The current study investigated the effectiveness of genre-based instruction on the development of EFL learners’ writing skills. Participants were 34 undergraduate students majoring in textile engineering at an Iranian state university, and they had enrolled in the English for specific academic purposes course. Participants were taught how to write 4 types of business letters, highlighting the p...

Given a sequence of letters generated independently from a finite alphabet, we consider the case when more than one, but not all, letters are generated with the highest probability. The length of the longest run of any of these letters is shown to be one greater than the length of the longest run in a particular state of an associated Markov chain. Using results of Foulser and Karlin (19...

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An essential mode of contact between general practitioners (GPs) and hospital staff is the referral letter. This must be clear and concise with sufficient information to aid the GP, the consultant and the patient. In order to ensure this, a proposal was made for the use of a structured or standardized referral letter: a form letter. This report shows that form letters were shorter than typed le...

We extend the general solution to the Cauchy problem for the relativistic closed string (Phys. Lett. B404 (1997) 57-65) to the case of open strings attached to Dp-branes, including the cases where the initial data has a knotlike topology. We use this extended solution to derive intrinsic dynamical properties of open and closed relativistic strings attached to Dp-branes. We also study the singul...

In a recent PRL (2013, 111, 180604), we invoked the Shore and Johnson axioms which demonstrate that the least-biased way to infer probability distributions {pi} from data is to maximize the Boltzmann-Gibbs entropy. We then showed which biases are introduced in models obtained by maximizing nonadditive entropies. A rebuttal of our work appears in entropy (2015, 17, 2853) and argues that the Shor...

In a recent publication [PRL 111, 160405 (2013)] we proved a version of Heisenberg’s errordisturbance tradeoff. This result was in apparent contradiction to claims by Ozawa of having refuted these ideas of Heisenberg. In a direct reaction [arXiv:1308.3540] Ozawa has called our work groundless, and has claimed to have found both a counterexample and an error in our proof. Here we answer to these...