The teams of Korea, Singapore and Iran are getting ready!
First we’ll hear WuHyun Sohn from Korea with his report on Problem 1. Gaussian cannon!

President Alan Allinson is asking everybody in, the Stadtforum Bad Saulgau is completely filled, everything is prepared and the teams are getting ready!

Introduction of the teams:

Three former participants in the Jury: Ilya, Martin and Kathryn:

Korea’s report hast just started. Here’s Singapore’s mascot listening carefully:

The jury for IYPT 2012 finals:

Alan Allinson, Prapun Manyum, John Balcombe, Ivan Antsipau, Chuanyong Li, Valentin Lobyshev, Samuel Byland, Kreso Zadro, Kathryn Zealand, Martin Plesch, Othmar Marti and Ilya Martchenko

The opponent takes the floor:

Discussion, whiteboard:

From left to right:
Team Iran – Reviewer – Seyed Mohammadali Modarressi
Team Singapore – Opponent – Jie Yeo
Team Korea – Reporter – WuHyun Sohn

Last year Korea ended their concluding remarks with the words “This is physics” – today we get to see more fun videos

Juror grades are in:

REP: 8 8 9 8 7 8 7 7 7 8 8
OPP: 8 8 8 8 8 6 8 8 8 9 8
REV: 8 9 7 9 9 7 8 9 8 8 9

Stage 2 is about to start.
Daniel Keat Kay Mark will do his report on 5. Bright waves.

I asked the teams before if they needed a table for showing experiments. Sadly they don’t

It’s a fight of Captains:

Grades from stage 2:
REP: 9 9 8 8 8 7 7 6 6 7 10
OPP: 7 8 8 9 8 7 7 7 6 6 9
REV: 9 9 9 9 9 9 8 9 9 7 8

Waiting for Iran’s report. They might well win this IYPT if their report is good – Korea and Singapore got the exact same points for their reports. It’s your turn now, Rojin Anbarafshan!

REP: 7 9 10 9 9 8 8 6 6 7 8
OPP: 9 9 9 8 7 9 7 10 9 7 9
REV: 8 8 7 7 8 7 8 8 8 7 9

So the winners are:

1) Korea
2) Iran
3) Singapore

Congrats to everyone!

Well, and then there’s the actual tournament statistics, starting with the results.
This graphic shows what problems were presented and rejected:

And I’m sure you want to know what the grades looked like – here’s the jurors’ means and standard deviation:

Also, in case you wonder if the jurors were less homogeneous in their grading: Here’s the mean of std. devs and of min-max-differences for each performance:

IYPT2010: 0.8058 / 2.3137
IYPT2011: 0.9094 / 2.5206
IYPT2012: 0.8739 / 2.4333

So no, the grades weren’t too inconsistent, even more consistent than last year.

When Martin Plesch talked to the Jury, he was hoping for an overall mean of 5.5 (in the center of our scale) and a reasonable standard-deviation, somewhere around 1.5. Here’s the number for the IYPT2012:
Mean of Juror means: 5.82
Mean of Juror Stddev: 1.54

So our Jurors did a pretty good job I’d say!

oh, and seeing this graph, here’s one from our server, showing the traffic to and from the server that hosts iypt,org, newtoon, and the results:

Overview for Round: 1

Thomas came all the way from Frankfurt to help us over the weekend – preparations for tomorrow are already done.

Here is the schedule, based on the drawing of lots and here we have the Jury Schedule.

http://iypt.de/?p=1546 more…]]> The LOC must have been busy in the last few weeks: There are smaller and larger hints that the IYPT takes place in Bad Saulgau literally everywhere – here’s a few of them that I photographed so far:

I was especially excited to see little exhibitions showing former IYPT problems, posters and experiments in the display-windows of local shops. I guess that’s the main advantage that a small city like Bad Saulgau has to offer – everyone including the city’s mayor is involved and they all do their very best to make the IYPT family feel at home!

Find us on facebook for more photos!

Here’s some photos of all these brave mascots

Leave a comment if your team has a mascot too!

Next time i’ll write it will be from Bad Saulgau. See you there!

Everything and everyone is packed

They look like this one from 2012′s set:
“A long string of beads is released from a beaker by pulling a sufficiently long part of the chain over the edge of the beaker. Due to gravity the speed of the string increases. At a certain moment the string no longer touches the edge of the beaker. Investigate and explain the phenomenon.”

As a participant you might be fascinated by some of them, irritated by others and some will definitely lead to long weekends and a bit of frustration. But have you ever thought about where these problems come from?
Is there a holy book of problems (*) where we can look for them? Is there a large committee of experts spending weeks doing experiments to come up with new things to investigate?

Well, it’s a bit of both actually. Each year the members of the international organizing committee (IOC) are asked to submit ideas for problems. At the IOC meeting, which takes place during or past each year’s IYPT, there’s a discussion on the problems to select for next year and eventually a decision. Sometimes this takes long, other times it takes very long to reach a conclusion. To make sure that we have new high quality problems, even after all these years, last year we decided to introduce a new process:
A pre-selection committee was formed to improve our selection process and we opened the submission of ideas to everyone using a submission form on our website . Details of the new process are documented in the EC minutes from last October.

The committee did some impressive work: The report Ilya has submitted to the IOC is 60 pages and they worked through 89 proposals from 18 countries.
So, what was their selection based on? What makes a good set of problems? The report sums it up as follows:

1. No repeated, dangerous, trivial or solved problems.
2. Relevance, consistency, feasibility from the IYPT perspective, and reasonable novelty.
3. Balanced coverage of various areas of physics.

If you’re interested in some background material for this year’s problems, go check out the kit.

As every year, I’m excited to see what the 17 problems for the next year will be. Why 17 you might still ask yourself: An experienced IOC member once explained it to us in the following way: “Well,… You see, 16 would be too few, but 18 would be too many.”

(*) Some former problems have been inspired by a book that comes quite close to this notion – The Flying Circus of Physics.

New Zealand in the finals of IYPT 2010

2009:

2010:

2011:

PS: You can now link to this blog using http://blog.iypt.de
PPS: Comments are now enabled also for the older postings!

The diagram, like this description taken from Ilya’s archive, shows the distribution parameters (population mean and standard deviation) for grades of individual jurors at the 23rd IYPT (2010.) The grades are averaged across all stages, performances, and PFs. The data clearly reveals that the individual grading standards vary among jurors, and result in a marked spectrum of average grades in the range from ca. 6 to ca. 8. The relative standard deviations, not shown here, vary in the range from ca. 0.1 to ca. 0.3. The marks above 8—9 and below 5—6 are statistically rare events.

The perfect 5.5-mean.

One of the SG’s goals is to make it harder for jurors to just give a 7 all the time. Besides being a nice prime number, 7 also is a mark weak teams are happy about and strong teams aren’t too sad about (well, as long as it’s not the finals). Clearly this is not what we want for a tournament. Ideally the overall mean grade in a tournament is somewhere close to 5.5 with all the grades used – e.g. with a reasonable standard deviation. With jurors only giving marks from 6 to 8, we effectively narrow the results so much, that eventually randomness and rounding effects become much to influential. The SG certainly help to avoid this, with results from our national YPT in Austria showing that the standard deviation has improved a lot in the past two years and most of the jurors giving grades as low as 1 and as high as 10 over the course of the tournament.

update: a few more words from Ilya :

[01:14:06] Martchenko, Ilya: http://iypt.de/?p=1222
[01:14:59] Martchenko, Ilya: if you want to be completely open, you can also write 
that it's *very* important to have all jurors staying centered around one, uniform grade
[01:15:06] Martchenko, Ilya: i.e. 5
[01:16:11] Martchenko, Ilya: if it's not happening, we may easily have (and always had) the following situation:
[01:16:33] Timotheus Hell: c'mon, i posted this like 5min ago. How can you be that fast?!  
[01:17:02] Martchenko, Ilya: in the fight room A by a pure coincidence we have those jurors 
who put slighly higher grades (right leg of the spectrum) than in the fight room B
[01:17:17] Martchenko, Ilya: ** c'mon, it's by job to monitor mass media  

Now of course this wasn’t something that the Executive Committee came up with during one of their short meetings. It really was a long process that eventually led us to what I consider a very reasonable and helpful guideline for both new and experienced jurors. As the minutes of the EC meeting back in November 2010 state, “[a]fter discussing many alternatives, MP, TH and JB each volunteered to prepare a proposal for updated guidelines which will be circulated among EC members for a final decision during spring 2011.” My first proposal that I was willing to send around to some of my IYPT-friends dates back to December 2010. It’s interesting how this evolved with all the feedback I got, until eventually sending a version 4 to the EC mailing list in February 2011. Other proposals were submitted too and a long discussion via email followed with a stable result evolving sometime in April 2011. Eventually we voted on a proposal and decided to try it at some national YPTs first. Since the feedback there was mostly positive we went ahead and introduced them at the IYPT2011.

Something as complex as these guidelines will never be perfect. I’m sure the EC will continue to listen to any feedback and that the guidelines will continue to evolve. Much more important than the final details however is, that there are guidelines at all: To me it’s important to have rules that clearly state what this tournament is about – that’s what’s reflected in these guidelines: Physics and communicating Physics. And to make the grading even more transparent for the participants, the grading sheets with their partial grades will be scanned and published.

Next time I’ll write something about the grading and how it has changed over the years.

Personally I think it’s just amazing with how much dedication and how successfully Ilya has been working on collecting and archiving all of this IYPT-related information. If there is any (new) fact about one of the (old) IYPTs you can share: Ilya will participate at this year’s IYPT as a Juror and I’m sure he’ll be more than happy to collect any new information or material, like documents, photos or videos from you!

To make sure you know whom to approach, here’s a video I took back in 2011 when the archive was officially launched at the 13th AYPT:

Other numbers never change – we’ll have 17 Problems and Teams of 5 students. Some numbers change slowly: It’s the 25th IYPT already. To celebrate, we’re looking forward to welcoming Evgeny Yunosov, the “father” of the IYPT who was the organizer, main activist and supporter of this new type of competition.

So far it’s all looking good, we’re continuing to make some final design tweaks and the software was successfully tested at our local YPT.

If you’re a participant the main advantage is that you’ll be provided with more detailed fight results than ever before and faster than ever before.

Tim at the IYPT in Iran

I’ve been blogging about the past two IYPTs and this year I was asked to do the same here So during the tournament you will find the latest news like results, previews etc here.

Make sure to also visit the iypt 2012 facebook page at facebook.com/iypt2012.