ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by Not That Kind of Christian!! »

I was surprised at the preponderance of disease and disease-related questions that showed up in the submissions to this tournament; yeah, it might not have been smart to have two autoimmune disease tossups in the same tournament, but given how many disease-related questions were making it in anyway (because I felt better editing those than writing entirely new ones from scratch), I wouldn't have found it too egregious.
I only recall playing two disease tossups, Grave's and Wilson's diseases.
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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by Cheynem »

You didn't get chlamydia?
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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by Gautam »

Cheynem wrote:You didn't get chlamydia?
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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by cvdwightw »

HKirsch wrote:I only recall playing two disease tossups, Grave's and Wilson's diseases.
You're right; I ended up counting immunology-related questions (e.g. interferons, CD antigens) in "disease-related." There were some bonus parts I considered as "disease-related" as well (e.g. ricin, botulism).
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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by Not That Kind of Christian!! »

gkandlikar wrote:
Cheynem wrote:You didn't get chlamydia?
OWNED
No, I didn't, because I always have safe quizbowl.

Forgot about that one, though. Still, Dwight's explanation of "disease" questions makes sense.
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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by recfreq »

I suppose disease questions are easy to write if you don't have anything better; to be honest I think as much of them as "name this paleozoic period" questions. But if one wanted to keep the disease questions, one'd have some molecular clues to make them relevant, of which I believe there were at this tournament.
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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by grapesmoker »

recfreq wrote:I suppose disease questions are easy to write if you don't have anything better; to be honest I think as much of them as "name this paleozoic period" questions. But if one wanted to keep the disease questions, one'd have some molecular clues to make them relevant, of which I believe there were at this tournament.
I don't get it; do biologists not study diseases? There's a certain snottiness I detect among the MCB crowd to the tune of "we're real biologists and those other people are just hacks." If you don't know diseases I guess you won't be getting the tossup, but that's just like me not getting a tossup on condensed matter physics because that's not what I study.
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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by Sima Guang Hater »

grapesmoker wrote: I don't get it; do biologists not study diseases?
Yeah. I don't see any problem with asking a tossup on Lupus, there's important molecular things going on there (to use a really broad term). Most diseases fall under this category, so I don't see any problems with having to know them. Wilson's disease tossups are a much worse idea; the only reason I can think of writing one is there was a House episode on it.
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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by Susan »

grapesmoker wrote:
recfreq wrote:I suppose disease questions are easy to write if you don't have anything better; to be honest I think as much of them as "name this paleozoic period" questions. But if one wanted to keep the disease questions, one'd have some molecular clues to make them relevant, of which I believe there were at this tournament.
I don't get it; do biologists not study diseases? There's a certain snottiness I detect among the MCB crowd to the tune of "we're real biologists and those other people are just hacks." If you don't know diseases I guess you won't be getting the tossup, but that's just like me not getting a tossup on condensed matter physics because that's not what I study.
I was under the impression that most disease questions these days do have a lot of clues about molecular mechanisms and things like that. Maybe Ray's been hearing some old-timey-style questions that I haven't been hearing, but the complaint about disease questions seems more relevant to the disease questions of an older era.

Also, while many biologists do, in some sense, work on disease (or at least claim some sort of disease relevance to get $$$), sometimes it's in an awfully loose sense, and in a typical day, you don't conceptualize your work as being about breast cancer to the extent that you consider yourself to be studying Rad51-EVL interactions, to take one example. Unless you're in the process of writing about your work (grants, papers, theses) it can be easy to not think about it in the context of disease.
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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by Not That Kind of Christian!! »

myamphigory wrote: I was under the impression that most disease questions these days do have a lot of clues about molecular mechanisms and things like that.
This is definitely true. I'm not quite sure what you mean by "name these Paleozoic period" questions, but I think disease questions are in general less opaque and easier on the giveaway for non-science players than those pesky period tossups.
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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by naturalistic phallacy »

HKirsch wrote:
myamphigory wrote: I was under the impression that most disease questions these days do have a lot of clues about molecular mechanisms and things like that.
This is definitely true. I'm not quite sure what you mean by "name these Paleozoic period" questions, but I think disease questions are in general less opaque and easier on the giveaway for non-science players than those pesky period tossups.
This is true. It's a lot easier to learn about Barret's Esophagus than it is about amines. That said, writing on diseases must be done to reward science knowledge before "hey this was on House" knowledge.
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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by wturner »

I think the question on Boltzmann's constant contained an error. I believe it said that the Stokes-Einstein relation involves the chemical potential, which it does not. In said relation, mu stands for the mobility, not the chemical potential.
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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

wturner wrote:I think the question on Boltzmann's constant contained an error. I believe it said that the Stokes-Einstein relation involves the chemical potential, which it does not. In said relation, mu stands for the mobility, not the chemical potential.
Yeah, I remember this happening; it was a little confusing but thankfully immaterial.
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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by minor_character »

wturner wrote:I think the question on Boltzmann's constant contained an error. I believe it said that the Stokes-Einstein relation involves the chemical potential, which it does not. In said relation, mu stands for the mobility, not the chemical potential.
You're right in that the Stoke-Einstein relation does not involve the chemical potential. However, the relation is apparently identical to the force arising from a chemical potential gradient, which is what I misread when writing the question. Sorry.

http://books.google.com/books?id=zJzJvs ... t&resnum=6
Last edited by minor_character on Thu Apr 30, 2009 3:30 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by MLafer »

edited version:

According to the Stokes-Einstein relation, the Brownian diffusion of a particle under the influence of a chemical potential gradient is directly proportional to both temperature and this other value. The Kelvin scale is derived by multiplying the fundamental temperature by this value, and in the Eyring equation, it is divided by Planck’s constant. The average kinetic energy of a gas is equal to 3/2 times temperature times this value. It multiplies the natural log of the microcanonical partition function to yield the entropy in an equation inscribed on its namesake’s tombstone. For 10 points, name this constant that equals the gas constant divided by Avogadro’s constant, often symbolized k.

ANSWER: Boltzmann’s constant
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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by grapesmoker »

MLafer wrote:edited version:

According to the Stokes-Einstein relation, the Brownian diffusion of a particle under the influence of a chemical potential gradient is directly proportional to both temperature and this other value. The Kelvin scale is derived by multiplying the fundamental temperature by this value, and in the Eyring equation, it is divided by Planck’s constant. The average kinetic energy of a gas is equal to 3/2 times temperature times this value. It multiplies the natural log of the microcanonical partition function to yield the entropy in an equation inscribed on its namesake’s tombstone. For 10 points, name this constant that equals the gas constant divided by Avogadro’s constant, often symbolized k.

ANSWER: Boltzmann’s constant
This isn't a good questions because k_b multiplies temperature essentially everywhere that it appears.
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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

It's also a constant, right? So saying that something's directly proportional to it and temperature... well, I thought the question had to be going for some other quantity, with the constant of proportionality either being Boltzmann's or Boltzmann's and some other stuff. Maybe my terminology's bad because I never learned this stuff formally, but I'd not have said "directly proportional to" the product of a constant and something, since it's also true that it's directly proportional to half that constant, or (very much so) to R, or...
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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by MLafer »

Looking at it, it is a pretty bad question. I agree with Andrew that saying something is directly proportional to a constant is pretty nonsensical and the Kelvin clue is too early.

Full disclosure: I did not do any editing on this question, and probably should have because the clues are clearly more physics-oriented than chemistry, but I skipped over it because a) there was already a physics question in the packet (perturbation theory) and b) Dwight had written a comment on the content of the question, which he didn't do for any other physics question in the entire set, as far as i know, so i subconsciously skipped over it. In the end I'm not sure if Dwight considered this a chemistry question or not but obviously somebody got to it.
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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by grapesmoker »

It would be great if the questions were posted somewhere. I have some comments I wanted to make about the questions and would like to be able to cite specifics.
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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by cvdwightw »

MLafer wrote:Full disclosure: I did not do any editing on this question, and probably should have because the clues are clearly more physics-oriented than chemistry, but I skipped over it because a) there was already a physics question in the packet (perturbation theory) and b) Dwight had written a comment on the content of the question, which he didn't do for any other physics question in the entire set, as far as i know, so i subconsciously skipped over it. In the end I'm not sure if Dwight considered this a chemistry question or not but obviously somebody got to it.
Yeah, I did edit it as chem, although I'm not sure whether I should have. In any case, the Ostwald question was superior to it as chem and I think the perturbation theory question was probably superior as physics. Again, this was an issue of someone (in this case me) letting in a weaker question at the expense of a superior question in that category.
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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by Matt Weiner »

Questions as used are up at http://www.hsquizbowl.org/acfn09.zip. There's probably a small handful of mechanical things I'd like to fix there, so if you see anything that really bugs you let me know and I'll clean it up before I send it to the archive.
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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by grapesmoker »

The set is now also posted on QBDB
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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by Batsteve »

Looking back at the question on the Halting Problem, I believe Chaitin's constant was name-dropped far too early. I recognize that computer science has far, far from a fleshed out canon, but to me Chaitin's constant comes second only to "undecidable" and "something stopping" for the definition of the Halting Problem. I buzzed off that, and I don't think there's anything else I could have buzzed off (maybe "undecidability," or just guessing based on "this is a popular problem associated with Turing Machines") before the giveaway.
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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by The Toad to Wigan Pier »

Batsteve wrote:Looking back at the question on the Halting Problem, I believe Chaitin's constant was name-dropped far too early. I recognize that computer science has far, far from a fleshed out canon, but to me Chaitin's constant comes second only to "undecidable" and "something stopping" for the definition of the Halting Problem. I buzzed off that, and I don't think there's anything else I could have buzzed off (maybe "undecidability," or just guessing based on "this is a popular problem associated with Turing Machines") before the giveaway.
Looking at that tossup, I agree with you that Chaitin's constant is way to early in the question, but what is actually worse is that the clue directly before it is Rice's Theorem which is even more important that Chaitin's constant.
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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by Auks Ran Ova »

The Toad to Wigan Pier wrote:
Batsteve wrote:Looking back at the question on the Halting Problem, I believe Chaitin's constant was name-dropped far too early. I recognize that computer science has far, far from a fleshed out canon, but to me Chaitin's constant comes second only to "undecidable" and "something stopping" for the definition of the Halting Problem. I buzzed off that, and I don't think there's anything else I could have buzzed off (maybe "undecidability," or just guessing based on "this is a popular problem associated with Turing Machines") before the giveaway.
Looking at that tossup, I agree with you that Chaitin's constant is way to early in the question, but what is actually worse is that the clue directly before it is Rice's Theorem which is even more important that Chaitin's constant.
Yeah, Rice's Theorem was the out-of-place clue that really surprised me.
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Re: ACF Nationals question thanks/discussion

Post by The Atom Strikes! »

I know this is a bit late, but the tossup on "The Glass-Bead Game" in the Illinois/Maryland packet is incorrect-- it is Fritz Tegularius, not Thomas van der Trave, who is the Nietzche analogue. Van der Trave is actually analogous to Mann.
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