Authors' response:clinical evaluation of the MPS 9000 macular pigment screener

As a research group with no commercial interest in any macular pigment optical density (MPOD) measurement devices or nutritional supplements, we feel that we were well-placed to carry out an independent clinical assessment of the reliability of the MPS 9000 (Tinsley Precision Instruments, Redhill, Surrey, UK). Our study was prompted by the fact that we could not find any reported coefficient of repeatability value within the literature, and none was provided by the manufacturer.1 We had planned to use this instrument in our own research studies investigating the impact of nutritional supplementation on MPOD. For this purpose, we needed …

Authors Support in the TM4L Environment

The TM4L environment enables the development and use of ontology-aware courseware based on the Semantic Web technology Topic Maps. In this paper we discuss its features in the light of authoring support, giving illustrative examples to highlight its use.

Three Generations of Cuban Authors: The 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s , Lecture by Reina María Rodríguez

This flyer promotes the event "Three Generations of Cuban Authors: The 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s : Lecture by Reina María Rodríguez" and was cosponsored by the Cuban Research Institute and the Department of Modern Languages at Florida International University.

A collection of elegant extracts from some of the best English authors : with notes and explanations for The facility of those, who appley themselves to the study of the English language

selected by James Charles Carey

Authors night at Dalton Book Store with Rita Mae Brown and Swimmer Diana Nyad (right)

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Women's History month at City Hall in NYC. Dell Martin (left) and Phyllis Lyons are Lesbian authors

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

The effect of multilingual facilitation on active participation in MOOCs Authors:

A new approach for overcoming the language and culture barriers to participation in MOOCs is reported. It is hypothesised that the juxtaposition of English as the language of instruction, used for interacting with course materials, and one’s preferred language as the language of participation, used for interaction with peers and facilitators, is preferable to ‘English only’ for participation in a MOOC. The HANDSON MOOC included seven teams of facilitators, each catering for a different language community. Facilitators were responsible for promoting active participation and peer tutoring. Comparing language groups revealed a series of predictors of intention to learn, some of which became apparent in the first days of the MOOC already. The comparison also uncovered four critical factors that influence participation: facilitation, language of participation, group size, and a pre-existing sense of community. Especially crucial was reaching a sufficient number of active participants during the first week. We conclude that multilingual facilitation activates participation in MOOCs in various ways; and that synergy between the four aforementioned factors is critical for the formation of the learning network that supports a social dynamics of active participation. Our approach suggests future targets for the development of the multilingual and community potential of MOOCs.

Finding the Needle in a Haystack: Who are the Most Central Authors Within a Domain?

The speed at which new scientific papers are published has increased dramatically, while the process of tracking the most recent publications having a high impact has become more and more cumbersome. In order to support learners and researchers in retrieving relevant articles and identifying the most central researchers within a domain, we propose a novel 2-mode multilayered graph derived from Cohesion Network Analysis (CNA). The resulting extended CNA graph integrates both authors and papers, as well as three principal link types: coauthorship, co-citation, and semantic similarity among the contents of the papers. Our rankings do not rely on the number of published documents, but on their global impact based on links between authors, citations, and semantic relatedness to similar articles. As a preliminary validation, we have built a network based on the 2013 LAK dataset in order to reveal the most central authors within the emerging Learning Analytics domain.