Learn the hard way

Drops on soft surfaces learn the hard way.

A liquid drop sits on a solid surface and slides away when the surface is tilted. Few physical systems seem so mundane or would appear to be governed by such plain, predictable, and long-understood principles. Indeed, Young’s fundamental understanding of the equilibrium gas/liquid/solid contact line (Fig. 1A) has remained intact for over two centuries (1). Nonetheless, static and dynamic contac...

Learning the hard way :

Conversational inferences: the hard way and the easy way

This paper proposes a general theory of conversational inferences which distinguishes two kinds of inferences: the hard way and the easy way. The theory accounts for a wider range of non-literal utterance meanings than Gricean and relevance theories and is motivated by the types of utterances in which the hearer fails to infer non-

Does Screening Change the Way Students Learn?∗

In this paper I investigate changes in how long students stay in education, but also how they learn, when screening becomes more important. Using a human capital production function with different learning activities as inputs I show that when education becomes a better signal, initially students will increase study efforts, but also shift from unobservable to observable activities. This shift ...

The Way of the Transgressor Is Hard.