Thanksgiving normally brings turkey, shopping discounts, and every other year, a new version of Chessbase. When it comes to shopping for computer software upgrades, there’s always the question of “is the upgrade worth the money?” So, since I can be (somewhat easily) bribed by the 25% discount that’s normally available twice per year, I went…
Read More Chessbase 17… how will the updates help the average patzer?To members of administration and others: there are actually interesting academic discussions that take place on Facebook. A few days ago, I learned about one of them: tapered scoring in debate tournaments — particularly British Parliamentary Debate tournaments. In a nutshell, here’s the basic argument: all rounds don’t count equally when it comes to deciding…
Read More So I learned something (academically) new on Facebook: Tapered ScoringIn other words, the epistemology of “the top competitors at a given tournament.” When we tiebreak a final, we’re asking how to determine the top 6 (or so) speakers at a particular speech tournament, or ways of distinguishing between several teams that may have the same debate record. But how do we know who those…
Read More Another nerdy tab post: What’s the point of speaker points in forensics?So the following actually happened at a Vocal Viking tournament. One debater apparently couldn’t debate during round 3[1]Why? I still don’t know., so the debater’s partner debated “maverick” (in other words, by themself). Speechwire requires that each speaker receives at least 1 speaker point (that way, the program knows you didn’t accidentally forget to enter…
Read More Nerdy tab post: when is a team’s seeding not right?