The interaction of reading, spelling and handwriting difficulties with writing development

Editorial

Use of spellcheck in text production by college students with dyslexia

It is widely assumed that by identifying spelling errors and suggesting replacement words, spellcheck allows writers to revise spelling errors even if they do not have the necessary spelling knowledge. However, there have been no studies evaluating the efficacy of modern spellcheck tools for students with spelling difficulties, such as dyslexia. In fact, the very limited and dated research into use of spellcheck by writers with dyslexia indicated that, even when using spellcheck to revise spelling errors, this group left many misspellings in their texts. The current study is the first to investigate whether a modern spellcheck program allows college students with dyslexia to produce texts that are as free from misspellings as texts by their peers, and whether this affects the quality of the text in other ways. College students with dyslexia (n=18) and a control group of peers (n=18) wrote two short essays using Microsoft Word, one with spellcheck active and one without spellcheck active. Spelling accuracy and overall quality of the texts were measured. Without spellcheck, students with dyslexia made more misspellings than the control group, however, with spellcheck active students from both groups left almost zero misspelled words in their texts. Text quality was not affected. Results demonstrate that spellcheck helps college students with dyslexia to overcome the limitations that poor spelling knowledge imposes. Importantly, results indicate that spellcheck does not lead to improvements in text beyond spelling accuracy, or lead to poorer quality texts, indicating that it is suitable for use in exam conditions

An introduction to Elinor Glyn : her life and legacy

This special issue of Women: A Cultural Review re-evaluates an author who was once a household name, beloved by readers of romance, and whose films were distributed widely in Europe and the Americas. Elinor Glyn (1864–1943) was a British author of romantic fiction who went to Hollywood and became famous for her movies. She was a celebrity figure of the 1920s, and wrote constantly in Hearst's press. She wrote racy stories which were turned into films—most famously, Three Weeks (1924) and It (1927). These were viewed by the judiciary as scandalous, but by others—Hollywood and the Spanish Catholic Church—as acceptably conservative. Glyn has become a peripheral figure in histories of this period, marginalized in accounts of the youth-centred ‘flapper era’. Decades on, the idea of the ‘It Girl’ continues to have great pertinence in the post-feminist discourses of the twenty-first century. The 1910s and 1920s saw the development of intermodal networks between print, sound and screen cultures. This introduction to Glyn's life and legacy reviews the cross-disciplinary debate sparked by renewed interest in Glyn by film scholars and literary and feminist historians, and offers a range of views of Glyn's cultural and historical significance and areas for future research

Collaboration With Deaf Communities to Conduct Accessible Health Surveillance

Introduction Populations of deaf sign language users experience health disparities unmeasured by current public health surveillance. Population-specific health data are necessary to collaboratively identify health priorities and evaluate interventions. Standardized, reproducible, and language-concordant data collection in sign language is impossible via written or telephone surveys. Methods Deaf and hearing researchers, community members, and other stakeholders developed a broad computer-based health survey based on the telephone-administered Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. They translated survey items from English to sign language, evaluated the translations, and filmed the survey items for inclusion in their custom software. They initiated the second Rochester Deaf Health Survey in 2013 (n=211). Analyses (conducted in 2015) compared Rochester Deaf Health Survey 2013 findings with those of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System with the general adult population in the same community (2012, n=1,816). Results The Rochester Deaf Health Survey 2013 participants’ mean age was 44.7 (range, 18—87) years. Most were deaf since birth or early childhood (87.1%) and highly educated (53.6% with ≥4 years of college). The median household income was \u3c $35,000. The prevalence of current smokers was low (8.1%). Nearly all (93.8%) reported having health insurance, yet barriers to appropriate health care were evident, with high emergency department use (16.2% with two or more past-year visits) and 22.7% forgoing needed health care in the past year because of cost. Conclusions Community-engaged research with deaf populations identifies strengths and priorities, providing essential information otherwise missing from existing public health surveillance, and forming a foundation for collaborative dissemination to facilitate broader inclusion of deaf communities

‘Teachers’ to ‘academics’: the implementation of a modernisation project at one UK post-92 university

Among the many external forces that have impacted upon institutions, league tables have been the dynamic to which universities across the world are now responding. Following the appointment of a new vice-chancellor at one post-92 UK university, a modernisation project was introduced aimed at maximising the institutions’ research standing. For the institutional actors, the university’s lecturers, this modernisation project demanded a change in their working practices from one which had focused on teaching related activities to a situation where an emphasis was to be placed upon research. This study examines how university teachers at this institution understood and responded to the modernisation project to acquire research skills and provides an insight into a path-breaking strategic plan that was enacted within an historically dependent setting. It muses on the dialectics of institutional path dependency and the path breaking effect of a modernisation project that was stimulated by new managerialism

Elinor Glyn's British Talkies: Voice, Nationality and the Author On-Screen

Existing accounts of Elinor Glyn's career have emphasized her substantial impact on early Hollywood. In contrast, relatively little attention has been paid to her less successful efforts to break into the UK film industry in the early sound period. This article addresses this underexplored period, focusing on Glyn's use of sound in her two 1930 British films, Knowing Men and The Price of Things. The article argues that Glyn's British production practices reveal a unique strategy for reformulating her authorial stardom through the medium of the ‘talkie’. It explores how Glyn sought to exploit the specifically national qualities of the recorded English voice amidst a turbulent period in UK film production. The article contextualizes this strategy in relation to Glyn's business and personal archives, which evidence her attempts to refine her own speaking voice, alongside those of the screen stars whose careers she sought to develop for recorded sound. It suggests that the sound film was marked out as an important, exploitable new tool for Glyn within a broader context of debates about voice, recorded sound and nationality in UK culture at this time. This enabled her to portray a distinctively national brand identity through her new film work and surrounding publicity, in contrast to her appearances in American silent films. The article will show that recorded sound further allowed Glyn performatively to foreground her role as author-director through speaking cameos. This is analysed in relation to wider evidence of her practice, where she reflected on the performative qualities of the spoken voice in her writing and interviews, and made use of radio, newsreel and live performance to perfect and refine her own skills in recitation and oration

Soft-core hyperon-nucleon potentials

A new Nijmegen soft-core OBE potential model is presented for the low-energy YN interactions. Besides the results for the fit to the scattering data, which largely defines the model, we also present some applications to hypernuclear systems using the G-matrix method. An important innovation with respect to the original soft-core potential is the assignment of the cut-off masses for the baryon-baryon-meson (BBM) vertices in accordance with broken SU(3)$_F$, which serves to connect the NN and the YN channels. As a novel feature, we allow for medium strong breaking of the coupling constants, using the $^3P_0$ model with a Gell-Mann--Okubo hypercharge breaking for the BBM coupling. We present six hyperon-nucleon potentials which describe the available YN cross section data equally well, but which exhibit some differences on a more detailed level. The differences are constructed such that the models encompass a range of scattering lengths in the $\Sigma N$ and $\Lambda N$ channels. For the scalar-meson mixing angle we obtained values $\theta_S=37$ to 40 degrees, which points to almost ideal mixing angles for the scalar $q\bar{q}$ states. The G-matrix results indicate that the remarkably different spin-spin terms of the six potentials appear specifically in the energy spectra of $\Lambda$ hypernuclei.Comment: 37 pages, 4 figure

TERF Wars: Introduction

No abstract available

Standalone vertex finding in the ATLAS muon spectrometer

A dedicated reconstruction algorithm to find decay vertices in the ATLAS muon spectrometer is presented. The algorithm searches the region just upstream of or inside the muon spectrometer volume for multi-particle vertices that originate from the decay of particles with long decay paths. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated using both a sample of simulated Higgs boson events, in which the Higgs boson decays to long-lived neutral particles that in turn decay to bbar b final states, and pp collision data at √s = 7 TeV collected with the ATLAS detector at the LHC during 2011