The Effect of Street Vendors’ Efforts on the Improvement of Financial Performance

Street vendors are booming nowadays.  Most of the street vendors sell food that are easy to cook and affordable to everyone. This small scale of business is found everywhere. The purposes of this study were to know the different efforts done by the street vendors to improve financial performance, to analyze the financial performance of the vendors, to analyze financial performance, and to explore the effect of street vendors’ efforts on improve financial performance.  The method used in this study was an explanatory of which a purposive sampling technique was applied.  This research was conducted in one of the towns located in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia. There were 30 street vendors as participants around the town. Regression analysis was used to analyze the effect.  The findings showed that the efforts done by the street vendors have a low correlation with financial performance.  Thus, the effect of street vendor’s efforts on the improvement of financial performance is insignificant

The Effect of Firm Size on Audit Fee: An Empirical Study on State-Owned Corporations (SOCs) in Indonesia (2011 – 2016)

State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) are the backbone of Indonesia’s economy.  SOEs are considered large companies that conduct business with huge number of complex transactions.  Auditing these large companies need large audit staff, more working hours, and audit techniques to finish the audit before its deadline.  Audit fee is affected by the size of the company.  A high audit fee is charged to the clients whose company is large.  This study explored the effect of firm size on audit fee.  A purposive sampling technique was used in determining the sample.  There were 20 companies as the object of this research, of which 11 companies were chosen as the final sample.  Data were analyzed by regression analysis.  The findings of the study showed that firm size has significant and positive effect on audit fee

A special schedule of foliar application of nutrients for the tea fields under extensive mechanized harvesting

To overcome the problem of acute shortage of work force faced by the south Indian tea industry, UPASI Tea Research Institute recommends mechanized harvesting to cover large areas with high worker productivity. While adopting extensive mechanized harvesting, total leaf area of the maintenance foliage on the plucking surface is reduced. As a result growth of the crop shoots has been adversely affected leading to reduction in productivity. Excessive banji shoot formation and nutrient deficiency symptoms were also noticed. To overcome all these adverse impacts of extensive mechanization, foliar application of primary, secondary and micro-nutrients has been attempted. The practical utility of foliar feeding of all these nutrients when applied as a mixture after every harvest, except during continuous heavy rainy months, showed an increase in yield up to 21% compared to the current recommended practice, in spite of extensive harvesting using shears and machines. The problem of dwarfing of crop shoots due to extensive shear/machine harvesting could be minimized due to increase in internodal length by 0.87 cm and the dry weight of the crop shoots increased by 0.09 g/shoot. Excessive production of banji shoots also came down from 65 to 52%

Diversity of Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains in Nairobi, Kenya

Setting: Tuberculosis (TB) patients attending 16 public health facilities in Nairobi, Kenya. Objective: To determine the Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M.tuberculosis) strain families circulating in Nairobi, Kenya. Methods: Sputum specimens from consecutive new and previously treated smear positive pulmonary TB patients were collected between February and August 2010 and cultured on Lowenstein9Jensen media. Spoligotyping was done on DNA extracted from the first isolate of each patient. The international spoligotype data base (SpolDB4) was used to group isolates into strain families. Results: Fourty seven different strain families were identified from 536 isolates. The principal groups were; CAS1_KILI 96/536 (17%), T1 69/536 (12%), Beijing 65/536 (12%), LAM9 46/536 (9% ), LAM3 & S/Conversant 37/536 (7% ), LAM11_ZWE 26/536 (5%), CAS1_DELHI 24/536 (4%) and T2 24/536 (4%). Others identified and are found in the SpolDB4 were 113/536 (21%). A possible new M.tuberculosis strain family was identified with 21/536 (4%) isolates which was designated as Nairobi subtype. Others identified not previously included in the SpolDB4 accounted for 15/536 (3%). Conclusion: We found a diverse array of M.tuberculosis strain families which could be indicative of a cosmopolitant polulation with frequent migration that may suggest that the dorminant strain families may have been present in the population for an extended period of time or on going transmision of closely related strains families. The emergence of the Beijing strains poses a serious threat to TB control due to its high virulence and frequent association with multidrug resistance. We therefore call for strenghthening efforts on early case finding through enhanced public health education campains and provision of accessible diagnostic services with enhanced treatment compliance

Very-high energy gamma-ray astronomy: A 23-year success story in high-energy astroparticle physics

Very-high energy (VHE) gamma quanta contribute only a minuscule fraction - below one per million - to the flux of cosmic rays. Nevertheless, being neutral particles they are currently the best "messengers" of processes from the relativistic/ultra-relativistic Universe because they can be extrapolated back to their origin. The window of VHE gamma rays was opened only in 1989 by the Whipple collaboration, reporting the observation of TeV gamma rays from the Crab nebula. After a slow start, this new field of research is now rapidly expanding with the discovery of more than 150 VHE gamma-ray emitting sources. Progress is intimately related with the steady improvement of detectors and rapidly increasing computing power. We give an overview of the early attempts before and around 1989 and the progress after the pioneering work of the Whipple collaboration. The main focus of this article is on the development of experimental techniques for Earth-bound gamma-ray detectors; consequently, more emphasis is given to those experiments that made an initial breakthrough rather than to the successors which often had and have a similar (sometimes even higher) scientific output as the pioneering experiments. The considered energy threshold is about 30 GeV. At lower energies, observations can presently only be performed with balloon or satellite-borne detectors. Irrespective of the stormy experimental progress, the success story could not have been called a success story without a broad scientific output. Therefore we conclude this article with a summary of the scientific rationales and main results achieved over the last two decades.Comment: 45 pages, 38 figures, review prepared for EPJ-H special issue "Cosmic rays, gamma rays and neutrinos: A survey of 100 years of research

Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex genetic diversity: mining the fourth international spoligotyping database (SpolDB4) for classification, population genetics and epidemiology

BACKGROUND: The Direct Repeat locus of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTC) is a member of the CRISPR (Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) sequences family. Spoligotyping is the widely used PCR-based reverse-hybridization blotting technique that assays the genetic diversity of this locus and is useful both for clinical laboratory, molecular epidemiology, evolutionary and population genetics. It is easy, robust, cheap, and produces highly diverse portable numerical results, as the result of the combination of (1) Unique Events Polymorphism (UEP) (2) Insertion-Sequence-mediated genetic recombination. Genetic convergence, although rare, was also previously demonstrated. Three previous international spoligotype databases had partly revealed the global and local geographical structures of MTC bacilli populations, however, there was a need for the release of a new, more representative and extended, international spoligotyping database. RESULTS: The fourth international spoligotyping database, SpolDB4, describes 1939 shared-types (STs) representative of a total of 39,295 strains from 122 countries, which are tentatively classified into 62 clades/lineages using a mixed expert-based and bioinformatical approach. The SpolDB4 update adds 26 new potentially phylogeographically-specific MTC genotype families. It provides a clearer picture of the current MTC genomes diversity as well as on the relationships between the genetic attributes investigated (spoligotypes) and the infra-species classification and evolutionary history of the species. Indeed, an independent Naïve-Bayes mixture-model analysis has validated main of the previous supervised SpolDB3 classification results, confirming the usefulness of both supervised and unsupervised models as an approach to understand MTC population structure. Updated results on the epidemiological status of spoligotypes, as well as genetic prevalence maps on six main lineages are also shown. Our results suggests the existence of fine geographical genetic clines within MTC populations, that could mirror the passed and present Homo sapiens sapiens demographical and mycobacterial co-evolutionary history whose structure could be further reconstructed and modelled, thereby providing a large-scale conceptual framework of the global TB Epidemiologic Network. CONCLUSION: Our results broaden the knowledge of the global phylogeography of the MTC complex. SpolDB4 should be a very useful tool to better define the identity of a given MTC clinical isolate, and to better analyze the links between its current spreading and previous evolutionary history. The building and mining of extended MTC polymorphic genetic databases is in progress