ACF Fall 2012 Discussion

[Fond du lac operon]

[10] Karl Popper formulated this criterion, which rejected scientific claims that could not be DISproven scientifically. Thomas Kuhn argued against it in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Or, in fewer words, I think changing so little in that bonus part rather hurts your argument, Eric.

EDIT: Or, in even fewer words, I'm with Matt Weiner on this one.

[gyre and gimble]

[10] The Vienna Circle formulated this criterion of meaning, which rejected metaphysical and theological arguments that could not be proven scientifically. Problematically, this principle can’t be proven itself.

[10] The Vienna Circle formulated this criterion of meaning, which rejected metaphysical and theological arguments that could not be DISproven scientifically. Problematically, this principle can’t be proven itself.

Here's what the bonus part I submitted looked like:

[10] The Vienna Circle formulated this philosophical principle of empiricism, which led to their abandoning of metaphysical and theological arguments not based on tautology or experience. It was later rejected in favor of falsifiability.
ANSWER: verifiability principle [Accept word forms.]

I'm not sure how effective the first sentence is with differentiating, but it seems to avoid any discussion about science and sticks with metaphysics. The second sentence thing should have prevented people from giving falsifiability as an answer. I don't know if that's a cop-out but I thought it would be helpful without making it much easier; I'm assuming Matt disagreed and changed it.

[Sima Guang Hater]

However, if you are aware that Columbia's anthro department is a big deal, it seems like it would be kind of easy to fraud (maybe UChicago would be an alternate guess?),

I'm not sure this is true of this question or of this class of question in general. Offhand I can think of writing an anthropology, psychology, economics, or science question on quite a few institutions (Chicago, Columbia, Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Yale, Penn if I were really pushing it), and I think this class of questions can easily be made pyramidal (as I think this one was).

the question basically just kept saying "These anthropologists went there." Also, when boiled down to it, as I think Alex is suggesting, the question was basically just testing knowledge of one thing--"do you know that anthropologists went to Columbia?"

I'm not really sure that's true. I think there's a pyramid there, and I think the fact that they went to Columbia is important in the development of anthropology (since they took Boas' thought and spun it out in many cases).

[Sima Guang Hater]

That's missing the forest for the trees; verificationism is largely about the elimination of metaphysics from philosophy, whereas falsifability is about demarcating science from pseudoscience. That you could, in theory, use verificationism against pseudoscience or falsifiability against metaphysics is sort of looking at the letter of the law without a true understanding of what these positions were intended to accomplish by their creators. As you may guess from me saying that, the quizbowl implications here are that we should take a dim view of protests or complaints that arise from technicalities which only exist in the context of broad misinterpretations of the substantive material.

Agreed. The point I was trying to make is that there's no way, even if you use technicalities, you would be correct if you answered falsifiability.

[Rufous-capped Thornbill]

Regarding things I wrote or edited...

1. One theory about this formation is that it was built to align with the summer solstice sunset. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this 411 meter long archaeological formation that features a spiral tail and an open mouth.
ANSWER: Great Serpent Mound
[10] The builders of the Great Serpent Mound are believed to have developed independently of this set of similar cultures, which flourished in the 1st century AD and connected the American Southeast to the Northeast economically.
ANSWER: Hopewell tradition or cultures
[10] The Great Serpent Mound is located in Adams County in this state, which is also home to Hopewell ceremonial cities in the Scioto River valley which runs past this state’s capital of Columbus.
ANSWER: Ohio

I think this may be something of a product of my high school history classes never going over much pre-Columbian stuff in North America, but I suspect that this isn't a very strong area of knowledge for your average ACF Fall player.

While I agree with your surface assessment that we shouldn't expect everyone playing ACF Fall to know what the Hopewell tradition is, Great Serpent Mound is a pretty famous archaeological site, which appears in a bunch of kid-centric history books I read years ago, and the Hopewell are mentioned repeatedly in my (and I assume many other) intro to Archaeology class. Hopewell might be a little hard, but it is a hard part, and I don't think that this bonus is too far out of line and I wrote it thinking that a comfortable majority of teams would probably get 20 on it, with a very good chance of pulling the last part. Then again, my perception of the entire subject could be skewed from having grown up in Ohio.

3. Using a wooden gun darkened with shoe polish, this man once escaped from Crown Point jail. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this “Public Enemy Number 1” who robbed over two dozen banks and 4 police stations before finally being gunned down outside a theatre.
ANSWER: John Herbert Dillinger Jr.
[10] As head of the FBI, this man coordinated the efforts to capture Dillinger as well as gangsters like Al Capone and Babyface Nelson before trying to subvert civil rights activists like Martin Luther King Jr.
ANSWER: J. Edgar Hoover
[10] In exchange for preventing her deportation to Romania, brothel madam Anna Sage agreed to help the FBI corner Dillinger, which she did in part by wearing this color as a signal to agents.
ANSWER: red [or The Woman in Red]

I've never heard of this 3rd thing, but it seemed highly prone to guessing as red would be the color one would probably wear to stand out in a crowd.

As others have noted, the Woman in Red is a pretty famous part of the Dillinger story, but I'll grant that asking for the color red makes it a pretty guessable part.

5. He popularized the idea that development of belief in one’s own success is the greatest indicator of future success, an idea called self-efficacy, which is different from confidence. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this Stanford psychologist and social learning theorist who wrote Social Foundations of Thought and Action.
ANSWER: Albert Bandura
[10] Bandura conducted this experiment which showed that children descend into aggressive behavior after observing adults exhibit aggression towards the title object after being deprived of the toys like a spinning top and a truck after 2 minutes.
ANSWER: Bobo Doll experiment
[10] Social learning theory is an advancement over this other psychological theory, whose “radical” variety was researched by B.F. Skinner. It holds that human activity should be considered as a mechanical response to stimuli.
ANSWER: Behaviorism

Asking about Bandura without giving you Bobo Dolls seems quite difficult for ACF Fall. I think even the Bobo Doll Experiment is pushing it for a middle part....

These bonuses are probably around the same level of difficulty if you make the assumption that people have equal familiarity with Roman and Japanese history. However, I suspect that many of the newer players attending this tournament have much more experience with the former, as that's a pretty fundamental part of the high school history canon whereas the latter gets maybe a week at best in a world history class. I'd like to make the more general point here of always remembering that these easier fall tournaments are first are foremost always serving to introduce new players into college quizbowl and we shouldn't be assuming a large amount of prior quizbowl knowledge. This connects with the earlier comment about Bandura as well. I suspect that the vast majority of people in quizbowl get their knowledge about Bandura from non-primary sources (i.e. writing a tossup on Bandura or looking him up on Wikipedia because you've heard him come up a few times) rather than their studies. This is not a problem in itself, but for tournaments geared towards new players, we should probably not be requiring this type of quizbowl knowledge to get 20 points on the bonus.

I'll tie this into the discussion of the "Columbia University" tossup, which I wrote as an Editor's question, as I think it brings up a very legitimate criticism of how I handled the Social Science. I haven't taken a tremendous amount of Social Science classes, so most of what I know about them does come from quizbowl. I do think you're correct that this bonus has more quizbowl-centric knowledge than knowledge gleaned from primary social science courses or whathaveyou, and it may have been improved just by swapping the order of the Bandura and Bobo Doll parts. Unlike Bandura's actual research, I have encountered the Bobo Doll experiment in classes and it seems to be fairly familiar, and placing that part before Bandura probably would have increased conversion.

Regarding the Columbia tossup, I wrote this in an effort to kind of ask about things we've heard many times in a way that was a bit different. While I did fear transparency on that tossup, since it's fairly well-known among quizbowlers that Boas trained basically everyone that comes up in lower levels, I was very satisfied after writing it that it tested knowledge on a few levels, since it talks not only about each Anthropologist's works in that field, but to a lesser extent, their contributions to Anthropology as a field of Academic study. It may have concentrated on "what quizbowl knows" about certain works or their authors, as Alex suggested, but I felt like I did an ok job on giving brief descriptions of what I thought the main points were. I am curious, Alex--what did you neg the question with, and what was the thought behind it? I'm sorry that you weren't rewarded for your readings, and I'm just curious to see what you were thinking, as I'm pretty sure I stated that the question was looking for a University very early.

For the leadins for French and Phoneme, I'm sorry. I don't know enough about linguistics to fully know what is uniquely identifying and what isn't. If this caused problems, I apologize.

[AKKOLADE]

Maybe that Woman in Red part would have worked better if it asked for her actual name or her popular nickname, with "Woman in Red" being anticipated to be given more often.

[Nine-Tenths Ideas]

Regarding things I wrote or edited...

1. One theory about this formation is that it was built to align with the summer solstice sunset. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this 411 meter long archaeological formation that features a spiral tail and an open mouth.
ANSWER: Great Serpent Mound
[10] The builders of the Great Serpent Mound are believed to have developed independently of this set of similar cultures, which flourished in the 1st century AD and connected the American Southeast to the Northeast economically.
ANSWER: Hopewell tradition or cultures
[10] The Great Serpent Mound is located in Adams County in this state, which is also home to Hopewell ceremonial cities in the Scioto River valley which runs past this state’s capital of Columbus.
ANSWER: Ohio

I think this may be something of a product of my high school history classes never going over much pre-Columbian stuff in North America, but I suspect that this isn't a very strong area of knowledge for your average ACF Fall player.

While I agree with your surface assessment that we shouldn't expect everyone playing ACF Fall to know what the Hopewell tradition is, Great Serpent Mound is a pretty famous archaeological site, which appears in a bunch of kid-centric history books I read years ago, and the Hopewell are mentioned repeatedly in my (and I assume many other) intro to Archaeology class. Hopewell might be a little hard, but it is a hard part, and I don't think that this bonus is too far out of line and I wrote it thinking that a comfortable majority of teams would probably get 20 on it, with a very good chance of pulling the last part. Then again, my perception of the entire subject could be skewed from having grown up in Ohio.

Your viewpoint is pretty skewed, I think. No one I talked to converted either bonus part, including someone on our A team from Ohio, who had only vaguely heard of Great Serpent Mound. It was the very first bonus we heard in the tournament and kind of made us worried that the tournament would be pretty difficult.

[Boeing X-20, Please!]

Regarding things I wrote or edited...

1. One theory about this formation is that it was built to align with the summer solstice sunset. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this 411 meter long archaeological formation that features a spiral tail and an open mouth.
ANSWER: Great Serpent Mound
[10] The builders of the Great Serpent Mound are believed to have developed independently of this set of similar cultures, which flourished in the 1st century AD and connected the American Southeast to the Northeast economically.
ANSWER: Hopewell tradition or cultures
[10] The Great Serpent Mound is located in Adams County in this state, which is also home to Hopewell ceremonial cities in the Scioto River valley which runs past this state’s capital of Columbus.
ANSWER: Ohio

I think this may be something of a product of my high school history classes never going over much pre-Columbian stuff in North America, but I suspect that this isn't a very strong area of knowledge for your average ACF Fall player.

While I agree with your surface assessment that we shouldn't expect everyone playing ACF Fall to know what the Hopewell tradition is, Great Serpent Mound is a pretty famous archaeological site, which appears in a bunch of kid-centric history books I read years ago, and the Hopewell are mentioned repeatedly in my (and I assume many other) intro to Archaeology class. Hopewell might be a little hard, but it is a hard part, and I don't think that this bonus is too far out of line and I wrote it thinking that a comfortable majority of teams would probably get 20 on it, with a very good chance of pulling the last part. Then again, my perception of the entire subject could be skewed from having grown up in Ohio.

Your viewpoint is pretty skewed, I think. No one I talked to converted either bonus part, including someone on our A team from Ohio, who had only vaguely heard of Great Serpent Mound. It was the very first bonus we heard in the tournament and kind of made us worried that the tournament would be pretty difficult.

Yeah, this also probably very much due to being from Ohio - I certainly thought Cahokia/the Mississippian culture was easily the best known of these pre-Columbian cultures and that Monk's Mound was an important archaeological site, but I've never heard of Great Serpent or Hopewell

[Unicolored Jay]

I actually learned about everything in that bonus in a sixth grade class (while I was living in South Carolina). Although the Great Serpent Mound didn't get more than a mention and a picture, and the big focus was on the Mississippians.

I'm probably the exception, however.

[Rufous-capped Thornbill]

Well, I guess that settles that. Sorry, everyone.

[Ethnic history of the Vilnius region]

I actually learned about everything in that bonus in a sixth grade class (while I was living in South Carolina).

Me too!

Anyway, that bonus played fine in my room. I always thought the Hopewell culture was just something people learned. Maybe it's one of (many) things they taught in my day that don't get taught anymore, though.

[Cheynem]

The bonus could have been made slightly easier by giving the fact that the Great Serpent Mound was in Ohio first and then using a different easy part.