Science
- Captain Sinico
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Re: Science
I totally agree with Jerry here.
Also, to respond to the other living trend in this discussion, I'd say that if someone buzzes using a heuristic on a question, they're necessarily taking a calculated risk and should be fine getting what they get. If other people take the same risk and also negged, heuristic players everywhere can console themselves that at least their heuristic is popular and therefore probably positive-expected-value.
My attitude becomes a problem if questions are not susceptible to knowledge, which usually happens in the modern game, especially in science, in the form of questions with series of vague clues so that the only winning strategy is to guess the most canonical answer that fits the clues*. I didn't think this question suffered from that problem, exactly, though I do think it had some issues specifying answer immediately, per my earlier comments. That's a related problem, but not quite the same.
MaS
*Or second-most-canonical at Westbrook tournaments.
Also, to respond to the other living trend in this discussion, I'd say that if someone buzzes using a heuristic on a question, they're necessarily taking a calculated risk and should be fine getting what they get. If other people take the same risk and also negged, heuristic players everywhere can console themselves that at least their heuristic is popular and therefore probably positive-expected-value.
My attitude becomes a problem if questions are not susceptible to knowledge, which usually happens in the modern game, especially in science, in the form of questions with series of vague clues so that the only winning strategy is to guess the most canonical answer that fits the clues*. I didn't think this question suffered from that problem, exactly, though I do think it had some issues specifying answer immediately, per my earlier comments. That's a related problem, but not quite the same.
MaS
*Or second-most-canonical at Westbrook tournaments.
Mike Sorice
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Re: Science
To bring up something that's several weeks old, the disproportionation tossup I wrote for HSNCT (thinking "hey this thing was covered in my high school chem classes, so it's probably okay at this level") resulted in a negative points-per-room average. I'm really not sure whether my high school chem experience was completely atypical, or why this thing is so hard, but there definitely needs to be at least a prompt for "redox" in that bonus part. Also, I don't know why "alpha hydrogen" has to be the easy part on that bonus - why not just make it on "alcohols"?
While the "original experiment" papers are often quite interesting and clue-rich in biology, I think that all experiment questions, to some degree, suffer from the problem of "there just aren't that many of them that are important and askable." I think Jerry's entirely right - it's certainly easier to write a tossup on "DNA replication" using a few clues from the original Meselson and Stahl paper and variously using other sources than to write a Meselson-Stahl tossup (and I suspect it will get converted at a higher rate!).
While the "original experiment" papers are often quite interesting and clue-rich in biology, I think that all experiment questions, to some degree, suffer from the problem of "there just aren't that many of them that are important and askable." I think Jerry's entirely right - it's certainly easier to write a tossup on "DNA replication" using a few clues from the original Meselson and Stahl paper and variously using other sources than to write a Meselson-Stahl tossup (and I suspect it will get converted at a higher rate!).
Dwight Wynne
socalquizbowl.org
UC Irvine 2008-2013; UCLA 2004-2007; Capistrano Valley High School 2000-2003
"It's a competition, but it's not a sport. On a scale, if football is a 10, then rowing would be a two. One would be Quiz Bowl." --Matt Birk on rowing, SI On Campus, 10/21/03
"If you were my teammate, I would have tossed your ass out the door so fast you'd be emitting Cerenkov radiation, but I'm not classy like Dwight." --Jerry
socalquizbowl.org
UC Irvine 2008-2013; UCLA 2004-2007; Capistrano Valley High School 2000-2003
"It's a competition, but it's not a sport. On a scale, if football is a 10, then rowing would be a two. One would be Quiz Bowl." --Matt Birk on rowing, SI On Campus, 10/21/03
"If you were my teammate, I would have tossed your ass out the door so fast you'd be emitting Cerenkov radiation, but I'm not classy like Dwight." --Jerry
- Mechanical Beasts
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Re: Science
Yeah, at some point I'll erase all the quirks that come from weird educational experience, but a few still remain.cvdwightw wrote:To bring up something that's several weeks old, the disproportionation tossup I wrote for HSNCT (thinking "hey this thing was covered in my high school chem classes, so it's probably okay at this level") resulted in a negative points-per-room average. I'm really not sure whether my high school chem experience was completely atypical, or why this thing is so hard, but there definitely needs to be at least a prompt for "redox" in that bonus part. Also, I don't know why "alpha hydrogen" has to be the easy part on that bonus - why not just make it on "alcohols"?
.
alpha hydrogen clearly didn't have to be the easy part; it's true. I just wanted to ask about something that I thought was easy-part-difficulty off at least one interesting clue (i.e. a mechanistically interesting thing about the Canizzarro reaction that you learn when you cover it, unlike the Tishchenko-Claisen ester synthesis that employs it). I perhaps should have made it just _hydrogen_ off "needing to have at least one atom of THIS ELEMENT at the alpha position"; that's my mistake.
Andrew Watkins
Re: Science
Crazy Andy Watkins wrote:easy-part-difficulty
I do not think "easy-part-difficulty" means what you think it means.Crazy Andy Watkins wrote:i.e., a mechanistically interesting thing about the Canizzarro reaction that you learn when you cover it
Dwight Wynne
socalquizbowl.org
UC Irvine 2008-2013; UCLA 2004-2007; Capistrano Valley High School 2000-2003
"It's a competition, but it's not a sport. On a scale, if football is a 10, then rowing would be a two. One would be Quiz Bowl." --Matt Birk on rowing, SI On Campus, 10/21/03
"If you were my teammate, I would have tossed your ass out the door so fast you'd be emitting Cerenkov radiation, but I'm not classy like Dwight." --Jerry
socalquizbowl.org
UC Irvine 2008-2013; UCLA 2004-2007; Capistrano Valley High School 2000-2003
"It's a competition, but it's not a sport. On a scale, if football is a 10, then rowing would be a two. One would be Quiz Bowl." --Matt Birk on rowing, SI On Campus, 10/21/03
"If you were my teammate, I would have tossed your ass out the door so fast you'd be emitting Cerenkov radiation, but I'm not classy like Dwight." --Jerry
Re: Science
(As already said) It was negged with Diels-Alder in all three rooms at VCU.Crazy Andy Watkins wrote:Did it cause a vast swath of players to neg? I agree with you in principle (and prompts for every reaction and possible class described at every point before the later sites), but does this hold up in practice? I didn't moderate this packet for any teams, so I don't know myself; I could go over scoresheets and try to find out.
Cody Voight, VCU ’14.
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Re: Science
That's what I kept saying!cvdwightw wrote:Crazy Andy Watkins wrote:easy-part-difficultyI do not think "easy-part-difficulty" means what you think it means.Crazy Andy Watkins wrote:i.e., a mechanistically interesting thing about the Canizzarro reaction that you learn when you cover it
Rob Carson
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Re: Science
But, like, I also gave other alpha-hydrogen clues, like "you lose one when you form a goddamn enol." Either all those enol chemistry tossups you get at regular difficulty tournaments are too hard, or the common denominator of all of them is an okay easy part (if a little bit harder than I'd have wanted, and I already proposed a way to make it easier while asking about the same material).Ukonvasara wrote:That's what I kept saying!cvdwightw wrote:Crazy Andy Watkins wrote:easy-part-difficultyI do not think "easy-part-difficulty" means what you think it means.Crazy Andy Watkins wrote:i.e., a mechanistically interesting thing about the Canizzarro reaction that you learn when you cover it
Andrew Watkins
Re: Science
I think Dwight's right to point out that the "original experiment" papers may be a little more useful in biology--I read a bunch of them from pretty much all subfields of biology (okay, all subfields i care about, so not, like, neuro or anything) during both undergrad and grad school, and pretty much every paper of major interest was a) originally published in English and b) accessible to the educated non-specialist. I think the big problem with some of the experiments, particularly in physics, as question subjects is just that they've been dramatically overasked lately, and there are only so many middle and easy clues for, say, Stern-Gerlach (and really only so many hard clues until you start coming up with things that were in one never-cited wackadoo paper on arxiv once and no one will realistically be able to buzz on).cvdwightw wrote:While the "original experiment" papers are often quite interesting and clue-rich in biology, I think that all experiment questions, to some degree, suffer from the problem of "there just aren't that many of them that are important and askable." I think Jerry's entirely right - it's certainly easier to write a tossup on "DNA replication" using a few clues from the original Meselson and Stahl paper and variously using other sources than to write a Meselson-Stahl tossup (and I suspect it will get converted at a higher rate!).
Susan
UChicago alum (AB 2003, PhD 2009)
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UChicago alum (AB 2003, PhD 2009)
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- Yuna
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Re: Science
This is a great point, particularly part b. There still seems to be a rather limited canon of askable bio experiments, at least for now, but quizbowl could and should absolutely use more clues based on major experiments, like the this-is-how-ATP synthase-works clues that come up from time to time.myamphigory wrote:pretty much every paper of major interest was a) originally published in English and b) accessible to the educated non-specialist. I think the big problem with some of the experiments, particularly in physics, as question subjects is just that they've been dramatically overasked lately, and there are only so many middle and easy clues for, say, Stern-Gerlach (and really only so many hard clues until you start coming up with things that were in one never-cited wackadoo paper on arxiv once and no one will realistically be able to buzz on).
Hannah Kirsch
Brandeis University 2010
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Brandeis University 2010
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- Auron
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Re: Science
I agree with this.Captain Sinico wrote:Also, to respond to the other living trend in this discussion, I'd say that if someone buzzes using a heuristic on a question, they're necessarily taking a calculated risk and should be fine getting what they get. If other people take the same risk and also negged, heuristic players everywhere can console themselves that at least their heuristic is popular and therefore probably positive-expected-value.
I'm not ok with vague clues, but I don't see too much wrong by using canon-fitting if the clues make sense. To use a recent tossup that I liked, you might not know specifically that the Meselson-Stahl experiment used a Cesium Chloride gradient, but if you know how that technique works, you can realize its the only canonical experiment that would use one.Captain Sinico wrote:My attitude becomes a problem if questions are not susceptible to knowledge, which usually happens in the modern game, especially in science, in the form of questions with series of vague clues so that the only winning strategy is to guess the most canonical answer that fits the clues*.
Eric Mukherjee, MD PhD
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Brown 2009, Penn Med 2018
Instructor/Attending Physician/Postdoctoral Fellow, Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Coach, University School of Nashville
“The next generation will always surpass the previous one. It’s one of the never-ending cycles in life.”
Support the Stevens-Johnson Syndrome Foundation