Import of Information Sources in the Industrial Purchase Decision in Maiduguri, Borno State Nigeria

The basic objective of any industrial activity is to develop, manufacture and market products that can meet identified customer/consumer needs and wants at a profit. In order to accomplish this objective "men machines and management" must be carefully acquired and coordinated. A field survey was employed through semi-structured in-depth interviews to secure the basic data on the general purchasing procedure. Some specific purchase case studies were employed to examine the functions of information in the adoption and use of a product. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses were utilised for the discussion of results. The study focuses on the information sources of industrial buyers in the purchase of three different categories of items from ten different organisations purposively selected in Maiduguri, Nigeria. The findings indicate that the problem of shortages and disrupted supply of raw materials equipment among Nigerian industries can be attributed to lack of active search and qualification of sources of supplies in the purchasing procedure. The buyers’ search efforts are inadequate and they rely much on suppliers’ salesmen for almost all their information. The suppliers’ personal calls are considered the most important source of information of organisational buyers. The sort of information required by these buyers mostly cantered on price, quality and reputation of supplier, non-task factors largely influence buyers’ decisions as they lack more formalised procedure for search and analysis. It was recommended that information for buying industrial products are needed at all stages of the decision processes and therefore information should be directed at the right people, right time, through personal selling effort than those selling consumer items. The industrial salesmen must contact potential buyers earlier and must play greater role in generating interest and re-enforce contacts and approaches at the final stage of evaluation and trial of the adoption process. Keywords: Information Sources, Adoption Process, Industrial Purchasing, Decision Makin

Effects of Marketing Mix Strategy on Performance of Small Scale Businesses in Maiduguri Metropolitan, Borno State Nigeria

The study was designed to examine the effect of Marketing Strategy on Performance of Small Scale Business in Maiduguri, Borno State, Nigeria. The objectives of the study are to explore how Marketing mix elements are managed and they impacted on the performance of small scale enterprises in Maiduguri. Method of data collection consists of primary and secondary sources. Method of data analysis utilized was multiple regression. The study found that marketing strategy (product, price, promotion and place,) were significantly independent and joint predictors of business performance. Each one has its unique contribution and impact to the performance of the small Businesses. This also shows the importance of the marketing strategy no matter how small the Business may be. Its performance is proportionately depends and goes with the marketing strategy applied. The study therefore recommends that since small Businesses have high potential and opportunity for growth, instituting appropriate and adequate measures of marketing strategy in their Business practice will go a long way in Business success. Keywords: Marketing Mix, Marketing Strategy, Small Scale Enterprises, Performanc

A COMPARISON OF KAPLAN-MEIER AND CUMULATIVE INCIDENCE ESTIMATE IN THE PRESENCE OR ABSENCE OF COMPETING RISKS IN BREAST CANCER DATA

Statistical techniques such as Kaplan-Meier estimate is commonly used and interpreted as the probability of failure in time-to-event data. When used on biomedical survival data, patients who fail from unrelated or other causes (competing events) are often treated as censored observations. This paper reviews and compares two methods of estimating cumulative probability of cause-specific events in the present of other competing events: 1 minus Kaplan-Meier and cumulative incidence estimators. A subset of a breast cancer data with three competing events: recurrence, second primary cancers, and death, was used to illustrate the different estimates given by 1 minus Kaplan-Meier and cumulative incidence function. Recurrence of breast cancer was the event of interest and second primary cancers and deaths were competing risks.The results indicate that the cumulative incidences gives an appropriate estimates and 1 minus Kaplan-Meier overestimates the cumulative probability of cause-specific failure in the presence of competing events. In absence of competing events, the 1 minus Kaplan-Meier approach yields identical estimates as the cumulative incidence function.The public health relevance of this paper is to help researchers understand that competing events affect the cumulative probability of cause-specific events. Researchers should use methods such as the cumulative incidence function to correctly estimate and compare the cause-specific cumulative probabilities

Toxic Species And Particulate Emissions From Wood And Pool Fires

Fire fatalities in the UK are attributed to smoke inhalation especially in dwellings. Another serious issue of great concern is the exposure to respirable particles of sizes less than 0.1µ in diameter found in smoke and soot and these have not been given much attention despite the health hazards associated with them. The main aim of this research was to quantitatively look at the toxic emissions (toxic gases and particulates) under different fire conditions for wood based materials relevant to residential fires and in pool fires relevant to industrial scenarios. Different classes of wood (Natural, Processed and Plywoods) used in construction and furnishings were investigated under free ventilation conditions and restricted ventilation conditions using the standard cone calorimeter and the controlled atmosphere cone calorimeter modified to enable raw gas sampling. Pool fires (Diesel, Lubricating oil and olive oil) were also investigated using the freely ventilated standard cone calorimeter. Pine wood crib and diesel pool of different sizes were investigated in a 5m3 fire test compartment at varying ventilation rates. Toxic concentrations were measured through a heated sampling line using a heated FTIR analyser, calibrated for 65 species. An important finding was the overwhelming toxic gases produced by low temperature smouldering fires exceeding the impairment of escape threshold and the lethality threshold by a factor of 60-10 000 on an impairment of escape basis and a factor of 4-100 on lethal basis. The real-time particle size, number and mass distribution from the burning fuels was obtained using the DMS 500 particle size analyser and this showed a bimodal distribution, representing a nucleation mode and an agglomeration/accumulation mode. The particle size distribution on a number basis showed a peak of 20 nm in the nano particle size range and a peak of 200 nm in the agglomeration range for most fires. These nano particles (20 nm) will penetrate the lungs in the event of fire, potentially leading to impairment of escape and eventually death due to the effects that fine particles have on the lungs thereby making them a major toxic hazard in fires. To the knowledge of the author, this is the first time that particulates in this size range (20nm and less) have been quantified from burning materials. The modified cone calorimeter proved to be a good technique for realistic determination of toxic yields and particle size distributions when used with the heated FTIR and the DMS 500 analysers

Studies to inform the development and practical roll-out of a digital adherence intervention, Video-Observed Therapy (VOT)

BACKGROUND: Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, globally, tuberculosis (TB) was the leading cause of death from a single infectious agent. It is an important example of a curable condition which has well-documented treatment adherence challenges. WHO recommends the use of video-observed therapy (VOT) as a flexible alternative to DOT (Directly Observed Treatment). There is limited evidence of VOT’s acceptability and how it may enable patients to engage with their treatment to elicit optimal adherence outcomes. This PhD thesis aims to improve understanding of patient groups who may benefit most from VOT. METHODS: Drawing upon a narrative literature review, this PhD thesis includes: a) a study to identify factors that predict non-completion of TB treatment through a retrospective cohort analysis of cases with TB notified to the Enhanced TB Surveillance System in England, Wales and Northern Ireland between 2010 and 2017; b) a study comparing VOT to in-person DOT to examine the factors which affect the levels of engagement with DOT and VOT and whether these affect the level of treatment observation achieved in DOT and VOT groups through a secondary analysis of the UK DOT/VOT trial dataset using descriptive analysis and logistic regression; c) a qualitative study exploring the lived experiences and perspectives of DOT and VOT users in two settings, the UK and Republic of Moldova using semi-structured interviews with 16 UK DOT/VOT trial participants and 22 Moldovan DOT/VOT trial participants. Themes were mapped onto the Capability Opportunity Motivation Behaviour (COM-B) model, Theoretical Domains Framework (TDF) and Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW) to identify how the VOT and DOT functions, strategies and its policy categories elicit treatment adherence outcomes to support decision-making on commissioning of DOT and VOT interventions. RESULTS: Recent migration to the UK (0 -1 years from entry to the UK to TB notification), multidrug resistance, increasing social complexity and a previous TB diagnosis were significantly associated with non-completion of TB treatment. Higher levels of initial engagement with VOT (90% initially engaged) rather than DOT (49% initially engaged) were observed amongst all patient groups. Amongst those who initially engaged with either DOT or VOT, patients with TB on VOT had improved TB treatment adherence compared those on DOT. Women were less likely to adhere and those with a history of being lost to follow-up were also less likely to adhere. The COM-B model and TDF provided explanatory frameworks highlighting how VOT acted on key behaviour change domains and utilised key strategies to facilitate adherence behaviour change. VOT facilitated patient-provider interactions served as a prompt/reminder to address forgetfulness through regular personalised messages from VOT observers, building rapport and habit-forming practices. VOT was a flexible, time- and cost-saving alternative to DOT and supported patients with split dosing or negotiated timing of dosing to manage side effects and pill burden. VOT also served as an incentive through the provision of a smartphone and data plan, free domestic calls, text messages and internet access linking patients to providers, banking and social support services. In turn these ‘capability and ‘opportunity’ components of the model enhanced ‘motivation’ by supporting patients to re-gain autonomy, self-responsibility and establish regular dosing. There were mixed views on privacy with participants expressing concerns on how video clips would be used, shared and may compromise confidentiality and increase stigma. The Behaviour Change Wheel identified seven key functions (‘active ingredients’) of VOT: Enablement (increasing means/reducing barriers to increase capability), Education (increasing knowledge or understanding), Persuasion (using communication to induce positive or negative feelings or stimulate action), Training (imparting skills), Incentivisation (creating expectation of reward), Restriction (using rules to reduce opportunity to engage in target behaviour) and Environmental restructuring (changing the physical or social context). While participants on DOT felt cared for, they had doubts about their personal necessity for treatment, found DOT invasive and stigmatising, time-consuming and costly. At a health system level, DOT was resource-intensive and batch collections of medicines made it difficult to prove fidelity. CONCLUSION: VOT promotes engagement and adherence to TB treatment in all groups at risk of non-adherence, which suggest it is a more acceptable approach to TB treatment observation compared to DOT. VOT can be universally applied to all patient groups in need of adherence support, including inclusion health groups (those with a current or history of homelessness, imprisonment, drug misuse and current alcohol misuse, vulnerable migrant groups (asylum seekers and refugees), in low TB incidence settings. DOT is an acceptable intervention to some groups with multiple needs (participants who were aged over 55, had a prison history, a history of homelessness (more than 5 years ago) and those with current alcohol problems). The evidence from this research could be used to develop a personalised decision support tool to support clinicians to offer VOT to groups based on risk of poor adherence and quantitative and qualitative assessment of acceptability and engagement. Use of the e-Health Implementation Toolkit (e-HIT) supports the national and practical roll-out of VOT to all patient groups in need of adherence support, including those with social complexity. In the era of COVID-19 and acceleration of the use of digital innovations, monitoring the roll-out of VOT should also involve engagement with patients on privacy and confidentiality issues. Engagement with the TB workforce is needed to examine staff attitudes to support learning on what adaptations could be made to VOT and to inform their needs and health system readiness, strengthen health protection and global health security. Further engagement with healthcare professionals to secure their buy-in, address their concerns and to minimise “technology fatigue” is needed. VOT has shown that it improves treatment adherence and while trials are yet to provide convincing evidence to data that it enhances final outcomes, the technology itself does have the potential to reduce treatment-related costs at a patient and health service level. In 2020 WHO proposed VOT as one of the options to support adherence in its target product profiles for TB preventative treatment. Further real-world programmatic evidence on how VOT works and health system cost-effectiveness should continue to be conducted under different conditions of care, including in different geographical settings, patient sub-groups and at different stages of treatment. FUNDING: UCL discretionary funds, Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene and UCL Public Policy small grant award

China’s investment in the Democratic Republic of Congo: The impact of the 2007 Sino-Congolese agreement in a postwar period

Over the past 10 years, China has become a major actor in African politics and development process. It has invested significant amounts of money in infrastructure in mineral-rich countries, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo. In return, China secures the exploitation of main resources, necessary for its own economic development, such as cobalt and copper. In 2007, a consortium of Chinese enterprises signed a ‘resource for infrastructure’ agreement with the Congolese government. The parties agreed that China would export and sell Congolese cobalt and copper and, in return, China would build a number of infrastructure projects in the Congo. To guarantee reimbursement of Chinese loans, a Sino-Congolese joint venture was created in the Katanga province where the mines are located. This thesis aims at contributing to the discussion regarding the agreement’s impact on living conditions in the Congo. To what extent does China\u27s Chinese investment and the mineral exploitation in the Democratic Republic of Congo benefit the country? I look at internal and international debates around the agreement and works done so far by China and the joint venture in the Congo to assess the impact of the agreement

A statistical method for revealing form-function relations in biological networks

Over the past decade, a number of researchers in systems biology have sought to relate the function of biological systems to their network-level descriptions -- lists of the most important players and the pairwise interactions between them. Both for large networks (in which statistical analysis is often framed in terms of the abundance of repeated small subgraphs) and for small networks which can be analyzed in greater detail (or even synthesized in vivo and subjected to experiment), revealing the relationship between the topology of small subgraphs and their biological function has been a central goal. We here seek to pose this revelation as a statistical task, illustrated using a particular setup which has been constructed experimentally and for which parameterized models of transcriptional regulation have been studied extensively. The question "how does function follow form" is here mathematized by identifying which topological attributes correlate with the diverse possible information-processing tasks which a transcriptional regulatory network can realize. The resulting method reveals one form-function relationship which had earlier been predicted based on analytic results, and reveals a second for which we can provide an analytic interpretation. Resulting source code is distributed via http://formfunction.sourceforge.net.Comment: To appear in Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 17 pages, 9 figures, 2 table

Akad Jual Beli Saham Lewat Online Studi Komparatif Ulama Mazhab Syafi’i dan Dewan Syariah Nasional

This article aims to find out the contracts used in general stock buying and selling transactions and buying and selling contracts through online media according to the views of the scholars of the Shafi'i school and the views of the National Sharia Council. The type of research in this article is library research, the approach used is a normative-juridical approach. In conducting stock buying and selling transactions online, there are parties who make transactions even though they do not know each other, and in the transaction there is no sale and purchase contract except only in an agreement on the amount to be purchased and the price offere. In the view of the Shafi'i school, buying and selling transactions must meet the elements of the pillars, one of which is the existence of sighat between the seller and the buyer. However, there are also scholars of the Shafi'i school that still allow buying and selling transactions even though there is no sighat in them based on the urf that has been applied in society. Meanwhile, the National Sharia Council in its fatwa allows the public to carry out share buying and selling transactions because shares are a form of cooperation between one party and another in terms of seeking mutual benefitsThis article aims to find out the contracts used in general stock buying and selling transactions and buying and selling contracts through online media according to the views of the scholars of the Shafi'i school and the views of the National Sharia Council. The type of research in this article is library research, the approach used is a normative-juridical approach. In conducting stock buying and selling transactions online, there are parties who make transactions even though they do not know each other, and in the transaction there is no sale and purchase contract except only in an agreement on the amount to be purchased and the price offere. In the view of the Shafi'i school, buying and selling transactions must meet the elements of the pillars, one of which is the existence of sighat between the seller and the buyer. However, there are also scholars of the Shafi'i school that still allow buying and selling transactions even though there is no sighat in them based on the urf that has been applied in society. Meanwhile, the National Sharia Council in its fatwa allows the public to carry out share buying and selling transactions because shares are a form of cooperation between one party and another in terms of seeking mutual benefits

Channels of Distribution of Agricultural Produce in Nigeria

Channels of distribution consist of a set of independent organizations involved in making a product or service available for use or consumption. Basically there are two types of channel used for the distribution of goods; marketing channel for industrial good as well as that that for consumer goods .Both types of channels   directly and indirectly make goods available to end-users. While all goods and services pass through the marketing channels of distribution, the perishability of farm produce sometimes compel farmers to make use of direct distribution channels. Also, since majority of farmers reside in rural areas and are separated from their customers they on the other side make use of the indirect marketing channels. This paper therefore explores gaps between the producers or farmers and the final users of farm produce that justify the use of  channels of distribution; steps involved in selecting a marketing channel of distribution; the main functions of distribution channels and the centralized and decentralized channels of distribution of agricultural produce in Nigeria. The paper concluded that because of the high risks involved in agricultural production in Nigeria, there is the need for the channels of distribution to buy produce from farmers at a rate that would compensate for their efforts and continue to keep them in business. Keywords: Channels of Distribution, Agricultural produce, Nigeria, Distribution intensity, Direct and Indirect marketing channels,. Centralized and Decentralized marketing channe

Molecular Mechanisms of Transcription through Single-Molecule Experiments

Transcription represents the first step in gene expression. It is therefore not surprising that transcription is a highly regulated process and its control is essential to understand the flow and processing of information required by the cell to maintain its homeostasis. During transcription, a DNA molecule is copied into RNA molecules that are then used to translate the genetic information into proteins; this logical pattern has been conserved throughout all three kingdoms of life, from Archaea to Eukarya, making it an essential and fundamental cellular process. Even though some viruses that encode their genome in an RNA molecule use it as a template to make mRNA, others synthesize an intermediate DNA molecule from the RNA, a process known as reverse transcription, from which regular transcription of viral genes can then proceed in the host cells