Some simple math. 15% of the VLD at the Tiggers didn’t pref. 5% of the people who broke didn’t pref. That seems significant enough to me, although whether it means that people who didn’t pref aren’t intrinsically as good as people who did or whether their not preffing worked against them is hard to determine. But just playing the numbers, your odds are better of breaking if you pref than if you don’t, based on this one statistically useless example. I’ll keep an eye on these numbers going forward, until, perhaps, they are statistically meaningful.
Meanwhile, it was a good weekend for the Sailors. My Pffffters earned themselves a TOC bid, our OIers both broke, and one won the division (and also broke in his other event). The bus showed up and got them to Scarsdale, whence they shared their comfy coach bus for the rest of the trip. Our volunteer parent claimed to have had a good time judging, and everybody got home in one piece. I’m a little upset that we lost our meeting this week due to bad weather; I guess I’ll have to throw together a chez to make up for it, probably tomorrow.
Princeton is me and O’C in the LD divisions, and has been for a while. Of course, in O’C’s case, he was with me in body only (sometimes), because for most of the tournament his arm is incomplete unless he’s texting someone at one of the other tournaments that Bronx is attending (they were spread out all over the country). Yesterday he left his phone at home, and apparently he just sat in a corner all day under his trusty, rusty Muskie for President poster and cried like an abandoned baby. I’ve never seen anyone so attached to one of these things. Then again, most people I hang out with are about ready to enter the nursing home, and the only people they text are their own kids. Oh, well. This will probably be O’C’s last Tigger for a while, as he works on readjusting his schedule for some of that little thing called non-debate, or, alternately, “A Life.” I endorse this completely (his getting a life outside debate, not his not working the Tigger); running a big team that competes every weekend plus teaching all week does look suspiciously like no time left over for anything else, period. There’s other things in the world. Like planning for the DisAd14!
Somehow it seems like, aside from late dinners, we never left the tab room all weekend. I had my message alert set to the opening of “Coconut,” and every time it went off everyone in the room sank deeper into the slough of despond. Of course, the Tigs didn’t want to say anything, but I could see it in their slumping shoulders. On the other hand, I got O’C to download Jake Shimabukuru, so we also got a healthy dose of ukulele music, which led JV to the pronouncement that—and this is a shocker—he is not the world’s biggest fan of the ukulele. You could have knocked me over with the proverbial feather. My image of JV hitherto has been of someone pretty much wedded to their ukulele, when not actually coaching or teaching. Who would have thought that I was wrong in this?
Coming up this weekend is Ridge, with e-balloting. This should be fun.
3 comments:
Prof CLG can't help herself: correlation != causation, no matter the significance. Confound: debater experience. Perhaps students/schools who are more experienced know the judge pool and also the pref system better and are thus more likely both to pref and to break.
What you need, my friend, is a controlled randomized trial.
True. Although the schools not preffing have been around since you, i.e., the Dark Ages.
Anyhow, I agree that more data would be nice. But unfortunately, that would mean having more tournaments with more people more often. The bind moggles.
You are, of course, right about the cell phone. I am working on that, too! :o)
For real. Not having it with me for a day was a reminder of what it felt like before I was a Borg.
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