Using blogs to make peer-reviewed research more accessible

Discipline-based education researchers produce knowledge that aims to help instructors improve student learning and educational outcomes. Yet, the information produced may not even reach the educators it is intended to influence. Prior work has found that instructors often face barriers to implementing practices in peer-reviewed literature. Some of these barriers are related to accessing the knowledge in the first place such as difficulty finding and understanding research and a lack of time to do so. To lower these barriers, we created an online blog, PERbites, that summarizes recent discipline-based education research in short posts that use plain language. Having covered nearly 100 papers to date, we conducted a survey to see if we were addressing the need we had originally set out to address. We posted a 23-item survey on our website and received 24 usable responses. The results suggested that readers do generally agree that we are meeting our original goals. Readers reported that our articles were easier to understand and used more plain language than a typical discipline-based education research (DBER) journal article. At the same time, readers thought that all the important information was still included. Finally, readers said that this approach helped them keep up with DBER studies and read about papers they otherwise would not have. However, most readers did not indicate they changed their teaching and research practice as a result of reading our blog. Our results suggest that alternative methods of sharing research (e.g., non-peer reviewed publications or conference talks) can be an effective method of connecting research with practitioners, and future work should consider how we as a community might build on these efforts to ensure education research can make meaningful changes in the classroom.Comment: Published in the Proceedings of the 2022 Physics Education Research Conference, Grand Rapids, MI, US July 13th - July 14t

The Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA Survey: III. HI Source Catalog of the Northern Virgo Cluster Region

We present the first installment of HI sources extracted from the Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA (ALFALFA) extragalactic survey, initiated in 2005. Sources have been extracted from 3-D spectral data cubes and then examined interactively to yield global HI parameters. A total of 730 HI detections are catalogued within the solid angle 11h44m < R.A.(J2000) < 14h00m and +12deg < Dec.(J2000) < +16deg, and redshift range -1600 \kms < cz < 18000 \kms. In comparison, the HI Parkes All-Sky Survey (HIPASS) detected 40 HI signals in the same region. Optical counterparts are assigned via examination of digital optical imaging databases. ALFALFA HI detections are reported for three distinct classes of signals: (a) detections, typically with S/N > 6.5; (b) high velocity clouds in the Milky Way or its periphery; and (c) signals of lower S/N (to ~ 4.5) which coincide spatially with an optical object of known similar redshift. Although this region of the sky has been heavily surveyed by previous targeted observations based on optical flux-- or size-- limited samples, 69% of the extracted sources are newly reported HI detections. The resultant positional accuracy of HI sources is 20" (median). The median redshift of the sample is ~7000 \kms and its distribution reflects the known local large scale structure including the Virgo cluster. Several extended HI features are found in the vicinity of the Virgo cluster. A small percentage (6%) of HI detections have no identifiable optical counterpart, more than half of which are high velocity clouds in the Milky Way vicinity; the remaining 17 objects do not appear connected to or associated with any known galaxy.Comment: Astronomical Journal, in pres

Inexact Picard iterative scheme for steady-state nonlinear diffusion in random heterogeneous media

In this paper, we present a numerical scheme for the analysis of steady-state nonlinear diffusion in random heterogeneous media. The key idea is to iteratively solve the nonlinear stochastic governing equations via an inexact Picard iteration scheme, wherein the nonlinear constitutive law is linearized using the current guess of the solution. The linearized stochastic governing equations are then spatially discretized and approximately solved using stochastic reduced basis projection schemes. The approximation to the solution process thus obtained is used as the guess for the next iteration. This iterative procedure is repeated until an appropriate convergence criterion is met. Detailed numerical studies are presented for diffusion in a square domain for varying degrees of nonlinearity. The numerical results are compared against benchmark Monte Carlo simulations, and it is shown that the proposed approach provides good approximations for the response statistics at modest computational effor