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"stanford housewrite" General Discussion

Posted: Mon Feb 29, 2016 5:35 pm
by gyre and gimble
I'd like to start by thanking everyone who played this set. Hopefully you enjoyed it, or at least didn't come away from it wishing you could be refunded.

This was my first time editing an upper-difficulty collegiate set. That meant that a lot of my judgment calls were simply done in good faith and also tended to be on the conservative side. I think most people would agree, if they saw a side-by-side comparison between "stanford housewrite" and other recent Nationals-minus sets, like George Oppen and the Minnesota Opens, that our answerlines are for the most part easier. I figured it would be better not to be too ambitious in terms of canon-expansion or "writing on cool things" on my (and our) first go.

That said, there were question topics that were certainly new, or relatively new. At least in categories where I have non-quizbowl interests in (literature, history, visual arts, mythology) I made sure that these "new" things were topics that I find to be important or famous in the real world, but simply haven't established their place in quizbowl yet. Examples include, in no particular order (and only from questions I personally wrote) Karen Russell, Terrance Hayes, the wedding of Arthur and Guinevere / first quest of the Round Table, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Edith Sitwell, Michel Faber, Peter Ackroyd, Faith Ringgold, Jean Metzinger, Nicias, the Lochner era, the modernization of Sweden, and Norman Davies. There were many others brought up by my co-writers, and wherever I could I tried to make sure they were actually important and could be converted. My hope is that they were, and that these questions were perceived as long-overdue, rather than overly experimental.

I don't have much else to say, though I may add 1) more thoughts if a lively discussion on editing theory develops, and/or 2) various apologies, depending on how this thread goes.

Thanks again, and discuss away.

EDIT: I saw Ike's post two seconds after posting mine, which reminded me--I apologize, in advance of any additional discussion, for the bonus variability. It was difficult for me, as someone who is not exactly a pure generalist, to even things out across categories. I tried as best I could, but the bell curve probably had a pretty wide standard deviation as a result.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Mon Feb 29, 2016 6:20 pm
by Galadedrid Damodred
I'm too busy trying to make sure I graduate in the next 3 weeks to be able to post a lengthy manifesto concerning my approach to writing questions for this tournament, but here's a list of the raw tossups that I wrote. Some of them were changed more than others, but I'll take the blame for anything that went wrong. I'm not going to bother listing bonuses, but there were a lot of those too, mainly in physics, other science, religion, mythology, and world history.

British Literature - Katherina Minola, Marriage a la Mode
European Literature - Sancho Panza
World Literature - Euripides as an Aristophanes character, Chinese poetry
Philosophy - al-Ghazali
Social Science - the Pill
Other Fine Arts - Amarna
Religion - Ismailism, mandalas, Harrowing of Hell, Mormon temples, ablution, conversion, Raelism, zakat, incense, Shoghi Effendi, Presbyterianism, yoga
Mythology - Pele, Navajo, boat races, Vietnam, Surya
Biology - koalas
Chemistry - Langmuir, liquid crystals, size exclusion chromatography, solvation
Physics - everything
Other Science - masers, measures, hotspots, knots, salinity, solar flares, Dedekind, cloud formation, planetary nebulae
American History - GI Bill, United Farm Workers, Missouri, Watts riots, Puerto Rican independence, John Hay, Seminoles, Philadelphia, Louisiana
European History - Bulgaria, Montreal, New Zealand, Russian Civil War
World History - everything

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Mon Feb 29, 2016 7:01 pm
by Ike
I greatly enjoyed this tournament and thought it was one of the better hard tournaments I have played over the years.

I'll guess I'll use this space to post a bit about "meat and potatoes" (like core, but none of the connotations of that word) topics. Overall, I think the tournament did a good job with this: some of the lit, for example, was on Faulkner, heart of darkness, etc., some of it was on harder things; I think the tourney hit the right amount in the categories I know. I think the one area that didn't really hit this well was CS, where all 5/4 focused on applied things or exotic theoretical topics ("desert" topics.)

I'll also add that some of the bonuses were crazy hard. I know people complain about that all the time so let me give a trend that I specifically don't like: the hard part being a book by an author that the player has never heard, AND you don't get said author as a clue. JL and I were baffled by that one bonus which made you name a book by a Hungarian writer who I don think has ever come up before. There were a few other times this happened, but I'd need the set to point out more examples. Also...Naming a Soyinka poem without Soyinka is overkill, since naming any Soyinka poem with the author is still a hard part.

I'll probably post more later, but thanks a lot everyone!

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2016 6:44 am
by jekbradbury
I wrote the CS. The slightly heterodox approach (skewing towards applied and under-asked topics) was intentional -- I wrote on things I know about, and to a certain extent on relatively "stanfordy" things -- and I think at least some of the players at our site enjoyed it. I'm happy to take criticism about specific answer choices or question content, though. (Or, if you think my whole approach was a mistake, feel free to say that!)

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2016 7:05 am
by naan/steak-holding toll
This tournament was quite (EDIT: very) good - it had a lot of solid ideas and generally seemed pretty consistent in difficulty. Best of all, it actually adhered to its target "Nationals-Minus" difficulty, which I think was to the great benefit of all in the field. I don't think any of the muddiness of results at the UMD site had anything to do with the set not being hard enough - rather, that's a reflection of the evenness of the matches between the top teams in the country.

If anything, I think the middle parts of bonuses tended to be a bit generous - a lot of them felt like they had two easy parts (by this set's standards) or Regionals-level middle parts. This, of course, is still better than having bonuses be way too hard. Most (though not all, but that's inevitable) of the hard parts were quite reasonable, and the best teams were getting into the 21-22 PPB range easily.

Basically every category I pay attention to was well-executed in my opinion, particularly the painting and European history. The economics seemed rather easy, but in a way that rewarded people who had strong academic backgrounds in the matter, so this didn't seem like a big issue for the most part. The world history and religion (and, looking at Austin's post, Austin's humanities questions in general) seemed a bit above the other categories in difficulty, but their cluing was good so I can't really complain too much. My only issue is that, even excluding the tossup on the Brazilian First Republic (which really needs to have its answerline fixed - I'll post about that elsewhere), 6 of the 14 world history tossups we played were on the 20th century, which wouldn't ever fly in European history.

To reiterate - thanks for writing this tournament. It was definitely the most enjoyable that I've played all year - both on account of its content and on account of the awesome team I was a privilege to be part of.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2016 12:06 pm
by Ike
jekbradbury wrote:I wrote the CS. The slightly heterodox approach (skewing towards applied and under-asked topics) was intentional -- I wrote on things I know about, and to a certain extent on relatively "stanfordy" things -- and I think at least some of the players at our site enjoyed it. I'm happy to take criticism about specific answer choices or question content, though. (Or, if you think my whole approach was a mistake, feel free to say that!)
Yeah, I don't want to dominate the entire discussion about one small subcategory, but generally, I felt this set's CS focused too much on exotic topics, I would have liked to see a few more questions on just things that everyone who knows CS will encounter in their undergraduate classes. To be fair, I think the CS questions in of themselves were solid - though that Design Patterns one wasn't very good since it just seemed pretty obvious. If you would like my fuller thoughts, feel free to PM me.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2016 1:59 pm
by Victor Prieto
I think this set, for the most part, is a solid example for future tournaments attempting to hit "Nationals-minus" difficulty. That's not to say there weren't mistakes or some clunkers here and there, but definitely a solid set.

At least twice, there were bonuses that were identical to bonuses in previous rounds (Grubbs/polymerization/Schrock carbenes, for one). Should probably fix this for future mirrors. I think there might have been a repeated tossup in round 2, but that might have been because that moderator was rather clueless and started reading the same tossup again.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2016 5:25 pm
by theMoMA
Perhaps the bonuses could have been a bit more even; many seemed to have two fairly routine parts, which seemed appropriate for the announced difficulty, but others had tough middle parts. There were also some very tough hard parts in the vein that Ike identified (a difficult work by a noncanonical author without giving the author's name). That said, I didn't feel like the bonuses got in the way of fair competition, and the set seemed to hit appropriate conversion benchmarks pretty well.

I thought the set was generally a good one, and there were plenty of interesting ideas even though the tossups were gettable on the whole. I thought that the kinds of answers that Stephen identified--things that people know but haven't wedged their way into the body of typically asked answers--were well-represented and -executed in the set. All in all, this made for a tournament that sets a good example for late-season opens to come. Kudos to Stephen, Austin, and co. for a job well done; thanks for putting the set together!

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2016 9:09 pm
by Galadedrid Damodred
Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote:If anything, I think the middle parts of bonuses tended to be a bit generous - a lot of them felt like they had two easy parts (by this set's standards) or Regionals-level middle parts. This, of course, is still better than having bonuses be way too hard. Most (though not all, but that's inevitable) of the hard parts were quite reasonable, and the best teams were getting into the 21-22 PPB range easily.
I'm not sure what you're arguing here. As has been mentioned, we probably could have done more to lower the standard deviation of bonus difficulty, but 21-22 PPB is precisely what the best teams should be putting up if you want the numbers to be higher than ACF Nationals and lower than ACF Regionals.
Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote:The world history and religion (and, looking at Austin's post, Austin's humanities questions in general) seemed a bit above the other categories in difficulty, but their cluing was good so I can't really complain too much. My only issue is that, even excluding the tossup on the Brazilian First Republic (which really needs to have its answerline fixed - I'll post about that elsewhere), 6 of the 14 world history tossups we played were on the 20th century, which wouldn't ever fly in European history.
The reason that about half of the world history was from the 20th century is because there is more to ask about from that time period. European history has a seemingly endless supply of people, states, events, and texts from ancient Greece to the present that are just begging to be made into clues. The same cannot be said for the rest of the world, my dreams of there being 1/1 pre-modern Far East in every packet notwithstanding. There just isn't as much source material that people read and engage with academically. We did the same thing with American history (approximately half of it was post-1900) for the same reason; in fact, I think that the American history distribution should skew even more toward the last 100 years than it usually does, but that's a different issue. I don't have any concrete data to back this up, just my experience studying and trying to find good tossup answerlines for these categories.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2016 9:20 pm
by naan/steak-holding toll
There's not as many answers available for pre-modern world history, that's true - you can't toss up nearly as many leaders or countries. But there is a wealth of clues to be mined - they aren't flashy or anything (compared to exciting named events, death squads, and coups) but there are mountains upon mountains of records of medieval and early modern Asia, or pre-Columbian archaeology, or the Swahili coast and tons of delightful history books out there that can synthesize the details for you. I think it can sound boring to people to repeatedly have tossups on the same empires, dynasties, etc. but a given dynasty may well govern for hundreds upon hundreds of years and encompass dozens of rulers, hundreds of officials and interesting policies/social developments, and countless fascinating trends in art and literature. It's like music - you could have a tossup with the answer _string quartet_ at every other tournament and it would be totally fine because there's so many different string quartets you can clue from.

Yeah, it's not exactly easy to get a background in this stuff - it takes a lot more reading to find out what's unique and buzzable for pre-modern world history than it does for modern world history. That said, I think it's really worth doing - there's a ton of humanity out there to explore.

It's understandable if you don't have a lot of knowledge of the category as to why you'd reach for more modern history because you're absolutely correct - it's easier to write and probably easier to appreciate as well. But you're a good history player with a lot of knowledge, so I really think you can do it. Not that there was anything wrong with the questions here, I just think quizbowl can try harder to explore other areas more in depth. Similar shifts have happened with high-level music questions, which used to focus on flashy "cool" modern composers and now present a balance of material - I think a similar effort can be done with history.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2016 9:53 pm
by DumbJaques
This tournament was excellent. Sure, there was some bonus variability, and some clunkers, but that's how it goes. Overall the set was fantastic, and did an impressive job of striking the right balance between exciting and accessible. In particular, this set should be seen as making a strong case that in-season opens do not need to be abusively hard to be extremely challenging and do a great job differentiating top teams. I'm really impressed with the job Stanford did, and look forward to playing more events by the authors in the future.

Also I have chosen to take this tournament as a harbinger that the science leadins I learned 7 years ago have finally started to complete their life cycle (from "hard" to "fake" to "dude Chris Ray knows that" to "[missing]" to finally becoming "hard" again). See you at AVOGADRO'S NUMBER, your poor motherfuckers.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2016 10:51 pm
by Ike
DumbJaques wrote:This tournament was excellent. Sure, there was some bonus variability, and some clunkers, but that's how it goes.
Yeah just to be clear, I'm not making one of those Libo-style posts about how the set sucked because of bonus variability because everyone always complains about that. I just wanted to point out a simple sanity check you can use on some of your bonuses to make your hard parts easier.
Also I have chosen to take this tournament as a harbinger that the science leadins I learned 7 years ago have finally started to complete their life cycle (from "hard" to "fake" to "dude Chris Ray knows that" to "[missing]" to finally becoming "hard" again). See you at AVOGADRO'S NUMBER, your poor motherfuckers.
Hey I benefit from these too! When Chris Ray learns, everyone benefits!

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Mar 02, 2016 1:07 am
by Jem Casey
Ike wrote:JL and I were baffled by that one bonus which made you name a book by a Hungarian writer who I don think has ever come up before.
I guess dropping Magda Szabo's name would have helped, but The Door has kinda been a big deal recently; it seems that it would have been hard to read book reviews or browse literature on Amazon in 2015 without coming across it. More generally, this bonus was one of the many "oh, this is coming up! awesome!" moments that made the set a really unique and exciting experience for me. I'll single out the lit and visual fine arts as being particularly full of interesting clues on fresh, important content, but really all the categories I pay any attention to were quite good and the set's writers deserve all the praise they've gotten.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Mar 02, 2016 3:10 am
by Galadedrid Damodred
Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote:There's not as many answers available for pre-modern world history, that's true - you can't toss up nearly as many leaders or countries. But there is a wealth of clues to be mined - they aren't flashy or anything (compared to exciting named events, death squads, and coups) but there are mountains upon mountains of records of medieval and early modern Asia, or pre-Columbian archaeology, or the Swahili coast and tons of delightful history books out there that can synthesize the details for you. I think it can sound boring to people to repeatedly have tossups on the same empires, dynasties, etc. but a given dynasty may well govern for hundreds upon hundreds of years and encompass dozens of rulers, hundreds of officials and interesting policies/social developments, and countless fascinating trends in art and literature. It's like music - you could have a tossup with the answer _string quartet_ at every other tournament and it would be totally fine because there's so many different string quartets you can clue from.

Yeah, it's not exactly easy to get a background in this stuff - it takes a lot more reading to find out what's unique and buzzable for pre-modern world history than it does for modern world history. That said, I think it's really worth doing - there's a ton of humanity out there to explore.

It's understandable if you don't have a lot of knowledge of the category as to why you'd reach for more modern history because you're absolutely correct - it's easier to write and probably easier to appreciate as well. But you're a good history player with a lot of knowledge, so I really think you can do it. Not that there was anything wrong with the questions here, I just think quizbowl can try harder to explore other areas more in depth. Similar shifts have happened with high-level music questions, which used to focus on flashy "cool" modern composers and now present a balance of material - I think a similar effort can be done with history.
I don't disagree with you, but given that I have a tendency to write very hard questions, I erred on the side of trying not to impose my own interests on any particular category (except for religion - more on that below) in favor of creating a more accessible tournament for the average quizbowl player. Even so, Stephen rightly shot down many of my wackier ideas. In an earlier post, you commented on my humanities questions seeming harder than the norm - this is almost certainly true, but since I did the bulk of my tossup writing before very much of the set was fleshed out, it gave me the chance to come up with as many creative ideas as I could at an early stage before other people came in and made sure the difficulty balanced out to Nationals-minus on the whole. So it's somewhat by design that I wrote a good chunk of the hardest questions.

Since this is my only major contribution to a quizbowl tournament ever, I did make a great effort to ensure that the religion questions rewarded knowledge of contemporary practices and placed much less emphasis on the historical and textual minutiae that, in my opinion, tends to dominate this category for no good reason. There is a great deal of material on the subject of religion that remains relatively untapped in quizbowl because people find it easier to write yet another Sikh gurus or Biblical prophets question than to attempt to address more fundamentally important topics, both from an academic perspective and from the perspective of someone who is a member of a particular religion. You can review the questions for yourselves and decide whether I managed to realize this goal while keeping the difficulty at a reasonable level, so I won't launch into a more detailed argument unless people really want to hear it (which would be great, because this category often gets shafted in discussion). I will say though that probably my favorite lead-in to any of my tossups was the one on sociological models of religious conversion. If anyone out there has been waiting for more religious studies clues to come up in quizbowl, I hope I made your day.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Mar 02, 2016 4:00 am
by naan/steak-holding toll
Galaedred Damodred wrote:Since this is my only major contribution to a quizbowl tournament ever, I did make a great effort to ensure that the religion questions rewarded knowledge of contemporary practices and placed much less emphasis on the historical and textual minutiae that, in my opinion, tends to dominate this category for no good reason. There is a great deal of material on the subject of religion that remains relatively untapped in quizbowl because people find it easier to write yet another Sikh gurus or Biblical prophets question than to attempt to address more fundamentally important topics, both from an academic perspective and from the perspective of someone who is a member of a particular religion. You can review the questions for yourselves and decide whether I managed to realize this goal while keeping the difficulty at a reasonable level, so I won't launch into a more detailed argument unless people really want to hear it (which would be great, because this category often gets shafted in discussion). I will say though that probably my favorite lead-in to any of my tossups was the one on sociological models of religious conversion. If anyone out there has been waiting for more religious studies clues to come up in quizbowl, I hope I made your day.
You did do a very good job of this - I think the religion was, while hard, also quite enjoyable and rewarding to play on. I was very pleased with my religion buzzes, and the same seemed to be true of my teammates.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Mar 02, 2016 12:15 pm
by 1.82
I enjoyed the religion a lot in this set; even when I didn't know a question, the content was framed in a way that made me interested in learning about it. The two tossups in that batch that I thought didn't play very well were on mandalas and yoga; the former seemed to confuse people because it seemed to easy, while the latter felt difficult to parse at game speed.

One notable blemish on this set was its proofreading. Having multiple repeated bonuses is self-evidently problematic.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Mar 02, 2016 6:47 pm
by Sima Guang Hater
This tournament was very well written and executed. My only overarching complaint was the high number of eponymous or named clues in the leadin of science questions without explaining what those things actually mean. For example, I looked up that quantum generalization of the Boltzmann transport equation (which was merely namedropped as a generalization and not explained), and it doesn't seem to universally be seen as a generalization as such.
DumbJaques wrote:Also I have chosen to take this tournament as a harbinger that the science leadins I learned 7 years ago have finally started to complete their life cycle (from "hard" to "fake" to "dude Chris Ray knows that" to "[missing]" to finally becoming "hard" again). See you at AVOGADRO'S NUMBER, your poor motherfuckers.
i'll beat you to death with the hugenholz pine you son of a bitch (/s)

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Wed Mar 09, 2016 10:26 pm
by touchpack
The science in this tournament had a couple issues that were recurring but not pervasive.

1) Answerline issues

Andrew and Victor already explained the problems with the rigid rotor and ssNMR questions, and I agree with them. It bears repeating that the ssNMR question was bad because a) it's very obviously a form of NMR from the very beginning and b) the answerline was too strict, leading the question to devolve into a "can I figure out what the question writer wants me to say" situation rather than a "do I actually know what these clues are" situation. A few non-transparent clues in the beginning and a more lenient answerline (there's absolutely no reason not to flat out accept MAS-NMR) would have made this a good question.

Other examples:

The tossup on _electron density_, which should just accept _density_, both because DFT can be used to analyze plasmas and other systems with non-electron particles, and because in DFT the quantity is colloquially referred to as just "density."

The maser question doesn't have prompts for answers like "microwave emission," which is an answer that fits the vague pronoun (phenomena). This is exacerbated by the fact that the giveaway hints at the "microwave" part but not the "amplification of stimulated emission" part.

The tossup on "dielectric constant" decides to, for some reason, stop accepting the correct answer of "permittivity." This is dumb because the vacuum permittivity is a constant, and thus the dielectric constant and permittivity are always proportional and effectively the same thing. A note here: the question construction of "accept answer X until point Y" is bad and should be avoided at all costs, because players sometimes need time to process clues! I was thinking for approx. one line after hearing the photonic crystals clue (deciding whether to say permittivity, index of refraction, or dielectric constant). Thankfully my moderator didn't read the shitty answerline so I still got the points!

2) As Eric points out, there were several questions that had a bunch of named things that weren't really described well. I understand that sometimes you can't really describe a named thing due to transparency issues, but this tournament suffered greatly from just having too many named things. A few examples include: Boltzmann equation, liquid crystals, particle accelerators, and vortices (yeah this one actually described the named things but jesus christ can we please stop asking about abrikosov vortices, all these superconductor clues are boring and faaaaakeeeeee).

I'll also note that this tournament had a heavy engineering bias, which, while not a problem on its own, when combined with the excessive amount of named clues, produced a tournament that was a bit light on the "meat and potatoes" content, as Seth Teitler puts it. Like, when your chemistry distribution has only twice as many organic chemistry tossups as it does Geiger counter tossups, that's an issue.

Again, I'd like to emphasize that these issues were recurring, but not pervasive. This was a decent tournament and I'd certainly play it again, if the writers write another one next year.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2016 2:38 pm
by Ike
produced a tournament that was a bit light on the "meat and potatoes" content, as Seth Teitler puts it.
So I can't speak to physics and chemistry or biology, but I want to re-emphasize this in the other science: it is NOT okay to produce a tournament in which you only hit on exotic topics over and over again. It doesn't matter if it was well received by some percentage of the population, you really should be writing on some standard fare as well. In computer science, the subject I know best in this area, there was one question an answerline that I wouldn't consider exotic, but it was written in such a way that wasn't great.

In the other science distribution - this happened a lot - astronomical masers, knots, qubits, classification, just to name a few of the answers that come off the top of my head. The reason why these topics are "exotic" is because they are likely to be encountered as an elective, upper-level undergraduate, or even grad level class. It's okay to have a tossups be on "orbits" or "chromatic number" - things you can learn about conceptually with a simple science education in a tournament like this - I certainly wrote on a lot of these simple things for nats last year with the occasional weird question space-filling curves. It's okay to be like Sisyphus writing your 10th tossup on basis - the clues are probably going to be fresh anyway if you do your digging.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Fri Mar 11, 2016 12:47 pm
by Mike Bentley
What was the classification question? Was that cs? I honestly only remember hearing one distinctly cs tossup on joins but am probably misremembering one of the more math ones.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Sun Mar 13, 2016 9:18 pm
by What do you do with a dead chemist?
My one complaint (that I still remember) is that the science could probably have done with a few more prompts, for example the relative permittivity question could probably have prompted on refractive index until clues on the Clausius Monsotti equation was mentioned and the oxidation question could have prompted on radical reactions until at least the TEMPO clue and probably the hydrogen peroxide clue as well.

Re: General Discussion

Posted: Sun Mar 20, 2016 3:37 pm
by Galadedrid Damodred
Mike Bentley wrote:What was the classification question? Was that cs? I honestly only remember hearing one distinctly cs tossup on joins but am probably misremembering one of the more math ones.
That was math. Design patterns, qubits, and gradient descent were the other CS tossups.

I've been overwhelmed with schoolwork the past 3 weeks, so sorry for not responding to people's complaints sooner. I readily acknowledge that the science was weaker than the rest of the set. This was due to a combination of factors, but a tedious explanation is probably irrelevant at this point, so I'll just say that for my own part, I wish I had had more time to spend on my science questions, but I ended up having to prioritize writing new questions over revising old ones. The physics tossups in particular could have used another pass, because I wrote most of those long before the real editing work began, but I never got around to beefing them up and correcting some of the issues that people have pointed out, like there being too many name-drops without context. At some point, trade-offs have to be made if you don't have the time to polish and re-polish every question.