Demolition:Windham Moody Wessell
Sorrel
Demolition:Windham Moody Wessell
Sorrel
The Bonus Army
II:The Sequel Ouisconsin
Honorable Mention (in no particular order): The Late Show, Glory Daze, Servants of Cthulu, Renegades 6.5, H/2, 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Snowballs from Hell, Seedless Grapes, HGB & the 3 Fingers, Supralatsarians II, Tech's Taxi Squad, Purdue Replacement Team, Florida, Maryland, GWU, & MIT.
Next year there will be a quiz on identifying Teams from their pseudonyms.
(all dates tentative)
Late October 1988 Early Bird at Berry CollegeGordon Carper 211 Rollingwood Circle Rome GA 30161 |
January 28,29 Southeastern Invitational at Georgia TechJim Dendy PO Box 31367 Atlanta GA 30332 |
Emory Junior Bird |
|
January 15,16 Sunshine State Invitational at U. FloridaLohse Beeland J Wayne Reitz Union Rm 330 Gainesville FL 32611 |
Florida State Invitational |
|
Allen Ludden Memorial |
and possibly an NC State/ ACC Tournament |
Fall 1988 NYU Invitational |
Winter 1989 Nittany Lion Invitational at Penn State |
November 4,5 1988 Terrapin Invitational |
Winter 1989 Wisconsin Invitational |
February 18,19 1989 US Openat Georgia Tech |
Then, That Sunday at Tech The Gunslingers -- one on one competition between the best.contact Chris Moody: 86 5th Street #9, Atlanta, GA 30338 |
late Winter Tennessee Invitational atUT-Knoxville |
College Bowl Inc. Regionals Å Feb 24,25, 1989 |
As before, the two year subscription rate for BUZZER is $5.00
Make all correspondences to:
David Levinson PO Box 30158 Atlanta, GA 30332
And please, if you are moving, or if you never received this newsletter, contact the publisher at the above address.
Finding good sources to write new questions is a quest many writers undergo. The almanac just won't cut it, and Fred Worth questions are neither new nor challenging. The encyclopedia is filled with facts, but what is really needed is "nifty" knowledge.
This Season's Source for question material is An Incomplete Education by Judy Jones and William Wilson, a compendium of information that the reader should have learned in college - and all good Academic Buzzer Competitors will have. It has sections on most of the major areas of study and is all in all very interesting.
Since this is a new column, reader contributions will be welcome. Last Season's Source (which does not make it pass´e by any means) is Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia- neat stuff mostly about literature and references in literature such as mythology, history, and significant persons.
This BUZZER is dedicated to the best academic buzzer competitor of all time as recognized by his rivals, a man who is one of the few Gentlemen in the game, an individual who represents the ideal of what a player should be -- Tom Waters.
Well, it seems as if the good guys are currently running the show at CBI. New questions have been promised for the 1989 tournaments, the old questions were locked away. An experienced question writer is solely responsible for the effort, and all may be right with the world. However, the last two years were not right, and the moral thing for College Bowl Incorporated and Richard Reid Productions would be to give free entry to this year's regionals for any team that paid for either of the last two seasons monstrosities. That would be the right thing. It would cost them money, but then again, they should have a bankroll from last year, and they have some silly game show in production (Keeping College Bowl off the air, thankfully). Support Free Regionals in 1989!
There comes a time in every sport where the analysis takes more time then the play itself, Football is a one hour game that takes three hours, Basketball is 48 minutes but takes at least two hours, Baseball games are the epitome of this. Why- so commentators can tell you in detail greater than you want to know the statistics of the game. As Buzzer competitions approach this exalted status in American sport, it is time to develop the statistics to keep the commentators and spectators talking. Two different areas come forth for analysis- the questions and the answers.
Questions come in various levels of difficulty- from things any five year old should know to questions a graduate student majoring in that field doesn't know. Applying the Mohs Scale of Hardness to Questions, is a start, but is not enough. Each individual clue is of varying difficulty- proceeding from Diamond or Topaz to Talc or Gypsum. The Mohs level of a question can be found by taking the mean of the Mohs level of all of the clues. The Hardness of an entire round can be found the same way. Ideally each tournament should set a desired average Mohs level, and try to have each round conform to it. It is difficult, however, to judge what is difficult. As an example, I will provide Mohs rankings (on the new 15 ranking scale) for a series of related facts (and by doing so in widely read form thereby lower their difficulty ... just one of those paradoxes) One way of thinking about is, you should be able to get all of the questions at the first three clue rankings, all of the second three, two of the third three, one of the fourth three, and none of the fifth three. Nobody should know #16!
Rank. Question
0. American Literature,
Physics,
Geography,
American History
1. Who wrote Moby Dick?
This man is best known for developing the formula E = mc^2
This Egyptian river...
Who was the first President of the United States?
2. Who wrote Billy Budd?
The first states that force equals mass times acceleration...
What is the capital of Soviet Union?
Who was the first Vice President of the United States?
3. He was a neighbor and friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne ...
This universal constant is equal to 3.0 x 10^8 metres per second
What are the three capitals of South Africa?
Who was elected President of the United States in 1872?
4. Who wrote Omoo?
This property of a wave is the inverse of its frequency...
This city was called Lutetia by the Romans ...
Who was the first Secretary of the Treasury?
5. Who wrote the work subtitled A Peep at Polynesian Life?
Who developed the law which states that Æmomentum times Ævelocity is greater than or equal to a constant
What city is at the mouth of the Yang-tze River?
Who was the first Secretary of the Navy?
6. Subtitled , Or The Whale, this work features ...
What law of astronomy states that equal areas are swept out in equal amounts of time by a planet's orbit?
What body of water separates the Philippines from Indochina?
This Colonel is best known as friend and advisor to Woodrow Wilson.
7. Two characters in this Melville short story are Turkey and Ginger Nut,
What man won the 1918 Nobel Prize for physics
What strait separates The Black Sea from the Sea of Marmara?
This bloody Civil War Battle was fought September 17,1862
8. His The Confidence Man is a cynical and satirical novel ...
If a 100kg mass is traveling in a circle, radius 9 metres, at a velocity of 4 metres per second, FTP what is the centripetal force experienced by the mass?
What mountain range lies along the border of Algeria and Moracco
What group of advisors included Rexford Tugwell and Harry Hopkins?
9. Born in 1819 into a once prominent New York Family, he married Elizabeth Shaw ...
This physicist was the first Secretary of the Smithsonian
What one nation is bordered by both Angola and Cameroon?
This Alabama born Supreme Court justice ...
10. The Piazza Tales collect some of his famous short stories, including "Benito Cereno" ...
If a spaceship sitting still appears to 100 metres long, how long would it appear if relative to you it was moving at 80% of the speed of light?
To what nation does the area known as the Caprivi Strip belong?
With what issue did the Darby Lumber Co. case deal?
11. A pessimistic and deeply personal book, his Pierre,or the Ambiguities ...
In 1888 he was the first physicist to observe the photoelectric effect?
What is the capital of the West German state of Hesse?
This Seminole Indian (not Osceola) ...
12. About the U.S. Civil War he wrote much poetry, collected in Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War ...
This physicist discovered cesium and rubidium in 1860 and 1861?
October Revolution Is., Komsomolets Is, and Bolshevik Is. are the three major islands of what group?
He was Secretary of War in Andrew Jackson's second cabinet ...
13. His voyage to Liverpool became the subject of his fourth novel Redburn.
In electronics, what type of bridge has a parallel combination of a resistor and a capacitor in one arm and a series combination in another
What peninsula separates the Gulf of Ob from the Kara Sea?
This battle was the land version of the Battle of Ft. McHenry ...
14. His Mardi and a Voyage Thither begins as an adventure story, but ends in a philisophic allegory ...
What Swiss-American physicist was the first Director-General of CERN?
What is the capital of the Russian ASSR of Nagorno Karabahk
This movement was begun by Lewis Miller and John Vincent ...
15. He shares his name with an island fifty miles due North of Darwin Aus.
This physicst was born in 1908 in Grand Valley, Colorado
To what nation do the St. Paul Rocks belong?
How many people signed the Mayflower Compact?
16. (Even Harder) This poem, from Melville's Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War expresses the authors abhorance of violence and ...
If a neutron were to spontaneously decay, without an interaction with another particle, what series of particles would be produced?
What major city is located at 52º 15' N, 21º 00' E
In what year did William Seward become Governor of New York
These rankings were composed by experienced players, but it is still subjective. Next time Further Statistical tools.
If your team has the support of overeager alumni, you too can have your own bumper stickers printed as shown below:
© 1988 Intercollegiate Buzzer Association