The State of Asian America: Trajectory of Civic and Political Engagement

Compiles research on how and to what extent Asian Americans are civically and politically engaged. Examines levels of participation among immigrants and students, issues of racial/ethnic identification, growth of nonprofits, and institutional barriers

Strategies for Improving the Performance of Project Managers in South Sudan

Business leaders persistently face the challenges of project failures. Lack of proper project alignment with business strategies is a major contributor to less successful project outcomes. One major concern of project managers in South Sudan is that misalignment of the project management processes with business strategies could result in project delays and cost overruns. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore strategies 8 project managers from 2 telecommunication companies use to align project management processes with business strategies to improve project performance in Juba, South Sudan. Using hoshin kanri as the conceptual framework for this study, semistructured face-to-face interviews were conducted with purposely selected participants. Four themes that emerged from the thematic analysis of the interview data and archival documents are effective communication among project stakeholders, stakeholder engagement in project management processes, competence of project manager in leadership decisions, and executive commitment and support to project team. The findings of the study may lead to proper project alignment and successful project outcome. Business leaders should involve project managers during the development of business strategies. The results from this study may contribute to positive social change by enabling project managers and business leaders to execute sustainable projects that can offer employment opportunities for the local citizens and help the recovery of the South Sudan economy

Coronary computed tomography angiography: an overview of clinical applications

High diagnostic accuracy has been achieved with coronary CT angiography using 64- and more slice CT scanners, and in selected patients, coronary CT angiography is considered a reliable alternative to invasive coronary angiography. Coronary CT angiography is able to detect variable densities in the coronary atherosclerotic plaques and demonstrate the corresponding intraluminal changes due to presence of plaques, thus providing prognostic value of disease extent. Despite the tremendous contributions of coronary CT angiography to cardiac imaging, coronary CT angiography suffered from high radiation dose, which has raised serious concerns in the literature. The aim of this review is to provide an overview of the clinical applications of coronary CT angiography in coronary artery disease with focus on diagnostic and predictive value of coronary CT angiography; technical developments of cardiac CT imaging and different approaches for radiation dose reduction

Real circles tangent to 3 conics

In this paper we study circles tangent to conics. We show there are generically 184 complex circles tangent to three conics in the plane and we characterize the real discriminant of the corresponding polynomial system. We give an explicit example of 3 conics with 136 real circles tangent to them. We conjecture that 136 is the maximal number of real circles. Furthermore, we implement a hill-climbing algorithm to find instances of conics with many real circles, and we introduce a machine learning model that, given three real conics, predicts the number of circles tangent to these three conics

Effect of Cell-Free Layer Variation on Arteriolar Wall Shear Stress

Relationship between a cell-free layer and wall shear stress (WSS) in small arterioles has been of interest in microcirculatory research. However, influence of temporal variation in the cell-free layer width on the WSS in vivo has not been fully elucidated. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that the layer variation would increase the WSS, and this effect would be enhanced by red blood cell aggregation. The cell-free layer width in arterioles (29.5–67.1 μm ID) in rat cremaster muscles were obtained with a high-speed video camera, and the layer width data were introduced into WSS estimation. Dextran 500 was administrated to elevate the aggregation level of red blood cells to those seen in normal human blood. The variation of the layer was quantified by the variability (coefficient of variation), and its effect on WSS was studied under normal and reduced flow conditions. We found that the dextran-induced red blood cell aggregation significantly elevated the variability (p < 0.01) at low pseudoshear rates of 9.2 ± 0.6 s−1. The WSS estimated without taking account of the variability showed underestimation of its value than that of with consideration of the variability under all flow conditions, and this effect became more pronounced with increasing the variability. The variation of the cell-free layer should, therefore, be considered in the determination of the WSS particularly in the presence of red blood cell aggregation under reduced flow condition