"Say, you know, this is the best student I've ever had," says Kuheli Dutt, a social scientist and diversity officer at Columbia University's Lamont campus. "Compare those excellent letters with a merely good letter: 'The candidate was productive, or intel

And new research reveals that men are more likely to receive excellent letters of recommendation, too.

Building a neon sign is an art practiced by?professionals trained on the job to mold glass tubes into decorative?shapes and letters.

But she says the results still suggest women in geoscience are at a potential disadvantage from the very beginning of their careers starting with those less than outstanding letters of recommendation.

Compare those excellent letters with a merely good letter: The candidate was productive,or intelligent,or a solid scientist or something that's clearly solid praise, but nothing that singles out the candidate as exceptional or one of a kind.

Dutt and her colleagues studied more than 1,200 letters of recommendation for postdoctoral positions in geoscience.

Female applicants to postdoctoral positions in geosciences were nearly half as likely to receive excellent letters of recommendation, compared with their male counterparts.

If you are a graduate student, you may depend on your adviser for many things, including help with improving grades, acquiring financial support, forming an examining committee and getting letters of recommendation.

The tests are designed to detect subtle changes in mental function, and involve solving puzzles, recalling words and details from stories, and identifying patterns in collections of letters and symbol.

They found that female applicants were only half as likely to get outstanding letters, compared with their male counterparts.

Three letters of recommendation are required to apply to graduate schools.

Submit no more than three letters

I got two letters this morning with job offers, one from the Polytechnic, and the other from the Language School in Pistoia, Italy.

If they wanted to spell something, they used code words for letters of the Alphabet.

In 1863, after 17 years of advocacy including letters to five presidents, Hale got it.

A team of researchers trained three rhesus monkeys to associate 26 clearly different symbols consisting of numbers and selective letters with 0-25 drops of water or juice as a reward.

Almost a month ago, he bought popular word game that used little pieces of wood with different letters on them.

Another way to hide a message is to use symbols to stand for specific letters of the alphabet.

For example, the first letters of "my elephant eats too many eels" spell out the hidden message "meet me".

Here are some letters from our readers.

I sent letters to everyone I knew, telling them about my project.

In any language, some letters are used more than others.

My interest was aroused only by the fact that the word "poems" appeared in big, hot pink letters.

Over the years, the game had been produced using letters in different sizes and game boards in different colors.

The three letters present viewpoints on real source of road danger.

You can hide a message by having the first letters of each word spell it out.

You might represent each letter with a number, for example, let's number the letters of the alphabet, in order, from 1 to 26.

The popularity of these novels consolidated Dickens as a nationally and internationally celebrated man of letters.

When younger kids learn computer science, they learn that it's not just a confusing, endless string of letters and numbers -- but a tool to build apps, or create artwork, or test hypotheses.