An Overview and Assessment of Wireless Technologies and Co- existence of ZigBee, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Devices

AbstractWi-Fi, ZigBee and Bluetooth wireless communication systems utilize the Industrial Scientific and Medical-(ISM) Band, which results in a high mutual interference between these technologies since they all these systems operate at the same or very close frequency bands. The interference problem increases with an in-device Co-existence (technologies existing on same device). This is primarily due to the characteristics of each technology such as access mechanism, frame structure, peak transmit power and frequency of operation. This work describes the interference between the Wi-Fi mostly as an aggressor on Bluetooth and ZigBee wireless networks. So the experimental analysis of the coexistence of these three technologies in an assumed home environment is studied especially when ZigBee is enabled for a Home Automation Network where there could be close proximity of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices such as PDAs and mobile phones. The obtained result shows that there is severe degradation on ZigBee and Bluetooth packet transmission of packets as well as re-transmission of ZigBee packets when Wi-Fi is operating

Factors that Influence School Choice: A Look at Parents’ and School Leaders’ Perceptions

School choice is a growing movement, and public school districts are faced with the challenge of preventing declines in student enrollment.  In response, school districts must work to retain enrolled students and at the same time, attract new students. This qualitative study focused on developing an understanding of the factors that influence parents’ decisions to enroll their child(ren) in a chosen school, that is, a school which differs from that assigned to the student, also known as school choice.  This case study examined data from the perspectives and experiences of parents and public school district leaders. Results suggest that school leaders need to ensure they build good relationships with parents and keep a positive school culture where customer service is valued and held to the highest standards.  In essence, school leaders must maintain strong partnerships with their families to attract and retain student enrollment. The results from this study equip school leaders with valuable information for strategic planning to address declines in student enrollment

Teachers’ and Principals’ Perceptions of Factors That Contribute to the Success of Blue-Ribbon Schools

Creating and sustaining an organizational culture that contributes to high academic achievement is frequently a problem in schools. This basic qualitative study explored measures implemented in thriving campus cultures and effective leadership on those campuses by interviewing principals and teachers in Blue Ribbon Schools. The study focused on principals’ and leaders’ perceptions of three different campuses in South Texas. The study selected schools that have been awarded Blue Ribbon campus designation in 2019 to explore factors that contributed to these campuses’ success. The study drew perceptions from three principals and four teachers from two different districts in the Rio Grande Valley

Parallel Trajectory Training of Recurrent Neural Network Controllers with Levenberg–Marquardt and Forward Accumulation Through Time in Closed-loop Control Systems

This paper introduces a novel parallel trajectory mechanism that combines Levenberg-Marquardt and Forward Accumulation Through Time algorithms to train a recurrent neural network controller in a closed-loop control system by distributing the calculation of trajectories across Central Processing Unit (CPU) cores/workers depending on the computing platforms, computing program languages, and software packages available. Without loss of generality, the recurrent neural network controller of a grid-connected converter for solar integration to a power system was selected as the benchmark test closed-loop control system. Two software packages were developed in Matlab and C++ to verify and demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed parallel training method. The training of the deep neural network controller was migrated from a single workstation to both cloud computing platforms and High-Performance Computing clusters. The training results show excellent speed-up performance, which significantly reduces the training time for a large number of trajectories with high sampling frequency, and further demonstrates the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed parallel mechanism

An Investigation into the Impacts Creating a Distance Learning Course on AGEP STEM Dissertators and Fellows

Preparing university faculty to teach online has been a major concern of many higher education institutions of late. Faculty, who have built their careers as face-to-face instructors, are having to learn at light speed how to translate their content into online instruction. The researchers in this study, as part of an National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) grant, sought to prepare minority dissertators and doctoral fellows in STEM fields for online teaching. The purpose of this research was to study the impacts of training in online course construction on their efficacy in constructing and teaching an online course