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Pick 50 and Mexico

I remain supportive of Tim's effort to have us pick the 50 judges we most
want to hear us in rounds at nationals.  I don't know about the other
programs, but we will pick a variety of judges.  Schools "out of the loop"
can look at the nationals judging booklet and pick the judges who best meet
the educational and competitive needs of their programs.  
I agree with people who say students should learn to adapt to judges and I
think Tim's proposal maintains the need to adapt--students have to adapt to
the judges they pick, students will still get judges that they did not pick,
students will know their judges better so they can adapt in more developed
ways, etc.  I disagree with the people who say students, in every round,
should have to adapt to people they have never seen before in their life at
the nationals tournament.  Students work hard and they ought have some
familiarity with the judges they have--rather than find out that the judge
voted on t as a reverse voter when it was just a blip in the 1ar.  If we didn't
believe in knowing about the judges' predispositions--we wouldn't hand out
judging booklets (which, unfortunately, are not adequate versus having had
or knowing the judge beforehand).

I am also more supportive of the Mexico topic than I was before.  We are
going to be listening to nanotech, non-carbon life, like Greg Achten and
Bob Lechtreck have discussed in rounds.  I would much prefer the benefits
of continuing to debate Mexico:
1. Wide diversity of cases and arguments.  I have yet to hear a round with
the same set of arguments.
2. More development.  We are just now starting to understand nuances of
the topic and now, we can begin to develop more insight on the topic.
3. No mad rush preparing for the Cal Swing/whatever first spring topic you
go to.
4. Mexico is more concrete than infotech.  I, personally, prefer topics
where people's ability to eat, live, breath, culture, etc are directly effected. 
Infotech is an entity that tends to effect how people think--that's fine, but
less interesting to me.  Plus, Mexico does not encourage weird generics
like cyberwars and infoconciousness.
 
Jim Hanson
Whitman College
Archive created by Jonathan Stanton (jonathan@cs.jhu.edu)
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