271 teams for this week’s first MHL. 70 of them are policy, 30 PF, the rest LD (127 of these being novices). Yee-ha! Just when Bronx Science thought that it was going back into its box, we return the following weekend with one of the biggest tournaments in the northeast. Again. (Better them than me.)
As a general rule, the first MHL of the year, attended as it is by multitudes of raw recruits, is something of a jumble. There’s a lot of not knowing where to go and what to do, all of it come by honestly. Throw into this a bunch of parent judges that we’ll be training, not to mention that I’ll be training Go-go Joe on the back end on how to tab, and you’ve got quite the clambake. The confusion usually settles down by halfway into round 2, however. I hope.
This week’s Sailorfest was remarkably well unattended. (I went looking for a jokey tumbleweeds image to post here, and found this: http://www.thirstyrock.com/Tumbleweed.htm Check it out, and leave it on for a few seconds. Welcome to the 90s.) The plebes were there in newbie force, but the rest of the team was apparently abducted by aliens. Of course, I had planned for a 50/50, so the second 50 was all vamping, entirely calorie- and nutrition-free. Oy. Better planning in the future. In any case, two of the plebes are set for Saturday. As for the others, one looks to have cases ready by Easter, and the couple of others could be ready any time from right this second to that date on the Mayan calendar when Roland Emmerich comes out with a new movie. (I shudder at the thought. Of the movie, that is, not the cases.) We’ll see. One thing we did at the meeting was some ad hoc flowing instruction. Went well. I read a paragraph, and some of them caught a few words. Then, for comparison, I asked SuperSquirrel (who did show up) to flow a different paragraph, and, well, she missed maybe a few words. Very impressive display, if you ask me. If you learn nothing else from debate you will learn how to take supremely solid notes, a skill that will actually be worth something beyond high school. So at least we’re good for something.
TVFT was interesting last night. We mostly talked about placing judges in rounds, everything from random to MJP. The more you look at this stuff, the harder it gets to hold some hard-and-fast opinion that it ought to be one specific way (the story of my life). I’ll be working on the podcast after this gets posted, and it should be up before long. Keep an ear out. (And do comment over at the TVFT blog. We want to hear what people have to say.)
And I’ll explain what I meant about something a few days ago: Max Katz. The K sound is spelled both with an X and a K. The S sound is spelled with both an X and a Z. It should be, unquestionably, Maks Kats. Or, questionably, Max Xatx. I sort of like Max Xatx; it’s like an old D.C. superhero secret identity. Of course, my favorite wrong name of all time (aside from names like Beauchamps pronounced Beechum and Talifiero pronounce Tolliver and those other British jumbles) is Sean Bean. Is it pronounced Seen Been, long Es? Or Shawn Bawn? The correct pronunciation is, needless to say, totally ridiculous. (Sean, if you’re reading this blog, my apologies for dragging you into this discussion. Then again, if you’re reading this blog, your career is worse off than any of us could have imagined, and that’s something I do not feel a need to apologize about. You can’t blame me for that.)
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Final answer? Part Two: Final Harder
Max’s question in the comment to the recent post highlights the original problem. The judge starts talking, and the debater responds, and then the judge is not sure of the decision anymore.
Well, that could happen, for a variety of reasons. But here’s the issue. What about the other debater? Does he get to put his two cents in too? Going back to the first debater, how long does he have to speak in the afterround? How long does the opponent have to speak in the afterround rebuttal? What, exactly, are the rules for the debate after the debate is over?
That’s the crux of this. The debate is over. In this example, the decision has been made. Given the number of split decisions in multi-judge rounds, of course there’s more than one way to look at a round, and an alternate decision is often possible. But that alternate decision wasn’t made in this case, even if it might have been. At the point where we go off the clock, and beyond the rules, and are still arguing, and the ballot is still fair game, we lose the ability to provide a fair environment for the contest. When you think about it, most of the rules of the activity are devoted entirely to that fairness, rather than content.
Back to the beginning. The round ends when the timer sounds after the 2AR. Then the judge makes a decision, absent any interference, in a reasonable amount of time, studying the flow and, if necessary, calling for evidence. There can absolutely be no calls for clarification from the debaters: they already had 16 carefully regulated minutes each to do their clarifying. At the point where the judge announces that a decision is reached, and/or the ballot is collected, the decision is final.
Well, that could happen, for a variety of reasons. But here’s the issue. What about the other debater? Does he get to put his two cents in too? Going back to the first debater, how long does he have to speak in the afterround? How long does the opponent have to speak in the afterround rebuttal? What, exactly, are the rules for the debate after the debate is over?
That’s the crux of this. The debate is over. In this example, the decision has been made. Given the number of split decisions in multi-judge rounds, of course there’s more than one way to look at a round, and an alternate decision is often possible. But that alternate decision wasn’t made in this case, even if it might have been. At the point where we go off the clock, and beyond the rules, and are still arguing, and the ballot is still fair game, we lose the ability to provide a fair environment for the contest. When you think about it, most of the rules of the activity are devoted entirely to that fairness, rather than content.
Back to the beginning. The round ends when the timer sounds after the 2AR. Then the judge makes a decision, absent any interference, in a reasonable amount of time, studying the flow and, if necessary, calling for evidence. There can absolutely be no calls for clarification from the debaters: they already had 16 carefully regulated minutes each to do their clarifying. At the point where the judge announces that a decision is reached, and/or the ballot is collected, the decision is final.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Final answer?
It takes a while to get back on track after 4 days away. My feeds, for instance, both for debate and the DJ, are woefully unattended, being secondary functions at best. I did prep up last night for tonight’s Sailorfest, however. Last chance to convince the plebes that, for reasons that are apparently hard to understand, actually going out and debating is one of those pesky albeit integral aspects of being a member of the debate team. Also, I had a moment of enlightenment on Bump and realized that, worst-case scenario, I could put tab in a classroom and a bunch of PF rounds in the library. The waiting list has shrunk accordingly. And it’s not as if our library is all that great as far as tab rooms go. No comfy chairs, no internet, nothing special. In fact, putting tab and ballots over by the cafeteria makes a ton of logistical sense. Even if things settle down and the entries start dropping like flies, I may still make the move. And last night I even entered some NFL points; I’m hoping to catch up with O’C and the Scientologists one of these days. Except he knows all the ways to garner points and I only know one: try to remember to enter points now and then. No surprise there, eh?
One issue that I think I can address without too much mental exercise (there’s a couple of issues outstanding) is that of when a ballot is over. That is, at what point is a ballot considered submitted and fixed? There are different aspects to this worth discussing. First of all, we need to establish the premise that the ballot is the judge’s evaluation of the round. Period. Nothing else should play into this. Other things often do, but they shouldn’t. We all know that sometimes judges vote on reputation, or personal bias, or something patently bogus, which is something we, as a community, can’t do very much about. If the topic is capital punishment and I’m against capital punishment and no argument will ever convince me that cp is good in any situation, then I shouldn’t be judging that round. Most of us aren’t like that, at least that baldly, but there are other, more subtle prejudices: a tendency to prefer one kind of debate over another, for instance. But even judges with strong opinions about debate are usually more than open to whatever goes on in the round, and don’t vote on their preference when it obviously lost the round at hand. What I’m saying is, the goal is that the ballot reflect the round, and the round only.
With this idea in mind, it is pretty standard to suggest that, after the round ends, the debaters should not continue debating it. While there are rules about speeches and timings during the round, there are no rules surrounding how much time someone can spend convincing the judge after the last timer has gonged. If the judge is unclear on a point, asking the debaters for clarification is not the solution. Of course, a judge can ask to read evidence. That’s fine by me. On the other hand, I personally am a little against asking for a case; if the debater was so garbled that you couldn’t understand what he or she was saying when he or she said it, unless there’s a physical disability involved, reading the case is counter to the idea of public speaking, an inherent aspect of debate. To me, reading a case is sort of cheating on the judge’s part, and not fair to the debater whose case isn’t read. Unless of course both cases are read, at which point we could all have stayed home in the first place. So, point number one, no more persuading after the round has ended.
Occasionally (and this happened at BBv3.0), a judge will come by and say that they want to change the speaker points after a ballot is entered (sometimes way after a ballot is entered). This is not allowed. (Of course, if they’ve read the results posting and seen an inaccuracy, that’s different, and of course we’ll fix our errors.) The thing is, we have no idea what has transpired since the ballot was delivered, and neither do the debaters. Once you’ve given your ballot to the runner (or ballot table, or tab), it’s over. We could all reflect till the cows come home and honestly and sincerely change our minds a hundred times, so we set a moment beyond which you can’t do that. That moment is when you pass the ballot along into the system.
A third case is when a judge changes his or her mind while contemplating the round. This is not unheard of, and what happens is this. The round ends, and the judge precipitously marks up the ballot. But, while putting together the RFD and studying the flow, the judge realizes that such-and-such was said or whatever, and that the decision is not as originally seen. The ballot is changed accordingly. (This happens a lot with speaker points, less often with actual decisions). In these cases, it is simply the judge sitting there thinking and making a decision. There is no discussion with anyone. Now the thing is, we’ve already established that there’s no discussion after the round, and no changing the ballot after it’s handed in. But the period between the end of the round and the handing in of the ballot is the judge’s time to do whatever the judge wants in figuring the round in the privacy of that judge’s mind. I’ve judged a lot of rounds in my day and some of them were over in the AC and some of them took a lot of time after the round was over to parse, argument by argument, weight by weight. So what we are asking for in tab is that the judge deliver the best decision possible, by honest means. If it takes a while, and requires some paradigm shifting, so be it. (Just don’t hold up the tournament, you yabbo!)
By the way, along these lines, quite a few ballots are filled out incorrectly by a judge, and then corrected by that judge, without any influence whatsoever. We write down the wrong thing, fill out the wrong box, whatever. Would the rule be, if we didn’t accept what I’m saying here about this situation, that if a judge incorrectly fills out a ballot, an honest mistake, we are stuck with the wrong decision because that was the original decision? Na’ah.
So the deal is this: once the round is over, the judge is required to use nothing but the judge noodle to sort it out (although with recourse to evidence, if desired). No further debating may ensue, and it is the judge’s responsibility to prohibit such debating. Then, the judge will think and do whatever it takes until submitting the ballot, at which point it is fixed for all time. These parameters are clear and logical. And they’re the ones we use week after week after week (after week after week—I need a new night job!).
One issue that I think I can address without too much mental exercise (there’s a couple of issues outstanding) is that of when a ballot is over. That is, at what point is a ballot considered submitted and fixed? There are different aspects to this worth discussing. First of all, we need to establish the premise that the ballot is the judge’s evaluation of the round. Period. Nothing else should play into this. Other things often do, but they shouldn’t. We all know that sometimes judges vote on reputation, or personal bias, or something patently bogus, which is something we, as a community, can’t do very much about. If the topic is capital punishment and I’m against capital punishment and no argument will ever convince me that cp is good in any situation, then I shouldn’t be judging that round. Most of us aren’t like that, at least that baldly, but there are other, more subtle prejudices: a tendency to prefer one kind of debate over another, for instance. But even judges with strong opinions about debate are usually more than open to whatever goes on in the round, and don’t vote on their preference when it obviously lost the round at hand. What I’m saying is, the goal is that the ballot reflect the round, and the round only.
With this idea in mind, it is pretty standard to suggest that, after the round ends, the debaters should not continue debating it. While there are rules about speeches and timings during the round, there are no rules surrounding how much time someone can spend convincing the judge after the last timer has gonged. If the judge is unclear on a point, asking the debaters for clarification is not the solution. Of course, a judge can ask to read evidence. That’s fine by me. On the other hand, I personally am a little against asking for a case; if the debater was so garbled that you couldn’t understand what he or she was saying when he or she said it, unless there’s a physical disability involved, reading the case is counter to the idea of public speaking, an inherent aspect of debate. To me, reading a case is sort of cheating on the judge’s part, and not fair to the debater whose case isn’t read. Unless of course both cases are read, at which point we could all have stayed home in the first place. So, point number one, no more persuading after the round has ended.
Occasionally (and this happened at BBv3.0), a judge will come by and say that they want to change the speaker points after a ballot is entered (sometimes way after a ballot is entered). This is not allowed. (Of course, if they’ve read the results posting and seen an inaccuracy, that’s different, and of course we’ll fix our errors.) The thing is, we have no idea what has transpired since the ballot was delivered, and neither do the debaters. Once you’ve given your ballot to the runner (or ballot table, or tab), it’s over. We could all reflect till the cows come home and honestly and sincerely change our minds a hundred times, so we set a moment beyond which you can’t do that. That moment is when you pass the ballot along into the system.
A third case is when a judge changes his or her mind while contemplating the round. This is not unheard of, and what happens is this. The round ends, and the judge precipitously marks up the ballot. But, while putting together the RFD and studying the flow, the judge realizes that such-and-such was said or whatever, and that the decision is not as originally seen. The ballot is changed accordingly. (This happens a lot with speaker points, less often with actual decisions). In these cases, it is simply the judge sitting there thinking and making a decision. There is no discussion with anyone. Now the thing is, we’ve already established that there’s no discussion after the round, and no changing the ballot after it’s handed in. But the period between the end of the round and the handing in of the ballot is the judge’s time to do whatever the judge wants in figuring the round in the privacy of that judge’s mind. I’ve judged a lot of rounds in my day and some of them were over in the AC and some of them took a lot of time after the round was over to parse, argument by argument, weight by weight. So what we are asking for in tab is that the judge deliver the best decision possible, by honest means. If it takes a while, and requires some paradigm shifting, so be it. (Just don’t hold up the tournament, you yabbo!)
By the way, along these lines, quite a few ballots are filled out incorrectly by a judge, and then corrected by that judge, without any influence whatsoever. We write down the wrong thing, fill out the wrong box, whatever. Would the rule be, if we didn’t accept what I’m saying here about this situation, that if a judge incorrectly fills out a ballot, an honest mistake, we are stuck with the wrong decision because that was the original decision? Na’ah.
So the deal is this: once the round is over, the judge is required to use nothing but the judge noodle to sort it out (although with recourse to evidence, if desired). No further debating may ensue, and it is the judge’s responsibility to prohibit such debating. Then, the judge will think and do whatever it takes until submitting the ballot, at which point it is fixed for all time. These parameters are clear and logical. And they’re the ones we use week after week after week (after week after week—I need a new night job!).
Monday, October 19, 2009
Aftermath
Debating at a major tournament has to be pretty draining, but at least you get out before the tab room and you arrive in the morning after the tab room. In other words, the people who sleep the least on a tournament weekend, aside from the tournament directors who leave after and arrive before even tab, are the yabbos at the computer. Like me and Kaz on LD and Stefan and Nicole and Sarah on Policy. I don’t know about any of the others, but the minute I got home yesterday I fell asleep. I set a timer to wake me up in half an hour, at which point I got up and started dinner and then I lit a fire and read the papers and did the puzzle and then we ate and shortly thereafter, after reading O’C’s various requests for paperwork (he even saves the wrappers from the deli sandwiches in the Bronxology archives, so every other document having to do with the event is obviously on his to-get list as well, unlike the rest of us who, aside from saving the results pdf, toss out the entire thing, including the lost and found items, about an hour before the final round is started), I tucked in for the night. I was, in a word, pooped. It’s nice to know that the next three weekends are walks in the park, one-day affairs with novices and JVers. It will allow me to recharge the old batteries for Bump (which is still oversubscribed—would you people PLEASE drop some entries!). Autumn used to be a lot easier, but nowadays, it’s the Yale-Monti-BBv3.0 triangle, with Bump for dessert a few weeks later, followed almost immediately by the Tiggers, who need a bit more hand-holding than the average bear. Then things lighten up. Finally.
At one point in the tournament this last weekend, I got pissed off at something or other, as I tend to do at all tournaments (and which, of course, I immediately regret). I find it interesting that my emotional level is so high at these events. At the DJ, my emotional level is roughly set at comatose. I read and write and edit, all very quiet, intellectual pastimes. I mean, I also schedule and organize and manage and all that sort of thing, and occasionally I am forced to cock an eyebrow, but only one at a time (although, if necessary, I can do one or the other or both, as warranted). But the tide seldom rises particularly high, and we seldom see a whitecap out on the waves, and most of the winds are warm and balmy. Meanwhile, at tournaments, the adrenaline level for everybody is set to boil, and all the winds are hot and barmy. Maybe that’s why I like doing this. It puts a little sizzle in the old existence. I mean, I can’t imagine not doing it. So, yeah, it poops me out, but I like being pooped out. What the hell else would I have been doing in my spare time?
Some interesting questions arose over the weekend. I want to talk about the nature of strikes and rankings on TVFT. Some people obviously have a strategy in mind with these, and it would be nice to sort it out. The thing is, plenty of superlative judges are ranked low by schools that obviously know they’re superlative. An interesting anomaly, obviously for political reasons (as I’ve mentioned here when talking about the RR). We should clarify this. (Also, for the record, strikes should not preclude a ranking: I might strike an A judge for reasons having nothing to do with my estimation of that judge’s skill as a judge.) Max Katz (a name that strikes me as being terribly misspelled) brought up an interesting point on flying pigs that deserves its own posting here. Also the issue of when a ballot is final needs to be addressed, as this came up a couple of times in different contexts (and has arisen at other tournaments recently as well). All in good time, my pretty, all in good time…
By the way, I’m sorry that we didn’t do TVFT last week, but O’C claimed to be too busy. Yeah, right. Getting a pedicure, probably. What else did he have to do last week? Jeesh.
At one point in the tournament this last weekend, I got pissed off at something or other, as I tend to do at all tournaments (and which, of course, I immediately regret). I find it interesting that my emotional level is so high at these events. At the DJ, my emotional level is roughly set at comatose. I read and write and edit, all very quiet, intellectual pastimes. I mean, I also schedule and organize and manage and all that sort of thing, and occasionally I am forced to cock an eyebrow, but only one at a time (although, if necessary, I can do one or the other or both, as warranted). But the tide seldom rises particularly high, and we seldom see a whitecap out on the waves, and most of the winds are warm and balmy. Meanwhile, at tournaments, the adrenaline level for everybody is set to boil, and all the winds are hot and barmy. Maybe that’s why I like doing this. It puts a little sizzle in the old existence. I mean, I can’t imagine not doing it. So, yeah, it poops me out, but I like being pooped out. What the hell else would I have been doing in my spare time?
Some interesting questions arose over the weekend. I want to talk about the nature of strikes and rankings on TVFT. Some people obviously have a strategy in mind with these, and it would be nice to sort it out. The thing is, plenty of superlative judges are ranked low by schools that obviously know they’re superlative. An interesting anomaly, obviously for political reasons (as I’ve mentioned here when talking about the RR). We should clarify this. (Also, for the record, strikes should not preclude a ranking: I might strike an A judge for reasons having nothing to do with my estimation of that judge’s skill as a judge.) Max Katz (a name that strikes me as being terribly misspelled) brought up an interesting point on flying pigs that deserves its own posting here. Also the issue of when a ballot is final needs to be addressed, as this came up a couple of times in different contexts (and has arisen at other tournaments recently as well). All in good time, my pretty, all in good time…
By the way, I’m sorry that we didn’t do TVFT last week, but O’C claimed to be too busy. Yeah, right. Getting a pedicure, probably. What else did he have to do last week? Jeesh.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
BBv3.0
The Big Bronx is not back. I can attest to this first hand. I used to attend the Big Bronx tournament. It was pretty good, in its heyday.
The tournament that took place this weekend is a whole ‘nother animal. It’s not merely Big Bronx rebooted: it’s Big Bronx version 3.0 for a new millennium. It was not pretty good, it was the strongest tournament Bronx has ever run. Let me put it this way: the 4-3s were all pretty much bid-worthy. The 5-2s were epic. I don’t even want to think about the higher brackets.
Putting this sort of tournament together requires a couple of things. First of all, you’ve got to have judges. If you’re going to get on an airplane, you want a certain level of adjudication that is professional, predictable, and readable. This is not to say that you love all the judges, but you can strike enough of them that you don’t like, and rank all the rest in such a way that you are unlikely to get them in a clutch situation. But here’s the key: there have to be enough of them that only the strong judges ever get their hands on you if you’re in any sort of jeopardy, including the presets. With the number of judges at BBv3.0, hired by the tournament, we were able to place ONLY A judges in the presets, except for the tiniest number of Bs (who certainly looked like As to me, but I was only following the rankings of the community that Anjan and I had struggled over for hours.) After the presets, it was a slam dunk: only As in all the down-2 and down-1 rounds. As the day progressed, only As on all the top three brackets. While this meant that a handful of lower-ranked judges were storming the tab room begging for a round (which ‘ardly ever ‘appens), from the debaters’ point of view, this is as good as it gets.
The second thing you need for this sort of tournament is a machine capable of processing about 500 kids and the attendant number of judges, coaches and innocent bystanders. This is problematic at any tournament, but the issue at Bronx Science is that the building is bigger than downtown Peoria. Making things run in a timely manner—keeping the machine oiled and operating—is an absolute bear. What this takes is, mostly, a team, i.e., students, oiled and stoked to work intelligently. They’ve got to know to get rounds started and to get rounds ended and to get the ballots to tab. At a lot of schools if there’s a problem I can just mosey out of the tabroom and get the missing ballot from the classroom down the hall, but at Bronx, I would need whatever is the equivalent of Peoria’s public transit system. Or a team that knows how to do that job. It wasn’t easy, but the Bronx team figured it out amazingly. Saturday, we were ahead of schedule. Let me phrase that another way: Saturday, we were ahead of schedule. A seven-round tournament, with a runoff. Ahead of schedule. Amazing. Kudos to the Scientists: they did the job!
Even I managed to get into the swing of things. BBv3.0 is a rather serious, complicated tournament, and I wasn’t goofing around with silly stuff on the schematics or anything, not because I couldn’t but I didn’t have the inclination. It was neither the time nor place. I was even obligingly providing O’C with pdfs of the schematics to post on WTF! When has that ever happened?
Of course, the thing was exhausting. For me it started on Thursday and went through some pretty short nights up through Sunday. By Sunday, needless to say, things were on automatic and we were listening to Ukelele Ike songs on the MegaPod, but I have to say, I was pretty pooped by the time it was over.
Bottom line? By me, BBv3.0 has arrived. It has met the standard for top national tournaments by any measure. It has added its own spin to that standard. It treats the participating students with respect and enthusiasm; it treats the coaches with similar respect and enthusiasm. (Crab legs in the judges’ lounge? Great googly-moogly!) I’m even thinking of going again next year.
The tournament that took place this weekend is a whole ‘nother animal. It’s not merely Big Bronx rebooted: it’s Big Bronx version 3.0 for a new millennium. It was not pretty good, it was the strongest tournament Bronx has ever run. Let me put it this way: the 4-3s were all pretty much bid-worthy. The 5-2s were epic. I don’t even want to think about the higher brackets.
Putting this sort of tournament together requires a couple of things. First of all, you’ve got to have judges. If you’re going to get on an airplane, you want a certain level of adjudication that is professional, predictable, and readable. This is not to say that you love all the judges, but you can strike enough of them that you don’t like, and rank all the rest in such a way that you are unlikely to get them in a clutch situation. But here’s the key: there have to be enough of them that only the strong judges ever get their hands on you if you’re in any sort of jeopardy, including the presets. With the number of judges at BBv3.0, hired by the tournament, we were able to place ONLY A judges in the presets, except for the tiniest number of Bs (who certainly looked like As to me, but I was only following the rankings of the community that Anjan and I had struggled over for hours.) After the presets, it was a slam dunk: only As in all the down-2 and down-1 rounds. As the day progressed, only As on all the top three brackets. While this meant that a handful of lower-ranked judges were storming the tab room begging for a round (which ‘ardly ever ‘appens), from the debaters’ point of view, this is as good as it gets.
The second thing you need for this sort of tournament is a machine capable of processing about 500 kids and the attendant number of judges, coaches and innocent bystanders. This is problematic at any tournament, but the issue at Bronx Science is that the building is bigger than downtown Peoria. Making things run in a timely manner—keeping the machine oiled and operating—is an absolute bear. What this takes is, mostly, a team, i.e., students, oiled and stoked to work intelligently. They’ve got to know to get rounds started and to get rounds ended and to get the ballots to tab. At a lot of schools if there’s a problem I can just mosey out of the tabroom and get the missing ballot from the classroom down the hall, but at Bronx, I would need whatever is the equivalent of Peoria’s public transit system. Or a team that knows how to do that job. It wasn’t easy, but the Bronx team figured it out amazingly. Saturday, we were ahead of schedule. Let me phrase that another way: Saturday, we were ahead of schedule. A seven-round tournament, with a runoff. Ahead of schedule. Amazing. Kudos to the Scientists: they did the job!
Even I managed to get into the swing of things. BBv3.0 is a rather serious, complicated tournament, and I wasn’t goofing around with silly stuff on the schematics or anything, not because I couldn’t but I didn’t have the inclination. It was neither the time nor place. I was even obligingly providing O’C with pdfs of the schematics to post on WTF! When has that ever happened?
Of course, the thing was exhausting. For me it started on Thursday and went through some pretty short nights up through Sunday. By Sunday, needless to say, things were on automatic and we were listening to Ukelele Ike songs on the MegaPod, but I have to say, I was pretty pooped by the time it was over.
Bottom line? By me, BBv3.0 has arrived. It has met the standard for top national tournaments by any measure. It has added its own spin to that standard. It treats the participating students with respect and enthusiasm; it treats the coaches with similar respect and enthusiasm. (Crab legs in the judges’ lounge? Great googly-moogly!) I’m even thinking of going again next year.
Friday, October 16, 2009
The only down side was that the awards were covered with wasabi
You should have been there.
The Bronx Round Robin, which probably isn’t called the Bronx Round Robin (that would be too easy), and which didn’t take place in the Bronx (that would be easier still) was this Thursday. Twelve debaters from across your country, down your alley and up your whatever, met to argue whether they should have to actually know anything in order to graduate high school. It was an interesting day.
We met at a very nice venue high above Manhattan on the NYU campus. Nice view, until the rain started. O’C brought in an impressive bagel breakfast, including some serious whitefish. My goal for the day was to prep the Big Jake data; HoraceMann, the Superhero Without any Superpowers, who is now studying film at NYU, was covering my judging obligation. While debaters debated, Anjan and I laboriously pored over the community rankings of the judges, entering the numbers for each job. Pretty straightforward, right?
Meanwhile, before the event, O’C asks me if I can bring a printer down with me. Now, da bruddah weighs about 150 pounds, which is why it’s so amusing to me that the Panivore is our Hardware Engineer: the printer box is bigger than she is (and eats better, as a general rule). Which means there was no way I was lugging that thing around Manhattan (although I wouldn’t have minded if the Panivore were the one doing the lugging, but that’s another story altogether). When we arrived, we put the tournament on Vegas Elvis, but there was still no printer. “No problem,” O’C says. “I live two minutes from here.” This translates into about thirty hours passing before he finally goes out to get the Cruz family memorial printer. While he’s away, he calls half a dozen times to check in. “I’ll be there in three minutes.” “I’ll be there in two minutes.” “I’m buying umbrellas for everybody. I’ll be there in a minute.” I mean, how many tournaments have you been to where they bought you an umbrella? Given that the average high school student doesn’t believe in any outerwear whatsoever, despite weather ranging from sirocco to monsoon to potato blight, this was probably not that bad an idea. This way instead of not wearing their coats they wouldn’t carry their umbrellas. Good thinking on the part of the tournament administration.
Eventually he returned to the Top o’ the Robin with umbrellas and a printer. His final excuse was that it was raining so hard that people kept trying to buy the umbrellas from him. It would have better if he had been able to palm off the printer. In a word, it didn’t. It wouldn’t even come on most of the time, and when it did, it just printed endless copies of its test sheet. It passed the test with flying colors; it just couldn’t print ballots. That O’C had bought this printer back at the same time he bought his original Apple II+, the one with the 48K built-in memory (!), may have been part of the problem. Before the end of the day, it was not just merely dead but really most sincerely dead. As far as I can recollect, either we abandoned it or else Ryan Hamilton lugged it with his dirty laundry back to O’C’s department. It didn’t matter. No one ever wanted to see it again. Trust me on that. By the end of the day, we were asking the judges to write their ballots on, well, whatever came to hand. Used tissues, paper towels, ticket stubs from the local gentleman’s clubs. Whatever.
Lunch was John’s Pizza, of which O’C was mighty proud. It wasn’t bad—as a matter of fact it was pretty good, if you like cold pizza. No doubt transporting it through the blizzard was the problem. This was around the point Lakeland Stefan called us up worried that the snow would cause us to cancel the tournament tomorrow. Good gravy!
For reasons that elude me, the powers that be at NYU decided that we had debated enough rounds at our original venue, and shooed us out to another venue for round 5. This was no real problem. It was only about three or four miles away, on foot, during a typhoon, with twenty people who have never been to NYC before in their lives. What could go wrong?
Actually, this wasn’t as bad as it sounds. We got wet, and frozen, but we made it eventually. The new venue wasn’t half as good as the original one. Rounds were in places like “Igor’s Office” and “Lavatory Next to Abattoir,” but that didn’t stop anybody. Eventually we even had a final. What more could you ask?
After the official proceedings, we all moseyed on over to Japonica, also known as O’C’s home away from home. They know him there. They call him O’C (although with a Japanese accent: it sounds more like O’C, if you know what I mean). Given the amount of sushi that the assembled multitude put away, it’s no wonder they know him there. This is my recommendation to you if you like Japanese food: work hard at debate, and get invited to the Bronx RR. Your reward: the best Japanese food of your life.
And the good news, I was tucked in by midnight. Zzzzzzzzzzz.
The Bronx Round Robin, which probably isn’t called the Bronx Round Robin (that would be too easy), and which didn’t take place in the Bronx (that would be easier still) was this Thursday. Twelve debaters from across your country, down your alley and up your whatever, met to argue whether they should have to actually know anything in order to graduate high school. It was an interesting day.
We met at a very nice venue high above Manhattan on the NYU campus. Nice view, until the rain started. O’C brought in an impressive bagel breakfast, including some serious whitefish. My goal for the day was to prep the Big Jake data; HoraceMann, the Superhero Without any Superpowers, who is now studying film at NYU, was covering my judging obligation. While debaters debated, Anjan and I laboriously pored over the community rankings of the judges, entering the numbers for each job. Pretty straightforward, right?
Meanwhile, before the event, O’C asks me if I can bring a printer down with me. Now, da bruddah weighs about 150 pounds, which is why it’s so amusing to me that the Panivore is our Hardware Engineer: the printer box is bigger than she is (and eats better, as a general rule). Which means there was no way I was lugging that thing around Manhattan (although I wouldn’t have minded if the Panivore were the one doing the lugging, but that’s another story altogether). When we arrived, we put the tournament on Vegas Elvis, but there was still no printer. “No problem,” O’C says. “I live two minutes from here.” This translates into about thirty hours passing before he finally goes out to get the Cruz family memorial printer. While he’s away, he calls half a dozen times to check in. “I’ll be there in three minutes.” “I’ll be there in two minutes.” “I’m buying umbrellas for everybody. I’ll be there in a minute.” I mean, how many tournaments have you been to where they bought you an umbrella? Given that the average high school student doesn’t believe in any outerwear whatsoever, despite weather ranging from sirocco to monsoon to potato blight, this was probably not that bad an idea. This way instead of not wearing their coats they wouldn’t carry their umbrellas. Good thinking on the part of the tournament administration.
Eventually he returned to the Top o’ the Robin with umbrellas and a printer. His final excuse was that it was raining so hard that people kept trying to buy the umbrellas from him. It would have better if he had been able to palm off the printer. In a word, it didn’t. It wouldn’t even come on most of the time, and when it did, it just printed endless copies of its test sheet. It passed the test with flying colors; it just couldn’t print ballots. That O’C had bought this printer back at the same time he bought his original Apple II+, the one with the 48K built-in memory (!), may have been part of the problem. Before the end of the day, it was not just merely dead but really most sincerely dead. As far as I can recollect, either we abandoned it or else Ryan Hamilton lugged it with his dirty laundry back to O’C’s department. It didn’t matter. No one ever wanted to see it again. Trust me on that. By the end of the day, we were asking the judges to write their ballots on, well, whatever came to hand. Used tissues, paper towels, ticket stubs from the local gentleman’s clubs. Whatever.
Lunch was John’s Pizza, of which O’C was mighty proud. It wasn’t bad—as a matter of fact it was pretty good, if you like cold pizza. No doubt transporting it through the blizzard was the problem. This was around the point Lakeland Stefan called us up worried that the snow would cause us to cancel the tournament tomorrow. Good gravy!
For reasons that elude me, the powers that be at NYU decided that we had debated enough rounds at our original venue, and shooed us out to another venue for round 5. This was no real problem. It was only about three or four miles away, on foot, during a typhoon, with twenty people who have never been to NYC before in their lives. What could go wrong?
Actually, this wasn’t as bad as it sounds. We got wet, and frozen, but we made it eventually. The new venue wasn’t half as good as the original one. Rounds were in places like “Igor’s Office” and “Lavatory Next to Abattoir,” but that didn’t stop anybody. Eventually we even had a final. What more could you ask?
After the official proceedings, we all moseyed on over to Japonica, also known as O’C’s home away from home. They know him there. They call him O’C (although with a Japanese accent: it sounds more like O’C, if you know what I mean). Given the amount of sushi that the assembled multitude put away, it’s no wonder they know him there. This is my recommendation to you if you like Japanese food: work hard at debate, and get invited to the Bronx RR. Your reward: the best Japanese food of your life.
And the good news, I was tucked in by midnight. Zzzzzzzzzzz.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Breaking news!!! Bump wants the shirt off your back
But, we're willing to sell you a replacement. Go to the Bump website and click on T-shirts. And yes, this is entirely serious.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Gadgetry, plus fond memories of the frigid Montwegian north
I managed to dig up from my discarded gadget box this little microphone you hook up to your iPod that I haven’t used since my abortive attempt to interview O’C lo these many years ago. (Charter members of the VCA know well what we call “The Irish Interview,” the thought of which always breaks me up, but then again, I’m easy to please, and while I never laugh at my own jokes when I tell them, if I’ve happened to record them, I roll on the floor laughing, so to speak, during playback, unless there’s a lot of cat vomit around or something. I also laugh at my written jokes, some of which are so subtle—like the tag on Monday’s poem—that probably nobody else even knows they’re there.) It seems to work on both the MegaPod and the Touch. I was thinking of doing something ad hoc with Kaz over the weekend (we’ll have a lot of time to kill) about case disclosure in policy. We talked about it a bit at Monti; very illuminating. And, of course, tonight we record Episode 3 of TVFT, also known as Menick, Cruz and the Chipmunk. With luck, last week’s snafu will not reoccur.
Speaking of Monti, while there were no highlights the equal of last year’s “Stop the Rounds!” moment, it was still an enjoyable experience. For those who don’t attend, the tab room is in the library on the 3rd floor, and the ballot table is by the cafeteria on the 1st floor. This distance can easily be covered in under an hour by all but the most lethargic runner, and I can attest to this fact because there was this one kid there who was, by any account, The. Most. Lethargic. Runner. Every time this particular Eeyore arrived with another couple of ballots he would flop down on a chair in sheer exhaustion and proceed to suck all the oxygen out of the room for the next half hour or so. The only thing that kept him going was his iPod. The bad news is that he was listening to Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder,” never exactly the most rousing music, if you know what I mean. (I know what you’re saying: Oh, crap, now I have to speak German to get the jokes? Jeesh!) To overcome this distance gap, there were the ever-amusing walkie-talkies, an annoyance I find perfectly acceptable in the hands of others, as long as those hands are attached to arms attached to bodies that are somewhere else. Squawk squawk, Come in Colonel Klink, etc., etc. Yeah, right. No wonder the ballot table, in the usual overenthusiastic fashion, occasionally felt the urge to assign judges to rounds without discussing it with me, because they’d ping tab and tab would stare at the squawk box and just sneer. Oh, well…
Anyhow, despite the lack of Tiny Thomas running around stopping rounds, there was the sight of RJT counting the money, which she starts doing two minutes after registration ends, and which keeps her busy all the way through semis. Lots of cackling from her direction, until she finds a problem, and then we’re ordering some poor schlub to come to tab at risk of immediate disintegration by ray gun, and then she dresses said schlub down for a while, then turns him upside down to shake the shekels from his pockets. It’s quite a thing to see, and it explains why nobody ever leaves the Kaiser owing them any money. That is, RJT makes sure that nobody ever leaves the Kaiser owing them any money. Ever. It’s as simple as that.
I did feel bad for Tiny Thomas, though, since he was quite dissatisfied with his name on the ballots, since he wishes to be identified clearly with Hasan Massey, who is his father. (This revelation, in episode five of Monti Wars: The Polician Strikes Back, is considered one of the best dramatic moments in the series.) Little Daddy just doesn’t work for me, but then again, Big Daddy never worked either. Screw You Thomas was quite satisfying on my end after reading a bunch of ballots that critiqued the tab room more than they critiqued the debaters, but I did promise that he’d be Little Daddy at Wee Sma’ Lex. Yeah, right. Wee Sma’ Daddy, maybe. Come to think of it, I never did see Tiny Thomas in the flesh, and he actually ran out early and I had to judge one of his rounds (much to the dismay, I’m sure, of the debaters). Screw You Thomas became ever more appropriate.
Other high points were the pairing of the Pfffter rounds with, if I remember correctly, 14 teams, 8 of them Regis. This must be done by hand, of course, and I explained to one and all that I would go precisely by bracket after, first, allowing all the non-Regis to hit only non-Regis in the presets. The amazing thing was that, doing this, I managed to find, in two different non-preset rounds, two different natural non-Regis pairings. To which I could, of course, assign a Regis judge. I always feel bad for any school that is so big in the field; it happens once in a while at MHLs. The thing was, the school that would have alleviated this problem dropped at the last minute. So it goes. Anyhow, aside from having to read the riot act once to a couple of teams from Clueless Academy, this went well enough. The shocking thing is, Regis closed out semis. Who would have guessed?
The food in the judges’ lounge was, as always, superb, while as far as I could tell no one died from the food served to the competitors, or at least died too much. JV and I managed to go out at one point and run smack dab into a Yankees game. We were held at bat-point and challenged, on entry, as to whether we were Yankee fans. JV made the correct answer (“That’s a baseball thing?”) and we were allowed entrance. I also got to visit RJT’s classroom, aka Green Bay East. I was shocked, shocked, to see football items decorating her walls. And her desk. And the floor, the ceiling, the board, and the two little gerbils (Brett and Favre) that she has as class mascots. Very disturbing.
Anyhow, that about sums up the Kaiser Roll. Starting tomorrow, Big Jake, beginning with the RR. Let the award ceremonies begin!
Speaking of Monti, while there were no highlights the equal of last year’s “Stop the Rounds!” moment, it was still an enjoyable experience. For those who don’t attend, the tab room is in the library on the 3rd floor, and the ballot table is by the cafeteria on the 1st floor. This distance can easily be covered in under an hour by all but the most lethargic runner, and I can attest to this fact because there was this one kid there who was, by any account, The. Most. Lethargic. Runner. Every time this particular Eeyore arrived with another couple of ballots he would flop down on a chair in sheer exhaustion and proceed to suck all the oxygen out of the room for the next half hour or so. The only thing that kept him going was his iPod. The bad news is that he was listening to Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder,” never exactly the most rousing music, if you know what I mean. (I know what you’re saying: Oh, crap, now I have to speak German to get the jokes? Jeesh!) To overcome this distance gap, there were the ever-amusing walkie-talkies, an annoyance I find perfectly acceptable in the hands of others, as long as those hands are attached to arms attached to bodies that are somewhere else. Squawk squawk, Come in Colonel Klink, etc., etc. Yeah, right. No wonder the ballot table, in the usual overenthusiastic fashion, occasionally felt the urge to assign judges to rounds without discussing it with me, because they’d ping tab and tab would stare at the squawk box and just sneer. Oh, well…
Anyhow, despite the lack of Tiny Thomas running around stopping rounds, there was the sight of RJT counting the money, which she starts doing two minutes after registration ends, and which keeps her busy all the way through semis. Lots of cackling from her direction, until she finds a problem, and then we’re ordering some poor schlub to come to tab at risk of immediate disintegration by ray gun, and then she dresses said schlub down for a while, then turns him upside down to shake the shekels from his pockets. It’s quite a thing to see, and it explains why nobody ever leaves the Kaiser owing them any money. That is, RJT makes sure that nobody ever leaves the Kaiser owing them any money. Ever. It’s as simple as that.
I did feel bad for Tiny Thomas, though, since he was quite dissatisfied with his name on the ballots, since he wishes to be identified clearly with Hasan Massey, who is his father. (This revelation, in episode five of Monti Wars: The Polician Strikes Back, is considered one of the best dramatic moments in the series.) Little Daddy just doesn’t work for me, but then again, Big Daddy never worked either. Screw You Thomas was quite satisfying on my end after reading a bunch of ballots that critiqued the tab room more than they critiqued the debaters, but I did promise that he’d be Little Daddy at Wee Sma’ Lex. Yeah, right. Wee Sma’ Daddy, maybe. Come to think of it, I never did see Tiny Thomas in the flesh, and he actually ran out early and I had to judge one of his rounds (much to the dismay, I’m sure, of the debaters). Screw You Thomas became ever more appropriate.
Other high points were the pairing of the Pfffter rounds with, if I remember correctly, 14 teams, 8 of them Regis. This must be done by hand, of course, and I explained to one and all that I would go precisely by bracket after, first, allowing all the non-Regis to hit only non-Regis in the presets. The amazing thing was that, doing this, I managed to find, in two different non-preset rounds, two different natural non-Regis pairings. To which I could, of course, assign a Regis judge. I always feel bad for any school that is so big in the field; it happens once in a while at MHLs. The thing was, the school that would have alleviated this problem dropped at the last minute. So it goes. Anyhow, aside from having to read the riot act once to a couple of teams from Clueless Academy, this went well enough. The shocking thing is, Regis closed out semis. Who would have guessed?
The food in the judges’ lounge was, as always, superb, while as far as I could tell no one died from the food served to the competitors, or at least died too much. JV and I managed to go out at one point and run smack dab into a Yankees game. We were held at bat-point and challenged, on entry, as to whether we were Yankee fans. JV made the correct answer (“That’s a baseball thing?”) and we were allowed entrance. I also got to visit RJT’s classroom, aka Green Bay East. I was shocked, shocked, to see football items decorating her walls. And her desk. And the floor, the ceiling, the board, and the two little gerbils (Brett and Favre) that she has as class mascots. Very disturbing.
Anyhow, that about sums up the Kaiser Roll. Starting tomorrow, Big Jake, beginning with the RR. Let the award ceremonies begin!
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Tab browsing
So I suspended the Tabroom account on Facebook. It was supposed to echo the Twitter @DebateTab, which was problematic at best, but there was also the issue of keeping track of “friends” and the like. One Facebook account is enough for anyone. Two smacks of hubris. If people are too anti-Twitter to follow the proceedings, such as they are, that way, then they can take the proverbial flying leap.
I think that tomorrow night the Tres Hombres will be discussing tabbing, especially in light of our latest drive to publicize what’s going on in general, but that won’t stop me from talking a little today about who breaks and why. This came up in Monticello, and in a different way with Big Jake. Here’s my thoughts.
The first way to break at a tournament is to win all your prelim rounds. This is usually quite effective. The second way to break at a tournament is to win all but one of your prelim rounds. This also usually works. In fact, Menick’s Law #2874 states that it is desirable to lose one of your random rounds, as this puts you into the down-one bracket henceforth, and if your speaks are high, you’re in good shape to win all your rounds in high-low bracketing. This should not be extended, however, in the mistaken belief that Menick’s Law #2874 means that you should lose ALL of your prelim rounds. The odds of breaking in the 0-5 bracket are, in my experience, relatively slim.
Most tournaments break most people who are down two. But they can’t break all of the down-twos without taking extraordinary measures. The reason is simple. You can’t create brackets if you break, say, 39 people. The only way this can be handled is with a run-off round. The problem with a run-off is finding time to do it, and most tournaments simply don’t have that time. TOC does, of course, and we’re making the time at Big Jake to clear all the 5-2s. But these are unusual circumstances, and unusual tournaments. Most tournaments would never end if similar approaches were taken. The alternative to the run-off round is to get higher speaks, although some tournaments prefer other measures for bracketing (opponent wins, for instance). This is an up-for-grabs subject, but the point is, you usually can’t break everybody at the same point in the bracket, so some other measure than win-loss has to come into play. That’s just the way life is. (All competitions work similarly, as far as I can tell, one way or the other.)
The issue of tabbing a tournament is to somehow engineer what is perceived by the tournament director as the correct number of breaks (tab directors suggest, tournament directors decide). Different rules will apply. For instance, in a novice division we tend to be fairly generous, and we’ll almost always break a third of the field if we can because they’re young and we want to be encouraging. Tougher competitions set tougher breaks, but the rule of thumb is about 25% of the field at the most. Bump, for instance, with a field of 120, breaks 32, marginally generous. A tournament with 90-100, maybe break 24. Under 80, probably break to octos.
What’s the difference between 5 and 6 rounds? It depends. The more rounds you have, theoretically the clearer it is who the better competitors are, but there can be more to this than pure math. Tournament size connotes inherent judging limitations. At Monticello, for instance, the nature of the pool (mostly very experienced, some newbies), meant that if we went for a sixth round we might have to use the less experienced judges in important rounds (bubbles or speaker-point contests), whereas breaking a large percentage of the field allowed us to husband our good judges in double-flighted elimination panels. The field was better served by 5 rounds and double octos than the alternative, which would have been 6 rounds and octos. Those were the only real choices (the field was 85 people).
At Big Jake, on the other hand, the pool is rich with experienced judges, and there is no issue about placement of As vs Cs. Plus, many of them are tournament hires, so you can work them to death (although O’C and I are planning on a very strict pattern of rounds off to allow a little nap time for everyone). You could, if you wanted, do the 7 rounds knowing that your top debaters are at the top of the break. But the thought is, you know, any 5-2 is damned close. Off by what, a half an adjusted speaker point? And you paid a bazillion dollars to fly to Bronx International Airport and stay at the South Bronx Burnout Hilton for this? Since they’ve got the time (the tournament lasts longer than WWII), and the judges are available, why not create the run-off? My only objection to this is that there are the poor slobs at the bottom of the 5-2 bracket who have to defend their position that one extra time, the same sympathy I have with the bubble debaters at TOC. The pressure! Oy. (To be honest, I’m not quite sure how we do this in the TRPC software, but I’m sure O’C knows, or else we’ll figure it out. If you know, please pass it along to me. At the moment I'm assuming I'll set up the rounds off-line and stop scheduling the losers.)
So this whole thing is not an exact science by any means. But the general inclination always seems to be to have the number of people break that makes sense, and to have that breaking be as meaningful as possible. No solution is perfect, but looking at, say, the bid round at my most recent tournaments, Monti and Yale, and the people who were awarded TOC quals at both, I’d be hard-pressed to say that the system doesn’t work.
Bottom line: if you want to break, win a lot and speak well. (It’s the giving of advice like this that earns me the big coaching bucks.)
I think that tomorrow night the Tres Hombres will be discussing tabbing, especially in light of our latest drive to publicize what’s going on in general, but that won’t stop me from talking a little today about who breaks and why. This came up in Monticello, and in a different way with Big Jake. Here’s my thoughts.
The first way to break at a tournament is to win all your prelim rounds. This is usually quite effective. The second way to break at a tournament is to win all but one of your prelim rounds. This also usually works. In fact, Menick’s Law #2874 states that it is desirable to lose one of your random rounds, as this puts you into the down-one bracket henceforth, and if your speaks are high, you’re in good shape to win all your rounds in high-low bracketing. This should not be extended, however, in the mistaken belief that Menick’s Law #2874 means that you should lose ALL of your prelim rounds. The odds of breaking in the 0-5 bracket are, in my experience, relatively slim.
Most tournaments break most people who are down two. But they can’t break all of the down-twos without taking extraordinary measures. The reason is simple. You can’t create brackets if you break, say, 39 people. The only way this can be handled is with a run-off round. The problem with a run-off is finding time to do it, and most tournaments simply don’t have that time. TOC does, of course, and we’re making the time at Big Jake to clear all the 5-2s. But these are unusual circumstances, and unusual tournaments. Most tournaments would never end if similar approaches were taken. The alternative to the run-off round is to get higher speaks, although some tournaments prefer other measures for bracketing (opponent wins, for instance). This is an up-for-grabs subject, but the point is, you usually can’t break everybody at the same point in the bracket, so some other measure than win-loss has to come into play. That’s just the way life is. (All competitions work similarly, as far as I can tell, one way or the other.)
The issue of tabbing a tournament is to somehow engineer what is perceived by the tournament director as the correct number of breaks (tab directors suggest, tournament directors decide). Different rules will apply. For instance, in a novice division we tend to be fairly generous, and we’ll almost always break a third of the field if we can because they’re young and we want to be encouraging. Tougher competitions set tougher breaks, but the rule of thumb is about 25% of the field at the most. Bump, for instance, with a field of 120, breaks 32, marginally generous. A tournament with 90-100, maybe break 24. Under 80, probably break to octos.
What’s the difference between 5 and 6 rounds? It depends. The more rounds you have, theoretically the clearer it is who the better competitors are, but there can be more to this than pure math. Tournament size connotes inherent judging limitations. At Monticello, for instance, the nature of the pool (mostly very experienced, some newbies), meant that if we went for a sixth round we might have to use the less experienced judges in important rounds (bubbles or speaker-point contests), whereas breaking a large percentage of the field allowed us to husband our good judges in double-flighted elimination panels. The field was better served by 5 rounds and double octos than the alternative, which would have been 6 rounds and octos. Those were the only real choices (the field was 85 people).
At Big Jake, on the other hand, the pool is rich with experienced judges, and there is no issue about placement of As vs Cs. Plus, many of them are tournament hires, so you can work them to death (although O’C and I are planning on a very strict pattern of rounds off to allow a little nap time for everyone). You could, if you wanted, do the 7 rounds knowing that your top debaters are at the top of the break. But the thought is, you know, any 5-2 is damned close. Off by what, a half an adjusted speaker point? And you paid a bazillion dollars to fly to Bronx International Airport and stay at the South Bronx Burnout Hilton for this? Since they’ve got the time (the tournament lasts longer than WWII), and the judges are available, why not create the run-off? My only objection to this is that there are the poor slobs at the bottom of the 5-2 bracket who have to defend their position that one extra time, the same sympathy I have with the bubble debaters at TOC. The pressure! Oy. (To be honest, I’m not quite sure how we do this in the TRPC software, but I’m sure O’C knows, or else we’ll figure it out. If you know, please pass it along to me. At the moment I'm assuming I'll set up the rounds off-line and stop scheduling the losers.)
So this whole thing is not an exact science by any means. But the general inclination always seems to be to have the number of people break that makes sense, and to have that breaking be as meaningful as possible. No solution is perfect, but looking at, say, the bid round at my most recent tournaments, Monti and Yale, and the people who were awarded TOC quals at both, I’d be hard-pressed to say that the system doesn’t work.
Bottom line: if you want to break, win a lot and speak well. (It’s the giving of advice like this that earns me the big coaching bucks.)
Monday, October 12, 2009
With apologies to Mrs. Browning. And Mrs. Cruz.
How do I award thee? Let me count the ways.
I award thee at the Robin one and all:
At N.Y.U, the encomiums fall.
At the start of Jake when the teams arrive
I love to start the celebration jive.
Bronx boosters, by sun and candle-light:
I give them freely, tossed out left and right;
I give thee purely, each bright loving cup
To ev'ry man jack who's ever shown up.
I love awards with a passion brimming;
Saturday night you get them for winning.
I love awards for speakers and breakers,
I give them to losers, no-shows, bakers.
On Sunday we give at the end of rounds
And Monday, we put in our order for next year, only twice as many, bigger, and this time, use let's encrust them with diamonds because those emeralds are so...gauche, and then let's email Menick and ask if there's time in the schedule to add, say, just three more award ceremonies, PLEASE!!!!
I award thee at the Robin one and all:
At N.Y.U, the encomiums fall.
At the start of Jake when the teams arrive
I love to start the celebration jive.
Bronx boosters, by sun and candle-light:
I give them freely, tossed out left and right;
I give thee purely, each bright loving cup
To ev'ry man jack who's ever shown up.
I love awards with a passion brimming;
Saturday night you get them for winning.
I love awards for speakers and breakers,
I give them to losers, no-shows, bakers.
On Sunday we give at the end of rounds
And Monday, we put in our order for next year, only twice as many, bigger, and this time, use let's encrust them with diamonds because those emeralds are so...gauche, and then let's email Menick and ask if there's time in the schedule to add, say, just three more award ceremonies, PLEASE!!!!
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Top 5 ways to get struck from judging
5. Tab the tournament. There's always a couple of jokers who think that striking the tab room is the height of hilarity. And it so is. Why, Oscar Wilde himself, the god of wit, when he was at a loss for words, always struck the tab room. As he used to say at these times, "Uh, hmh, uh, er..."
4. Use the words "big picture" in your paradigm. This is especially useful at TOC if you need to get to Starbucks more often.
3. Describe in your paradigm how you don't really like theory, but you will sometimes consider theory, and then always pick up kids on theory whenever you can. This will make you, theoretically, a hot strike at any tournament.
2. Have either "Mr." or "Mrs." as your first name on the strike sheet. This will work even if your last name is Timmons, Savage, Craven, Jih, Theis, etc. Again, look at it as more quality time with those triple nonfat lattes.
1. Suck hugely. The number one way of getting struck at any tournament remains the tried and true method of judging a lot and getting a reputation as a profound idiot. This is the one I personally recommend as absolutely fail-safe. (If you wish to pursue this option further, send for my handy dandy introductory online instructional package, "Applying Theory to the Big Picture," for a one-time-only price of $99.99, and you, too, will be about to amaze your friends and family with your knowledge of values, criteria, spikes, turns, and the location of every Starbucks in the continental USA.)
4. Use the words "big picture" in your paradigm. This is especially useful at TOC if you need to get to Starbucks more often.
3. Describe in your paradigm how you don't really like theory, but you will sometimes consider theory, and then always pick up kids on theory whenever you can. This will make you, theoretically, a hot strike at any tournament.
2. Have either "Mr." or "Mrs." as your first name on the strike sheet. This will work even if your last name is Timmons, Savage, Craven, Jih, Theis, etc. Again, look at it as more quality time with those triple nonfat lattes.
1. Suck hugely. The number one way of getting struck at any tournament remains the tried and true method of judging a lot and getting a reputation as a profound idiot. This is the one I personally recommend as absolutely fail-safe. (If you wish to pursue this option further, send for my handy dandy introductory online instructional package, "Applying Theory to the Big Picture," for a one-time-only price of $99.99, and you, too, will be about to amaze your friends and family with your knowledge of values, criteria, spikes, turns, and the location of every Starbucks in the continental USA.)
TVFT Episode 2 is up
I haven't updated my podcast page yet (maybe today during the down time), but you can link to it on the TVFT blog (theviewfromtab.blogspot.com) or iTunes. (iTunes is a program that this company called Apple is working on...) It sounds pretty good. No chipmunks, equal volume settings, a couple of yucks. Enjoy.
Friday, October 09, 2009
I caught this morning morning's minion, cross-word of Friday's paper...
I spent last night wanting to work on TVFT Episode 2, but the file I had from Bietz wasn't formatted like the others, so he sounded like a chipmunk. Normally I wouldn't mind if Bietz sounded like a chipmunk, but the sped-up track threw him off from the others, so he'd be laughing at the jokes (if any) before they were told, or crying before the dog died heroically at the end or whatever. As soon as I get the raw file from him I'll put it together, but there may be a delay because connections to the internet at the Kaiser Roll are dubious at best. They block everything but Packer games, if I recollect correctly. (For those members of the VCA who do not know anything about sports, the Packers are a lacrosse team from Sheboygan, or something very much like that. The only thing I know about them for sure is that Brett Favre doesn't play for th—Wait a minute! This just in. He DOES play for th—Wait a minute! This just in. He's now playing for the Mets. Sorry about that, sports fans.)
Not working on TVFT last night, aside from an hour spent trying to understand why Bietz = Alvin, meant I got to prep Monticello. As with last weekend, the data didn't come in right from tabroom into TRPC with the preferred system, but the old system works perfectly well, and once one is prepared, one is forearmed, as they say. The Roll looks like fun. 88 LDers at this point, so that shouldn't change much, and 16 PF teams (18 of them from Regis). With the PF I'll do the usual with such small fields as pair same-school teams early on with neutral judging, then pop out the top ones to debate the others. Not the greatest tournament for them, but better than staying home picking their noses. This way they can come to Monticello and pick their noses there. The difference is obvious.
I will tweet things at the tournament over @debatetab, for what it's worth, just to keep my hand in. Set your cell phones on stun.
Not working on TVFT last night, aside from an hour spent trying to understand why Bietz = Alvin, meant I got to prep Monticello. As with last weekend, the data didn't come in right from tabroom into TRPC with the preferred system, but the old system works perfectly well, and once one is prepared, one is forearmed, as they say. The Roll looks like fun. 88 LDers at this point, so that shouldn't change much, and 16 PF teams (18 of them from Regis). With the PF I'll do the usual with such small fields as pair same-school teams early on with neutral judging, then pop out the top ones to debate the others. Not the greatest tournament for them, but better than staying home picking their noses. This way they can come to Monticello and pick their noses there. The difference is obvious.
I will tweet things at the tournament over @debatetab, for what it's worth, just to keep my hand in. Set your cell phones on stun.
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
Coming tweets, changing venues, cunning folders, clever programs, costumed criterion monkeys
We will be tweeting a little for Monti and probably a little more for the Babycakes Invitational. Sign up to follow @debatetab to enjoy the proceedings.
The latest news on the NY State final is that it is going to be moved to Long Island this year, according to our regional director. For us, this is a move that means little in terms of travel time and probably a lot in terms of hospitality. The folks in Albany have always been stretched. Although they did what I think was a fine job for CatNats last May, with the support of the CatNat organization, over the years they have not been able to handle the numbers for States in all the various venues. I don’t fault them on this; I probably wouldn’t be able to handle it either. But when your stomach is growling and there’s nuttin’ to eat within 20 miles… Well, people get unhappy. Of course, the poor folks who must join us from way up north have a longer journey than usual, but honestly, I make a comparable journey maybe once a month, and there’s worse things in the world than a long bus ride. Add to this that JV is tabbing, and I think we’re definitely starting to see responsiveness in the organization to the desires of the community. And that is a good thing, no matter how you slice it. I did work up some templates for a new website design during the off moments at the Pups. I’ll get those out as soon as I’m at the right place at the right time and remember about them. (Note to self: remember about them.)
How come I can’t find an Ethernet cable in my house? I’ve got enough speaker wire and co-ax to wrap the Pentagon, and not one crappy Ethernet cable? Jeesh. Speaking of supplies, yesterday I bought a folder specifically for important tab papers. The thing is, in tab rooms, we generate enough paper to [insert clever humorous metaphor here]. The problem is, often the unimportant and the important get all jumbled together. You’d think that I’d be better at this after the first million or so years, but just putting the important stuff in the important-stuff pile hasn’t worked yet, and there’s no reason to expect that it will start working some magical time in the future. For five bucks, a nice still little folder? Look in there for the list of strikes, you yabbo! Anyhow, I forgot to buy the Ethernet cable while I was at Staples. Another shopping trip coming up.
Bump is filled up in Novice and PF, but I can’t seem to get those last 7 varsity slots taken. Dagnabbit! Housing is also fully subscribed. I remember with absolutely no fondness the bad old days when I had to do all of this by hand. Now, it’s all automated in tabroom, and all I occasionally have to do is click the odd button. Sainthood for CP? Well, it’s too soon to request it from the Vatican at this point, but some day. On the other hand, his constant turning to me during the Pups and saying, “You have done this before, haven’t you?” started to wear thin after a while. What’s the opposite of sainthood, anyhow? Damnationhood? Sounds right to me.
Speaking of the NYCFL (we were speaking of the NYCFL?) we’re going to speed up the Byram Hills Halloween event so that all those Catholics can get home in time for a little pagan fun and games. Out by 5, home by 6, dressed up in your Tweedle Dee costume and roaming the Village by 7—that’s the goal. Me, I dress up every year as a garden gnome. It just seems to work, and keeps the makeup requirements down to a minimum.
The latest news on the NY State final is that it is going to be moved to Long Island this year, according to our regional director. For us, this is a move that means little in terms of travel time and probably a lot in terms of hospitality. The folks in Albany have always been stretched. Although they did what I think was a fine job for CatNats last May, with the support of the CatNat organization, over the years they have not been able to handle the numbers for States in all the various venues. I don’t fault them on this; I probably wouldn’t be able to handle it either. But when your stomach is growling and there’s nuttin’ to eat within 20 miles… Well, people get unhappy. Of course, the poor folks who must join us from way up north have a longer journey than usual, but honestly, I make a comparable journey maybe once a month, and there’s worse things in the world than a long bus ride. Add to this that JV is tabbing, and I think we’re definitely starting to see responsiveness in the organization to the desires of the community. And that is a good thing, no matter how you slice it. I did work up some templates for a new website design during the off moments at the Pups. I’ll get those out as soon as I’m at the right place at the right time and remember about them. (Note to self: remember about them.)
How come I can’t find an Ethernet cable in my house? I’ve got enough speaker wire and co-ax to wrap the Pentagon, and not one crappy Ethernet cable? Jeesh. Speaking of supplies, yesterday I bought a folder specifically for important tab papers. The thing is, in tab rooms, we generate enough paper to [insert clever humorous metaphor here]. The problem is, often the unimportant and the important get all jumbled together. You’d think that I’d be better at this after the first million or so years, but just putting the important stuff in the important-stuff pile hasn’t worked yet, and there’s no reason to expect that it will start working some magical time in the future. For five bucks, a nice still little folder? Look in there for the list of strikes, you yabbo! Anyhow, I forgot to buy the Ethernet cable while I was at Staples. Another shopping trip coming up.
Bump is filled up in Novice and PF, but I can’t seem to get those last 7 varsity slots taken. Dagnabbit! Housing is also fully subscribed. I remember with absolutely no fondness the bad old days when I had to do all of this by hand. Now, it’s all automated in tabroom, and all I occasionally have to do is click the odd button. Sainthood for CP? Well, it’s too soon to request it from the Vatican at this point, but some day. On the other hand, his constant turning to me during the Pups and saying, “You have done this before, haven’t you?” started to wear thin after a while. What’s the opposite of sainthood, anyhow? Damnationhood? Sounds right to me.
Speaking of the NYCFL (we were speaking of the NYCFL?) we’re going to speed up the Byram Hills Halloween event so that all those Catholics can get home in time for a little pagan fun and games. Out by 5, home by 6, dressed up in your Tweedle Dee costume and roaming the Village by 7—that’s the goal. Me, I dress up every year as a garden gnome. It just seems to work, and keeps the makeup requirements down to a minimum.
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
More on Pups 09
So, let’s see. What else happened over the weekend?
Vegas Elvis was, in the main, quite cooperative. Occasionally it would freeze, but all one had to do was reboot Fusion and you’d be back in business. Given VE’s speed of operation, this was about 2 minutes of your life, once you realized that it wasn’t the end of the world. The printer kept coming and going, but this was merely a matter of CP showing me how to reconnect it via the software, so that wasn’t an issue either. Quite honestly, overall Vegas Elvis worked better than my Dell, which has been known to just peter out from sheer exhaustion, and Little Elvis, which is slower than the proverbial corn syrup. Still, I did keep a backup handy, but thankfully I never had to use it.
For the longest time da bruddah printah had been telling me to change the toner. But, since it printed anyhow, I ignored it. But da bruddah has a habit of stopping in the middle of a print job when it really runs out of ink, and nothing you can do, no amount of shaking and shimmying with the cartridge, will make a difference. Needless to say, this moment of Halt! took place while we were printing doubles ballots. Aaaarrgh! So, we replaced the cartridge, simple enough once we read the directions. I put it in, hit start, and guess what. Da bruddah started telling me I need to change the toner. Nice try, bro.
On the Sailor side, the Panivore discovered Au Bon Pain for the first time. Where has this been all her life? “They had all these…breads,” she reported breathlessly, her eyes wide. She bought one of each.
My favorite line of the weekend was in a round that I was walking by on my various errands. “To respond to his point about education and crime, there is no link between education and crime. Crime is what you do in your spare time.” So much for professional criminals.
JV and I talked a bit about case disclosure, the subject of Episode 1 of TVFT. He made one very good point about the word “openness,” which sets up a binary in which opponents are, obviously, against openness, which sounds inherently wrong. I’m sure we’ll talk more about it on the podcast, but the more I think about case disclosure, the more I think that it’s probably a good thing at some level, but probably not the posting of entire cases so much as a brief on framework and thesis. I have a feeling that in a year or two disclosure of some sort will be the norm; exactly how we’ll make it happen, on the other hand, remains a mystery. The attempt to level the playing field of big and small programs is a good thing; how that is achieved is problematic. And perhaps at some point big programs will always have an inherent advantage because of their size.
Speaking of the podcast, CP informed me that it hadn’t come through iTunes. I checked. I updated the RSS but never uploaded it. Is there any lingering doubt that my mind has recently been encased in cement?
Since I drove the debating Sailors in my car, the vehicle, after they disembarked Sunday evening, was awash with empty water bottles (a substance, by the way, that the Pups were selling for about $50 a pop, tsk tsk). What is it with water these days? They didn’t have water when I was a kid. If you were thirsty, you sucked on a salt lick and were happy for it. And we stayed off people’s lawns, too! Those of you who want to see what some of these people look like, by the way, should check out my new FB profile pic. Only Stealth was excluded, but, uh, her nickname is, uh, Stealth…
Vegas Elvis was, in the main, quite cooperative. Occasionally it would freeze, but all one had to do was reboot Fusion and you’d be back in business. Given VE’s speed of operation, this was about 2 minutes of your life, once you realized that it wasn’t the end of the world. The printer kept coming and going, but this was merely a matter of CP showing me how to reconnect it via the software, so that wasn’t an issue either. Quite honestly, overall Vegas Elvis worked better than my Dell, which has been known to just peter out from sheer exhaustion, and Little Elvis, which is slower than the proverbial corn syrup. Still, I did keep a backup handy, but thankfully I never had to use it.
For the longest time da bruddah printah had been telling me to change the toner. But, since it printed anyhow, I ignored it. But da bruddah has a habit of stopping in the middle of a print job when it really runs out of ink, and nothing you can do, no amount of shaking and shimmying with the cartridge, will make a difference. Needless to say, this moment of Halt! took place while we were printing doubles ballots. Aaaarrgh! So, we replaced the cartridge, simple enough once we read the directions. I put it in, hit start, and guess what. Da bruddah started telling me I need to change the toner. Nice try, bro.
On the Sailor side, the Panivore discovered Au Bon Pain for the first time. Where has this been all her life? “They had all these…breads,” she reported breathlessly, her eyes wide. She bought one of each.
My favorite line of the weekend was in a round that I was walking by on my various errands. “To respond to his point about education and crime, there is no link between education and crime. Crime is what you do in your spare time.” So much for professional criminals.
JV and I talked a bit about case disclosure, the subject of Episode 1 of TVFT. He made one very good point about the word “openness,” which sets up a binary in which opponents are, obviously, against openness, which sounds inherently wrong. I’m sure we’ll talk more about it on the podcast, but the more I think about case disclosure, the more I think that it’s probably a good thing at some level, but probably not the posting of entire cases so much as a brief on framework and thesis. I have a feeling that in a year or two disclosure of some sort will be the norm; exactly how we’ll make it happen, on the other hand, remains a mystery. The attempt to level the playing field of big and small programs is a good thing; how that is achieved is problematic. And perhaps at some point big programs will always have an inherent advantage because of their size.
Speaking of the podcast, CP informed me that it hadn’t come through iTunes. I checked. I updated the RSS but never uploaded it. Is there any lingering doubt that my mind has recently been encased in cement?
Since I drove the debating Sailors in my car, the vehicle, after they disembarked Sunday evening, was awash with empty water bottles (a substance, by the way, that the Pups were selling for about $50 a pop, tsk tsk). What is it with water these days? They didn’t have water when I was a kid. If you were thirsty, you sucked on a salt lick and were happy for it. And we stayed off people’s lawns, too! Those of you who want to see what some of these people look like, by the way, should check out my new FB profile pic. Only Stealth was excluded, but, uh, her nickname is, uh, Stealth…
Monday, October 05, 2009
Pups 2009, in which certain people feel really sorry for themselves, poor baby
The Pups? Well, we got through it. Although for some reason I just sort of felt out of it all weekend. Maybe lack of sleep, maybe the flu shot. I don’t know. It was as if my head were packed in cement or something; it was very hard for stuff to get in or out of it.
I arrived early enough to solve (sort of) the first problem, which was that the data was not coming in correctly from tabroom. The thing is, nothing had changed from the last time we’d done this, not in tabroom, not in TRPC, but the process of transmitting the data was interpolating a number into the second team member field, then concatenating a # with the last name of the first team member, but # is invisible, so everywhere it mattered you’d get Hen Hud G or Regis S rather than both initials. Hardly enough information… We never did figure it out; I reverted back to using separate team, school and judge files, which worked fine, with the down side that one needs to comb through them for duplicates that will otherwise wreak havoc. Caught all but one, which isn’t terrible. Also entered in all the strikes and rankings at this point. Nothing automated here, but tabroom does keep a record of the strikes, so when someone comes in wondering why such-and-such is judging because they struck s-a-s, we can quickly check and (happily) report that, actually, no you didn’t. Two schools with similar names provided one minor issue here, ending up that both schools got to strike one person deliberately and the other school by ill-gotten strike gain, but those things are hardly a problem in a big tournament.
The rounds went off hitchless on Friday. There’s two of them, with plenty of extra judges. And speaking of the judges, the pool was outrageously solid. Going by the community rankings, as explained in the invitation, we were able to provide As in every potentially game-breaking situation, and most others as well. In aid of transparency, I report that we start at the top of every list (random) and never vary in the assignment of judges: we do not inject our own opinions of who should judge whom. Mostly TRPC does the assignments for us, but if the program puts in less that an A judge on a bubble, we always take from the top. Thank God it’s not alphabetical, or Bietz would judge every round…
On Friday we heard that there might be some problems getting all our Saturday rooms, so we rejiggered the schedule in case we had to stagger V and JV rounds. This would, unfortunately, have also staggered us into Sunday morning doubles, so we were hoping to be able to crawl out of this hole if the worst didn’t occur. And, fortunately, said worst didn’t occur. But there was some scrambling. I’ve never seen a schedule readjust so often, but always moving quicker and not slower. We just told everybody to pay attention, and most of them did. One person missed a round, but given that we were twittering, posting on the schematics and announcing in the meetings, and the other 400 people did get the message, I’ve got a feeling that it really wasn’t us. Anyhow, we got everybody out of there at around 8:00 on Saturday, with doubles under their little LD belts. I miss the old days at Yale, where ballots went out Saturday at about midnight, and coaches carrying torches and pitchforks stormed the battlements. Then again, I don’t think I could have handled too much storming, the way I was feeling. It took me forever to do the Friday crossword, if you want to know how bad I was. Friday? Forever? Moi? No way, Hose A.
One of my favorite moments was when some poor schlub read the schematic and saw a room on the college campus as the location for the round. We were at a high school about fifty parsecs from said campus; this was an oversight on our side, the inadvertent clicking of a little box somewhere in the deep dark past, and a miss of the problem when we eyeballed the skem. The other people in the round came by and said that we had to be kidding, while that one poor schlub hightailed it all the way down to Pup Land. Poor thing. There are very few ways to get the sympathy of the tab room, and a bye. This is one of them. I mean, we did say that was where the round is, so technically it was our fault. Rule number one in life: when it looks too dumb to be true, it’s either not true or else it’s in Sarah Palin’s autobiography. Ask somebody if you’re not clear on things, in other words.
Breaks went fine on Sunday, after I managed to let loose the ballots that we had been planning to distribute by hand. Ah, the wrath of Vaughan! This was my lowest point of the weekend. Fortunately the judges were at hand to keep things moving, but nothing is worse than letting the farflung folks think that they can go wandering off, which is what I did. There’s a lesson in this: everybody screws up. The takeaway from the lesson: screw up some other way next time. Making mistakes is okay, just don’t keep making the same mistakes. Dedicate yourself to making new mistakes. That’ll keep things fresh. That’s what Menick would do!
(Jeesh: I’m referring to myself in the third person. What next? Thanking God for letting me record a rap song?)
There were all sorts of interesting things going on, transparency-wise. We published all the results after the rounds, starting Saturday morning. We published the brackets when we announced the breaks. The ballots went online during the tournament, for coaches to check. I don’t recall any tabbing errors (but then again, I don’t recall anything about 13 hours in the middle there). I tweeted regularly, so anyone who bothered to subscribe to @debatetab, as they were asked to repeatedly, got the important updates, although I slowed down a bit Saturday since, after all, we were all in one place, and JV could make announcements directly. To be honest, I have a feeling that the Twittering of a tournament won’t ripen until Princeton, where everyone is farflung at all times. We’ll see.
There’s probably more to report, but as you can see, mostly things went fine, at least from the perspective of the attendees. Meanwhile, I’m assuming that I’ll get some sleep between now and the Kaiser Roll, and be back to my former sterling self.
I arrived early enough to solve (sort of) the first problem, which was that the data was not coming in correctly from tabroom. The thing is, nothing had changed from the last time we’d done this, not in tabroom, not in TRPC, but the process of transmitting the data was interpolating a number into the second team member field, then concatenating a # with the last name of the first team member, but # is invisible, so everywhere it mattered you’d get Hen Hud G or Regis S rather than both initials. Hardly enough information… We never did figure it out; I reverted back to using separate team, school and judge files, which worked fine, with the down side that one needs to comb through them for duplicates that will otherwise wreak havoc. Caught all but one, which isn’t terrible. Also entered in all the strikes and rankings at this point. Nothing automated here, but tabroom does keep a record of the strikes, so when someone comes in wondering why such-and-such is judging because they struck s-a-s, we can quickly check and (happily) report that, actually, no you didn’t. Two schools with similar names provided one minor issue here, ending up that both schools got to strike one person deliberately and the other school by ill-gotten strike gain, but those things are hardly a problem in a big tournament.
The rounds went off hitchless on Friday. There’s two of them, with plenty of extra judges. And speaking of the judges, the pool was outrageously solid. Going by the community rankings, as explained in the invitation, we were able to provide As in every potentially game-breaking situation, and most others as well. In aid of transparency, I report that we start at the top of every list (random) and never vary in the assignment of judges: we do not inject our own opinions of who should judge whom. Mostly TRPC does the assignments for us, but if the program puts in less that an A judge on a bubble, we always take from the top. Thank God it’s not alphabetical, or Bietz would judge every round…
On Friday we heard that there might be some problems getting all our Saturday rooms, so we rejiggered the schedule in case we had to stagger V and JV rounds. This would, unfortunately, have also staggered us into Sunday morning doubles, so we were hoping to be able to crawl out of this hole if the worst didn’t occur. And, fortunately, said worst didn’t occur. But there was some scrambling. I’ve never seen a schedule readjust so often, but always moving quicker and not slower. We just told everybody to pay attention, and most of them did. One person missed a round, but given that we were twittering, posting on the schematics and announcing in the meetings, and the other 400 people did get the message, I’ve got a feeling that it really wasn’t us. Anyhow, we got everybody out of there at around 8:00 on Saturday, with doubles under their little LD belts. I miss the old days at Yale, where ballots went out Saturday at about midnight, and coaches carrying torches and pitchforks stormed the battlements. Then again, I don’t think I could have handled too much storming, the way I was feeling. It took me forever to do the Friday crossword, if you want to know how bad I was. Friday? Forever? Moi? No way, Hose A.
One of my favorite moments was when some poor schlub read the schematic and saw a room on the college campus as the location for the round. We were at a high school about fifty parsecs from said campus; this was an oversight on our side, the inadvertent clicking of a little box somewhere in the deep dark past, and a miss of the problem when we eyeballed the skem. The other people in the round came by and said that we had to be kidding, while that one poor schlub hightailed it all the way down to Pup Land. Poor thing. There are very few ways to get the sympathy of the tab room, and a bye. This is one of them. I mean, we did say that was where the round is, so technically it was our fault. Rule number one in life: when it looks too dumb to be true, it’s either not true or else it’s in Sarah Palin’s autobiography. Ask somebody if you’re not clear on things, in other words.
Breaks went fine on Sunday, after I managed to let loose the ballots that we had been planning to distribute by hand. Ah, the wrath of Vaughan! This was my lowest point of the weekend. Fortunately the judges were at hand to keep things moving, but nothing is worse than letting the farflung folks think that they can go wandering off, which is what I did. There’s a lesson in this: everybody screws up. The takeaway from the lesson: screw up some other way next time. Making mistakes is okay, just don’t keep making the same mistakes. Dedicate yourself to making new mistakes. That’ll keep things fresh. That’s what Menick would do!
(Jeesh: I’m referring to myself in the third person. What next? Thanking God for letting me record a rap song?)
There were all sorts of interesting things going on, transparency-wise. We published all the results after the rounds, starting Saturday morning. We published the brackets when we announced the breaks. The ballots went online during the tournament, for coaches to check. I don’t recall any tabbing errors (but then again, I don’t recall anything about 13 hours in the middle there). I tweeted regularly, so anyone who bothered to subscribe to @debatetab, as they were asked to repeatedly, got the important updates, although I slowed down a bit Saturday since, after all, we were all in one place, and JV could make announcements directly. To be honest, I have a feeling that the Twittering of a tournament won’t ripen until Princeton, where everyone is farflung at all times. We’ll see.
There’s probably more to report, but as you can see, mostly things went fine, at least from the perspective of the attendees. Meanwhile, I’m assuming that I’ll get some sleep between now and the Kaiser Roll, and be back to my former sterling self.
Sunday, October 04, 2009
On @debatetab
If anyone wants to provide feedback on Twitter and the Pups, please do so. I used it a bunch on Friday and Sunday when everyone was cast far afield and I had internet access, but not on Saturday when we were all in the high school and I had to use my phone. I can see this being fairly useful, but not absolutely crucial, at the average high school, and quite useful and nearing crucial at far-flung college venues.
Anyhow, I'll do it again at the Kaiser Roll. It does provide an opportunity to keep people posted, if they wish to keep posted. Nothing terribly wrong with that.
Anyhow, I'll do it again at the Kaiser Roll. It does provide an opportunity to keep people posted, if they wish to keep posted. Nothing terribly wrong with that.
Saturday, October 03, 2009
Thursday, October 01, 2009
Breaking news!
No, this isn't about Babycakes.
The podcast is live. It's got flaws, but it's listenable, and I promise we'll get technically better as we go along.
Enjoy.
The podcast is live. It's got flaws, but it's listenable, and I promise we'll get technically better as we go along.
Enjoy.
Modest Novice in practice
So last night MB and O’C and I recorded a podcast. I have to admit I haven’t listened to it yet, because first it needs to be assembled. It was fun doing it, though. I’ll post details—and the podcast—in a day or two (at most).
Meanwhile, whatever happened to the Modest Novice? Well, here’s my experiences so far. (I'll be cross-posting this over at ModNov.org.)
I started my novices this year with analysis of rights and the social contract. This is obviously elementary stuff one would want to start them with (although this year’s Sept-Oct of high school exit exams hardly seems inclusive of such discussion). Rights is a cornerstone of LD (and western philosophy); protecting those rights is theoretically the goal of society; hence the social contract. What does that all mean? That was our starting point.
Recommended reading: John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government.
Next session we move on to a different subject, morality. Morality, the determination of right and wrong, has many facets. I begin by asking the students if there is such a thing as right and wrong, and how they distinguish between the two. When I covered this at the MHLW, there was strong feeling that religion was the source of morality (true enough), but the problem is that we can’t draw on a religious answer to a secular question. We need an understanding of morality that we can use in a debate round.
The discussion of R/W usually is pretty lively, because students have firm belief in their ability to distinguish between the two. With luck, by the end of the session, you will have shaken that firm belief. In fact, revving up the trolley examples (which are, after all, classic tools of morality evaluation and not just the bad taste in many mouths left over from last year’s Sept-Oct) is not a bad idea at all.
In my morality discussion I usually go first for the idea of deontology versus consequentialism. We can say that an action is either right or wrong because of the action itself, or the results of the action. Simple enough. A deontological test is hard to explain (Kant’s categorical imperative) whereas the numbers of utility are easily understood. This leads us naturally into the question of whether there is, indeed, an objective right and wrong. If not, then we are in a relativistic, subjective universe. If so, all we have to do is find it.
So, a session on rights and SC, then a session on Morality. (Or as many sessions as it takes; I only meet with students once a week.)
The next step in ModNov, I think, is to address the topic head-on, a brainstorming session for the novices (and interested members of the team, given that many will be judging this topic). We need to understand civil disobedience. It is breaking the law. It is not inherently nonviolent nor inherently promotional, although these are the normal connotations; these should be defined and clear at the outset of a case. We need to understand that, in a democracy, we make the laws ourselves. That is what a democracy is (and some understanding of the General Will is important here). We are breaking the laws that we made, in other words. And why? Because of a moral view of that law (the morally justified). The brainstorming should include things like the history of CD from Gandhi on (or Thoreau on), Civil Rights in the US, etc.
Recommended (if not required) reading: Thoreau.
Then we need to brainstorm arguments. Why is the aff right? Why is the neg right? Do that for a while, then go home and write a case, and I’ll see you at the first tournament.
Meanwhile, whatever happened to the Modest Novice? Well, here’s my experiences so far. (I'll be cross-posting this over at ModNov.org.)
I started my novices this year with analysis of rights and the social contract. This is obviously elementary stuff one would want to start them with (although this year’s Sept-Oct of high school exit exams hardly seems inclusive of such discussion). Rights is a cornerstone of LD (and western philosophy); protecting those rights is theoretically the goal of society; hence the social contract. What does that all mean? That was our starting point.
Recommended reading: John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government.
Next session we move on to a different subject, morality. Morality, the determination of right and wrong, has many facets. I begin by asking the students if there is such a thing as right and wrong, and how they distinguish between the two. When I covered this at the MHLW, there was strong feeling that religion was the source of morality (true enough), but the problem is that we can’t draw on a religious answer to a secular question. We need an understanding of morality that we can use in a debate round.
The discussion of R/W usually is pretty lively, because students have firm belief in their ability to distinguish between the two. With luck, by the end of the session, you will have shaken that firm belief. In fact, revving up the trolley examples (which are, after all, classic tools of morality evaluation and not just the bad taste in many mouths left over from last year’s Sept-Oct) is not a bad idea at all.
In my morality discussion I usually go first for the idea of deontology versus consequentialism. We can say that an action is either right or wrong because of the action itself, or the results of the action. Simple enough. A deontological test is hard to explain (Kant’s categorical imperative) whereas the numbers of utility are easily understood. This leads us naturally into the question of whether there is, indeed, an objective right and wrong. If not, then we are in a relativistic, subjective universe. If so, all we have to do is find it.
So, a session on rights and SC, then a session on Morality. (Or as many sessions as it takes; I only meet with students once a week.)
The next step in ModNov, I think, is to address the topic head-on, a brainstorming session for the novices (and interested members of the team, given that many will be judging this topic). We need to understand civil disobedience. It is breaking the law. It is not inherently nonviolent nor inherently promotional, although these are the normal connotations; these should be defined and clear at the outset of a case. We need to understand that, in a democracy, we make the laws ourselves. That is what a democracy is (and some understanding of the General Will is important here). We are breaking the laws that we made, in other words. And why? Because of a moral view of that law (the morally justified). The brainstorming should include things like the history of CD from Gandhi on (or Thoreau on), Civil Rights in the US, etc.
Recommended (if not required) reading: Thoreau.
Then we need to brainstorm arguments. Why is the aff right? Why is the neg right? Do that for a while, then go home and write a case, and I’ll see you at the first tournament.
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