ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by DumbJaques »

No time for full reaction post now, so will just yell at Libo!
Ringil wrote:
Matt Weiner wrote:
kdroge wrote: This was a problem not only in a couple religion tossups but also in history; the tossup on comfort women required that exact term, but the tossup on atomic bomb survivors didn't require Hibakusha.
"Comfort women" is the term that is used (though the protest on this was denied on simple factual grounds--the answer given of "Korean prostitutes" was wrong because most of the question to that point was about a specific person who was not Korean). "Hibakusha" is just a Japanese word that means "atomic bomb survivors"; English translations are always acceptable.

I don't know why Michigan as a team consistently has problems with this, but: when things have a name, that is the name you need to give. When they don't, you don't. Knowing whether something has a name is part of having knowledge about that thing, and sometimes when you don't have complete knowledge about a thing you don't get questions on it, which is how quizbowl works. I don't think increased use of pre-question flags that tell you what kind of answer we are looking for will solve this, for two reasons. One is that questions which don't tell you what kind of answer we are looking for OR use clues that make it impossible to give a right answer in a different category are bad questions and should not be written, and this is going to become an excuse to write ambiguous questions if we start doing it. The second is that saying "general description acceptable" or "specific term required" would not change anything about either of those questions you mentioned--"Hibakusha" IS a general description, just one that is in Japanese, and "Swiss Catholics" IS the specific term used for Swiss Catholics, so it can actually be misleading to say that one is a "term" and the other a "description" when it's just as true to say the reverse. You're not adding anything for people who don't already know what the answer is and you're opening the door to a lot of problems, so I oppose this idea.
Uhh... there are plenty of examples where English translations are NOT always acceptable. For example, Nats 2011 Editors 6 TU 19: prompts on the English translation of kafir, namely infidel. I don't see any difference between this tossup and say a tossup that required Hibakusha and prompted on atomic bomb survivors as kafir from what I can find is just an Arabic word that means infidel. It is a general description, just one that is in Arabic. It seems stupid to force players to have to guess whether the tossup will be kind and let you get away with English translation or whether the tossup is hardcore and wants the original language term.
No, that's pretty wrong. There's the case-specific way in which it's wrong, and then there's just a more general common sense way in which it's also wrong. Let's look at the specific examples first:

So, the term "kafir" is not "an Arabic word that means infidel." At all. "Infidel" is one of several words you could use to translate "kafir," but it's problematic because kafir is a proper term that identifies a certain group mentioned in the Quran who are precisely defined by their relationship to Islam. This is why you might see other terms used to translate it as well (unbeliever, apostate, etc.). So the question should certainly prompt on all of those. Now, the term has been used by assorted historical assholes in a way that's largely synonymous with "non-Muslim," but that's not remotely what it means for a whole laundry list of reasons.

The key here is that all of the words you might use for "kafir" are problematic. "Apostate" defines a related but distinct concept in Islam. "Unbeliever" could be used to imply a similar concept, but it could also just be used to describe a bunch of random dudes living beyond the spread of Islam who had never heard of the Prophet, and living in jahiliyyah certainly doesn't make you a kafir (sorry, Sayyid Qutb).

And here's where we run into the more general issue. Scholars tend not to translate kafir for the reasons I just mentioned, or when they do they include the original (or for some reason the distinctions aren't necessary for their particular purposes). Buzzing in on that tossup and thinking the answer is "infidels" (in, let's say, the "non-Muslim" definition of the term) is flat-out wrong. But it's possible they could just be translating a concept they do understand into English, so we prompt. That's fine.

Now, I don't speak Japanese, but assuming Wikipedia is right hibakusha just means "explosion-affected people." It literally describes people who survived the atomic bombing of Japan during World War II. It does not mean bomb survivors, it does not mean Japanese people who survived bombings in WWII, etc. When someone buzzes in and says "Japanese atomic bomb survivors," it's expressing literally the same concept that "hibakusha" expresses. The same is just not true of "infidel" for "kafir."

But really, it kind of doesn't matter on the practical level, because dude, "comfort women" is such a precise term that's use all the fucking time in history, politics, and dinner conversations with Shinzo Abe. It's absolutely ludicrous to assert "I know enough about comfort women to deserve points on this question, but I don't know the term 'comfort women.'" Kurtis, aren't you earning a Master's in history? How on earth can you not understand this?

Maybe you guys are just trying to point out that it's a problem when someone with knowledge can't be sure if a buzz will be unfairly negged. That's a good point! But it's not being made the right way. What people DO need to take away from this is that you have to take a long, hard look at whether your "exciting" answerline needs some kind of weird modification in instructions/prompting to avoid boning people. And, if the answer is "yes," if you're just being stupid and need to JUST WRITE A GODDAMNED TOSSUP ON SWITZERLAND GOD BRUCE WHY DO YOU KEEP DOING THIS SHIT.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by Theory Of The Leisure Flask »

Skepticism and Animal Feed wrote:This is the Geography tossup that Columbia submitted, exactly as submitted:
This man strongly influenced the recent book Rebel Cities, which in one section praises how city planning encouraged community action in El Alto and Cochabamba, while other applications of this man’s work to geography are encouraged by the Antipode Foundation and Journal. In 1990, Julie Graham argued that terminological differences caused schisms among contemporary geographers influenced by this man, while Kevin Cox tried to distinguish the “HGM” interpretations of him by Keith Buchanan and others from the related “critical human geography” field. David Harvey is this man’s most fervent contemporary geographer acolyte, and Harvey has used the analysis of “accumulation by dispossession” in works like Social Justice and the City to try situate this man’s ideas in real 20th century states. For 10 points, identify this philosopher whose application to geography revolves around how cities, peoples and spaces are influenced by capitalism.
ANSWER: Karl Marx (yes this is a tossup on Marxist geography, and if they cut this for some almanac question about Tanzania they’re ignoring what kind of nonsense geographers actually talk about)
I took one look at this, came to the conclusion that it was an untenable answerline for the geography distribution, and decided that "Tanzania" would in fact be a good answer: it wasn't repetitive of other questions in the set, and there were plenty of geography clues about it.

EDIT: as for the complaint that my writing sounded like...my writing, I am completely unsympathetic. The author's work matches the author's style? Such is the nature of reading things.
Poking my head out of my retirement hidey-hole to say that Columbia submitted an awesome question on a very real thing that strikes me as totally appropriate for ACF Nationals. If I was still active I would have been absolutely thrilled to hear this question (and buzz on David Harvey).
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by Rufous-capped Thornbill »

DumbJaques wrote:No time for full reaction post now, so will just yell at Libo!
Ringil wrote:
Matt Weiner wrote:
kdroge wrote: This was a problem not only in a couple religion tossups but also in history; the tossup on comfort women required that exact term, but the tossup on atomic bomb survivors didn't require Hibakusha.
"Comfort women" is the term that is used (though the protest on this was denied on simple factual grounds--the answer given of "Korean prostitutes" was wrong because most of the question to that point was about a specific person who was not Korean). "Hibakusha" is just a Japanese word that means "atomic bomb survivors"; English translations are always acceptable.

I don't know why Michigan as a team consistently has problems with this, but: when things have a name, that is the name you need to give. When they don't, you don't. Knowing whether something has a name is part of having knowledge about that thing, and sometimes when you don't have complete knowledge about a thing you don't get questions on it, which is how quizbowl works. I don't think increased use of pre-question flags that tell you what kind of answer we are looking for will solve this, for two reasons. One is that questions which don't tell you what kind of answer we are looking for OR use clues that make it impossible to give a right answer in a different category are bad questions and should not be written, and this is going to become an excuse to write ambiguous questions if we start doing it. The second is that saying "general description acceptable" or "specific term required" would not change anything about either of those questions you mentioned--"Hibakusha" IS a general description, just one that is in Japanese, and "Swiss Catholics" IS the specific term used for Swiss Catholics, so it can actually be misleading to say that one is a "term" and the other a "description" when it's just as true to say the reverse. You're not adding anything for people who don't already know what the answer is and you're opening the door to a lot of problems, so I oppose this idea.
Uhh... there are plenty of examples where English translations are NOT always acceptable. For example, Nats 2011 Editors 6 TU 19: prompts on the English translation of kafir, namely infidel. I don't see any difference between this tossup and say a tossup that required Hibakusha and prompted on atomic bomb survivors as kafir from what I can find is just an Arabic word that means infidel. It is a general description, just one that is in Arabic. It seems stupid to force players to have to guess whether the tossup will be kind and let you get away with English translation or whether the tossup is hardcore and wants the original language term.
Maybe you guys are just trying to point out that it's a problem when someone with knowledge can't be sure if a buzz will be unfairly negged. That's a good point! But it's not being made the right way. What people DO need to take away from this is that you have to take a long, hard look at whether your "exciting" answerline needs some kind of weird modification in instructions/prompting to avoid boning people. And, if the answer is "yes," if you're just being stupid and need to JUST WRITE A GODDAMNED TOSSUP ON SWITZERLAND GOD BRUCE WHY DO YOU KEEP DOING THIS SHIT.
While the rest of this post is educational, these two points are good ones. Stop writing on stupid shit, and if you do write on something that might lead to some hesitance on what to buzz with, plan for that.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by felgon123 »

I strongly agree with the post by Matt and the post by Eric (I'm not a scientist, but it was clear even to me that some of the biology questions were poorly written, so I appreciate your thorough review across all the categories). In general, I don't think it's too much to ask that for ACF Nationals, every question should be looked over by at least one person with some expertise in the subcategory, which was obviously not the case for this set, resulting in the field being forced to play many downright bad questions that could have been easily fixed with more thorough editing. As is usual, this thread has already degenerated into an extended debate over the merits of a single mildly controversial tossup, and not nearly enough attention will be given to the glaring fact Eric has singlehandedly illustrated (without even going beyond science): the number of simply bad questions in this set was totally unacceptable. I took high school biology five years ago, and even I knew that none of those clues in the tossup on paramecia were uniquely identifying, and even one question like that per ACF Nationals is too many. (Again, by "like that" I mean "a bad question that anyone with the relevant knowledge could have identified as bad and fixed.") And no, such mistakes were by no means limited to science. For instance, even confining myself to a very small subcategory, off the top of my head I can remember two egregious film tossups. First, the tossup on Keaton (I won't even complain about the transparency issue because that's so much less important than the type of badness I'm focusing on) inexplicably plopped the basic plot of The General into the first half of the tossup... and The General was the giveaway four lines later! The person writing the question understood (presumably?) that it is his most famous film, so I can't even wrap my head around how that happened. Also, I didn't play this tossup or see it played, but in the tossup on Spain, I imagine many people buzzed on the Pan's Labyrinth clue, correctly answered Mexico, and were negged for it. The writer/editor was either unaware that Del Toro is Mexican or (I generously suppose) thought that "film from this country" and "film set in this country" mean the same thing, which they do not.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by Tees-Exe Line »

I haven't mentioned the Mike Fink question because I thought it would just be gratuitous coming from me, but seriously? Second packet of an ACF Nationals final facing off two people who take mythology super-seriously and THAT question comes up?
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

Mike Fink is a character within American folklore. It seems perfectly fair game to me as something that people would know things about.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by grapesmoker »

Mike Fink is a legitimate mythology topic.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by Mike Bentley »

felgon123 wrote:Also, I didn't play this tossup or see it played, but in the tossup on Spain, I imagine many people buzzed on the Pan's Labyrinth clue, correctly answered Mexico, and were negged for it. The writer/editor was either unaware that Del Toro is Mexican or (I generously suppose) thought that "film from this country" and "film set in this country" mean the same thing, which they do not.
Sorry, this was a stupid error on my part. I hope that this did not impact any games.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by Tees-Exe Line »

grapesmoker wrote:Mike Fink is a legitimate mythology topic.
Right, which is why the room erupted in guffaws as the giveaway was read and Matt Jackson (!!) made a knowingly incorrect guess. In the second round of ACF Nationals finals.

What I want to know is whether Ike Jose was buzzing on "this guy shot cups of whiskey off of people's heads" when he answered Seven Macaw.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

You, of all people, are aware that certain topics in quizbowl get little respect, in this case, American folklore. The fact that an otherwise excellent player cannot convert it or the fact that quizbowlers think the topic is inherently amusing is irrelevant. I'm sorry that Yale couldn't convert it, but I fail to see what makes this inherently an awful question.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by Sima Guang Hater »

Tees-Exe Line wrote:What I want to know is whether Ike Jose was buzzing on "this guy shot cups of whiskey off of people's heads" when he answered Seven Macaw.
He was buzzing on a clue about a red feather being his source of power. I see what he was doing (Seven Macaw's real name is Vucub Caquix, Caquix means red feather), but it was still a really funny neg.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by grapesmoker »

Tees-Exe Line wrote:
grapesmoker wrote:Mike Fink is a legitimate mythology topic.
Right, which is why the room erupted in guffaws as the giveaway was read and Matt Jackson (!!) made a knowingly incorrect guess. In the second round of ACF Nationals finals.
It was legitimately funny. It was also a legitimate answer choice. Or would you like to suggest we made a mockery of ACF Nationals again?
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by Tees-Exe Line »

grapesmoker wrote:
Tees-Exe Line wrote:
grapesmoker wrote:Mike Fink is a legitimate mythology topic.
Right, which is why the room erupted in guffaws as the giveaway was read and Matt Jackson (!!) made a knowingly incorrect guess. In the second round of ACF Nationals finals.
It was legitimately funny. It was also a legitimate answer choice. Or would you like to suggest we made a mockery of ACF Nationals again?
If words have any meaning, then this post presents the implication that criticism of ACF Nationals questions amounts to the suggestion that the editors made a mockery of the tournament. Which as far as I'm aware is not an implication that attaches to question critiques generally on this site or in any context.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by grapesmoker »

Tees-Exe Line wrote:If words have any meaning, then this post presents the implication that criticism of ACF Nationals questions amounts to the suggestion that the editors made a mockery of the tournament. Which as far as I'm aware is not an implication that attaches to question critiques generally on this site or in any context.
Your line of insinuating ridicule of the editors' efforts, combined with your never-ending quest for quizbowl martyrdom and your persecution complex, constitute, in my not-humble opinion, genuinely offensive and revolting tactics of argumentation. I will say a third time: you may think you are a very clever person, and you likely are, but you are not more clever than the rest of us, who can also read and process subtext just fine.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by Sima Guang Hater »

I think the best way for me to criticize the Mike Fink question is to simply point out that I think that's not the editing decision a lot of people would make in this instance. I would have put something like the Alcinous question (which rewards deep academic mythology knowledge) or a tossup on something like Ko-no-hana or the Vafthrudnismal (which rewards reading the Kojiki and Vafthrudnismal, respectively) in place of that one. This is only because there's a reasonable academic engagement to be had with some mythology, which I think is something that an answerline like Mike Fink lacks.

Does that make Mike Fink an illegitimate mythology topic? No. But is it a suboptimal choice for the finals of a national? I would have to say yes.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

I think you can be reasonably engaged academically with something like Mike Fink if you study American folklore, which has a lot of academic implications (folklore, like the Greco-Roman or Norse myths, don't just happen; they reflect the concerns of a particular culture). I will admit that probably a lot of quizbowlers don't, so okay, maybe it wasn't the top finals choice, but to me, there is nothing more inherently "academic" in reading the Kojiki than in reading collections of American folklore.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by Matt Weiner »

Nobody reads the Kojiki. People do know American folklore. You're basically just arguing that we have to ask about "canonical" pet topics.

I think this Nationals did an excellent job of providing tossups that were consistently challenging while rarely going dead in games between good teams. Some past tournaments have missed the mark one way or the other--either operated at such a low level that it wasn't really Nationals difficulty, or gone so far the other way in order to discriminate that even the best teams in the tournament were routinely unable to answer questions at the end. Only two of the sixty tossups in the three-game tiebreaker/finals series went dead; to me that seems like the best possible ratio. To get to 60/60 you have to lower the overall difficulty level substantially in order to avoid ever stumbling on that one subfield some team doesn't know, and if you're just asking whatever you want and having something like 45/60 then you are verging dangerously close to have-you-heard-of-this bowl. The fact that Illinois and Yale didn't know Mike Fink doesn't mean it was too hard; had it been asked in a regular round I'm sure many rooms would have converted it.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by Sima Guang Hater »

Matt Weiner wrote:Nobody reads the Kojiki.
I had to read parts of it for a survey course on Japanese history, and it's an extraordinarily important text.
Matt Weiner wrote:You're basically just arguing that we have to ask about "canonical" pet topics.
There's a difference between straying from "'canonical' pet topics" and asking something that rewards the people playing the actual game who have knowledge of a category. You can stray from the canon and ask things that people in a field have a legitimate chance of engaging with (I don't think there's been a tossup on Freud's "The Uncanny" before this tournament, and that's something I imagine a lot of literature people read) without resorting to asking about something like Mike Fink (the field's total engagement with whom seems to be a children's book Dallas read and Joe Nutter's fourth grade teacher).
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

Maybe that's true of the field, although it seems pretty low. I mean, even in the IRC viewing audience, there were at least four people with Mike Fink knowledge, so maybe it was just a quirk of the field.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by Skepticism and Animal Feed »

I just want to chime in with one of my pet points, which is that quizbowl doesn't just reward what is studied in the academy or taught in class, but also what intellectually curious people read in their spare time. Even if you don't think this is what quizbowl should be, empirically it is what quizbowl does.

However, I'd bet that Mike Fink is more studied in the academy than the Kojiki is. There are a lot of Americanists like Mike Cheyne out there. The Kojiki is likely more the province of people who are into myth just reading it (or more correctly, just learning the major stories from it: the Kojiki itself is one of the densest books I've ever opened, and has a bad signal to noise ratio where the important stories are drowned out by lots of crap that will never come up)
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by grapesmoker »

For what it's worth, the Kojiki actually gets around 1500 hits on JSTOR, so it's something people in the academy definitely seem to have devoted some attention to.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by Rufous-capped Thornbill »

I know about Mike Fink because someone (probably Mike Cheyne, that fiend) mentioned him in some thread a year or two ago and I looked him up. But that's beside the point, which is that American Folklore is just as acceptable in the mythology distribution as anyone in the Kalevala or whatever minor Norse deity (looks like it was Aegir this year!) is in vogue.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by Auks Ran Ova »

Yeah, Mike Fink is no less gettable or important than whatever minor figure from Japanese myth or minor text from Norse myth (that has somewhat inexplicably been tossed up before itself) you'd have asked in its place. I can understand the argument that maybe it's a little hard, but it's not like nobody at all was getting it--had I been playing that match, for example, I'd've gotten a decent buzz on Mike Fink but probably would not have been able to pull Ko-no-hana; had the tossup been on the latter, though, I certainly wouldn't've started decrying it as illegitimate.

Also,
Minnesota Open 2010, Finals packet 1 wrote:13. One writer claimed that this concept is an “experience of [the] limits” of nature in an essay that distinguishes this concept from the marvelous and events not controlled by natural laws. This concept was first introduced in a work that claims that bright children are more fearful since they are aware of the limits of their knowledge and also argues this phenomenon arises from “intellectual uncertainty” about one’s usual environment. It was described in Tzvetan Todorov's "The Fantastic" and in an essay by Ernst Jentsch, the latter of which formed the basis of another essay about this concept that claims that the fear of blinding in E.T.A. Hoffman’s “The Sandman” represented a fear of (*) castration. That essay claims that this concept is the return of repressed infantile fears and traces the linguistic origins of this concept from the German word for “unhomely”. This concept is also explained as the unease when confronted with a look-alike or a severed hand. For 10 points, name this concept, the subject of an essay by Freud about the “uncomfortably strange”, which names a “valley” that describes the reaction to robots that look too human.
ANSWER: the uncanny [or unheimlich]
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by Lagotto Romagnolo »

Skepticism and Animal Feed wrote:The Kojiki is likely more the province of people who are into myth just reading it (or more correctly, just learning the major stories from it: the Kojiki itself is one of the densest books I've ever opened, and has a bad signal to noise ratio where the important stories are drowned out by lots of crap that will never come up)
Nobody who's read that book will dispute the bad signal-to-noise ratio (I think the reason Donald Keene gave is that it the Kojiki was basically slapped together, unlike most national epics, which were recited by professional poets, hence the lack of polish). But people do read it in Japanese history class (we read a few excerpts from it, and had to memorize the major plot points for our first exam). It's also the source for that longstanding claim of the Japanese emperor's descent from Amaterasu, which of course has had major implications for history up to the present day. So yes, people do study it, even if it lacks the literary merit of the Odyssey or the Aeneid. That said, I agree that it's been overasked recently (when is the Manyoshu getting its day in the sun?) and I'm glad we didn't need to answer tossups on Okuninushi in the final. Or maybe I've just played too many JRPGs.

Also, this thread is looking strangely familiar...
Tommy C. in the film reform thread wrote: A bizarre taboo has been placed on almost all American film
Jacob Reed in the music/fine arts thread wrote: Listening to Smile as it has recently been released is a musically satisfying event in the same way as listening to Franck can be; the intense usage of cyclical form, the division of the album into "suites," the brilliant "instrumentation" with the voices, and the notable lack of most of the instruments that we associate with "pop" show that Wilson was very much trying to be a serious composer.
Which category will be the next ideological battleground, I wonder?
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

In my opinion, the threads look familiar because of the bias directed against forms of American culture as not being "academic," i.e. its movies, folklore, and music (although the latter gets conflated a bit with the Bob Dylan "important music" talkfests).
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by AKKOLADE »

The Superfluous Man wrote:Which category will be the next ideological battleground, I wonder?
I don't think ACF Nationals should use questions.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by kayli »

I think the problem is that mythology in a vacuum isn't that important aside from casual interest in subject matter. The stories themselves influenced the development of many cultural and social institutions, but that's usually not what's being asked. I think the mythology distribution should tend towards more sociological, cultural, or anthropological treatments of the subject matter rather than just asking about minor Norse gods of smells. The trouble is, of course, that it's hard to write these questions and the existing paradigm in mythology questions seems pretty set. However, there have been good examples of this in this set (for instance the hero tossup was good, though a bit transparent) and others which I hope will continue.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by Sima Guang Hater »

So in an effort to get this discussion back to some semblance of usefulness, I'd like to leapfrog off of Tommy's post and say that I agree with him - the number of clunkers in this set was a little high for my taste. I would love to hear about this from people who are knowledgeable outside of the categories already addressed (science and film), as an instructional method for how to avoid this kind of thing in the future.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by Muriel Axon »

A minor point: I realized, for multiple reasons, that this was a stupid buzz the moment I buzzed in, but the question on r/K selection is just begging people to neg with "island biogeography" when it says "theory was outlined by Robert MacArthur and E. O. Wilson..." considering that the most famous collaboration between MacArthur and Wilson was The Theory of Island Biogeography (which, to my dismay, was mentioned in the next few words, since r/K selection is part of island biogeography), and if you ask any ecologist about a theory created by those two, "island biogeography" will be the first thing to come to mind. I admit this was mostly my own fault, but this is just a wording issue to watch out for.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

Post by Santa Claus »

I was reading through the packets and I have a question: what is the difference between "heliocliff" and "heliopause"? This was bonus 16 in Cheyne-Auroni-Carson. I was under the impression that the correct answer would have been heliopause, since that is the term for the edge of the heliosphere.
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