ACF Nationals 2022 Specific Question Discussion

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ACF Nationals 2022 Specific Question Discussion

Post by ThisIsMyUsername »

Here is a thread for the discussion of specific questions from the set.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Specific Question Discussion

Post by Ehtna »

This might be an issue deserving of its own discussion elsewhere, but the tossup on "violin" in jazz in one of the later packets explicitly names the jazz style developed by Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli, which has an ethnic slur for the Roma people in it. Given that it is the name of the style, I'm not really sure what a good workaround to that would be, but it should still probably be taken out of the final packets.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Specific Question Discussion

Post by Bhagwan Shammbhagwan »

I greatly enjoyed the history in this set, but I was wondering the rationale behind asking the 1640s as a bonus part. I'm not really an expert in Ming Dynasty history, but it seemed very arbitrary and hard to place, and I'm curious to hear how it played in other rooms. Very glad there were almost no other questions asking on time periods like this.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Specific Question Discussion

Post by ThisIsMyUsername »

Ehtna wrote: Wed Apr 13, 2022 10:26 am This might be an issue deserving of its own discussion elsewhere, but the tossup on "violin" in jazz in one of the later packets explicitly names the jazz style developed by Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli, which has an ethnic slur for the Roma people in it. Given that it is the name of the style, I'm not really sure what a good workaround to that would be, but it should still probably be taken out of the final packets.
This is a potentially tricky issue, but I would defend my use of the term on several grounds. I hope we would agree that when dealing with something like Langston Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" or James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man, we should have no hesitation in using those titles, even though the terms themselves would be considered offensive if applied to an individual in current speech. They are simply the titles of the books, and the titles were not externally imposed.

The genre name we're talking about now is the standard one not merely colloquially, but also in jazz studies (which I assure you is not a discipline that takes racism lightly!) and by the majority of practitioners of the genre, some of whom I'm sure would hate to have the label applied directly to them rather than to their music. Now, this doesn't mean that the name is entirely free of controversy. The question of how internal vs. external the genre name is is itself a topic of debate, as some of the contemporary practioners and scholars are white people with no connection to the genre's ethnic origins. But all of the alternatives are themselves controversial. "Roma jazz" is not standard; and some of the practitioners are from groups that white people like to call Roma but who do not themselves like to be called Roma (e.g. the Sinti). "Jazz manouche" (the term often used by people trying to be inoffensive) is (understandably) strongly disliked by Roma and Sinti who don't identify as Manouche, who see it as erasing their massive contribution. Also, it would have been nearly useless in practical terms as a late clue, because it's not well known.

Long story short, while I understand the concern you are raising, (1) I think it is correct to regard this as equivalent to a title, not as a label for the ethnicity or any individual person; (2) I don't think it makes sense to refuse to name the genre (that's its own form of erasure); and (3) if I'm going to name the genre, I am going to use the standard one, used by the scholars and practitioners alike.

EDIT: for typos and clarity
Last edited by ThisIsMyUsername on Wed Apr 13, 2022 12:32 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Specific Question Discussion

Post by Adventure Temple Trail »

Bhagwan Shammbhagwan wrote: Wed Apr 13, 2022 11:18 am I greatly enjoyed the history in this set, but I was wondering the rationale behind asking the 1640s as a bonus part. I'm not really an expert in Ming Dynasty history, but it seemed very arbitrary and hard to place, and I'm curious to hear how it played in other rooms. Very glad there were almost no other questions asking on time periods like this.
ACF Nationals 2022, Purdue packet, bonus 8 wrote:[10h] The great king Souligna Vongsa (“soo-lee-nyah vong-sah”) welcomed the first European traders to Lan Xang in this Gregorian decade. Elsewhere in Asia, the Chongzhen (“chong-zhen”) emperor abdicated during this decade.
ANSWER: 1640s CE [accept any answer indicating a ten-year time span with the year 1641 in it] (The Ming dynasty ended with the Chongzhen emperor’s abdication in 1644.)
I wrote this. My thought process: Once we determined that Luang Prabang could be a middle part with all basic information provided, it became clear that almost all yet-unused information about the city's history was too hard for a hard part without looping something else in. Of those too-hard things, the most significant included Souligna Vongsa, who (among other things across a six-decade reign) brought what's now Laos into global trade by opening it to the Dutch East India Company. That opening occurred in 1641, which made me think of the end of the Ming dynasty as another knowable Asia event that happened around the same time. ("1644" is a year that's kind of burnt into my brain, but I'm pretty good at memorizing dates.) Asking for the decade seemed like an elegant linkage, and saying directly that the Ming dynasty ended would have been too easy, so I named its last emperor instead.
(The other option I proposed for the hard part was asking for one of the rare goods traded to the Dutch, such as gum lac or benzoin; it's quite possible that would have played better.)
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Specific Question Discussion

Post by AlexLi »

Can I see the tossup on earthquake magnitude? I enjoyed the theme and think that it is great that we have tossups on seismology whose answerline is something other than just "earthquakes", although I did feel that the answer space reduced to magnitude/intensity/energy from the very first clues with subtle differences that were hard to parse at game speed.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Specific Question Discussion

Post by Berniecrat »

Could I see the question on Loyalists? I think I heard “Haldimand Proclamation” and said “the Iroquois supporting the British” which I was negged for, so was wondering if this was just an incomplete answerline or I misunderstood what I was buzzing on

On a super minor note, the selection bias bonus part felt very soft for a medium

(also so this isn’t just negative, I thought the music theory tossup on Schoenberg as a theorist was cool and a great way to have a music theory tossup that wasn’t just a number or a note. I also heard multiple people talking about how much they loved the Golda Meir clue for the Milwaukee tossup)
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Specific Question Discussion

Post by Tejas »

ThisIsMyUsername wrote: Wed Apr 13, 2022 11:20 am
Ehtna wrote: Wed Apr 13, 2022 10:26 am This might be an issue deserving of its own discussion elsewhere, but the tossup on "violin" in jazz in one of the later packets explicitly names the jazz style developed by Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli, which has an ethnic slur for the Roma people in it. Given that it is the name of the style, I'm not really sure what a good workaround to that would be, but it should still probably be taken out of the final packets.
This is a potentially tricky issue, but I would defend my use of the term on several grounds. I hope we would agree that when dealing with something like Langston Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" or James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man, we should have no hesitation in using those titles, even though the terms themselves would be considered offensive if applied to an individual in current speech. They are simply the titles of the books, and the titles were not externally imposed.

The genre name we're talking about now is the standard one not merely colloquially, but also in jazz studies (which I assure you is not a discipline that takes racism lightly!) and by the majority of practitioners of the genre, some of whom I'm sure would hate to have the label applied directly to them rather than to their music. Now, this doesn't mean that the name is entirely free of controversy. The question of how internal vs. external the genre name is is itself a topic of debate, as some of the contemporary practioners and scholars are white people with no connection to the genre's ethnic origins. But all of the alternatives are themselves controversial. "Roma jazz" is not standard; and some of the practitioners are from groups that white people like to call Roma but who do not themselves like to be called Roma (e.g. the Sinti). "Jazz manouche" (the term often used by people trying to be inoffensive) is (understandably) strongly disliked by Roma and Sinti who don't identify as Manouche, who see it as erasing their massive contribution. Also, it would have been nearly useless in practical terms as a late clue, because it's not well known.

Long story short, while I understand the concern you are raising, (1) I think it is correct to regard this as equivalent to a title, not as a label for the ethnicity or any individual person; (2) I don't think it makes sense to refuse to name the genre (that's its own form of erasure); and (3) if I'm going to name the genre, I am going to use the standard one, used by the scholars and practitioners alike.

EDIT: for typos and clarity
If possible, it would be nice to have a short version of this argument as a comment appended to the question before the set is posted. Since quizbowl has become more sensitive about language choices I think this is really important to keep for posterity, regardless if future writers agree with you or not.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Specific Question Discussion

Post by jmarvin_ »

ThisIsMyUsername wrote: Wed Apr 13, 2022 11:20 am (John's comments on a problematically named jazz subgenre)
For whatever it's worth, John is right about this to the best of my understanding. The term has been self-applied and is still used by many musicians of the style's ethnicities of origin. But, more generally, the situation regarding the term in question is more complex than many realize. Much like the term "American Indian," persons of other backgrounds (especially of the well-educated sort) are often quick to self-censor and to chastise others for failing to do so, (usually) out of good intentions, but in so doing fail to attend to what the people in question, the supposed victims of the words' violence, actually think about the situation. As it turns out, (by some counts) most indigenous people in the USA identify with the term, as did their movement for civil rights, and many prefer it to the phrase "Native American" that has become standard in "polite society." Likewise, Romani peoples' thoughts on the word are not as straightforwardly negative as the laudable standards of would-be respectful self-censorship among American outsiders might suggest. The congress of Romani peoples have discouraged the term for decades now on account of it being an exonym, preferring first their actual terms of self-identification, but one must be careful not to confuse this for a universal declaration of the wish to abolish the word in all contexts. Many Romani people in English-speaking countries have tried to reclaim the word and identify with it, even if not primarily, to celebrate the very aspects of their culture that the term has so regretfully been used to disparage - I've met a few myself over the years (as well as a Sinti individual who prefers to identify only with that endonym, much as many indigenous peoples identify with their own groups and reject imposed umbrella terms like "native American" or "aboriginal" that elide the diversity of colonized peoples). The history of the music under discussion has been partially characterized similarly by a celebration of Romani culture by Romani people reclaiming the word, though things aren't quite so simple: Django and his fellows would never have heard the term during the heights of their career, for example.

The violence of slurs comes not from anything intrinsic to the words themselves, but from the speech-act of saying them, the contours of which are sensitive to the context of who is speaking, how, to whom, when, and so on. Some words have gone so far beyond the pale that seeing fit to say them in any context as an outsider to the group the slur targets, quoted or otherwise, communicates immense disrespect and tacit hatred, which is why we don't ask about a certain Conrad novel under any circumstances. The word we're discussing now may well be such a term or it may become one, but one should first see what the Romani people think before assuming one knows the whole story. If the name for this jazz-derived style gets superseded or reclaimed and the term's history of violence subverted with the passage of history, it will be because Romani people willed one way or the other. Anti-Romani racism is still rampant and deplorable, as anyone who's spent enough time in Europe will know, but the way to combat this in our everyday speech is not to stop ourselves from talking about one of their culture's great artistic achievements out of fear of offense, but to see how things actually stand between the Romani people and the term, and to navigate the situation carefully but without fear. Respecting Romani self-determination and self-identification also means respecting those who encourage and celebrate the term, which includes a wide range of community leaders up to the present day, as a 2019 UK legislative report found. I think John is right to make measured, deliberate, specifically contextualized use of the term rather than to join in on clunky and artificial circumlocutions that merely confuse the matter and allow good intentions to cause one to presume that one has the right to participate in the renaming of a cultural phenomenon that isn't one's own. Perhaps we'll reach a day when the term "gypsy jazz" has been fully reclaimed or fully surpassed by language unencumbered by a legacy of oppression, a development that can and will only come on account of the peoples who created and continue to practice the tradition, but neither is yet the case.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Specific Question Discussion

Post by TangDynasty0701 »

May I see the tossup on Chicago?
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Specific Question Discussion

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

TangDynasty0701 wrote: Wed Apr 13, 2022 6:43 pm May I see the tossup on Chicago?
Here you go:
Editors 5 wrote:5. A protest march in this U.S. city ended with a man nailing a list of fourteen demands to the door of its city hall. This city’s Blackstone Rangers street gang turned to nonviolent protest in the mid-1960s. A riot in this city began after two policemen chased William Young, a Black ex-convict who tried to open a fire hydrant. In this city, elusive civil rights leader Al Raby founded the Coordinating Council of Community Organizers. After he was hit by a rock here, Martin Luther King Jr. said he’d never seen “mobs” more “hateful” than those in this city, where he campaigned for fair housing from January to August 1966. A seminary student who ran this city’s chapter of Operation Breadbasket later ran for president twice, touting a “Rainbow Coalition.” For 10 points, name this city where Jesse Jackson lives, whose largely-black South Side contains Hyde Park.
ANSWER: Chicago, Illinois
<American History>

Also:
Once we determined that Luang Prabang could be a middle part with all basic information provided, it became clear that almost all yet-unused information about the city's history was too hard for a hard part without looping something else in. Of those too-hard things, the most significant included Souligna Vongsa, who (among other things across a six-decade reign) brought what's now Laos into global trade by opening it to the Dutch East India Company. That opening occurred in 1641, which made me think of the end of the Ming dynasty as another knowable Asia event that happened around the same time.
Fully seconded Matt's logic here. I think it was way, way too much to expect people to know many specific details about Lan Xang, but I didn't want to go for Lan Xang as a hard part since I think such a part might have required obscuring a bunch of information in a way that I didn't want to do. Whereas Matt's bonus part tied a very obscure, but important fact related to Lan Xang (when it was "opened") in with a much more knowable fact, when the Ming dynasty ended. I don't think knowing when the Ming dynasty ended is a particularly challenging thing to know, so giving the name of the last Ming emperor bumped the difficulty up adequately there (but not so much that it wasn't converted in playtesting).

Like Matt, I'm pretty good at memorizing dates and keeping track of them; not everyone in quizbowl is the same way. But on some level, it's just another facet of knowledge to test - in this case, pulling a specific decade within the broader disruptive 17th century.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Specific Question Discussion

Post by beatlesfan087 »

I'm a little late to the game, so sorry for the late response.

I wanted to just shout out Adam Silverman's absolutely amazing bonus on carbon dioxide photocatalysts.

I currently work in a lab that's a part of CHASE (the Center for Hybrid Approaches in Solar Energy to Liquid Fuels). One of the gripes I have with chemistry in quizbowl is that all too often, it misses the big picture by focusing on named reactions, or particular reagents and techniques. While all of these are conventionally notable, it feels like there has been a dearth of content on the problems that chemists are working on now.

This bonus was written just perfectly. CO2 was written well for an easy part, and anyone working close to solar fuels knows about formic acid and methanol as potential liquid organic hydrogen carriers. Ruthenium as the hard part was spot on in terms of providing something that was difficult but extraordinarily notable for the subject.

This question really brightened my day. Thanks for writing it!
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Specific Question Discussion

Post by benchapman »

In a vaguely similar vein to Matt (insofar as we are talking about chemistry), I want to shout out the Suzuki reaction tossup as particularly strong. Normally, chemistry tossups on named reactions can disintegrate into ultra-boring eponym bowl, but this one avoided that. I don't remember all the clues and it's not something I'm terribly well versed in (I think I got it very close to the end), but I thought each clue was presented in such a way as to make apparent its possible interest to the layman and drew from a variety of clue types. In my opinion, it was one of the best tossups in the set.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Specific Question Discussion

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

Could I see the question on Loyalists? I think I heard “Haldimand Proclamation” and said “the Iroquois supporting the British” which I was negged for, so was wondering if this was just an incomplete answerline or I misunderstood what I was buzzing on
Sorry for my late response - here's the tossup on Loyalists:
16. Cato Perkins, a man who took up arms to support this political faction, was part of a resettled community whose preacher was the Huntingdonian John Marrant. This faction enlisted support by guaranteeing land purchase rights by the Haldimand Proclamation and “full security” to those who enlisted under the Philipsburg Proclamation. Samuel Birch created the Book of Negroes to list supporters of this faction who were resettled in Nova Scotia, many of whom went to Sierra Leone. This faction’s losses at the Battle of Great Bridge included several members of the Ethiopian Regiment recruited by Lord Dumore, who guaranteed freedom for indentured servants and slaves who took up arms to support this faction in 1775. For 10 points, name this faction which supported the British Crown during the American Revolution.
ANSWER: Loyalist faction [or Loyalists or Tory faction or Tories; prompt on Conservatives; prompt on pro-British faction before “British”; prompt on slaves who fought for Britain; reject “slaves”]
<American History>
I meant to edit this tossup to be mostly about Black Loyalists, though didn't end up finding the time to research more clues to tightly theme such a question. Regardless, the answerline instructs to prompt on "pro-British faction" and I should have added "Iroquois who fought for Britain" as a prompt as well to be consistent with the "slaves who fought for Britain" prompt.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Specific Question Discussion

Post by ryanrosenberg »

I'll note, though, that "Iroquois supporting the British" is incorrect for the Haldimand Proclamation clue; the Iroquois were guaranteed land purchase rights by the Haldimand Proclamation, not the other way around.
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