I recently created a new website for IU Quizbowl Club. It will be very useful in communicating with members throughout the course of this and future years.
I especially like the embedded Google Calendar, which serves as a single updatable source for our entire year’s schedule. It can be easily synchronized very easily to iCal, Google Calendar, or Mozilla Sunbird, and comes with a much better web interface than I could ever design myself.
My team was instead dubbed “Time Without Bells” as part of a series of inscrutable team names devised by the tournament director. I was much more out of practice than I thought, and combined with a notable deficiency in math and physics, this resulted in a worse personal performance than anticipated. The stats are available here.
In case you are wondering who “Carlo’s Bitch” is, that’s Nick, who managed to net -5 points for his team over the whole day. I mean, I know I only got 95 points, but that’s a lot higher than -5.
One of the best parts of CO, however, was having another van ride with the New Trier team, known for our amazing van conversations on the way to tournaments. For instance:
Jonah: “I’ve been working since legally allowed.”
Carlo: “Yeah, but you can’t be in porn until you’re 18.”
Nick: “When can you start child porn? Oh wait…”
Several other conversations were even less appropriate.
Anyhow, I’ve learned that I need to learn a lot more organic chem and molecular biology to really have a chance at more science questions. Time to crack open that organic chem book again!
Oh right, and write questions. I should do that.
I’m leaving Bloomington this weekend to participate in the 2008 incarnation of the Chicago Open, an open quizbowl tournament (essentially, the ultimate national championship), held at the University of Chicago.
I will be playing on a team dubbed “Sophomoronic” with three other soon-to-be-sophomores, including one long-time rival and occasional teammate, Greg Peterson. The great prognosticators that be (i.e. Matt Weiner) have pegged us at 10th out of 17, which would be pretty cool if it actually happened. Unfortunately I’m extraordinarily out of practice, but I plan to read lots of music and science questions tonight, so maybe I’ll get back in the swing of things a bit.
More Chicago Open news to come later.
Hey guys, I’ve released my acfdb project to categorize collegiate quizbowl tossups. Here’s some information about it:
You can use the database at http://www.carloangiuli.com/acfdb. It currently has all the ACF tossups since 1999 Regionals in it, for a total of 10,703 questions, all of which have been categorized. (Many thanks to everyone who helped out, especially Jonah Greenthal and Ben Cohen, who apparently have nothing better to do than categorize thousands of tossups.)
The idea here is to allow people to more effectively study particular subjects. You can search for tossups by text, but you can also find all tossups on a certain category. Tossups are all labeled by their year, level, author, and number, so you can easily find them in the original packets if you’re interested. I haven’t added bonuses, because this isn’t meant as a place to read packets from — it’s just meant as a study tool, and tossups are much more uniform and easier to study off of. ACFDB features a powerful Boolean search tool and can export the results to a text file.
Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions!
Aegis Questions has started a blog with our ideas about quizbowl. After great deliberation, we decided to name it “Much Ado About Quizbowl.” Y’know, because, um, people spend a lot of time quizbowling it up. Including us.
We hope to write in it a decent amount, which shouldn’t be too hard, seeing as we spend too much time on quizbowl and have lots of ideas about it… But if you have anything you’d like us to write about, just let us know! Otherwise, um, go read it sometimes. It’ll be good stuff.
Yesterday, Indiana University’s Quizbowl Club attended its first ever quizbowl tournament, the 2008 Matt Cvijanovich Memorial Novice Tournament at the University of Illinois. Seven teams came, including a team from Lawrence “University” headed by my friend and occasional nemesis, Greg Peterson. (If that name is familiar to you, perhaps that’s because last summer, he placed second on the Jeopardy! Teen Tournament.)
We, too, placed second yesterday, behind Lawrence. After a full round-robin with all seven teams, we were 4-2 and entered the top playoff bracket as the third-place team. After another round-robin between the top four teams (Lawrence, Chicago A, Indiana, and Northwestern) we ended 6-3, in second place to Lawrence’s 7-2.
We then entered an advantaged final against Lawrence, in which we had to win two games or they had to win one. Lawrence’s only two losses during the day had been to us, but we lost to them 245-200 in the first final game.
We also came in second to Lawrence in virtually every statistic: points per game, margin of victory, tossups, negs (hah!), bonus points, and bonus conversion. Greg was the high-scorer, I was fifth, and Nick was seventh.
I was very pleased with how we did. Despite the fact that nobody on our team had played competitive quizbowl in the past nine months (or longer), we managed to beat many teams that have been playing a lot this year, especially Lawrence. Also, given that it was also everyone’s first foray into college quizbowl, I’m pleased that we not only did well, but actually knew stuff! The college game, even at the lowest levels, covers vast amounts of knowledge that high school never touched, and we showed we knew enough of it.
Nick and I are used to working together and know exactly what each other has to offer, but Luke and Alex showed they could contribute a lot to our team, too. Alex, in particular, comes from a very different quizbowl tradition than the other three of us do, and he put up a solid 75 points over the course of the day.
We did realize that there are certain things we don’t know much about–like anything related to anthropology–so we’ll certainly focus on those things for next year. I also look forward to getting more people interested in the team (sign up for our intramural tournament!) and know of at least one person who will be attending Indiana next year and would be a great help to our team.
Nick and I went back to Chicagoland to moderate for Scobol Solo this weekend. I had a pretty good time, but I wish I could have moderated some of the better matches. My room lacked particularly good competitors, with a few exceptions.
A nod, however, to Tim Ekl, for whom I moderated a whopping three times (twice as Tim Ekl, once as a phantom player) in my eleven rounds of moderating. That’s over 27%!
I saw some people I haven’t seen in a while, and a lot of people I have never seen before as well. It’s always interesting to witness the changing of the guard as the next season rolls around. Even though most of the people I moderated for didn’t know me, a few people did tell me I was a very good moderator, which I appreciated.
But I’m not going to lie; the field was not very impressive this year. As I had predicted, Greg Gauthier won, but blew everyone else out of the water in the final. Last year, he only scored 8 points in the finals, losing by two to me. Siva was the morning champion, which wasn’t too surprising; if Greg was going to lose a match, it would have to be to someone who was extremely fast, like Siva. Unfortunately, Siva made no noise in the finals after entering with the 9 points graciously provided by Greg’s current score. He simply alternated correct and incorrect answers.
As to the rest of the finalists, there weren’t really any surprises except for Tony Cao, who landed in the top four. Unlike many years, someone known won the desperation shot, Caitie Flynn, and she did decently in the finals. John Brown and Robert Sido were fairly expected; Michael Jiang and Mike Verity are good players who weren’t necessarily expected to make it into the finals.
I will likely come back next week on Friday, meaning that I can moderate at Kickoff as well.
Yesterday, we received NAQT’s New College Package, a set of a bajillion good practice questions.
Today, we received our two Anderson buzzer systems, and Nick and I met with Tim, our faculty advisor. We talked about how quizbowl works, and what we want to do with the team.
Soon, we will be holding some small interest meetings, at least on my floor. I live in the central neighborhood’s Honors Residential Community, and a lot of people have played quizbowl at some point, and are interested in at least trying it out. In a few weeks, we should be holding a general callout meeting, and hopefully in the early spring we can hold an intramural tournament.
Between NAQT’s shipment and the Stanford Packet Archive, we have a huge amount of practice fodder, and we have two lockout systems to actually practice on. I’m happy about the progress we’ve made.
I just received my championship ring from the Panasonic Academic Challenge. It’s pretty awesome.
I need to write more questions! Also, if you’re in Aegis and you’re reading this, go write questions! Also, if you’re not in Aegis and you intend to be, send in your application!