Apakah itu "Factoring agent"?

So tadi semasa sedang urus-mengurus PO dan RO (tersilap sebut PO dekat staff, pening dia cari borang, rupa-rupanya PO. haha!) adalah terkeluar persoalan mengenai Factoring Agent.

Awalnya saya sangkakan bahawa factoring agent ini sejenis bentuk formula matematik (factoring = pemfaktoran). Rupa-rupanya ia adalah istilah perniagaan untuk ejen orang tengah dalam urusniaga.

Bayangkan suatu situasi: Anda menjadi pembekal kepada institusi kerajaan. Dan seperti yang anda tahu, institusi kerajaan ni banyak pula karenah birokrasinya (dalam bahasa inggeris dipanggil red tape). Duit nak bayar memang ada tapi, bayarannya lambat kredit. Jika anda sebuah syarikat kecil yang baru nak naik, dan pusingan modal anda lambat, ini boleh menyebabkan duit anda "terikat" tanpa aliran tunai. Tentu susah bukan?

Jadi salah satu cara mengatasinya ialah mendapatkan sebuah ejen, Factoring Agent. Mereka akan menjadi orang tengah antara anda dan pelanggan, di mana pelanggan akan membayar kepada mereka, dan mereka akan membayar kepada anda--dengan sedikit upah, tentunya. Contohnya begini. 

Pihak Jabatan A memesan barang. Anda pun menghantar barang. 

Anda pun mengeluarkan invois untuk Jabatan A itu. Tapi, invois itu dibayar kepada akaun Ejen B. Sebaik saja invois diberikan. Ejen B membayar sebahagian daripada nilai invois itu kepada anda, WALAUPUN Jabatan A tak bayar lagi duit (kira sekarang Jabatan A berhutang kepada Ejen B).

Apabila Jabatan A bayar kepada Ejen B mengikut invois tersebut, Ejen B akan memberi baki wang selebihnya kepada anda. Tapi dia tolak sikit untuk untung. Contoh kalau harganya 100 ringgit, dia ambil 5 ringgit buat simpanan sendiri (diorang pun nak cari makan juga kan. haha!).

Apa akan jadi kalau customer cabut lari tak bayar? Ha, itu kena tengok pula perjanjian dengan Ejen B. Biasanya anda yang kena tanggung (recourse agreement), tapi ada juga yang mereka akan tanggung (non-recourse agreement). Kalau mereka yang tanggung tentunya untung yang diambil nanti agak banyak, tetapi anda juga selamat daripada pelanggan yang melarikan diri.

Begitulah adanya Factoring Agent. Kelebihannya ialah memudahkan dokumentasi akaun kerana kita berurusan dengan sorang ejen sahaja. Satu lagi adalah ia membebaskan aliran tunai dan membolehkan kita membeli lebih banyak inventori dan menjalankan projek jangka pendek. Jadi bagi syarikat yang mengutamakan pertumbuhan memang sesuai untuk membuat Factoring. 

Apa-apapun saya tidaklah mahir sangat, ini barang dari google sahaja. Dapatkan maklumat lebih lanjut daripada perancang kewangan profesional. Assalamualaikum!

Ciku antimicrobial activity report

After I did some extraction last week, I gave a bottle of the frozen extract to another researcher for an antimicrobial activity pre-test. My objective is to see whether how much, and at what concentration, is the activity in Ciku extract.

The researcher, Cindy, proposed a pretest using the method she is familiar with, which is outlined below:

1. Saline and media is prepared, around 30 plates. Media: Mueller-Hinton.
2. Microorganism is isolated, around 100 microliter into a saline and adjusted with McFarland standard.
3. 100 microliter of the mircoorganism is streaked on plates of Mueller-Hinton agar.
4. A dilution of the extract is done at 0%, 50%, and 25% dilution level.
5. 1000 microliter of each diluted extract is pipetted into three 6.00mm filter paper disks.
6.  Disks are placed on the media carefully with forceps.
7. The plates are incubated for 16-18 hours in 37C.
8. Clear zones is measured, if any, and recorded in mm.

 And, the results are given as below:

So as you can see here, the ciku is compared with a control antibiotic. The inhibition zone is under 20 mm for ciku extract while the antibiotic is above 40mm. According to standard, this can be translated to antimicrobial activity as follows:

Not effective	10 or less
intermediate	11 to 15
effective	16 or more

Therefore, the ciku is between intermediate and not effective. But mostly, not effective.

How is this so, especially when ciku has been proven to have anticancer activity as shown in breast cancer cells (Jayakumar and Kanthimathi, 2011) and colon cancer cells (Ma et al, 2003)? In these studies as well, it is explained that the activity is attributed to its polyphenols and flavonoids, which is proven to have an antimicrobial activity (Daglia, M., 2011) 

Therefore, what happens here may be attributed to an error for example, due to difference in method or experiment excecution. For example, extraction is done following exactly the one outlied in the 2011 research. However, the fruit maturity level chosen may be different since it is not stated in the research. Also, the length of exposure to light and air may destroy the polyphenols.

Another thing is that the method of antimicrobial activity may not be suitable for the type of extract. In a research on ginger as shown here (Sebiomo et al, 2010) , water extract are done using disk diffusion while ethanol extract is done using agar well. Therefore using disk diffusion, ethanol extracts of ciku may not have diffused fully onto the agar.

A suggestion is to do the experiment again with another sample extraction, to see whether this is just experimental error; or to do a newer extraction with less mature fruits.

Table from:
Johnson, T. and C. Case, 1995. "Chemical Methods of Control," adapted from Laboratory Experiments in Microbiology, Brief Edition, 4th ed. Redwood City, CA: Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Co., available online from The National Health Museum, Access Excellence Activities Exchange http://www.accessexcellence.org/AE/AEC/CC/chance_activity.html.

How to dispose of these bacteria?

A while back someone asked me this question: what happens after you have used a bunch of microbes? How do you dispose them? Ah, usually when we are undergrads all of these are handled by the lab staff—they instruct you to put in a blue trash bag labelled “biohazard” after each lab session. Sometimes they even let you leave them on the bench with all the utensils, where they will pick up and clean themselves.

Not as tiny as this one.

However when we are in postgrad—or using professors’ lab—it’s every man/woman for himself. Disposal of microbes are the own researcher’s responsibility. So as we were discussing, several solutions come up.

“Boil them, sterilize them!”

“What if they are spore-able microbes?”

“Then...boil them in a very long time?”

“Do they die?”

I don’t have the answers to these questions. So we left the lab with an issue still hanging (and a rack full of microbes on the bench, in case we mull over it that night and get an eureka). But then, after a bit of googling, I found a website offering a solution. 

An ideal situation is to put them into a heat-stable biohazard bag and autoclave it (oh so that’s what the blue bag is used for!). After autoclaving it is suitable for disposal by trash.

Another alternative method is to use bleach—yes, your good-old friendly neighborhood normal household bleach Clorox.  Make a one part bleach four parts water solution (20% Clorox) and saturate the plates with it. Leave it overnight to soak, before disposal.

Kills 99.9% of bacteria, it's super effective!

There—as simple as that. Remember that bleach is corrosive and proper hand/face/body protection should be worn. Equipment should also be rinsed thoroughly afterwards.