The MacArthur Fellows Program awards were given out today for 2007. I asked a question about this at Frank's a few weeks ago. Within hours of the annoucment I received an email pointing out an error of mine regarding that. Obviously I'm not getting one of these "Genius Grants" anytime soon...My question was what the monetary award is in total. The source I'd read (an article about a different topic I can no longer exactly recall) claimed that 5 annual payments are made of $500,000 each. This is incorrect; the prize is quarterly payments for 5 years which total $500,000. Now I know. I have to be more careful with original sources.
This means that a few teams lost 6 points each in the Unreasonably Difficult Round. I don't believe it would have affected standings as I believe all of the top teams had what turns out to be the correct answer. If anyone thinks this alone kept you off of the All-Time Top Ten List, let me know.
Thus far I've asked in the neighborhood of 2,200 questions, 6 of which were disputed. In 3 of those cases I was right all along, in 2 I was wrong and in 1 case things were a bit ambiguous. That means I've accepted outright incorrect answers 0.000909% of the time, which I find to be a tolerable margin of error. I'm striving for better than that. I've always said that if anyone's unhappy with the quiz I'll be more than happy to fully refund your entry fee*. Funny thing is I've never gotten an email that said "Hey, I was watching the news the other day, and you're right! Lansing is the capital of Michigan!" or some such.
* yes, this is a joke, it's always free to play...
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