A pint’s a pound the world around

I don't usually have to think about all those odd imperial measurements, but just recently my husband started some commissioning work in the USA, and everything 'over there' is still in old money!

Now that I have stopped to think about it, those imperial measures really are difficult to work out. For example, what does 32 degrees mean on the Fahrenheit scale - because 0 degrees - freezing - is no longer 0 degrees? Surely it is more difficult to have to work out ounces and pounds and pints when you could simply have grams and kilograms or millilitres and litres? Why have yards and miles when you could have metres and kilometres and all you have to do is move the decimal point...

Nothing is neat and tidy with the old measures: and even worse, US measures are almost always different to elsewhere on the planet. For example, a US gallon (3.8 litres) is not the same as the gallon that was used in the rest of the world (4.54 litres). Additionally, there is a US saying, "A pint's a pound the world around". Except it isn't. Only in America is a pint (473 ml) almost the same as a pound (0.454 kilograms), despite one being volume and one being weight. As you can see, it is actually 19 ml/g out depending on which end of the silly stick you are looking from. While a pound in the rest of the world was the same, rounded usually to 0.454 kilograms, a pint was 600 ml.

Nightmare. NOTHING is the same. The craziest thing is that the US and Burma are the only two non-metric nations on the planet (what awesome company to be in!). The rest of us have to go to the madness of working in these antiquated measurements for 4.4% of the global population. I think you need to call 'Time' on these measures, USA, and join the rest of us over here on the base ten scale.

Anyway, the conversion is driving me bat-shit crazy. So I found an online converter which I have bookmarked so I can understand out what my husband is experiencing, without him having to convert everything in order to tell me a simple story. You can find CalculateMe, a handy site at:

1. https://www.calculateme.com/weight/
2. https://www.calculateme.com/volume/
3. https://www.calculateme.com/temperature/

So much better when I don't have to keep interrupting to get the gist of the tale!


Sam

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Law & Watt's DOTS model

Law & Watt's DOTS Model, 1977 (RMIT, n.d.)

In 1977, Law and Watts had a book on career guidance published, Schools, Careers and Community: A study of some approaches to careers education in schools, which detailed their now famous DOTS model. Each letter represents one of four key aspects which collectively lead to employability (Watts, 2006) including Decision learning, Opportunity awareness, Transition learning, and Self-awareness.

These four elements can be explained as (Law & Watts, 2003, 1977):

• Decision learning: students need access to career assistance to understand the many ways decisions can be made, including pressures, expectations and cues; methods of decision-making; developing skills in prioritisation, curation of information and self-knowledge; learning to balance risk against likely reward; and taking responsibility for the impact and outcomes for themselves.
• Opportunity awareness: students need career assistance to experience and gain understanding of the world of work, their potential range of opportunities, what requirements and responsibilities they will need to meet, and what satisfaction and rewards they are likely to achieve.
• Transition learning: students need career assistance so to grow self-awareness and skills manage the transitions into adulthood and into adult decisions, such as ‘knowing’ the reality of the differences between school and work; applying and linking learning to the workplace; building soft skills to help them join and navigate the world of work, such as negotiation, communication, representation, rights and responsibilities.
• Self-awareness: students need career assistance so they can sense themselves clearly, knowing their similarities and differences to others; understanding their personality and how that may affect their opportunities; exploring actual and potential qualifications, abilities, aptitudes, skills, qualities, and physical strengths, and the limitations of these; exploring personal needs, aspirations, satisfiers, interests and value. In some areas of the world, understanding how family views may impact and intersect with self-awareness.

While DOTS is a useful model to illustrate the steps in working with someone who is preparing for the transition from learning into work, it is also useful for working with someone who is preparing for other transitions. For example, a client about to transition into retirement also must consider their personality, to explore their abilities, aptitudes, skills, qualities, physicality, needs, aspirations, satisfiers, interests and values. The DOTS model has a relatively pan-career approach.

While this model underpins a great deal of the high school and university career development work in the UK (and in the USA where the model is usually cited as Peterson, Sampson & Reardon, 1991, effectively the same as the Law & Watts DOTS model), the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services (AGCAS) has promoted the use of the DOTS model throughout their mission and vision statements, embedding it into their developmental approach and their lobbying. It is supported by the UK's Higher Education Academy, the Association of Graduate Recruiters and the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (Stapleford, Stanbury & Kuma, 2005).

The most likely developmental order that students would be ready for each stage is S-O-D-T, as a certain level of Self-awareness needs to precede Opportunity awareness; which then requires Decision learning to enable any form of Transition learning (see RMIT DOTS Model, n.d.). Although the DOTS model is in Decision learning-Opportunity awareness-Transition learning-Self-awareness order, lacking a convenient acronym, DOTS remains the model’s name.

RMIT cites Watts in saying there is "consensus amongst careers educationalists that any theoretical model for the educational process of careers education should be congruent with, and encompass as a minimum, all these four elements, if it is to enable [clients] to implement fully informed and sound career plans" (n.d.). While mature clients in work are more likely to require career development in one or two areas of the model, rather than in all areas, the DOTS model may be helpful to ensure that all areas are briefly investigated.

If you don't currently use the model, I would recommend downloading a copy of The Higher Education Academy's career series publication by Watts (2006) where on pages 10 to 11 a list of outcomes for each area of the DOTS model is supplied. This is an extremely useful checklist framework for any career practitioner to have at hand.


Sam

References:

• Law, B. & Watts, A. G. (2003). The DOTS Analysis: Original version. Retrieved from http://hihohiho.com/memory/cafdots.pdf
• Law, B. & Watts, A. G. (1977). Schools, Careers and Community: A study of some approaches to careers education in schools. London, UK: Church Information Office (pp. 8-10).
• Peterson, G.W., Sampson, J.P. & Reardon, R.C. (1991). Career Development and Services: a Cognitive Approach. Pacific Grove CA, USA: Brooks/Cole.
• RMIT University (n.d.). DOTS Model. Retrieved from http://www.graduate-careers.org/2016/03/21/dots-model/
• Stapleford, J., Stanbury, D. & Kuma, A. (2005). Benchmarking Careers Education: support for enhancing student employability. At Enhancing Employability: Higher Education and Workforce Development, Ninth Quality in Higher Education International Seminar in collaboration with ESECT and The Independent, Birmingham 27th-28th January 2005.
  
• Watts, A. G. (2006). Career development learning and employability. Retrieved from https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/esect_career_development_learning_and_employability.pdf

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Searching in MS Outlook

When we use Outlook we will all be very familiar with the frustration of trying to find elusive emails that simply will not turn up in a search.

I simply could not count the number of times I have been absolutely sure that I have replied to an email, only to be unable to find what I sent. So I painstakingly write another email... only to have the recipient reply that I had already responded...! Grr: what a tremendous waste of time it is to do work twice :-(

So I thought it was time to do a bit of investigating on how to narrow down a search in Outlook 2016, and to make our lives a bit easier.

Below are some search terms which can be loaded into the Outlook search window to limit our searches:

"Jane Doe".	Only looks for exactly Jane Doe. Not JaneDoe, or janedoe, or Jane doe.
from:"Jane Doe".	Finds emails from Jane Doe. Not JaneDoe, or janedoe, or Jane doe.
hasattachment:yes.	Finds emails with attachments.
received: [greater than] 01/1/18 AND received: [less than] 01/1/19.	Finds emails you received in the past year.
read:no.	Finds unread emails.
to:jane.	Finds emails you sent to anyone with jane in their name.
subject:invoice.	Finds emails with invoice in the subject line.
body:bank.	Finds emails with bank mentioned in the body.
sent:yesterday.	Finds emails you sent yesterday (change out for Sunday, Monday, this week etc).

The best thing is that we can then do combinations of these, so we could search for an email that we sent to Jane with invoice in the subject line, where we mentioned bank in the body of the email, which had an attachment:

to:Jane AND subject:invoice AND body:bank AND hasattachment:yes

Even better, we are not limited by AND. We can use other Boolean commands, such as OR, NOT, =, < and >.

This makes searches much easier!


Sam

References:

• Microsoft (n.d.). Learn to narrow your search criteria for better searches in Outlook. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/learn-to-narrow-your-search-criteria-for-better-searches-in-outlook-d824d1e9-a255-4c8a-8553-276fb895a8da
• MSOutlook.info (26 July 2017). Boolean search with multiple criteria in Outlook (AND and OR statements). Retrieved from https://www.msoutlook.info/question/boolean-search-with-multiple-criteria

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An update on the Pav

Some time ago I wrote about the origins of the humble pavlova, because I got interested in trying to find out where it was created (here): Australia or New Zealand.

At the writing of the previous piece, I was awaiting the arrival of Keith Money's biography of Anna Pavolva. I managed to get a copy of this book, and had a good look through it.

From what I can gather, Money's 1982 Pavlova biography is "the most comprehensive and perhaps the most accurate biography of the dancer" (Gale Group Inc., 2004). Money apparently drew on many documents and archives from the time including access to the performer’s own documents as one of the British Royal Ballet’s biographers.

When it comes to the history of the Pavlova, unlike the reportage by Tracey Tufnail of the Vancouver Sun (15 February 2015), Money did not state that a hotel chef “in the country's capital city of Wellington invented a dessert inspired by Pavlova's tutu, which was decorated with green silk roses. His metaphorical representation with its light, soft meringue and cream filling was garnished with emerald green slices of kiwifruit to represent the roses”.

In fact, ALL that is said of the dessert in Keith Money's biography of Anna Pavlova is that, when journeying through the South Island of New Zealand - Christchurch, Timaru and Dunedin - in June and July of 1926 (Melita, 2009), there was “…the creation by a hotel chef of a meringue confection named in her honor…” (Money, 1982, p. 352). No mention of tutus, green silk roses, lightness, cream or emerald green kiwifruit anywhere. This statement appears to have been creative licence by Tufnail (15 February 2015). It may have been written elsewhere, but I have not yet found this in any 1926 reports.

I had been unconvinced about the Vancouver Sun story, as I was dubious about 'Chinese gooseberries' - as they were then known - being in a dessert created in June or July of 1926 (Melita, 2009). Chinese gooseberries would have been too sour and too small - not to mention well out of season - to have gone into a dessert in winter. The modern, sweeter Kiwifruit only appeared in 1959, and did not rise to international prominence until the 1980s (New Zealand History, n.d.). It appears that I was right to be skeptical.

As previous researchers (noteably Emerita Professor Helen Leach, 2010) have reported, the creation of the Pavolva apparently stems from 1926, with the first documentation found in the Australian edition of the Davis Gelatine Company's Davis Dainty Dishes in that year. However, the research is silent on what month this recipe book was published. If the Australian edition was published later than June or July, it might imply that the Pavolva was a New Zealand creation - or at least a New Zealand named creation - after all.

I have emailed Emerita Professor Leach to find out if she knows the month of publication, and have ordered her book, The Pavlova Story, to see if there is any other information to be gleaned.

There will be more to come on this culinary who-dunnit :-)


Sam

References:

• Gale Group Inc. (2004). Anna Pavlova. Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/literature-and-arts/dance-biographies/anna-pavlova
• Leach, H. M. (2010). The Pavlova Wars: How a Creationist Model of Recipe Origins Led to an International Dispute. Gastronomica, 10(2), 24-30. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2010.10.2.24
• Melita, N. (2009). Anna Pavlova’s 1926 Australian tour. Retrieved from https://ausdance.org.au/articles/details/anna-pavlovas-1926-australian-tour
• Money. K. (1982). Anna Pavlova: Her Life and Art. New York, USA: A. Knopf & Sons
• Money, Keith (n.d.). Retrieved from http://worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n50003771/
• New Zealand History (n.d.). Chinese gooseberry becomes kiwifruit 15 June 1959. Retrieved from https://nzhistory.govt.nz/the-chinese-gooseberry-becomes-the-kiwifruit
• Tufnail, T. (21 February 2015). Bitter rivalry and a sweet ending; Pavlova is the quintessential New Zealand dessert - just don't tell Aussies. The Vancouver Sun. http://search.proquest.com.libraryproxy.griffith.edu.au/docview/1657260381?accountid=14543

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Getting a Word count from a pdf 2

Last week I wrote a post about getting free online word count from Adobe Acrobat files.

This week I have tried some software that supposedly adds that functionality to the pdf Reader software.

The first piece of software I tried was a free piece of kit which supposedly added a text counter to Acrobat Reader, called WordCountReader. I found an article on this extension here (http://try67.blogspot.com/2015/01/reader-word-count-free.html). Going to the WordCountReader website from the link in the article, I applied for and got a unique download link from www.payloadz.com. I downloaded the .js file and installed it as per the .txt file instructions. However, this extension did nothing at all, even after a full reboot. I uninstalled the .js file.

The second piece of kit, abracadabraCompteur, was also a .js extension, which I downloaded from here (https://www.abracadabrapdf.net/utilitaires/reader-utilities/abracadabracompteur_en/). This one worked on Acrobat Reader DC, having installed it as per the .pdf file instructions. It did not need a full reboot to work.

Next I went to Ginstrom.com and downloaded another piece of freeware: CountAnything. This piece of kit was a very simple download from http://ginstrom.com/CountAnything/. Once installed, was really easy to use. Simply open it, and drop your chosen file into it, and click the count button. It will read pretty much anything, including all Office products, text files, html and some calculation files.

I was going to check AnyCount, but it was only trialware, not freeware, it fell outside the range of this small experiment. It can be downloaded at https://www.anycount.com/try-free if you want to try it.

If you recall from part 1, the results of my free online pdf counts were as follows. I have now added the freeware pdf results to that, again, in decreasing order of accuracy on the base of a pdf document of 10,448 words:

1. 10,684, Online, https://docwordcounter.com/wordcountprocess (+2%)
2. 10,126, Online, https://www.kennistranslations.com/wordcount (-3%)
3. 11,619, Freeware, CountAnything (+11%)
4. 12,047, Freeware, abracadabraCompteur (+15%)
5. 2,005, Online, http://www.montereylanguages.com/pdf-word-count-online-free-tool.html (-81%)
6. 0, Freeware, WordCountReader (-100%)

Interestingly, the software tools were less reliable than the online tools, and none of them were that accurate.

Providing you aren't worried about privacy, then the online tool, Doc Word Counter (while factoring in a 2% over-count), is the best option. If documents need to remain private, then CountAnything (while factoring in an over-count of 11%) is the best option.


Sam

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Getting a Word count from a pdf 1

Each semester I take a word count of student research reports and articles, and cross tab the various section counts with the final grades to give students a rough idea about how much they needs to be written in order to get a good pass.

Getting a Word count if students submit in a Word document is easy. But each semester, however, some students will submit their work as a pdf, and Adobe Acrobat does not have a built-in count function.

Some pdfs will save as a Word document, which will give me a rough word count (although it double-counts headers and footers). Those pdfs which won't convert to Word I am sometimes able to use Ctrl & A to select all the text in the document, then copy it out to Word.

However, from time to time I will find that neither of these methods will work. That is when I need either software, or an online pdf word counter. In this article, the first of two, I look at some free online word counters that a Google search turned up (here), where I was able to upload a pdf to a website and have the words within counted.

I used a pdf created from a Word document containing 10,448 words. Following are the free online sites I used (all of which said they would count the words in a pdf), and what the count was, in decreasing order of accuracy:

1. 10,684, https://docwordcounter.com/wordcountprocess
2. 10,126, https://www.kennistranslations.com/wordcount
3. 2,005, http://www.montereylanguages.com/pdf-word-count-online-free-tool.html

All of these tools were easy to use, but it can be easily seen that the DocWordCounter was the most accurate.

The only thing that troubles me with doing an online count is privacy of the file we upload. I would not want to be uploading files which were at all confidential...!

In part 2, I will look at freeware installs to do the same thing.


Sam

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Google Photo & Album count

I use Google photos to back up all my images. It is a great service, as well as being a superb way to ensure that you have all your images even if your phone gets run over by a truck.

Having been on holiday recently, I created some Google photo albums to share with those who were on holiday with me. While knowing I had taken quite a lot of photos, I tried to work out how many photos I had actually taken.

I was surprised to see that there appears to be no count within Google photos at all. Even more alarmingly, there also appears to be a limit on albums of 2,000 images... but how would you know you were even close if you can't get an image count?

However, thanks to Jamie (28 December 2018), I now know there is a way to sneakily get a count through Google Dashboard:

• Go to your Google Dashboard here (https://myaccount.google.com/intro/dashboard)
• Then click on the Photos tab. It will expand
• Clicking on the albums will show you all the albums you have and number of images in each.

It is simplicity itself, once you know how.

Why on earth this function is not inside Google photos itself is beyond me.


Sam

• Reference: Jamie (28 December 2018). How to Count the Photos in Google Photos and Other Photo Tricks. Retrieved from https://www.techjunkie.com/count-google-photos/

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Rotating Blogger images

Recently I was writing up some family news for another wee blog that I have, when I realised that some of my images were loading upside down, or rotated by 90 degrees. Many images are automatically rotated to their correct orientation, but some were persistently skew-whiff.

In the past I have simply gone out, rotated the image, and re-uploaded.

And then I thought: surely there is a way to code images so they rotate within the post... so I googled it. Sure enough, there was a way, by the simple addition of "-r90", "-r180", or "r-270" to the image string in the html window. This little instruction gets inserted with the display size, so your text might read:

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/Z...As/s320-r90/Name_of_image.jpg

I had not expected it to be so utterly easy. But it was.

NB: you may need to also tweak the display size, if it is specified in the string


Sam

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How to choose a research topic

Some students start their a capstone research paper with a clear idea of a research problem or have an embryonic research question. These students are quickly out of the blocks, and their research and project management progress is usually fairly smooth. Then there are those who have some idea of what they want to do. They spend the next five weeks scrambling to filter their ideas down to a clearly defined research question and usually have to pull an all-nighter to get their research proposal in on time.

However, there are also students who start with no topic area ideas at all. These students have some really tough decisions which need to be made very quickly. Any delay will run them out of time, with them not being able to meet the five week deadline for the research proposal submission.

This article is to help those students to get to a research topic by the end of week one, so they can then narrow down their topic to a research question (read here about research questions) by week four.

What we need to do is to find a empty classroom with a big whiteboard. We need some whiteboard markers, and to have our phone.

Then we fill the whiteboard with ideas. Each time we fill the whiteboard, we take a photo, clean the board, then start again:

• List all the topic areas we like or are interested in
• List any unanswered questions we have
• List any assignment projects we would have liked to have taken further
• List the theories which are our favourites
• List the theories that we loathe
• List all the topics that we avoid
• List what we are good at (our strengths)
• List the areas where we lack skills (our weaknesses)
• Consider who we might like to be supervised by, and what their interests are. List where their interests might intersect with ours
• List current “hot” topics
• List marketable skills or areas for our work
• List organisations whom we might like to work for.

Go through all our photos. Look for intersections where we have had three or more related ideas. Put those up on a clean white board. Now think about:

1. Are we curious about it, or want to disprove it?
2. Do we think that we are interested enough about this idea to become passionate about it?
3. Do we know if there is a gap in academic literature?
4. Do we think we could apply this research topic locally?
5. Could we apply this research topic to an organisation we want to work for?
6. Would our potential supervisor be interested in this idea?

Those last six questions should knock some ideas out, and bring some ideas to the fore. This process can be done in an afternoon, and can get us up and running with a research topic by day two.

Speedy :-)

Sam

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Create a system image error

As part of my back-up regime, I run a Windows system image overnight each week. However, for the first time ever recently, I got an error message:

The backup failed.

The operation failed due to a device error encountered with either the source or the destination. If the source or destination volume is on a disk, run CHKDSK /R on the source or destination volume, and then retry the operation. (0x8078012D).

Additional Information: The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error. (0x8007045D).

At first I thought that the external HDD I was using had failed, so I checked that drive using CHKDSK (as per the instructions on the error message; ie, through CMD and into DOS), but found nothing wrong. Just in case something had gone wrong with the indexing, I did a quick reformat on the HDD.

Then I tried running the system image again overnight, and got the same failure message.

OK: so time to move onto the C:Drive. I tried running a CHKDSK on the C:Drive in DOS (again, as per the instructions) but the process appeared to get stuck at 89,000-ish files, showing up a few bad sectors and effectively stalling.

I wondered if this process was unable to run as the computer was on: ie, that Windows functions were identifying as 'bad' sectors simply because of the operating system. So I decided to find out how to run CHKDSK within Windows, and see if that would work instead.

Google to the rescue with appropriate instructions, care of EaseUS (28 December 2018):

1. In Windows Explorer, right-click the drive to be checked
2. From the pop up menu, select Properties.
3. In Properties dialogue box, click the Tools tab
4. On the Tools tab, under "Error-checking", click the "Check Now" button
5. On the Check Disk dialogue box, tick both options (Automatically fix file system errors; and scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors)
   
6. Click Start.

You will then get a Windows message saying that it can't check the disc while it is in use.

Click "Schedule disk check" and select that the disk check runs on the next start up. Be prepared for a wait of some hours: I think the CHKDSK took something like 6 hours to run.

Interestingly, there were no repairs needed, but regardless, it was a good piece of maintenance to do.

After running CHKDSK, Windows should then start normally.

And even better, my next system image ran perfectly.


Sam

• Reference: EaseUS (28 December 2018). How to Repair A Bad Sector in Windows 10/8/7? Retrieved from https://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/clone-resource/repair-a-bad-sector-in-windows-10-8-7.html

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The Cycle of Action Research

There are two main elements to action research: firstly that it is cyclic; and secondly that it is participatory (Drummond & Themessl-Huber, 2007).

The participatory element is fairly easy to define: research which is being undertaken by the researcher in partnership with the research participants. All involved move forward together, in a democratic research process.

The cyclic element is fairly easy to sort out as well. Similar to Kolb, since the early 1980s, Kemmis and McTaggart's (1990) iterative and virtuous model of Plan | Action | Observe | Reflect has been used as a learning spiral for conducting action research. The aim is to learn from each cycle, helping all participants to get closer to 'knowing' what will work and to discard that which will not.

Planning is all about method, and the actions we take must follow our plan. We then observe the results of our actions - with our participants - then collectively reflect on how that went. Our next cycle builds on and eliminates the failings of the first cycle.

However, how this model is represented bugs me: it looks 'untidy'. Kemmis & McTaggart had a go at using a spiral (2014, p. 19), but it is a bit ugly.

It almost looks as if our research is plumbing the deeps, or is going down the toilet. Not a great metaphor.

The University of Pretoria (2009, p. 1) had a go at portraying Kemmis & McTaggart's model in a different way, with a curving arrowed lines rather than trying to write the step names into a ribbon. While this seems more constructive, it becomes harder to read.

While these diagrams are not perfect, I do think that they both better illustrate the iterative nature of the action research cycle than the original one - at the top of the page - developed by Kemmis & McTaggart (1990).

There is a real talent in portraying models as graphics, which I don't have. In looking at the models out there, I suspect that many researchers don't have it either. I am sure there is a better, and simpler way, created by someone who has graphic design absolutely nailed. So I am looking for a better example.

If anyone has such a diagram, I would love to see it.



Sam

References:

• Drummond, J. S., & Themessl-Huber, M. (2007). The cyclical process of action research: The contribution of Gilles Deleuze. Action Research, 5(4), 430-448. https://doi.org/10.1177/1476750307077317
• Kemmis, S., McTaggart, R., & Nixon, R. (2014). The action research planner: Doing critical participatory action research. Singapore: Springer Science & Business Media.
• Kemmis, S. & McTaggart, R. (1990). The Action Research Planner. Australia: Deakin University
• University of Pretoria (2009). Chapter 3: Research methods. Retrieved from https://repository.up.ac.za/bitstream/handle/2263/29266/02chapter3.pdf?sequence=3

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Making all new mistakes

It is the time of year where we have had a break, and where we plunge into the excitement of a new year. We have caught up with family. We have looked at the close of the last year with fresh eyes. We may have decided that we don't want to repeat the mistakes of last year. The future looks rosy. We set out to be the best person we can be with at this fresh beginning. Great!

Now reality moves in. We get a week into our new health /fitness /eating /reading /study regime and are riding off into that sunset of great deeds, and - oops - something goes wrong. We may get back on that horse a couple of times, but sometimes that first bobble may be all it takes to scupper our good intentions. And we repeat the mistakes of last year.

There are no easy answers when it comes to trying to change ourselves, but doing a bit of 'what if' thinking can help us to keep getting on that horse, which will help us to make all new mistakes for the coming year.

The following goal-setting techniques, the 'shoulds', can help us:

1. Firstly, we have to know our own limitations. A goal to run 10ks a day when we can't walk 2 isn't going to work, but aiming to build to 10ks over a year might be do-able (Doran, 1983).
2. Secondly, we have to prioritise (Doran, 1983). What is our most important change? If we can work out where we will get most bang for our buck, other, easier goals may be achieved with less effort as by-catch to our main goal.
3. Thirdly, we should create our goals using a structure. I personally prefer Professor George Doran's SMART goal model (see articles here, here and here). SMART can help us to write goals that are worded and thought-through in a way that makes them more achievable, and helps to keep us accountable to ourselves (Doran, 1983).
4. Fourthly, we should write our goals down, or tell someone. This makes our goals more concrete, which makes it more likely that we will actually achieve them (Morisano, Hirsh, Peterson, Pihl & Shore, 2010).
5. Fifthly, we have to check that we maintain momentum, and decide how we will get back on track if we fall off that horse (Doran, 1983). For example, I put daily reminders in my online diary, and am not allowed to go to bed unless I have achieved what I said I would do. Where that is not possible, I also have to make up any overall missed goals before the end of each week.

Hopefully this might help some of us who are trying to keep that horse moving. And that will enable us to make all new mistakes this year :-)


Sam

References:

• Doran, G. T. (1983). How to be a Better Manager in 10 Easy Steps. USA: Monarch Press.
• Morisano, D., Hirsh, J. B., Peterson, J. B., Pihl, R. O., & Shore, B. M. (2010). Setting, elaborating, and reflecting on personal goals improves academic performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(2), 255-264. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018478

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Truth ungarnished... or unvarnished?

I went to write "the plain, ungarnished truth" recently; then thought: should that be "the plain, unvarnished truth"?

I was in a quandary. I didn't know whether the truth was unadorned, or whether the truth was unpolished. Either, in my opinion, could work. A check online seemed to favour ungarnished, however all the examples were American. The more I read, the more doubtful I became.

While a minor point, what made me doubt 'ungarnished' even more was that it shows up as a spelling error, while unvarnished does not. This made me think that ungarnished was a mondegreen (more on these here).

How I wished our friend, Michael Quinion, from world wide words, was still etymology-ing. Michael was an Oxford English Dictionary reader from 1992 to 2016, who managed to polish off over 175,000 English additions for the OED. Plenty of chops there to provide excellent, RELIABLE usage advice.

Then I realised that nothing on the web ever really dies, and that his site (here) was still up. I went and checked. And while Michael Quinion did not explicitly explore the difference between an garnished or unvarnished, he did have a reference to "the plain or unvarnished truth" (Quinion, 2 July 2016).

So unvarnished truth it is :-)


Sam

• Reference: Quinion, M. (2 July 2016). Newsletter 925: 5. Fard. Retrieved from http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/tfzu.htm or http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-far3.htm

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