Self-Directed Learning Readiness of Baccalaureate of Science in Nursing (BSN) Students

One of the goals of nursing programs is to prepare students to be self-directed learners and assist them to meet the challenges in today\u27s healthcare environment. Self direction is critical for lifelong learning, and it is imperative that nurses continue their education in order to provide high quality and competent care to patients. Students enter nursing programs with learning styles already established. Nursing faculty presuppose that the learning environment will be mutually respected, collaborative, and supportive. A clash between student learning styles and faculty teaching styles can have a great impact on the ultimate success of the student. This study focused on the self directed learning (SDL} readiness of baccalaureate of science in nursing (BSN) students. A convenience sample of BSN students in designated classes participated in a paper/pencil survey that measured self-directed learning readiness. The statistical analysis of the questionnaire which was completed by sixty nursing students, ten from each semester level, sophomore, junior and senior, found that age was the leading factor in self directed learning. Results identified the level of student readiness for SDL and assisted faculty to identify teaching methods that could be incorporated into the curriculum to more effectively meet the students\u27 learning needs

LTE and Wi-Fi Coexistence in Unlicensed Spectrum with Application to Smart Grid: A Review

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is expanding its utilization in unlicensed band by deploying LTE Unlicensed (LTEU) and Licensed Assisted Access LTE (LTE-LAA) technology. Smart Grid can take the advantages of unlicensed bands for achieving two-way communication between smart meters and utility data centers by using LTE-U/LTE-LAA. However, both schemes must co-exist with the incumbent Wi-Fi system. In this paper, several co-existence schemes of Wi-Fi and LTE technology is comprehensively reviewed. The challenges of deploying LTE and Wi-Fi in the same band are clearly addressed based on the papers reviewed. Solution procedures and techniques to resolve the challenging issues are discussed in a short manner. The performance of various network architectures such as listenbefore- talk (LBT) based LTE, carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) based Wi-Fi is briefly compared. Finally, an attempt is made to implement these proposed LTEWi- Fi models in smart grid technology.Comment: submitted in 2018 IEEE PES T&

Utility Cost of Formal Privacy for Releasing National Employer-Employee Statistics

National statistical agencies around the world publish tabular summaries based on combined employer-employee (ER-EE) data. The privacy of both individuals and business establishments that feature in these data are protected by law in most countries. These data are currently released using a variety of statistical disclosure limitation (SDL) techniques that do not reveal the exact characteristics of particular employers and employees, but lack provable privacy guarantees limiting inferential disclosures. In this work, we present novel algorithms for releasing tabular summaries of linked ER-EE data with formal, provable guarantees of privacy. We show that state-of-the-art differentially private algorithms add too much noise for the output to be useful. Instead, we identify the privacy requirements mandated by current interpretations of the relevant laws, and formalize them using the Pufferfish framework. We then develop new privacy definitions that are customized to ER-EE data and satisfy the statutory privacy requirements. We implement the experiments in this paper on production data gathered by the U.S. Census Bureau. An empirical evaluation of utility for these data shows that for reasonable values of the privacy-loss parameter ϵ≥1, the additive error introduced by our provably private algorithms is comparable, and in some cases better, than the error introduced by existing SDL techniques that have no provable privacy guarantees. For some complex queries currently published, however, our algorithms do not have utility comparable to the existing traditiona