Regarding Rob's comment (3).  The total sample I
was referring to was actually not the LVL sample, but 
the sample we compiled in Kennicutt et al. (2008).
  
Here are some edits which will hopefully help 
clarify this point.

"The precursor H$\alpha$ survey and the GALEX 
ultraviolet component..."  -->
Drop the word "precursor" and after that sentence add:
"The sample used by 11HUGS is given in Kennicutt 
et al. (2008) and was compiled as follows. "

--Done

Delete the sentence "The sample as compiled by 
Kennicutt et al. (2008) is divided into primary and 
secondary subsets."

--Done

Replace:

"The primary subset includes galaxies that 
meet a combined criteria" -->
"A primary subset of the sample aims to be as complete as possible in its inclusion of galaxies that meet a combined criteria of..."

--Done

"The secondary subset..." --> 
"A secondary subset..."

--Done

"The total sample encompasses"  --> 
"The sum of the subsets encompasses"

--I essentially adopted this, with a slight tweak to be even more specific.

"The outer tier of LVL mainly consists of those 
galaxies in the primary subset, but with more 
stringent limits on Galactic" -->
"To build the outer tier of LVL, we have targeted those galaxies in the primary subset, but with more stringent limits on Galactic latitude..."

--Done

Regarding Rob's comment (6).

In the third paragraph of section 2, delete remaining text
in the paragraph after "Since the inception of the LVL program..."
and insert the following as a separate paragraph.

"It is important to note that an inherent difficulty 
with efforts to construct a volume-limited sample is 
that its membership will necessarily be fluid until 
accurate distance and photometric measurements are 
available for all of the galaxies that are within the 
volume and around its periphery.  Since the inception 
of the LVL Spitzer program, four galaxies included in 
the sample (and in Table 1) have updated distances which 
place them outside of 11 Mpc.  In addition, the flow 
model initially applied was updated in Kennicutt et al. 
(2008) to provide consistency with one used by
NED.\footnote{The NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database
(NED) is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
California Institution of Technology, under contract
with NASA.} As a result 30 galaxies with
$|b|>30^{\circ}$ and B<15.5 in the published parent
sample are not included in LVL.  The galaxies are
generally between 10 and 11 Mpc, where flow distance
uncertainties ($\pm15$\%) would most likely scatter
objects in and out of the volume.  Such uncertainties
however, should not have a significant impact on studies
which use the sample to statistically characterize
the physical properties of local galaxies.  Further 
discussion of such issues is provided in
section 2 of Kennicutt et al. (2008)."

--Thanks!

Sec. 3.3.

Not sure if this is jumping the gun, but you might
mention the S18 pipeline and describe improvements 
from previous processing.

--Done

Sec. 4.1.

I was somewhat alarmed after looking at Fig. 4.
In the figure it looks like there is mostly sky in the 
new larger aperture, so the uncertainties in these new 
fluxes must be pretty large.  Although the comparison 
with the Kirby et al. measurements provides some
reassurance that these fluxes are not 
off the map, some discussion of the photometric
uncertainties in the text would probably be a 
good idea.

Instead of plotting the two apertures directly on the 
image, you might consider plotting a growth curve for 
one or two of the galaxies. That is, 
plot the flux enclosed as a function of the radius
along the major axis, and then indicate the extents
of both the 2MASS and your apertures on the plot.  
The radii plotted should go out beyond your new 
aperture to the sky. If what you've done is robust, 
it should be clear that there is excess flux above
the sky beyond the 2MASS aperture, and the apertures
you've used are also appropriate. On second thought,
this might also show that the apertures that you've
used (which I understand are simply the same
apertures used for the MIPS and IRAC fluxes for
convenience) are unnecessarily including a lot of 
noise, and if so perhaps this needs simply be 
acknowledged in the discussion of the uncertainties.

--Good idea.  I didn't think the image gave much quantitative insight, and so I've taken your suggestion and show instead the curve-of-growth with the 2MASS and LVL apertures.  It's a fairly well-behaved curve-of-growth, given the relatively crummy 2MASS sensitivity.


Section 5.5

2nd par.

- Typo: the birthrate is the ratio of the current to past 
average SFR (not the other way around).
- Could set apart introduction to birthrate parameter and 
pull forward a bit.
- Could use a brief description of the Buat et al (2005) 
model-based recipe for computing the attenuation from TIR/FUV. 
- How about citing medians of the attenuation distribution 
instead of (or in addition to) the 90 percentile points?
- Add sentence at end of paragraph noting: "The H$\alpha$ EWs 
shown here are measured over the entire extent of galaxies 
via narrowband imaging (as opposed to typical spectroscopic
EW measurements of nearby galaxies), and so are representative 
of global,  galaxy-wide averaged values."

--Done

Some suggested text (might also be broken off to form new paragraph).  

"To further explore possible correlations with the dominant stellar 
population and recent star formation history, in Figure 13 we plot 
two observable tracers of the stellar ``birthrate parameter" as a 
function of the perpendicular distance to the starburst curve in 
Figure 12.  The birthrate parameter is defined as the ratio of the 
current SFR to its overall lifetime average (Kennicutt et al. 1994) 
and thus provides a normalized measure of the star formation activity.  
Both the ratio of far-ultraviolet-to-near-infrared luminosity and the 
H$\alpha$ EW have been previously used as tracers of the birthrate (e.g., 
Kennicutt et al. 1994, Lee et al. 2009a, Carlos-Munoz et al. 2009).  
In the top panel of Figure 13, the far-ultraviolet tracks star formation 
averaged over the most recent $\sim$100 Myr and is normalized by the 
near-infrared luminosity which probes the total stellar mass built up 
over much longer timescales.  The far-ultraviolet emission is corrected 
for extinction using equation 2 in Buat et al. (2005), which is derived 
from  the modeling of a range of dust geometries with input SEDs for 
star-forming galaxies produced by the PEGASE stellar population synthesis 
code.  The distribution of far-ultraviolet extinctions estimated by 
this method is provided in Figure 14.  Ninety percent of the sources 
have far-ultraviolet extinctions less than 1.7 mag, or equivalently, 
ninety percent have optical extinctions AV<0.6 mag using the Li & Draine 
(2001) extinction curve.   The bottom panel of Figure 13 uses an indicator 
of the birthrate parameter that is much less affected by extinction, 
the H$\alpha$ EW (taken from Kennicutt et al. 2008).   The H$\alpha$ 
EW is the H$\alpha$ flux (which traces the SFR over short  â¼3â20 Myr 
timescales as it is H II line emission powered by massive (> 10 M$_{\odot}$) 
stars) divided by the red continuum flux density (which traces the total mass 
of stars).  The H$\alpha$ EWs shown here are measured over the entire extent 
of galaxies via narrowband imaging (as opposed to typical spectroscopic
EW measurements of nearby galaxies), and so are representative of global, 
galaxy-wide averaged values."

In Figure 13, the caption needs to be updated to include description on 
the bottom panel (with the H$\alpha$ EWs).

--Thanks

Another suggestion on authorship that you
can feel free to ignore if you wish --
since the paper uses the GALEX data a bit,
perhaps Armando can also be pulled up
before the general list of LVL team members
is given.

--Done