The Quizbowl Resource Center

Discuss specific questions and errata here. Several issues were caught and corrected on Saturday night, the most glaring being:

1) repeated line in Oboe bonus (Georgia A)
2) use of the word “cathedral” in the “cathedrals” tossup (Georgia A)
3) incorrectly ordered Cervantes bonus (Michigan State C)
4) “eight note” rather than “eighth note” in the string quartets tossup (NYU A)
5) Tom Stoppard, not Harold Pinter, wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Michigan State A)

Here's a couple more I took note of:

-Doctor Faustus is by Christopher Marlowe, not Charles Marlowe
-sulfuric acid is produced in the contact process, not the compound process
-the Hong Kong film from which The Departed was adapted is titled Infernal Affairs, not Internal Affairs
-the Sherman Alexie book is called The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, not The Absolutely True Story etc.

I don't want to come off as if I'm accuse anyone working on this tournament of specific crimes, of course, but some of these are the sort of easily avoidable errors one gets when writing hurriedly and/or from memory rather than double-checking clues. Take the extra time!

This was a mostly quite good set of novice science questions, I can think of very little to nitpick!

-The first clue of the tossup on "pressure" actually refers to energy density, but it doesn't accept that."It can be easily shown that the radiation pressure exerted by a light wave is equal to the energy density contained in its electric field, but the formula given is most fundamentally a formula for energy density, making that the most correct answer.

-It is generally not a very good idea to write a tossup on "photosynthesis" that mixes clues from the light-dependent reactions and the Calvin cycle--in practice that causes a lot of people to neg with specific pathways that are part of photosynthesis (like the light-dependent reactions, Calvin cycle, or, as happened at the UIUC site, the electron transport chain) which end up being false because that answer didn't apply to previous clues. The answerline as written accepts the answers of "light-dependent reactions" or "Calvin cycle", but that's complete nonsense that's at odds with a fundamental principle of quizbowl--an answer is correct if and only if every single clue in the tossup applies to it. A more correct thing to do would be to include instructions like "prompt on Calvin cycle by asking for a more general answer', but the most correct thing to do is to never write a question which will invariably create this kind of subset/superset issue. (This situation was even more problematic than normal because the pronoun used was "pathway", which is a term more commonly used to describe specific parts of photosynthesis rather than the whole thing)

I was negged on the Mango Street tossup after buzzing in on the first line and saying "Chicago"- I knew it was referring to The House on Mango Street but wasn't 100% certain what it was asking for (and questions on Chicago that drop Mango Street are a thing). Some form of clarification (or at least a prompt of some form of Chicago early on) would've been good- but I'm honestly not sure the creative answerline works here (why not just toss up the novel?).

From the TU on spheres (Eds. 1): "the solid that gives the largest surface area for a given volume" is the exact opposite of the truth.

A question mentions the "pyridinium atom," which I assume means "pyridinium ion."

The centaurs bonus spells "lapiths" as "lapthis."

A minor thing that I'm only mentioning so that it isn't propagated into further sets is that a more appropriate pronunciation guide for kevalajnana (from the Jainism TU) is something like "KEH-vull-GNYAN" or "KEH-vull-GNAN."

There was some odd capitalization, e.g. "Christ" at one point being uncapitalized, as well as specific Nobel Prizes (e.g. "Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine").

Answer lines could generally be fleshed out a bit more (as Julia alludes to).

It is generally not a very good idea to write a tossup on "photosynthesis" that mixes clues from the light-dependent reactions and the Calvin cycle

I agree with this.

The tossup on British mathematicians could have used an answerline directive for England. I didn’t accept it because I assumed they were a mix of countries but another reader did.

vengefulsweatermensch wrote: ↑Sun Nov 04, 2018 11:43 pm Discuss specific questions and errata here. Several issues were caught and corrected on Saturday night, the most glaring being:

1) repeated line in Oboe bonus (Georgia A)
2) use of the word “cathedral” in the “cathedrals” tossup (Georgia A)
3) incorrectly ordered Cervantes bonus (Michigan State C)
4) “eight note” rather than “eighth note” in the string quartets tossup (NYU A)
5) Tom Stoppard, not Harold Pinter, wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Michigan State A)

I looked over UGA A's submission and we didn't have any tossups written for Cathedral(s) and no repeated lines for the oboe bonus as we didn't write any bonuses regarding an oboe. Could it have been from a different team's submission?

Nathan is presumably using a single team name as shorthand for a packet that combines submissions from multiple teams, as well as questions written by editors. (This makes more sense if you can see the packet headers and file names.)

In the Mahler tossup (from Editors 4), "Urlicht," not the Adagietto, is given as the title of the fourth movement of Mahler 5.

Some random stuff that I remember:

-I think the Bocaccio bonus part in Editors (6?) claimed that the Decameron was about 5 men and 5 women, escaping a flood
-I've heard multiple people negged Yugoslavia with Croatia on the clue about the ustase since those were specific to Croatia
-I think labors of Hercules got clued multiple times before Hercules was a bonus answerline (and labors of Hercules seemed to make up the majority of the greco-roman myth content)

more subjectiveish takes:
-The Gram Schmidt clue in the "normal" tu seemed super early - in my memory at least that clue often comes up post power even in hs sets
-I thought the clue about peat being a great carbon sink was sort of strange/unhelpful (also in general that tu seemed a bit hard for the difficulty)
-The EMT clue of the cancer cells tu seemed kinda misleading for stem cells
-The Ragnarok tu seemed pretty transparent

I’m not fantastically knowledgeable about music, so I’m not sure if it’s technically correct to call the Große Fuge a string quartet, but I feel like that tossup should have accepted fugue in the first two sentences that were talking about it.

Fair warning: I played the Briticized version of the tournament, so it's entirely possible that there were some questions that I played that weren't in anyone else's set.

The bonus on semantics called it "often contrasted with syntax" which is stupid, it's like cluing analysis by saying it's "often contrasted with algebra". This is only true insofar as they are subfields of the same field; semantics IS actually often contrasted with pragmatics, though.

The Ragnarok tossup was extremely transparent. Huh, I wonder what this cataclysmic event involving Norse things could be?

I quite liked the tossup on "peat" -- I think it's a really good example of a not-super-traditional answerline that's still gettable.

Nikos Kazantzakis is probably too hard for Fall.

I don't know whether our room was just bad at Hinduism or what, but it felt like "Indra" was a harder than necessary answerline choice for a Hinduism tossup at this level. It's possible I'm just miscalculating, though.

The "black holes" tossup was extremely first-linable by people with almost no science knowledge.

The tossup on Caligula was super cliffy. I'm not sure how to avoid this, but if the horse wasn't in the last line, it should have been.

The Eyjafjallajökull bonus seemed very easy. Iceland and "air travel industry" are both easy parts in my opinion, and I'm not sure Poland there is a hard part, but maybe it is. Either way, I think most teams would get at least 20 here.

The tossup on "cancer cells", in my opinion, should at least antiprompt on "HeLa cells". I buzzed with that on "unethically extracted" and was very disappointed to be negged, since the clue just said "these cells", not "one strain of these cells" or something that made clear that HeLa cells aren't the entire answerline.

The bonus on cossacks/Ukraine/Poland-Lithuania mentioned P-L in the first or second part, IIRC.

Mentioning Mictlantecuhtli in the second line of a TU on the underworld is probably a bad idea, since he's not super notable but Mictlan is, much more notably, the name of the Aztec underworld.

I really liked the tossup on "moons of Saturn" -- this was another creative but not inappropriate answerline!

The tossup on "antibodies" was extremely cliffy -- all the clues before "Y-shaped" were very hard.

I really liked the tossup on the Ottomans from naval history. Piri Reis was maybe too early, but I'm also better at geography than military history so perhaps I just have a skewed idea of that.

The Yugoslavia tossup clued the Ustaše, which got a reflex buzz of "Croatia". In retrospect this was stupid and I should have known better, but it seems this was pretty common so perhaps there was a way to make this clue less negbaity.

The Chartists tossup was waaaaaaaaaaay too hard. It went dead in multiple rooms in England.

The giveaway on the microphones tossup talked about it "increasing volume", which felt bad when I said "amplifier".

I haven't seen the question on semantics, but in my experience it is often contrasted with syntax.

CPiGuy wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 8:43 am
The tossup on "antibodies" was extremely cliffy -- all the clues before "Y-shaped" were very hard.

I looked this tossup up and it seems fine. I suspect that rather than this tossup being "very hard" that it actually contained words you do not know. In fact, the clues chosen are quite good (I will concede that it could use another pre ftp clue though)

EDIT: I looked through the same packet and the journey to the west tu claims that someone finds the source of a waterfall behind a bridge? He definitely just jumps through a bridge-less waterfall and finds a cave and this would have certainly been confusing to me had I been playing this tu (also the last 2 sentences seem to imply that the monkey king and sun wukong are different characters)

As has been mentioned elsewhere, the Briticisation team had some more holistic problems with the set, in terms of both difficulty and in terms of small errors etc. I'll probably weigh in at some point on the first point, which I think partly gets to heart of what ACF Fall is actually for, which I don't think has ever been agreed upon.

For now, I had some specific thoughts on the thought, which I'll go through in no particular order:

- The gender tossup was a nice idea but seemed hard - cluing Goffman's work on Gender Advertisements half way through a tossup at ACF Fall just seems very, very difficult. I moved this clue nearer the beginning and mentioned Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender, something someone who is more casually interested (but still interested) in this area might know.

- Tossup on wages: Nominal rigidity refers to cases where prices and/or wages become sticky, not just wages, so this was not uniquely identifying and would definitely draw a neg or two by people who've heard of sticky prices. Also the tossup is very vague on the MPL=w/p condition, you need to mention some sort of competitive equilibrium assumption (though this is less of an issue than the first point).

-Mencius/Confucius/Filial Piety probably was a bit hard, certainly for the fields we tend to send to this from the UK, but it's not completely out of wack. I think the issue partly is on who you think is the audience for Fall.

-Morphemes - lots of issues with these clues not being uniquely identifying and a little bit of an odd thing to tossup. We scraped this from the UK version of the tournament.

- Geography bonuses on diffusion etc: again, seemed quite hard, I can see quite a few competent teams getting a zero or a scrappy 10 on this, especially because the easy part (culture) wasn't that tightly defined.

- Free Will - Galen Strawson in the first line might be a bit easy if anything, but that's a nitpicking point. More problematic is the clue on Elbow Room, which is not uniquely identifying by a long shot. This could easily be rectified by referencing something specific in Elbow Room (or even making reference to its subtitle) but it wasn't.

- Inequality: Kutznets in the first line seemed a bit easy in this. The Stiglitz clue is borderline ok, but I think you could argue that inefficiency would also apply to that clue [see, eg: https://www.nber.org/papers/w4145]

- Sartre bonus set: Undoubtedly the worst bonus set here. Why anyone let "Existentialism as Humanism" get through as a hard part is beyond belief, and "bad faith" is too hard a middle part. Tbh, if I were playing Regs I wouldn't have been massively surprised by this bonus set, and anyone editing the philosophy should have caught this.

- PPFs econ bonus set - PPFs are not "used" by the H-O model to do anything - they are something one can derive from the set of the model and are sometimes useful to illustrate the relevant trade-offs. I'm also not convinced that the labour and capital answerline was that sensible as a medium part here, but I'm sure some would disagree with me. Efficiency seems rough as an easy part at Fall, as well.

- Tossup on states - This was a conceptually confused question because it combined the concept of "the state" in political philosophy with "states" as a unit of analysis in IR. In general, I think it's best to avoid doing this. Also, if you're going to have a clue which is just that states are the "primary actors in IR theory" you need more in the answerline than just "states" (governments? nations?). In fact, ruling out "nations" for this was specified in the answerline, which might be news to noted early IR theorist Hans Morgenthau, who wrote a work called "Politics Among Nations". This was another example where there needed to be a bit more care given to ensure the clues are unique and clear.

-Gary Fine bonuses. These were odd and did the thing which I don't think you should be doing at Fall where you have a middle part which is basically not a middle part but you kind of dress it up and make it a bit easier for teams to guess. For the medium and hard parts, I imagine most of the field had no idea what was really going on, but may have stumbled to a 20 (potentially) just by guessing something that isn't TV or music and is a medium played by men. Not ideal, but this is more a stylistic choice I guess. Fairly sure we didn't use these at the British site.

Marxism - I loved the idea for this, but I think it would have worked better as a tossup on Marx. The issue is that it's unclear what you do with an answer like "socialism" or "communism" in response to some of these clues.

I think that's most things. FWIW, I thought there were some good ideas for the thought in this set. I think what was lacking was the care required to check whether all the bonus parts were appropriate for Fall and the uniqueness and/or accuracy of clues. In general, I think it's good to keep thought as canonical and accurate as possible at this level, rather than try to push the boat out. I think there may have been a little too much of that in this set, but again maybe that goes back to the wider discussion on what Fall is.

The clue about the Ustaše is incorrect for "Yugoslavia". The pre-war state of Yugoslavia was partitioned during WWII, and the Ustaše ruled over an independent Croatian state. In fact, the pre-giveaway sentence of this tossup mentions that fact!

CPiGuy wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 8:43 am The Eyjafjallajökull bonus seemed very easy. Iceland and "air travel industry" are both easy parts in my opinion, and I'm not sure Poland there is a hard part, but maybe it is. Either way, I think most teams would get at least 20 here.

The tossup on "cancer cells", in my opinion, should at least antiprompt on "HeLa cells". I buzzed with that on "unethically extracted" and was very disappointed to be negged, since the clue just said "these cells", not "one strain of these cells" or something that made clear that HeLa cells aren't the entire answerline.

The Eyjafjallajökull bonus was made easier in Briticizing; the American version had a hard part on the year 2010, which seemed both hard and trivial. Don't ask about specific years unless they're extremely memorable!

The same buzz on "HeLa cells" happened in most rooms at UIUC. Either answerline instructions should have been provided or the sentence should have been phrased more carefully.

CPiGuy wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 8:43 am
The Eyjafjallajökull bonus seemed very easy. Iceland and "air travel industry" are both easy parts in my opinion, and I'm not sure Poland there is a hard part, but maybe it is. Either way, I think most teams would get at least 20 here.

The bonus on cossacks/Ukraine/Poland-Lithuania mentioned P-L in the first or second part, IIRC.

Mentioning Mictlantecuhtli in the second line of a TU on the underworld is probably a bad idea, since he's not super notable but Mictlan is, much more notably, the name of the Aztec underworld.

The Chartists tossup was waaaaaaaaaaay too hard. It went dead in multiple rooms in England.

To clear up some things regarding the version of the set you played:

The Icelandic volcano bonus was adapted by the Britons from a not-very-good bonus in the draft version of the packets we were working on - I didn't catch that this had been altered in the final packets to something more workable in the scramble; though I still don't think it was a particularly great question in either set.

The P-L cock-up is our fault and not that of the original editors - mea culpa.

The "gods of death" question was tweaked to avoid a clash from the same conch shell clue being used in the "Aztec mythology" TU later in the set (in the draft version). Whilst the editors went the other way and removed the Aztec content from this question in the final version of the set, we just replaced a clue in the Aztec TU and juggled around the "death" TU a little. I will add that in my view, Mictlan is more notable as the Aztec underworld if you have played a lot of quizbowl (which you have) than if you have not played much (which most people at the British site have not).

The Chartists tossup was tweaked slightly, though not significantly, from the original version. I can't speculate on how it would have played in America, but maybe we should have made it easier even for a British audience.

touchpack wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 1:40 am This was a mostly quite good set of novice science questions, I can think of very little to nitpick!
-It is generally not a very good idea to write a tossup on "photosynthesis" that mixes clues from the light-dependent reactions and the Calvin cycle--in practice that causes a lot of people to neg with specific pathways that are part of photosynthesis (like the light-dependent reactions, Calvin cycle, or, as happened at the UIUC site, the electron transport chain) which end up being false because that answer didn't apply to previous clues. The answerline as written accepts the answers of "light-dependent reactions" or "Calvin cycle", but that's complete nonsense that's at odds with a fundamental principle of quizbowl--an answer is correct if and only if every single clue in the tossup applies to it. A more correct thing to do would be to include instructions like "prompt on Calvin cycle by asking for a more general answer', but the most correct thing to do is to never write a question which will invariably create this kind of subset/superset issue. (This situation was even more problematic than normal because the pronoun used was "pathway", which is a term more commonly used to describe specific parts of photosynthesis rather than the whole thing)

This one I will take full blame for, as I wrote a few tossups* very late in the game to plug some holes and didn't give them the time that they deserved for filling out answerlines--ETC should have been promptable, and I apologize for that. That said, I don't actually see the issue with writing a tossup on photosynthesis cluing the LDRs and Calvin cycle separately--they're both part of the larger pathway of photosynthesis, and it doesn't strike me as "false" to accept things that don't apply to every clue in the tossup if they do specifically apply to one clue in the tossup. (An obvious example to me is common link "surname" tossups where the full name of one of the individuals involved is usually accepted.) Curious why this decision caused so much flak: I considered it generally player-empathetic, notwithstanding a dearth of prompting instructions.

*I also wrote the tossups on cancer cells, electrophoresis, and distillation columns, and edited the antibodies tossup. The rest was a very impressive effort by Neil and Ashwin, both of whom should 100% be recruited for other stuff if you're looking for science editors.

adamsil wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 9:52 am

touchpack wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 1:40 am -It is generally not a very good idea to write a tossup on "photosynthesis" that mixes clues from the light-dependent reactions and the Calvin cycle--in practice that causes a lot of people to neg with specific pathways that are part of photosynthesis (like the light-dependent reactions, Calvin cycle, or, as happened at the UIUC site, the electron transport chain) which end up being false because that answer didn't apply to previous clues. The answerline as written accepts the answers of "light-dependent reactions" or "Calvin cycle", but that's complete nonsense that's at odds with a fundamental principle of quizbowl--an answer is correct if and only if every single clue in the tossup applies to it. A more correct thing to do would be to include instructions like "prompt on Calvin cycle by asking for a more general answer', but the most correct thing to do is to never write a question which will invariably create this kind of subset/superset issue. (This situation was even more problematic than normal because the pronoun used was "pathway", which is a term more commonly used to describe specific parts of photosynthesis rather than the whole thing)

I don't actually see the issue with writing a tossup on photosynthesis cluing the LDRs and Calvin cycle separately--they're both part of the larger pathway of photosynthesis, and it doesn't strike me as "false" to accept things that don't apply to every clue in the tossup if they do specifically apply to one clue in the tossup. (An obvious example to me is common link "surname" tossups where the full name of one of the individuals involved is usually accepted.) Curious why this decision caused so much flak: I considered it generally player-empathetic, notwithstanding a dearth of prompting instructions.

How would people feel about including the specific prompt "What larger process is that a part of?" for each? Anybody who knows enough to buzz with either the light or dark reactions can surely get to photosynthesis from there.

There's a lot of criticism in this thread, so I want to make a point of saying that I really enjoyed reading this set and thought it was quite good. That said, a couple other errors I noted:

-Enrique Peña Nieto was AMLO's predecessor, not successor. (CMU A etc.)
-The main carbon atom of an ester is part of the carbonyl, not "attached to" it. (CMU A etc.)
-ZImbabwe was known first as Southern Rhodesia and then as just Rhodesia, but never as Northern Rhodesia. (FSU etc.)
-The formula for nitrite was rendered as NO^2-, when it should be NO₂^-. (Harvard etc.)
-The 1953 Iranian coup that ousted Mosaddegh did not also "install[] Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as its ruler," since he was already in office. (NYU A etc.)

There are other errata, but the Sappho bonus' final part is just plain wrong.

In a poem found in 2014, Sappho waits for her brother Charaxos to return from this conflict. Odysseus fights in this war in Homer’s Iliad.

The Brothers poem isn't (at least on the level of the basic text) about the Trojan War at all - the text of the poem talks of Charaxos as a trader. (See M.L. West, Nine Poems of Sappho, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik Bd. 191 (2014), pp. 1-12 (12 pages) on Fragment 9a.) It almost certainly has some manner of intertext with the Odyssey - links to Penelope, Odysseus and Telemachus have been found ( see Silvio Bär (2016) “Ceci n’est pas un fragment”: Identity, Intertextuality and Fictionality in Sappho’s “Brothers Poem”, Symbolae Osloenses, 90:1, 8-54) but the actual poem is talking about Charaxos' trade, possibly with Egypt if we can trust Herodotus' fun anecdote.

I don’t want to be That Person, but is there an ETA on the packets being publicly released? Speaking as someone who wrote a packet but ended up not playing (and who may have written the original versions of some of the questions being discussed here?), it would make the discussion easier to follow.

I'm not sure if this is really an issue, but the book in the leadin of the cookbooks tossup has a name that literally translates from the Arabic as "Book of cooking". In an ideal scenario, that tossup might've been altered to reward knowledge of the history of cookbooks rather than language, but I recognize that that degree of close attention isn't necessarily tenable over an entire set.

photosynthesis stuff

NAQT's correctness guidelines specifically state:

In general, a response to a tossup question must be compatible with every clue that has been read (e.g. a response that is correct for the second clue of a question but too specific to be correct for the first clue will be counted wrong). Responses to parts of bonus questions must be compatible with every clue contained in the question through the end of the current part.

The only time this is not really enforced occurs in tossups on people with the same surname but are otherwise disparate, unrelated, people or entities. I don't believe ACF has any official correctness guidelines, but in my experience this is the standard that is generally followed. In the case that happened at UIUC, a team protested that their answer of ETC should have been prompted. That may be correct in that a writer should have included the prompt, but when resolving a protest, a "should have been prompted / taken" response needs to be in line with all the previous clues, otherwise it is a "permissive prompt" as Andrew Hart articulated in this thread. Hart goes on to write about permissive prompts:

I would argue that "should have been prompted" protests should be outright denied if the prompt was permissive, since it was by definition a judgment call, and the judgment rested with the writers or editors (or moderators), who elected not to prompt.

All of this should indicate the need for writers to attempt to produce unambiguously worded questions, and to be zealous about fleshing out answerlines.

vinteuil wrote:How would people feel about including the specific prompt "What larger process is that a part of?" for each? Anybody who knows enough to buzz with either the light or dark reactions can surely get to photosynthesis from there.

I think if there's one thing you can expect with a group of novices, it's that the answers that come out during gameplay are invariably unpredictable. In general, expecting novice players to think exactly what you are thinking seems misguided.

Muriel Axon wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 2:28 am Nathan is presumably using a single team name as shorthand for a packet that combines submissions from multiple teams, as well as questions written by editors. (This makes more sense if you can see the packet headers and file names.)

Yep, that's it.

Geriatric trauma wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 9:19 am The Eyjafjallajökull bonus was made easier in Briticizing; the American version had a hard part on the year 2010, which seemed both hard and trivial. Don't ask about specific years unless they're extremely memorable!

Speaking as the editor of this bonus, I wanted to reward knowledge of the Eyjafjallajökull eruptions without forcing teams to say "Eyjafjallajökull." Asking teams to remember that they occurred in 2010 is hard, but I wouldn't call it "trivial" - this was (iirc) the largest spate of flight cancellations in history.

Louis XIV and Twenty Million Henchmen wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 11:35 am I don’t want to be That Person, but is there an ETA on the packets being publicly released? Speaking as someone who wrote a packet but ended up not playing (and who may have written the original versions of some of the questions being discussed here?), it would make the discussion easier to follow.

I want to correct some formatting issues before I upload the set, so maybe Wednesday? If you want the set before then, email/message me and I'll try to get it to you.

Karansebes Schnapps Vendor wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 2:50 am -I think the Bocaccio bonus part in Editors (6?) claimed that the Decameron was about 5 men and 5 women, escaping a flood

Here's the bonus part that you're referring to:

Editors 2 wrote: [10] Pizan’s Book was inspired by this author’s On Famous Women. Marguerite of Navarre parodied this author in a work about five men and women who escape a flood by hiding and telling stories in an abbey in the Pyrenees.
ANSWER: Giovanni Boccaccio

The clue in question is actually describing Marguerite of Navarre's Heptameron, but I could see it being easy to misparse something at game speed.

Couch's Kingbird wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 1:59 am I was negged on the Mango Street tossup after buzzing in on the first line and saying "Chicago"- I knew it was referring to The House on Mango Street but wasn't 100% certain what it was asking for (and questions on Chicago that drop Mango Street are a thing). Some form of clarification (or at least a prompt of some form of Chicago early on) would've been good- but I'm honestly not sure the creative answerline works here (why not just toss up the novel?).

I’m sorry that this happened! I agree that this should have had a more fleshed out answerline.

The Abydos Helicopter wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 11:27 am The Brothers poem isn't (at least on the level of the basic text) about the Trojan War at all - the text of the poem talks of Charaxos as a trader. (See M.L. West, Nine Poems of Sappho, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik Bd. 191 (2014), pp. 1-12 (12 pages) on Fragment 9a.) It almost certainly has some manner of intertext with the Odyssey - links to Penelope, Odysseus and Telemachus have been found ( see Silvio Bär (2016) “Ceci n’est pas un fragment”: Identity, Intertextuality and Fictionality in Sappho’s “Brothers Poem”, Symbolae Osloenses, 90:1, 8-54) but the actual poem is talking about Charaxos' trade, possibly with Egypt if we can trust Herodotus' fun anecdote.

I have no idea what I was thinking with this bonus part! I’m genuinely bewildered- sorry about that.

An Economic Ignoramus wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 11:53 am I'm not sure if this is really an issue, but the book in the leadin of the cookbooks tossup has a name that literally translates from the Arabic as "Book of cooking". In an ideal scenario, that tossup might've been altered to reward knowledge of the history of cookbooks rather than language, but I recognize that that degree of close attention isn't necessarily tenable over an entire set.

I’m comfortable rewarding language knowledge at Fall level (I was aware of this direct translation when writing the clue). Perhaps not ideal, but I think acceptable.

This is my first time giving feedback on any set I've read or played, so apologies if I don't go about this the right way. On the Thought tossup with Frankfurt School clues and the answer line "Germany," Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" was called "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." (The original German title has the work "Kunstwerk," so the word "work" should definitely be in there somewhere). Also, this is not technically incorrect owing to years of bad English translations of Hegel, but every philosophy course I've taken and every modern translation I've read of the Phenomenology of Spirit has referred to the "master-bondsman" or "master-servant" dialectic and not the "master-slave" dialectic. In addition, I would argue that it's incorrect to refer to Nietzsche as a "nihilist"' philosopher. If anything, he saw the central purpose of his philosophy as combating nihilism.

In terms of history, I don't think it's accurate to say that the Luddites were articulating an early form of Marxism. Marx's attitudes towards new technology are far from universally negative, and the term "Marxism" itself referred to a pretty specific strain of socialist thought in the 19th century that I don't think it's quite fair to associate the Luddites with. I second the criticism of the "Marxism" question above: I think it would have been far better as a tossup with an answer line of Marx which asked about a philosopher who influenced people like Althusser and Lukacs. "Marxism" refers to too broad a range of theorists to be a good answer line, in my opinion. Also, the term "Orthodox Marxism" is not terribly descriptive, as theorists ranging from Kautsky to Luxemburg to Lukacs with all of their greatly opposed views would have argued that they were advocating for some of Marx's original positions. Finally, going back to history questions, the "place in the sun" speech was not delivered by Germany's "ruler," who would have been Wilhelm II. It was delivered by the Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow. There was also one bonus that I clearly remember mentioned Cervantes in the second part when he was the answer line to the third part.

There was a bonus part on Mill that claimed he developed a descriptivist theory of names. That's wrong he proposed a referentialist theory of names, which is pretty much the exact opposite thing. This was part of a larger theme of there being quite a few misleading/wrong clues in the philosophy and social science (most of which have already been mentioned). While I thought the art, literature, and history were quite good, those categories as well as a fair bit of the science seemed to be little bit of a hot mess.

Heinrich Mann's Mustache wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 1:37 pm Also, this is not technically incorrect owing to years of bad English translations of Hegel, but every philosophy course I've taken and every modern translation I've read of the Phenomenology of Spirit has referred to the "master-bondsman" or "master-servant" dialectic and not the "master-slave" dialectic. In addition, I would argue that it's incorrect to refer to Nietzsche as a "nihilist"' philosopher. If anything, he saw the central purpose of his philosophy as combating nihilism.

If anything, it's almost universally translated as "master-slave." Furthermore, while many scholars think Nietzsche wasn't a nihilist, it's a pretty common way of reading his work (and let's be honest, no one, not even Nietzsche himself, knows what the hell he was talking about). I doubt either of these things confused anyone or caused them to supply the wrong answer.

Milhouse wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 8:12 am I’m not fantastically knowledgeable about music, so I’m not sure if it’s technically correct to call the Große Fuge a string quartet, but I feel like that tossup should have accepted fugue in the first two sentences that were talking about it.

Michael Yue negged with fugue on the first clue, and he was not happy.

AGoodMan wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 4:44 pm

Milhouse wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 8:12 am I’m not fantastically knowledgeable about music, so I’m not sure if it’s technically correct to call the Große Fuge a string quartet, but I feel like that tossup should have accepted fugue in the first two sentences that were talking about it.

Michael Yue negged with fugue on the first clue, and he was not happy.

The Große Fuge is definitely a string quartet...

Can I see the "giants" myth tossup? Admittedly, I had no idea what the first line was talking about, but I did buzz on the Heracles + Geryon clue and said dog, thinking it was referring to Orthrus but was negged. Is the giant there referring to Cacus?

Borrowing 100,000 Arrows wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 3:21 pm If anything, it's almost universally translated as "master-slave." Furthermore, while many scholars think Nietzsche wasn't a nihilist, it's a pretty common way of reading his work (and let's be honest, no one, not even Nietzsche himself, knows what the hell he was talking about). I doubt either of these things confused anyone or caused them to supply the wrong answer.

The A.V. Miller translation of The Phenomenology of Spirit, which to my understanding is the standard one taught in philosophy courses these days (and certainly the one used on the syllabi of all the Hegel seminars I've seen here at Columbia), translates "Herrschaft-Knechtschaft" as "Lordship-Bondage." In addition, the new translation from Cambridge University Press by Terry Pinkard uses "master-servant." My main complaint about this is that "slave" is simply a bad rendition of the original German: Knecht carries no connotation of slavery at all, and the specific term in German for "slave" is "Sklave," which Hegel did not use. As I was saying before, it is popularly known as the "master-slave" dialectic, so there really wasn't anything wrong with the question. This is just one of my personal pet peeves when it comes to Hegel, so I apologize if I came across as being a bit pedantic here.

However, in my view, It's completely unfair to say that Nietzsche himself had no idea what he was talking about. His opposition to nihilism comes out quite clearly if you read works like On the Genealogy of Morals, where he writes that "This man of the future will redeem us, not just from the ideal held up till now, but also from those things which had to arise from it, from the great nausea, the will to nothingness, from nihilism ... this Antichrist and anti-nihilist...he must come one day." It's fairly easy to misinterpret him as a nihilist, but that doesn't mean it's correct or that this incorrect interpretation should find its way into Quiz Bowl questions. I take your point that neither of these would have influenced how someone who knew the philosophers in question would have answered. However, talking to some players who knew philosophy relatively well afterwards, they seemed about as annoyed at it as I was when I read the questions. I think that we're in general agreement that there were quite a few misleading clues in philosophy and social science in general. The main reason I found these two questions particularly noteworthy was because they seemed to reproduce all the ill-informed comments I've heard in my core courses about two of my favorite philosophers.

EDIT: I managed to find the "string quartets" tossup again (NYU A). It seems that the first clue merely states "this genre" rather than something like "a piece written for this ensemble," so fugue should definitely be at least promptable after the first two sentences, though not after "Spring" and "Dissonance." I've seen the Gro

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 4:47 pm

AGoodMan wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 4:44 pm

Milhouse wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 8:12 am I’m not fantastically knowledgeable about music, so I’m not sure if it’s technically correct to call the Große Fuge a string quartet, but I feel like that tossup should have accepted fugue in the first two sentences that were talking about it.

Michael Yue negged with fugue on the first clue, and he was not happy.

The Große Fuge is definitely a string quartet...

The term "string quartet" is ambiguous. It refers above all to an ensemble, but has been taken to refer to sonata-like works for that ensemble since the time of Haydn. That's why Beethoven published 16 works as "Quartett" or "Quatuor"—they're in the format of a (Beethovenian) sonata. By contrast, on the title page of the Große Fuge, he didn't even include the word "quartet," simply listing the ensemble of 2 violins, viola, and cello.

According to this all-but-universal usage, a movement from a string quartet is not a string quartet, just as a movement from a piano sonata is not a piano sonata. And certainly a given movement for string quartet is not a string quartet just as a given movement for piano is definitely not, by itself, a piano sonata.

"These works" implies a form, genre, or format. "String quartet," while naming the ensemble that performs the Große Fuge, has a specific meaning in the context of format that most certainly does not apply to that piece; "fugue" does.

I would like to apologize for that blunder with respect to the Große Fuge clue; I realize that using the term "this genre" with respect to that piece caused some confusion, and I certainly wish I had written that differently (along with many other things in this set, which I will address in this subforum soon!) or had merely not used that clue.

Could I see the tossup on special relativity? There was a clue early on that mentioned a relativistic quantity, which threw me off.

Heinrich Mann's Mustache wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 1:37 pm In addition, I would argue that it's incorrect to refer to Nietzsche as a "nihilist"' philosopher. If anything, he saw the central purpose of his philosophy as combating nihilism.

It's important to remember that the point of a quizbowl philosophy question isn't to do philosophical work but to reward certain forms of engagement. Certainly Nietzsche dislikes a sort of Schopenhauerian nihilism, what he calls "passive nihilism", which he seems to take to be inextricably linked to the type of pessimism he wants to overcome. However, by modern lights Nietzsche seems to be a nihilist about all sorts of things, and he is pretty deeply associated with nihilism in the popular consciousness. By compressing thinkers into bonus parts, we necessarily lose some nuance, but I don't think the loss of nuance here is keeping anyone from answering the question.

Heinrich Mann's Mustache wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 1:37 pm In terms of history, I don't think it's accurate to say that the Luddites were articulating an early form of Marxism. Marx's attitudes towards new technology are far from universally negative, and the term "Marxism" itself referred to a pretty specific strain of socialist thought in the 19th century that I don't think it's quite fair to associate the Luddites with.

Analyzing Luddites as expressing an early version of Marxist concerns is extremely common. In fact, Marx discusses just that relationship in the first volume of Capital!

Heinrich Mann's Mustache wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 1:37 pm I second the criticism of the "Marxism" question above: I think it would have been far better as a tossup with an answer line of Marx which asked about a philosopher who influenced people like Althusser and Lukacs. "Marxism" refers to too broad a range of theorists to be a good answer line, in my opinion. Also, the term "Orthodox Marxism" is not terribly descriptive, as theorists ranging from Kautsky to Luxemburg to Lukacs with all of their greatly opposed views would have argued that they were advocating for some of Marx's original positions.

The fact that these thinkers are all Marxists in spite of their disparate positions is precisely why asking about that connection is interesting. The only problems this question runs into are the problems that every question on a "school of thought" or "position" runs into - people generally think many things and it can be hard to pick out one of them.

It seems that my edit got cut off when I was trying to post it. What I was trying to say was that I've seen the Grosse Fuge being used as a clue for "fugues" in other packets before, so I can understand the frustration of someone who knew the piece in question was the Grosse Fuge from the note clue, buzzed in and answered "fugue," and was told they were incorrect. As I was saying before, I think that an instruction to "prompt on fugue" before the end of the second sentence could solve this issue.

heterodyne wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 7:43 pm Analyzing Luddites as expressing an early version of Marxist concerns is extremely common. In fact, Marx discusses just that relationship in the first volume of Capital!

I looked at the section of Capital you're referring to here again. Marx writes that "The enormous destruction of machinery that occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first 15 years of this century, chiefly caused by the employment of the power-loom, and known as the Luddite movement, gave the anti-Jacobin governments of a Sidmouth, a Castlereagh, and the like, a pretext for the most reactionary and forcible measures. It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used." He does see them as an expression of early working-class resistance, but also criticizes them for misdirecting their outrage towards the technology used in manufacturing rather than how that technology is used under capitalism. My original criticism wasn't directed towards the fact that the Luddites weren't expressing "early Marxist concerns" (which I don't think in this case can really be distinguished from general anti-capitalist concerns among large segments of the working class and many other theorists of the time) but rather with the description of the Luddites as articulating an "early form" of Marxism. In this case, I think it would have been much better to identify them as "proto-socialist" or simply "anti-capitalist," as I don't see what connects the Luddites specifically to Marxism as opposed to other anti-capitalist thought.

I thought that the tossup on "Marxism" was a good idea for a question, but my main issue was that it could have been far easier to know what the question was asking for had "Marx" been the answer line rather than "Marxism" and been rephrased to ask about how "this man's ideas" influenced the philosophers mentioned in the question. I talked to another member of my team afterwards who told me that she immediately recognized the first clue as a Marx quote, but didn't buzz in until much later because she simply wasn't sure what the question was asking for.

Anyway, in general, I apologize if I come across as somewhat nitpicky in all of these posts. As I said before, this is my first time giving feedback for any set I've read or played before, so I tried to cover everything I could remember that I didn't think was correct when reading through the packets. I agree that calling Nietzsche a "nihilist" isn't an issue that would cause any teams to answer incorrectly, but I still think it's something that should be avoided if possible on future sets.

There's one more piece of feedback I had: on bonus 8 of the Editors 1 set, I was wondering if "Soong" by itself should be acceptable for "Soong Mei Ling," given that her sister Soong Ching-ling is also quite prominent.

Heinrich Mann's Mustache wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 5:29 pm However, in my view, It's completely unfair to say that Nietzsche himself had no idea what he was talking about.

That was a joke about the difficulties of exegetical work, not a serious claim my dude. Though, when the syphilis was hitting pretty hard, who knows?

But, yeah, Alston nicely summarized my thoughts. Sometimes when you're writing questions you have to get rid of a nuanced presentation of someone's views in favor of play-ability and that really isn't a bad thing. If it's not wrong or confusing to the point that you can't answer, it's probably not worth complaining about.

vengefulsweatermensch wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 12:46 pm

Geriatric trauma wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 9:19 am The Eyjafjallajökull bonus was made easier in Briticizing; the American version had a hard part on the year 2010, which seemed both hard and trivial. Don't ask about specific years unless they're extremely memorable!

Speaking as the editor of this bonus, I wanted to reward knowledge of the Eyjafjallajökull eruptions without forcing teams to say "Eyjafjallajökull." Asking teams to remember that they occurred in 2010 is hard, but I wouldn't call it "trivial" - this was (iirc) the largest spate of flight cancellations in history.

As a moderator reading that bonus, I fudged the volcano's name (even with the pronunciation guide) and the person I was reading the bonus to ended up saying the name properly to try to correct me. I felt it was particularly cruel to make us read it aloud twice. The teams in my room agreed that it was odd to ask for the year.

I adored the geology questions I heard, and the Harry Potter tossup. On the calcium carbonate tossup (Rutgers A et al) - is quicklime really more common knowledge than calcite and its polymorphs?

I thought the clue about peat being a great carbon sink was sort of strange/unhelpful (also in general that tu seemed a bit hard for the difficulty)

This clue was worded a bit funny, but the fact that peat decomposes slowly -- and thus, stores a lot of carbon -- is perhaps The One Thing You Should Know about peatlands. (A corollary is that preserving peatlands is really important for not worsening climate change!)

Did there have to be an entire tossup about aquaporins?...

The opening clue of the Dvorak tossup, AFAIK, is a solo piano work and not a work for violin and piano.

db0wman wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 7:19 pm Could I see the tossup on special relativity? There was a clue early on that mentioned a relativistic quantity, which threw me off.

Sorry to have missed this - here you go!

3. The Dirac equation modifies the Schrödinger equation to account for the results of this theory. A prediction of this theory was tested by measuring the relativistic decay of muons in the Rossi–Hall experiment. This theory involves rotations and boosts that make up the Lorentz transformations between inertial reference frames. The foundation of this theory was laid in the year of the Annus Mirabilis by the paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.” This theory, which involves length contraction and time dilation, predicts mass-energy equivalence through “E = mc squared.” For 10 points, name this theory formulated by Einstein, which is contrasted with its “general” counterpart.
ANSWER: special theory of relativity [or SR; or time dilation until it is read; prompt on (theory of) relativity; do not accept or prompt on “general relativity”]

Packets will be uploaded in an hour or so.

Eds 3 Bonus 12: Element 118 is "oganesson" though it seems the listed answer of "organesson" at least redirects on wikipedia. It also incorrectly lists the symbol (listed Or, should be Og)

FSU et al. Bonus 12: "gravity waves" should absolutely not be accepted for gravitational waves

Thought I'd mention a small error I ran into while reading over Editors 1:

Editors 1 wrote:[10] In 1866, the American steamer General Sherman attempted to emulate Perry’s expedition by visiting this
non-Japanese East Asian city; however, the ship was destroyed by this city’s residents. The USS Pueblo was
captured off the coast of this capital city, and is still held in this city today.

Pyongyang is not a coastal city, so saying the Pueblo was captured "off the coast" of Pyongyang is incorrect. The USS Pueblo was captured off the coast of Wonsan, a major North Korean naval base that's on the complete opposite side of the peninsula.

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote: ↑Thu Nov 08, 2018 5:23 pm Thought I'd mention a small error I ran into while reading over Editors 1:

Editors 1 wrote:[10] In 1866, the American steamer General Sherman attempted to emulate Perry’s expedition by visiting this
non-Japanese East Asian city; however, the ship was destroyed by this city’s residents. The USS Pueblo was
captured off the coast of this capital city, and is still held in this city today.

Pyongyang is not a coastal city, so saying the Pueblo was captured "off the coast" of Pyongyang is incorrect. The USS Pueblo was captured off the coast of Wonsan, a major North Korean naval base that's on the complete opposite side of the peninsula.

Yeah, this is my fault. I added the USS Pueblo clue to Nitin's (very well-written) bonus - obviously, Pyongyang's not a coastal city, but I made a conscientious decision to fudge the geography slightly in order to keep question length down + emphasize the parallels between the General Sherman incident and the USS Pueblo incident. I don't think this tied any teams up, but I'm sorry if it did.

The aquaporin tossup, in addition to being inappropriately hard, should have included an explicit "do not prompt" on "porins." The two are from completely distinct protein families, and it would be like prompting on apples for an answer of pineapples.

Small quibble: Hestia didn't give up her divinity for Dionysus, anybody who says that is relying on secondary sources which draw a frankly dubious inference from the discrepancy between ancient lists of the Twelve Olympians. Different sources (some contemporaneous with each other) list different gods. There is no myth or legend in which Dionysus takes the place of Hestia on Olympus, and both were venerated by the Hellenic / Hellenistic world.

Also, the answerline Marco Polo seemed to require both parts of his name, without even a prompt -- I sincerely doubt that any other people surnamed Polo are notable at the Fall level, and even if they were it felt odd that the question would depart from the standard in quizbowl of only requiring the surname. Admittedly, I've never heard him referred to as "Polo" in real life. Being only 10 points, it didn't end up mattering anyways.

I've forgotten literally everything else about the set in the time since I read it, those two things just came to mind just now.

I might be wrong about this, but I thought mentioning Lava and Kusha first line in the Sita tossup was a bit early