DI specific question discussion

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DI specific question discussion

Post by theMoMA »

Discuss individual questions, repeat issues, typos, and all other specific DI-related things in this thread.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by theMoMA »

I will update this post with a list of corrected questions:

packet 1: deleted "computer" from the prompt to the second part of the planarity bonus.
packet 2: deleted "Mannerism" from the bonus prompt on "Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time."
packet 3: changed bonus lead-in to "this composer's opera" from "this opera" in the "Billy Budd" bonus part; changed Ron Wyden prompt.
packet 5: added a space between "San Francisco" and "is" in the "McTeague" question.
packet 6: un-underlined "theorem" in the "Fubini's theorem" bonus; added pronoun to the lead-in of "Arrowsmith" bonus; added accept for George Gordon in Byron bonus.
packet 7: deleted ancillary space in Jackson Pollock tossup.
packet 9: deleted ancillary "rambling" from Juliet bonus part; expanded answer line of "molecular orbitals" tossup.
packet 10: added prompt on "Congress" for Senate tossup.
packet 11: added space in Roman Polanski answer line; removed ancillary "before this event" from Cuban Missile Crisis tossup.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by Sam »

There was one bonus whose lead-in asked players to name Old Testament books, and then went on to have questions on Jude, Acts, and Romans. This was confusing as those are not Old Testament books.

EDIT: It's also possible this was read wrong, or I just misheard it, in which case never mind.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by Important Bird Area »

Sam wrote:There was one bonus whose lead-in asked players to name Old Testament books, and then went on to have questions on Jude, Acts, and Romans. This was confusing as those are not Old Testament books.

EDIT: It's also possible this was read wrong, or I just misheard it, in which case never mind.
This currently reads:
DI SCT round 4 wrote:name these books of the New Testament:
so if this was ever a mistake, it has been corrected for future use.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by jonah »

bt_green_warbler wrote:
Sam wrote:There was one bonus whose lead-in asked players to name Old Testament books, and then went on to have questions on Jude, Acts, and Romans. This was confusing as those are not Old Testament books.

EDIT: It's also possible this was read wrong, or I just misheard it, in which case never mind.
This currently reads:
DI SCT round 4 wrote:name these books of the New Testament:
so if this was ever a mistake, it has been corrected for future use.
The packets that were sent out to hosts have the correct "New Testament" wording. I apologize for this having been misread at our site.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by theMoMA »

I just want to apologize for the two most annoying mistakes in the set: the bonus parts on Mannerism and "computers," which came up in bonuses in which those words had already been stated in previous prompts. I changed a lot of bonus parts to ask for easier things, and in these two instances, didn't read the other prompts carefully enough to catch the needed deletions. As noted above, these bonuses have been fixed. If you noticed any other examples of this, please let me know either by email or in this thread.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by Bartleby »

Having questions about the state of New York and about Harlem in the same pack was probably not the best placement.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by Tees-Exe Line »

I'm curious what people thought about the "standing" question, because I put a tossup on that in PR and got some pushback for it being overly obscure for non-lawyers though that was a nationals level tournament. For that reason, I delayed buzzing at SCT thinking it was too hard an answer line to possibly come up.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by The Ununtiable Twine »

Tossing up Kronecker at SCT was probably not the best idea. He's not a terribly notable mathematician - I mean he has some results, but more often than not the only thing people are going to know about him is that he names a symbol and maybe the Kronecker product of matrices.

Regarding the clue "His namesake symbol generalizes the Jacobi (*) symbol to all integers" (where the (*) is where there was a buzzer race between Harrison and I), I buzzed and said "Legendre" because Legendre's symbol is a generalization of the Jacobi symbol to odd primes and we study that in number theory as a basic result. Up until this point in the clue, it is not uniquely identifiable. Then the clue mentions "to all integers" which by that time, we took the neg bait.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by kayli »

Kronecker generalizes Jacobi which generalizes Legendre.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by kayli »

Can someone post the answer lines to all of the math questions and what packet they appeared in? I think I had some problems with the math in this set, but I'd like to check my memories of it before I say anything.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by The Ununtiable Twine »

Kooikerhondje wrote:Kronecker generalizes Jacobi which generalizes Legendre

I'm being silly then. Still not a good idea for an answerline.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by jonah »

Kooikerhondje wrote:Can someone post the answer lines to all of the math questions and what packet they appeared in? I think I had some problems with the math in this set, but I'd like to check my memories of it before I say anything.
Tossups: curvature (2), Kronecker (3), quaternions (4), Poincaré (8), Niels Abel (12), convergence (14), PDEs (15), polynomials (16)

Bonuses: planarity/four(-color theorem)/computer (1), prime numbers/Wilson's theorem/(if (n-1)! ≡ 2 mod n, then n =)4 (5), Fubini's theorem/differentiation/Euler-Lagrange equation (6), differentiability/smoothness/Cauchy-Riemann equations (9), groups/Lagrange's theorem/Ludwig Sylow (10), circle/secant line/Cauchy distribution (11), roots of unity/cyclotomic polynomials/complex conjugate (15)
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by Steeve Ho You Fat »

I too was surprised by the Kronecker tossup. A tossup on "the Kronecker delta" might have worked, although I'm not sure if there are enough clues.

I thought the standing tossup was fine difficulty wise, since it's really important, although I delayed buzzing because it mentioned taxpayer standing really early. Not being a lawyer, I may be mistaken, but I thought taxpayer standing was an important and controversial thing.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by Demonic Leftovers »

Plan Rubber wrote:I thought the standing tossup was fine difficulty wise, since it's really important, although I delayed buzzing because it mentioned taxpayer standing really early. Not being a lawyer, I may be mistaken, but I thought taxpayer standing was an important and controversial thing.
It's not. Taxpayer standing has never come up for me in any class, including the ones where we actually discuss standing. Based on what I've read about it online it appears to be something of some significance in the past that has been rendered essentially irrelevant by the Supreme Court. So it is somewhat strange that it keeps coming up. As for standing as a whole it seems like a decent amount of non-law students know about it (and certainly law students should) so it seems like an ok tu selection, although it is strange it has come up three times in the last year when so many other areas of law never come up.

I am kind of curious about the New York question. Could someone post the text of it? Was it just linked by the fact that the cases were all in New York, or were they all Cardozo decisions? Because I originally thought it wasn't a great question, as where something like where Salmon v. Meinhard took place seems insignificant (although I was excited to see it come up generally). However, if they were all Cardozo decisions then the NY answerline might be a slightly more accessible way of asking about that link.

Also I was really excited to Elsie Venner come up.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by theMoMA »

A case decided in this state held that partners in a business owe fiduciary duties to each other for business opportunities. Besides ~Meinhard v. Salmon~, another case in this state arose when fireworks exploded on a railway platform, causing a scale to fall on the plaintiff. The ~Palsgraf~ opinion was authored by a judge from this state, whose judiciary included both (*) Learned Hand and Benjamin Cardozo. For 10 points--name this state governed by {Charles Evans Hughes} and Mario Cuomo.
Both Meinhard and Palsgraf are Cardozo opinions (two of his most notable ones, in my opinion).
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by Demonic Leftovers »

Ok I figured that was what the tu might be going for. In that case I do think it was probably a good way to ask about something like Meinhard.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by Fond du lac operon »

jonah wrote:
Kooikerhondje wrote:Can someone post the answer lines to all of the math questions and what packet they appeared in? I think I had some problems with the math in this set, but I'd like to check my memories of it before I say anything.
Tossups: curvature (2), Kronecker (3), quaternions (4), Poincaré (8), Niels Abel (12), convergence (14), PDEs (15), polynomials (16)

Bonuses: planarity/four(-color theorem)/computer (1), prime numbers/Wilson's theorem/(if (n-1)! ≡ 2 mod n, then n =)4 (5), Fubini's theorem/differentiation/Euler-Lagrange equation (6), differentiability/smoothness/Cauchy-Riemann equations (9), groups/Lagrange's theorem/Ludwig Sylow (10), circle/secant line/Cauchy distribution (11), roots of unity/cyclotomic polynomials/complex conjugate (15)
I'd like to see the convergence tossup, since one of the early clues in it was (I believe) somewhat underdetermining.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by jonah »

Fond du lac operon wrote:I'd like to see the convergence tossup, since one of the early clues in it was (I believe) somewhat underdetermining.
Two types of this property are related in {Egorov's theorem}. The {Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem} relates {boundedness} to this property for a substructure. {Fatou's lemma} is used to prove Lebesgue's [luh-bayg'z] "dominated" theorem of it. The {Weierstrass [VY-ur-strass] M-test} checks for one type of this property, which is possessed in a {complete metric space} by every (*) {Cauchy [koh-shee] sequence}. For 10 points--the {ratio and root tests} assess what property of a {sequence} or {series} that consists of having a finite {limit}?

answer: _converge_nce (accept word forms; accept _uniform converge_nce)
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by Fond du lac operon »

So on the Bolzano-Weierstrass clue, it's just kind of begging you to neg with "compactness" -- which is what I did. I get that compactness is closely related to convergence, and B-W is often formulated as being about bounded sequences rather than bounded spaces, but if you've never heard of Egorov's theorem (and I really should have, since I've read some measure theory) then that clue makes you pretty much have to guess what the question writer wanted. I'm not sure how I'd phrase it without giving away too early that we're looking for a property of sequences, but as worded it's pretty unacceptable.

EDIT: Maybe just "It's not compactness, but..." although that might have just confused me.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by jonah »

Fond du lac operon wrote:So on the Bolzano-Weierstrass clue, it's just kind of begging you to neg with "compactness" -- which is what I did. I get that compactness is closely related to convergence, and B-W is often formulated as being about bounded sequences rather than bounded spaces, but if you've never heard of Egorov's theorem (and I really should have, since I've read some measure theory) then that clue makes you pretty much have to guess what the question writer wanted. I'm not sure how I'd phrase it without giving away too early that we're looking for a property of sequences, but as worded it's pretty unacceptable.

EDIT: Maybe just "It's not compactness, but..." although that might have just confused me.
Hm. The two formulations of the Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem I'm familiar with are that in R^n, (1) every bounded sequence has a convergent subsequence, or (2) a set is sequentially compact if and only if it is closed and bounded. I think (1) corresponds pretty directly to the question, which is what I intended. In the case of (2), I would say that since the theorem additionally requires topological closure to prove (sequential, but in R^n it's equivalent to regular) compactness, I'm not super convinced that "compactness" is a particularly defensible buzz for that clue. Seth, I assume you're hanging around this thread; thoughts?
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by jekbradbury »

I also negged with "compactness" (on the same tossup in DII); in my analysis class only the second version of Bolzano-Weierstrass that Jonah just described was discussed explicitly.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by The King's Flight to the Scots »

jonah wrote:
Fond du lac operon wrote:So on the Bolzano-Weierstrass clue, it's just kind of begging you to neg with "compactness" -- which is what I did. I get that compactness is closely related to convergence, and B-W is often formulated as being about bounded sequences rather than bounded spaces, but if you've never heard of Egorov's theorem (and I really should have, since I've read some measure theory) then that clue makes you pretty much have to guess what the question writer wanted. I'm not sure how I'd phrase it without giving away too early that we're looking for a property of sequences, but as worded it's pretty unacceptable.

EDIT: Maybe just "It's not compactness, but..." although that might have just confused me.
Hm. The two formulations of the Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem I'm familiar with are that in R^n, (1) every bounded sequence has a convergent subsequence, or (2) a set is sequentially compact if and only if it is closed and bounded. I think (1) corresponds pretty directly to the question, which is what I intended. In the case of (2), I would say that since the theorem additionally requires topological closure to prove (sequential, but in R^n it's equivalent to regular) compactness, I'm not super convinced that "compactness" is a particularly defensible buzz for that clue. Seth, I assume you're hanging around this thread; thoughts?
Yeah, the theorem does require closure, but the question didn't really get that precise; all it asked was what Bolzano-Weierstrass "related" boundedness to. The second definition clearly "relates" boundedness (and closure) to compactness, for some definitions of that word. The 500-character count makes constructions like that pretty necessary, I'm sure, but I think the wording is vague enough to admit either interpretation.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by setht »

jonah wrote:
Fond du lac operon wrote:So on the Bolzano-Weierstrass clue, it's just kind of begging you to neg with "compactness" -- which is what I did. I get that compactness is closely related to convergence, and B-W is often formulated as being about bounded sequences rather than bounded spaces, but if you've never heard of Egorov's theorem (and I really should have, since I've read some measure theory) then that clue makes you pretty much have to guess what the question writer wanted. I'm not sure how I'd phrase it without giving away too early that we're looking for a property of sequences, but as worded it's pretty unacceptable.

EDIT: Maybe just "It's not compactness, but..." although that might have just confused me.
Hm. The two formulations of the Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem I'm familiar with are that in R^n, (1) every bounded sequence has a convergent subsequence, or (2) a set is sequentially compact if and only if it is closed and bounded. I think (1) corresponds pretty directly to the question, which is what I intended. In the case of (2), I would say that since the theorem additionally requires topological closure to prove (sequential, but in R^n it's equivalent to regular) compactness, I'm not super convinced that "compactness" is a particularly defensible buzz for that clue. Seth, I assume you're hanging around this thread; thoughts?
I think it's worth tweaking the wording here. Maybe "For substructures, {compactness} and this property are related to {boundedness} by the {Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem}"?

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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by Sima Guang Hater »

The Ununtiable Twine wrote:Regarding the clue "His namesake symbol generalizes the Jacobi (*) symbol to all integers" (where the (*) is where there was a buzzer race between Harrison and I), I buzzed and said "Legendre" because Legendre's symbol is a generalization of the Jacobi symbol to odd primes and we study that in number theory as a basic result. Up until this point in the clue, it is not uniquely identifiable. Then the clue mentions "to all integers" which by that time, we took the neg bait.
I almost made that same mistake, until I remembered that you have it backwards. The Legendre symbol is less general than the Jacobi symbol because the Jacobi symbol accepts composite numbers in the bottom argument. I agree with the general thrust of your criticism of this question, however.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by Fond du lac operon »

The Ununtiable Twine wrote:Tossing up Kronecker at SCT was probably not the best idea. He's not a terribly notable mathematician - I mean he has some results, but more often than not the only thing people are going to know about him is that he names a symbol and maybe the Kronecker product of matrices
In general, I worry that the answer space for mathematicians is a little anemic. Lots of mathematicians, including Kronecker, are famous for only one or maybe two things; like, I'd say Kronecker has the Jugendtraum (which is a hard clue for basically any level) and the delta function. Lots of other mathematicians have done a good deal of important things but aren't famous enough among non-mathematicians to justify tossing up. I can see four quadrants, here:
  • Very famous mathematicians with large clue spaces. This is where you have Euler, Cauchy, Lagrange, Riemann, Gauss, and probably a half dozen others. I think any of these dudes (or ladies; Noether is borderline on this list) can be tossed up at almost any collegiate level.
  • Famous mathematicians with small clue spaces. This is for mathematicians who are well-known even to non-math majors, but who are mostly famous for one or two accomplishments. Think Hausdorff and Cantor here.
  • "Obscure" mathematicians with large clue spaces. There are a number of mathematicians who did a lot of notable things, but who aren't well-known enough to toss up at a regular or sometimes even national-level tournament. Examples include Serre, Frobenius, Artin, and (again borderline) Erdos.
  • "Obscure" mathematicians with small clue spaces. There's not much reason to ever toss one of these folks up, since the question is unlikely to be converted and it's hard to make pyramidal and vary the clues. Kronecker might belong here;' someone like de la Vallee Poussin definitely does.
Currently the trend, at least with NAQT, is to try and ask about people from the second category, sacrificing variation in clues for convertibility. But I'd rather see some canon expansion with people from the third category slowly integrating in, to the point that someone like Cayley or Frobenius could eventually be a tossup at a Regionals/Sectionals-level tournament. Obviously this isn't achievable right away, but it's something I try to keep in mind when writing math questions, and I think it's a worthy goal.

/mathrant
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by Sima Guang Hater »

Guess what its time for, Andrew Hart!

PREFACE: I generally really liked this set; it's definitely one of the best SCTs I've played. The only complaints I have are some early clue drops and some odd language, which I will point out.

PACKET 1:
-The leadin to the Friedel-Crafts tossup isn't unique. The Haworth penanthrene synthesis contains two Friedel-Crafts reactions and two reductions (which are usually either listed as Wolff-Kishner or Clemmensen reductions). The last question I remember that used this clue was in Winter 2009, in which all of those answers were acceptable for the first line.
-Moon rocks: I liked this question in retrospect, but I was a little confused by the wording. I know what KREEP is, but I probably would have negged with meteorites if I was feeling gutsy at that point because my interpretation of that question is that lunar meteorites are a subset of meteorites (so "some" would refer to a subset of meteorites).
-In the KE question, is the clue about the energy cascade specific for kinetic energy? I've always read that as just the turbulence energy cascade, without further specification.

PACKET 2:
-I loved the Norman Schwarzkopf tossup; very creative and interesting.
-Funny story on this impeachment question (this isn't a criticism at all): upon hearing the name "Porteus", I confused Thomas Porteus with John Porteus and negged with "lynching". I learned my lesson.
-You couldn't give us "Dawson from Dawson's Creek" for James van der Beek?

PACKET 3
-Someone already pointed out the Kronecker thing.
-Should "his opponent is a snake" really be in power for Ra? (ANSWER: _I'd strongly suggest not_)

PACKET 4
-"A Distant Mirror" (without Tuchmann) as a hard part? Really? Especially after that much easier Turgenev bonus, that stood out as pretty egregious.

PACKET 5
-Seems kind of mean to have a bonus part on Crazy Horse that makes it really difficult to distinguish him from Sitting Bull other than the title of a Stephen Ambrose work.

PACKET 6:
-Galactose: This question was odd in many ways. Since Andrew likes substantiative criticism of questions...

Clue 1: The clue about the ABO blood groups is really hard to parse. Here's a useful diagram:Image
I can see in retrospect what you were going for, in that the terminal sugar of the H antigen which is modified in A and B blood types, is a galactose, but that's impossible to parse on the fly. I could have buzzed at the end of that sentence with H antigen and been correct. Adding the word "monosaccharide" would have really helped.

Clue 2: I've never seen the Leloir pathway in something like 5 semesters worth of biochemistry. Turns out Voet and Voet (which is one of the 3 main biochemistry texts used) has about a paragraph on it, so I can't complain about it too heavily. What's more annoying is the second part of that sentence, which says that this molecule is converted to G-1-P before entering glycolysis. That fragment much more famously applies to glycogen, which during glycogenolysis is converted to G-1-P, then G-6-P. A simple "its not glycogen, but..." would have helped, again.

Clue 3: Cataracts are uniquely identifying for galactosemia, so this clue is pretty good. But this seems ridiculously hard for a clue right before power, especially because right after that you start talking about dairy products. Talking about the lac operon might have been a better decision, which is something that way more people would have heard of and seen.

These things combined make this question pretty excessively difficult and difficult to parse, a pretty bad combination.

-I'm totally ok with "contracts" being in power if it helps me beat David Seal to a law question, but others may feel differently.
-How do you distinguish between "basic" and "nucleophilic" in this bonus part? Seems like you're describing both, esp with the clue about protonation at physiological pH.

PACKET 7:
-Robert and Anthony Shirley should not be in the first line of a Safavid tossup.
-This management tossup was really inspired. I loved it.
-The fact that hyphae are septated are among the most famous things about hyphae.
-Minor thing: I would not have said that the Seattle Seven were fishing companies, just that they were companies. That makes it more figure-out-able than you probably want.

PACKET 8:
-Let me relate to you a conversation I had about this Malaysia tossup (paraphrased):
Chris R: Literally everyone in Malaysia is named Anwar!
Matt W: Yeah and if you made a pie chart of Malaysia's exports it would be 50% "people named Anwar" and 50% "sodomy charges"
Eric: *laughs and nods stupidly because I didn't buzz there*

PACKET 9:
-I've been told you can use the CI method to solve atomic orbitals as well as molecular ones. If someone could explain to me why Atomic orbitals shouldn't be acceptable (if there's something about that clue that rules it out), I'd really appreciate it (I'm not being sarcastic).
-The leadin to the Rehnquist tossup is incredibly quizbowl famous.

PACKET 10:
-I really liked this radio astronomy tossup. I thought it was an interesting way to ask about a well-trod set of answers.

PACKET 11:
-Eisenmenger's syndrome isn't unique to the left ventricle; if you have an ASD you have increased flow to the left atrium also. Also, I['m forced to] remember the criteria for left ventricular hypertrophy, but never knew they had a name. This was a really clever idea though.
-The entire room had a seizure on the first clue of the centaurs tossup. I think we scared our moderator.

PACKET 12:
-Feschbach resonance is a buzzword for BEC. Its pretty much a one-to-one association at this point.
-The story of Cupid and Psyche is exclusively Roman. This is confusing, not to mention kind of an unnecessarily mean way of asking this question.

PACKET 13:
-The leadin to the Kamakura question is incorrect. The Jodo-shu sect was established by Honen in 1175. The Heian period ended in 1185. And yes, that was negged in my room with Heian for this reason.

PACKET 14:
-"metropolis" over "city" seems like a waste of characters.
-Bolzano-Weierstrauss was already talked about.
-Now we come to my least favorite question of this set: the question on Star Trek: TNG. I have seen every episode of this show, and know it pretty well, but am treated to a leadin about an obscure Erdrich novel instead of actual clues about the answer. If Chris Ray and David Seal get questions on the Seattle Seahawks or Hakeem Olajuwon unpolluted by what Flann O'Brien or Mo Yan have written about them, why can't I have unpolluted trash that I like? I will gladly replace this question (for free obviously) for next Saturday it made me so angry.
-Webs of significance seems like a post-power clue for Geertz to me, but that might just be because Geertz gets a lot of play in quizbowl.

PACKET 15:
-Southhampton plot, with no description, was very early
-The Gilgamesh question had a very easy leadin (the story of how he befriended Enkidu). It felt DII-ish.

PACKET 16:
-Microscopic reversibility should be acceptable for detailed balance.
Last edited by Sima Guang Hater on Tue Feb 12, 2013 9:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by Not That Kind of Christian!! »

The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:Eric's extensive constructive criticism
The LV tossup was mine. According to one of my physio texts, Eisenmenger's refers to (among other findings) the shunt reversal due to an uncorrected VSD... and that book is a first-edition from 1998 that I got for like fifty cents and should have thought twice before using. Sorry for the lack of specificity.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by Ringil »

The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote: -In the KE question, is the clue about the energy cascade specific for kinetic energy? I've always read that as just the turbulence energy cascade, without further specification.
So I wrote that question. It originally was a question with just the answer line _energy_, but it was changed into KE as that is specifically what the energy in the turbulent energy cascade refers to. Still, just _energy_ was acceptable for most of the question until the description of Bernoulli's eq as it is usually just referred to as energy in the fluid mech context.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by Cheynem »

In regards to Eric's points:

-I disliked the impeachment tossup as I thought it was making it very clear that this was something that happened to bad/incompetent political figures of some kind, and then I just guessed.

-If I recall, the wording in the Crazy Horse bonus specifically clued you in to the fact that he was *fighting* as opposed to sort of supervising, but maybe I'm remembering wrong.

-I too strongly disliked the Next Generation tossup. If I had to guess, Eric and I are probably two of the biggest fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation actively playing quizbowl, and I think we both didn't power it. If it was just the fact that the clues were hard, that's one thing, but almost the entire pre-power clue is the Louise Erdritch clue followed by a description of the relatively minor character Dr. Pulaski. I buzzed on her name and I'd argue that unless you have amazingly good reflexes and by some chance happen to know this Erdritch work, you're not going to power this tossup no matter how much ST: TNG knowledge you have.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

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The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:Guess what its time for, Andrew Hart!
I just want you to know that I appreciate this type of detailed feedback, Eric. Here are some responses. (If I didn't respond to a particular criticism, it's because it's about something, like Friedel-Crafts reactions, that I don't feel qualified to comment on.)
Moon rocks: I liked this question in retrospect, but I was a little confused by the wording. I know what KREEP is, but I probably would have negged with meteorites if I was feeling gutsy at that point because my interpretation of that question is that lunar meteorites are a subset of meteorites (so "some" would refer to a subset of meteorites).
I wrote this question. In retrospect, a prompt on "meteorites" and "lunar meteorites" would probably be good, so I added it for subsequent mirrors.
Should "his opponent is a snake" really be in power for Ra? (ANSWER: _I'd strongly suggest not_)
This is perhaps a little easy; I think that section got edited around because my original question had an unverifiable claim about Ra and Apep being brothers.
"A Distant Mirror" (without Tuchmann) as a hard part? Really? Especially after that much easier Turgenev bonus, that stood out as pretty egregious.
I agree. Reading through the set, I think that there were some hard parts that stuck out as much harder than others. I think we generally did a good job ensuring that every hard part was at least within the realm of possibility, but we could have had a tighter clustering of difficulty in many instances, including this one.
Seems kind of mean to have a bonus part on Crazy Horse that makes it really difficult to distinguish him from Sitting Bull other than the title of a Stephen Ambrose work.
In my mind, Crazy Horse is the military commander and Sitting Bull is the spiritual leader at Little Bighorn. I don't know if this is entirely accurate or well known, but that was my thought when looking over that bonus and giving it the okay.
I've been told you can use the CI method to solve atomic orbitals as well as molecular ones. If someone could explain to me why Atomic orbitals shouldn't be acceptable (if there's something about that clue that rules it out), I'd really appreciate it (I'm not being sarcastic).
After consulting with Seth, I changed the prompt to accept "orbitals" or "atomic orbitals" before "bonding."
The story of Cupid and Psyche is exclusively Roman. This is confusing, not to mention kind of an unnecessarily mean way of asking this question.
The answer line initially accepted either Aphrodite or Venus, but I incorrectly read Seth's note to remove "Venus." This has been fixed, and it's now acceptable.

I largely agree with many of your claims about the ease of lead-ins, but I'm okay with a few easy lead-ins in a set like this.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by theMoMA »

Also, to the "nucleophilic" part, I changed it to read: The carbonyl reacts with the amine in the Maillard reaction because the amine is basic and has this property in alkaline environments. At physiological pH, the amine is typically protonated and lacks this property.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by bmcke »

Could someone post the Episcopal Church tossup?
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Re: DI specific question discussion

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DI SCT round 9 wrote:This denomination publishes a "Blue Book" during its triennial leadership summits, which convene a House of Deputies and a House of Bishops. In 2006, Katharine Jefferts Schori became this denomination's first female primate. Ellen Barrett was a pioneering priest in this denomination, which issued a 1976 proclamation stating that (*) homosexuals are "children of God," and ordained gay bishop Gene Robinson. For 10 points--name this offshoot of the Anglican Church in the United States.

answer: (Protestant) _Episcopal_ (Church in the United States of America) (or _Episcopalian_s; prompt on "Anglican Church" or "Anglicans")
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by bmcke »

Thanks! That all seems legit; I just got confused in-game on the word "primate."
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by Fond du lac operon »

For what it's worth (i.e. not much), I happen to own A Distant Mirror (after leaving a library copy outside Boston-Logan, which makes it even more memorable), so someone got that hard part at least.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by setht »

The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:PACKET 1:
-Moon rocks: I liked this question in retrospect, but I was a little confused by the wording. I know what KREEP is, but I probably would have negged with meteorites if I was feeling gutsy at that point because my interpretation of that question is that lunar meteorites are a subset of meteorites (so "some" would refer to a subset of meteorites).
-In the KE question, is the clue about the energy cascade specific for kinetic energy? I've always read that as just the turbulence energy cascade, without further specification.
KREEP refers to certain deposits on the Moon; I'm not sure why that would make someone think "this is a tossup on (lunar) meteorites" (in particular, I don't believe KREEP really points to "lunar meteorites"), but I guess I don't mind prompting on those answers.

As Libo said, the energy that cascades in turbulent systems is the (turbulent) kinetic energy, but lots of people just call it the energy cascade, so either answer was acceptable early on.
The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:PACKET 9:
-I've been told you can use the CI method to solve atomic orbitals as well as molecular ones. If someone could explain to me why Atomic orbitals shouldn't be acceptable (if there's something about that clue that rules it out), I'd really appreciate it (I'm not being sarcastic).
From what I can tell, the first few sentences of the tossup apply both to molecular orbitals and atomic orbitals (multi-electron systems is multi-electron systems, as they say), and the answer line was recently updated to reflect that.
The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:PACKET 12:
-Feschbach resonance is a buzzword for BEC. Its pretty much a one-to-one association at this point.
I put that in as a replacement for a lead-in that consisted of (what felt to me like) a very coy clue about the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. Since I hate hate hate the GPE and I hate even more the idea that we're at a point where we give coy clues about it*, I decided to go with something important that I hadn't heard come up much in quizbowl: Feschbach resonances. Perhaps they've come up more than I thought.

* I guess I don't actually hate the GPE that much, but the idea of giving coy clues about it really does seem repugnant.
The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:PACKET 16:
-Microscopic reversibility should be acceptable for detailed balance.
Huh. I'd only heard about microscopic reversibility as a different (but related) concept: any process is reversible. Looking around online suggests that the phrase is also used to describe detailed balance. I'll see about getting that added as an alternate answer.

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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by Tees-Exe Line »

I've literally never seen an episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation in my life, but I am reading The Round House right now and I didn't get that clue. The fact that the main character likes Star Trek and speculates about the characters' sexual powers in one scene with his friends is a tiny element of the book. I think he doesn't actually watch TV "on screen" at all, as it were.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

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The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote: PACKET 13:
-The leadin to the Kamakura question is incorrect. The Jodo-shu sect was established by Honen in 1175. The Heian period ended in 1185. And yes, that was negged in my room with Heian for this reason.
This was my mistake. I have revised the question with an actual Kamakura clue for the two upcoming SCTs.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

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setht wrote:KREEP refers to certain deposits on the Moon; I'm not sure why that would make someone think "this is a tossup on (lunar) meteorites" (in particular, I don't believe KREEP really points to "lunar meteorites"), but I guess I don't mind prompting on those answers.
For what it's worth, Seth, I found sources indicating lunar meteorites can be "KREEPy." I don't think it makes sense to accept lunar meteorites in the context of the early clues, but it seems like a prompt we should include if we want to be sympathetic, which I think we do.
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Re: DI specific question discussion

Post by Steeve Ho You Fat »

Sorry I forgot to mention this before today's mirrors, but in the War on Drugs tossup (which, by the way, I thought was a really cool idea), I'd rephrase the New Jim Crow clue to make it clear that it doesn't want answers like "mandatory minimums," "mass incarceration," or "prison-industrial complex," since her premise is basically that the war on drugs is an excuse to put black men in jail for a long time and then legally discriminate against them when they get out.
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