The tone languages of sub-Saharan Africa raise challenging questions for the design of new writing systems. Marking too much or too little tone can have grave consequences for the usability of an orthography. Orthography development, past and present, rests on a raft of sociolinguistic issues having little to do with the technical phonological concerns that usually preoccupy orthographers. Some...

The stroke sequence of kanji has been investigated chiefly from the viewpoint of energy in the dynamics of writing together with the informational viewpoint in memorization in learning. Sample characters include all the members for daily use, and also katakana. The results show that the standard sequence fundamentally follows the law of energy minimization in writing movements, The degree of sa...

not take the place of a standardized logistic regression coefficient for valuating the strength of the influences of the independent variables on the dependent variable, relative to one another.” The strength of each independent variable cannot be judged based on the magnitude of the OR, so that a larger OR for one independent variable might not have a stronger association than a smaller OR for...

Few medical journals specifically instruct authors to use the active voice and avoid the passive voice, but advice to that effect is common in the large number of stylebooks and blogs aimed at medical and scientific writers. Such advice typically revolves around arguments that the passive voice is less clear, less direct, and less concise than the active voice, that it conceals the identity of ...

User-generated contents (UGC) such as online reviews are inherently incomplete since we do not capture the opinions of users who do not write a review. These silent users may have systematically different online experiences than those who speak up. These differences can be driven by users‟ differing sentiments towards their online experiences as well as their disposition to generate UGC. Indisc...

The fabrication of fully three-dimensional photonic crystals with a bandgap at optical wavelengths is demonstrated by way of direct femtosecond laser writing of an organic-inorganic hybrid material with metal-binding moieties, and selective silver coating using electroless plating. The crystals have 600-nm intralayer periodicity and sub-100 nm features, and they exhibit well-defined diffraction...