Only two hermits remain. The ninth hermit has been joined by a tenth. They live on a small ranch in Central Texas with The Dogs of Hermits’ Rest. He does not hang out in bars anywhere near as much as when he was trying to be Li Po.
Other than family and music and song writing, his interests include writing. He has authored many technical tomes, several short stories, and a novel. He does have a day job or two, and he re-publishes some of his writings for those here.
For more information, see the complete profile.
Yesterday, our intern minister bade us farewell. It was his last sermon as an intern. I waited until today to blog about it so that I could say, “Thank you, Aaron. It has been a real privilege getting to know you while you finished your internship. You are a great speaker and your future is bright, especially in these uncertain times.”
The church hasn’t posted the sermon yet. When they do, I will link to it.
I finished the front part of the expanded bed in the front yard. The back still needs doing. But since I had been acquiring some plants for the expansion, I decided to plant them.
The soil is very clay-y there, and I hope I don’t kill my lovelies, which consist of:
Some time this week or next weekend, I hope to finish the wall. There is enough money on a gift card of Suna’s to pay for the needed stones—unless I have to add another course.
Now that we’ve had three days in a row that approached the century mark, it turns out that the lobelias (Queen Victoria) are not as happy as I thought they were. They get a bit droopy if I forget to water them twice a day. Although they were listed as full sun and are planted where they only get that in the afternoon, they apparently are not rated for Texas sun. Sigh.
6/2/08 Update: The Backyard Gardener identified the problem for me. Queen Victoria, “Prefers moist, rich soil and will continue to self-sow once established.” And a table lists “Water Range: Normal to Moist.” Unless you live in a river bottom, nothing in Central Texas can be considered “normal to moist.” Everything here is well drained. This certainly explains my the lovely LQV wants so much water.
After mowing and watering, I spent the rest of the day today building this compost sifter. I found a set of plans to fit a standard wheelbarrow here, but I didn’t want to bend over that much. So I modified the plans to fit my planting table. (Yes, that is a recycled shower pan.)
Other than one piece of 2x4 and the ½-inch hardware cloth, it is made of recycled materials. (There is an interesting story about the guy who worked in Home Depot’s hardware department not knowing what hardware cloth is, but I’ll save that for another time.) Later, I found another 2x4 in the scrap pile that would have let me say this sifter was made of 100% recycled wood. Sigh.
I put two forks of compost in the tray. As I move the tray back-and-forth with some gusto, the finished compost falls through the hardware cloth onto the planting table. I dump what remains into the wheelbarrow. I repeat the process. This time, I leave the tray in the wheelbarrow and scrape all of the finished compost down the drain. It falls into a small bucket on the tray under the table. Three of the small buckets fills a large cat litter container, and I take the finished compost to wherever I want to distribute it.
It took a little over two hours today for me to process my whole pile and distribute the finished compost. The plants all said, “Thank you, Lee.” I heard them.
Once I finish working the pile, I put fresh compostables (from cleaning out the fridge) at the bottom and move all of the unfinished compost from the wheelbarrow and other temporary storage devices back into the pile.
It turns out that our lazy New Guinea Impatients is neither. It is, however, pretty. I just wish I knew what it is.
BTW, Friday’s Feast is off-line this week.
27 May Update: Suna and I were walking through the garden center and found a different variety of this lovely plant. When she showed me the tag, I recognized the word Jacobi. Yes, these are a variety of Jacobi. They are no longer unidentified.
This post originally appeared in the now-defunctCentral Texas Instructional Design blog on this date.
Let’s take a break from multiple choice questions to revisit punctuation—quotation marks, in particular. When not setting off quoted text, what do they do?
One of my clients asked for my opinion on a marketing brochure. Marketing isn’t my specialty, but I agreed to look it over. One of the first things I noticed was an abundance of quotation marks bracketing single words and a couple of phrases. I asked, “When describing your new product, why is new in quotation marks? Why are so many other words in quotation marks?”
“I want to emphasize those words. The quotation marks will call the reader’s attention to those words.”
True enough, but what kind of attention do quotation marks draw? I told a story that one of my undergrad technical writing profs related in class. I wish I could take credit for it, but here is a short version of the story:
An editor and a writer were arguing over the use of quotation marks in a headline. The editor said they emphasize the meaning of the quoted word. The writer said they call the word into question. After much arguing, the writer said, “I can make my point if you give me control over tomorrow’s headline.” The overly-confident editor agreed. The next day, the banner headline read:
Editor Seen Leaving Motel with “Wife”
The next draft of the marketing brochure I saw had replaced the quotation marks with boldface type.
This weekend, I went to visit my dad. It was the first night Suna and I have spent apart since I moved in. We both survived and had a really good time. Suna and Beccano made it a mother-son weekend.
My brother and sister-in-law were there visiting when I arrived. We don’t really have that much in common, so these visits turn into a tall-tale festival. We have all heard each other’s tales so many times that we could almost save time by numbering them.
When Dad and I were walking through a recently harvested wheat field, we saw the summer’s first scissortail (
Dad wants me to sell part of the farm to his neighbor. For once, he and I agreed exactly on what the best thing to do is. Now all I have to do is work out the details with the neighbor. It is a rare situation where everyone wins. Dad is not using the part of the farm the neighbor wants. The piece will even out the a ragged border on the neighbor’s property and give his cattle access to water. The sale will pay off all my remaining debt, max out my IRA contribution for the year, pay for a needed repair around the house, and give me a nice nest egg to tide be over between contracts.
I am really grateful to have my dad still around at 85—still looking out for me. I hope he’s around when he’s 100.
Late again, naturally. Wasn’t that a song by Gilbert O’Sullivan?
This post appeared in the now-defunctCentral Texas Instructional Design blog on this date.
Distracters are opportunities to choose incorrectly on a multiple choice assessment. The more distracters a question has, the less likely a correct answer results from a lucky guess. I mentioned last time that most of the companies I work with have standardized on a using four options (three distracters and one correct answer). Assessments in higher education frequently use an extra distracter to reduce the chance of guessing (CERNet, n.d.).
So, if having more options makes guessing harder, why standardize on four options?
Most of us are familiar with the point of diminishing returns from Economics 101. For a certain amount of work, we derive a certain benefit. At some point, we hit the point where there is not enough additional benefit to justify the additional work. The following chart and table show the returns on the work of writing additional distracters.
| Number of Distracters | Chance of Guessing | Difference |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 50.000% | |
| 2 | 33.333% | 16.667% |
| 3 | 25.000% | 8.333% |
| 4 | 20.000% | 5.000% |
| 5 | 16.667% | 3.333% |
| 6 | 14.286% | 2.381% |
| 7 | 12.500% | 1.786% |
You can see that learners have a 50% chance of guessing correctly on a True/False question or a multiple choice question with only two options and one correct answer. Adding a third option reduces their chances of guessing by 16.7%, rounded. Going from four to five may still be worth the additional effort. But by the time you get to six options, the gain in accuracy is probably not worth the effort.
So, what is the correct number of options? It depends on the question and what the options are. When I took the written assessment for my driver’s license, one of the questions asked about the meaning of that little stripped sign you sometimes see at the roadside. One of the distracters was, “Stop for roadside barber shop.” My guess is that that distracter was never chosen, and its only reason for existence was to meet the magical number of required distracters. Since this distracter does not really distract, this was essentially a three-option question.
To sum up, there is no magic number of distracters. Remember that distracters should be “seductive alternatives” (University of St. Thomas Academic Support). They should “compellingly and confusingly” attract the test taker (Randall, 2003). If there are only two plausible alternatives, don’t waste your time trying to come up with two more implausible distracters that probably won’t have any effect on the outcome of the assessment.
Coming soon: Seductive Distracters
I met this little guy this morning. We had some terrible storms blow through last night, and they must have pushed him along with them. He was at least a hundred miles east of his normal migratory path from Central America to the forests of the American and Canadian West.
I’m sad to say that he didn’t make it this year. The storms were just too much for him. I found him on the front porch. I said a few nice words over him and buried him in the flowerbed where I hope he rests well.
He was a truly beautiful bird. He had a brilliant yellow underbelly. His head and cape are supposed to be slate gray, but his head looked almost purple (as seen in the painting). The gray cape had almost a greenish tint.
Other than the little MacGillivray’s warbler, we came through very lucky. A funnel cloud was spotted in our neighborhood about the time we were coming home from choir practice, but it didn’t touch down. Beccano is terrified of tornadoes, so he had a bit of a rough patch. I am proud of the way he handled himself. Not being afraid is stupid. Learning to work through your fear is what courage is all about.
We had a lot of wind and hail, but no downed branches on our block anyway. (Suna says the University campus took quite a bit of damage.) And the hail at our house was apparently small. It didn’t even stay on the ground long enough for me to measure it after the second wave. I didn’t see any hail damage or even any shredded leaves. Other places in town reported hailstones up to 4”—the largest ever recorded in the Austin metroplex, according to News8.
We did get about 1.5” of rain over night. (That’s on top of about .6” the night before.) I am worried that one of our plants is so top-heavy from the rain that it may have damaged its stem. I’ll check it out when I get back home.
