tests, then you, too, deserve 15 points, but not as much as the guy who knows who Diane Ravitch is.

The erasures was what I was talking about, since that tells you it's an education person involved in a test cheating scandal, and since whoever the superintendent of the Atlanta schools was probably isn't going to be tossed up, that leaves Rhee.

radio astronomy

I guess this was an interesting idea, but I didn't really like its execution. Kurtis negged it with something like "looking for aliens" and I spent the whole time trying not to buzz in and just say astronomy.

Plan Rubber wrote:

Kyle wrote:

Plan Rubber wrote:

Leucippe and Clitophon wrote:Michelle Rhee

This was basically in the first line as "do you remember who this person who hasn't been in the news in a while is" since it started describing the stuff she's most famous for.

Unless I am even more out of it than I think is the case, it is definitely not true that this question started out describing what she is most famous for. Consider the first three clues:

This activist was pictured on the cover of ~Time~ magazine holding a broom in 2008, the same year she was vociferously criticized by Diane Ravitch during a scandal about suspicious wrong-to-right erasures.

If you remember a Time cover from 2008, you deserve 15 points. If you know who Diane Ravitch is, you deserve 15 points. If you realize that "wrong-to-write erasures" refers to a particular academic scandal in which DC teachers were accused of artificially helping their students do better on standardized tests, then you, too, deserve 15 points, but not as much as the guy who knows who Diane Ravitch is.

The erasures was what I was talking about, since that tells you it's an education person involved in a test cheating scandal, and since whoever the superintendent of the Atlanta schools was probably isn't going to be tossed up, that leaves Rhee.

If you know about that & Rhee in the first place.

Fred wrote:

Plan Rubber wrote:

Kyle wrote:

Plan Rubber wrote:

Leucippe and Clitophon wrote:Michelle Rhee

This was basically in the first line as "do you remember who this person who hasn't been in the news in a while is" since it started describing the stuff she's most famous for.

Unless I am even more out of it than I think is the case, it is definitely not true that this question started out describing what she is most famous for. Consider the first three clues:

This activist was pictured on the cover of ~Time~ magazine holding a broom in 2008, the same year she was vociferously criticized by Diane Ravitch during a scandal about suspicious wrong-to-right erasures.

If you remember a Time cover from 2008, you deserve 15 points. If you know who Diane Ravitch is, you deserve 15 points. If you realize that "wrong-to-write erasures" refers to a particular academic scandal in which DC teachers were accused of artificially helping their students do better on standardized tests, then you, too, deserve 15 points, but not as much as the guy who knows who Diane Ravitch is.

The erasures was what I was talking about, since that tells you it's an education person involved in a test cheating scandal, and since whoever the superintendent of the Atlanta schools was probably isn't going to be tossed up, that leaves Rhee.

If you know about that & Rhee in the first place.

Right, this was my point: I expect most people would either get it there or not know who she is at all.

Plan Rubber wrote:Right, this was my point: I expect most people would either get it there or not know who she is at all.

Yeah, I really don't expect people to get it there unless they know what is going on.

Plan Rubber wrote:Right, this was my point: I expect most people would either get it there or not know who she is at all.

Unless that was the giveaway, I don't see the problem, to be honest.

I think Joe is saying that the way the tossup is constructed, people who know who Rhee is will get it at a certain point (I think still in power), while the giveaway will not make people who didn't know she is suddenly realize who she is. I thought the tossup was pyramidal and wasn't bad or anything, just that it got the point of who she was very quickly and then I assume at that point, everyone who knows she is will buzz, while in most other rooms, it will go dead. I read Diane Ravitch though, so I'm not the ideal critic of this tossup.

If any of you have anything (good or bad) to say about my questions, I likewise would love to hear it. According to Ginseng, these are my questions that made it in:

D-I
(1) Treaty of Shimonoseki/Emperor Meiji/Charter Oath
(2) Semi-Charmed Life; Jackson/Squeaky Fromme/Blair House
(4) Rene Magritte
(5) Batista/Castro/Moncada Barracks
(7) Little Diomede Island/Bering Strait/Nome (heavily edited)
(10) Jean-Honore Fragonard
(11) conversion of St. Paul/Caravaggio/Bellini (converted to a bonus from a submitted tossup)
(12) Kilgore Trout/Vonnegut/Slaughterhouse-Five
(13) Chester A. Arthur
(16) Treaty of Brest Litovsk

D-II
(4) Chad/Nigeria or Cameroon/N'Djamena (heavily edited)
(8) Georges Seurat

swwFCqb wrote:Semi-Charmed Life

Made my day.

Most of your questions were fine and interesting; I thought the Shimoneski bonus was pretty easy--was Shimoneski with the easiest clues the hard part?

I am not sure how Jeff saw it, but I viewed Charter Oath as the hard part. Perhaps I underestimated how easy that answer was?

I intended Shimonoseki as the hard part; in retrospect, that was easier than the other bonuses in the set and I overshot the target in Operation Kindler, Gentler SCT.

swwFCqb wrote:(13) Chester A. Arthur

Loved it. Arthur doesn't get enough respect, in quizbowl or in wider culture.

Tale of Mac Datho's Pachycephalosaur wrote:Bonus (9) - weak nuclear force, Steven Weinberg, Z-zero boson

Because of timing issues (we were I think about 40 points behind Georgia Tech with seconds left on the clock, and we needed another tossup to have a chance to catch up) I played that bonus by yelling out something the first clue I got, so I'm curious: what were meant to be the easy/middle/hard parts there? Presumably Weinberg wasn't easy, but I have no idea about the other two, since I got them (or missed them by arbitrarily yelling "W boson") on hard-ish clues.

Fond du lac operon wrote:

Tale of Mac Datho's Pachycephalosaur wrote:Bonus (9) - weak nuclear force, Steven Weinberg, Z-zero boson

Because of timing issues (we were I think about 40 points behind Georgia Tech with seconds left on the clock, and we needed another tossup to have a chance to catch up) I played that bonus by yelling out something the first clue I got, so I'm curious: what were meant to be the easy/middle/hard parts there? Presumably Weinberg wasn't easy, but I have no idea about the other two, since I got them (or missed them by arbitrarily yelling "W boson") on hard-ish clues.

Here's the full text:

2013 SCT Round 9 wrote:This force acts on all known {fermion}s, and is responsible for {beta decay}. For 10 points each--

A. Name this {fundamental force} that has been theoretically unified with {electromagnetism}.

answer: _weak_ interaction

B. This physicist shared a Nobel with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow for work on unifying the electromagnetic and weak forces.

answer: Steven _Weinberg_

C. Electroweak theory predicted this neutral gauge {boson} that mediates weak interactions that change a particle's {spin}, {momentum} and {energy}, but nothing else.

answer: _Z_ boson (accept _Z^0^_ ["Z zero"] boson)

That's meant to be easy/hard/medium.

-Seth

Ukonvasara wrote:

swwFCqb wrote:Semi-Charmed Life

Made my day.

Me too!

It made my day when I learned that none of my teammates had heard of that song.

They probably just didn't know the name of it; everyone's heard DOO DOO DOO, DOO DOO DOO DOO.

Cheynem wrote:They probably just didn't know the name of it; everyone's heard DOO DOO DOO, DOO DOO DOO DOO.

"Wait isn't that the song about meth?"

I'll take feedback on the rest of the PC:M: I edited (but didn't write) as well:

DI:

TUs: The Roots, Alt-J, Semi-Charmed Life
Bonuses: X-Factor/Killing in the Name/4'33"; Lady Gaga/Groove is in the Heart/Billie Holliday

DII:

TUs: The Roots (conversion), Radiohead, common link on "Sugar"
Bonus: Kanye/Kid Cudi/Common; I Just Had Sex/Lonely Island/I'm on a Boat; Rob Thomas/Unwell/3 AM; Gin Blossoms/Bob Dylan/Death Cab for Cutie; Three Dog Night/Chess/U2

Alt-J went dead in our room, with no one having heard of them at all.

Fred wrote:X-Factor/Killing in the Name/4'33"

was awesome

Fred wrote:Three Dog Night/Chess/U2

I'll bite; what was the common thread here? I can't think of what it could possibly be for either chess the game or Chess the musical.

Fond du lac operon wrote:

Fred wrote:Three Dog Night/Chess/U2

I'll bite; what was the common thread here? I can't think of what it could possibly be for either chess the game or Chess the musical.

Three Dog Night and U2 both had songs called "One," so that's my guess. I don't know how that would relate to chess.

The Eighth Viscount of Waaaah wrote:

Fond du lac operon wrote:

Fred wrote:Three Dog Night/Chess/U2

I'll bite; what was the common thread here? I can't think of what it could possibly be for either chess the game or Chess the musical.

Three Dog Night and U2 both had songs called "One," so that's my guess. I don't know how that would relate to chess.

NAQT wrote:For 10 points each—give the following about songs that focus on the number one:

One Night in Bangkok.

I might as well throw my hat in the ring. I wrote almost all of these questions (except the John Galsworthy one, which is from a submission I wrote in 2006, I think) in the past few months. I'm interested to hear what people think about some of the more creative answer lines.

Packet 1 tossups: Odysseus, Australian Open, rationality, moon rocks
Packet 1 bonuses: French-language films, superfluidity

Packet 2 tossups: Mary Poppins, G.M. Hopkins, Maimonedes, curvature, snakes, mobiles, Bolivia (geography)
Packet 2 bonuses: soccer transfers, titrations, Colette theme, Prague geography, Sienkiewicz, various James Wrights

Packet 3 tossups: Bolivar, Australia (history), Ra, Quran, French (poems), New York (legal history), Clair de Lune
Packet 3 bonuses: green chemistry, Freud, macroeconomic models, cosmic dust, black holes, Eli Manning looking at things

Packet 4 tossups: Dr. Pepper Ten, telescopes, Titanic, Cuba (poetry), The Birthday Party, France (sociology), Dido, Hussite Wars
Packet 4 bonuses: particle in a box

Packet 5 tossups: John Galsworthy, tombs (sculpture), Walden Two, Strindberg, Vancouver (geo), Kazakhstan (geo)
Packet 5 bonuses: two-body problem, out of Africa theory, cyanobacteria, steel (misc)

Packet 6 tossups: funnels (misc), King Hussein, data compression, Bahrain (geo)
Packet 6 bonuses: Maillard reaction theme, Schopenhauer, Atwood machine theme, velocity of money theme, asteroid belt, architects of buildings with frescoes

Packet 7 tossups: 21 Jump Street, management, Rio de la Plata (geo), King Arthur, Jackson Pollock, Russia (history), Safavids, random number generation
Packet 7 bonuses: Daniel Kahneman theme, Eric Wolf theme, covariant formulation of electromagnetism, Tamiflu synthesis, aging (bio)

Packet 8 tossups: Morocco (history), partitions of Poland, Jed Bartlet, Finland (geo), intelligence
Packet 8 bonuses: Mossbauer spec, ecological succession, Fisher v. Texas, medical anthropology, Congo River (geo), virtue ethics, baryogenesis

Packet 9 tossups: A Room with a View, The Old Gringo, Saussure, Episcopalians, Lord Amherst
Packet 9 bonuses: Percy Grainger, fiscal policy, Good King Wenceslas theme, chromotography

Packet 10 tossups: Brezhnev, U.S. Senate, Cullen family
Packet 10 bonuses: Jules Ferry theme, Seleucus, flasks, people buried in Pere Lachaise (misc), wind erosion, legalizing pot, Urals (geo), William Whytes, Stendahl

Packet 11 tossups: EPA, centaurs, graffiti, voter ID laws, Russian prisons, Blood of Christ, Franz Schubert
Packet 11 bonuses: Maurice Halbwachs theme, Chekhov, Gangnam geography, total internal reflection, tungsten, witch of Agnesi, Shang Dynasty

Packet 12 tossups: Rajiv Gandhi, adsorption, converting to Judaism, War on Drugs, Christopher Wren, Teddy Roosevelt (misc), Aphrodite
Packet 12 bonuses: laws of thermodynamics, Arrow's impossibility

Packet 13 tossups: double-entry bookkeeping, judges (in comics), Mayans (myth), ukiyo-e, Charon, Norway (history), Germany (history)
Packet 13 bonuses: Terracotta Army geography, Fosbury flop, Rushdie, Thorndike, Bird in Space, Gibbs-Duhem theme

Packet 14 tossups: Hugh Capet, Peru (history), Tokyo (geo), Calderon de la Barca, Geertz, English
Packet 14 bonuses: Gertrude Stein theme, unexpected frogs, earthquakes, platinum, Hexachordum Apollonis theme, Chinese religion, Beagle Channel geography, dinosaurs, Candide, Zero Dark Thirty, Oddibe McDowell

Packet 15 tossups: Unbearable Lightness of Being, Gunnar Myrdal, India geography, barbecue, "conjugate/conjugation" in chemistry,
Packet 15 bonuses: Kent geography, Nadar theme, German kings sleeping under mountains, fullerene chemistry

Packet 16 tossups: copper, St. Louis Blues, Spanish lit, Lewis Henry Morgan, Japan (myth)
Packet 16 bonuses: Lego video games, descamisados, Pernambuco (misc), crude oil chem, Richard Indiana theme, Parmenides theme, slave trade geography

Marble-faced Bristle Tyrant wrote:Three-cornered Hat/de Falla/jota

I thought this particular question was a little tough for SCT, in fact the only question we bageled in the tournament. Which is supposed to be the easy part here? I figure it's de Falla but he's a bit tough for an easy part at SCT, in my opinion. Everything you wrote seemed to be really solid.