My colleague Torgny Roxå had a new paper come out (on our shared Birthday no less!) on how academic development depends on context. Together with colleagues from Bratislava, they investigate the “educational choice architecture” (ECA), the boundary conditions that nudge teachers towards certain choices, much like big department stores get customers to buy things they […]
The study I am summarising here is a meta-analysis of 40 studies on how teacher characteristics influence secondary-school students, and they find that teacher characteristics and competencies explain 9% of the difference in student performance!
Since I referred to it in the post I just published, here is a quick summary of Ellis et al. (2014) on “Systematic reflection: Implications for learning from failures and successes”.
In the “static apnea” discipline in freediving, many cool pictures of athletes are taken underwater in a way that plays with the reflection of the athlete in the still water surface. This can lead to pretty spooky pictures (like the one of Victor in the top left). We do have other experiences with water, where […]
What is it that we actually look at when we go wave watching? Water is pretty much clear (or at least it is in the spots where I like to go wave watching), so how come we are able to see waves? What we are looking at are not actually the waves themselves, but at […]
How much physics can you spot in a single picture? What I see here: Waves and their reflection on the sea wall (Do you see the two main fields? One coming in from the top right, and then the other one (technically the reflection of the first one) going out to the top left) Total […]
Do you know the phenomenon that once you start noticing something, you see it everywhere? That’s been the case with me and total internal reflection. Not quite as impressive as last time, but still there: And what I found really interesting this time: a swarm of tiny fishies making wave rings! I only noticed them […]
Have you ever wondered why at some angles the sea looks blue (or whatever the color of the sky that day) and at others you can actually look into the water? That’s the phenomenon of total internal reflection. There is a critical angle at which you switch from “being able to look into water” to “total […]
