A number of companies have become the gatekeepers of the Original Filipino Musical (OFM), such as Trumpets, Spotlight Artists Center, and Musical Theatre Philippines. These companies are strongly influenced by the mega-musical genre, and draw on a range of Filipino source material, including a gay comic book superhero (ZsaZsa Zeturnah, ze Muzical), an eighteenth-century Philippine comedia (Orosman at Zafira), and a novel by the nineteenth-century Filipino writer and nationalist José Rizal (Noli me Tangere).
How are sexual minorities like lesbians, gay men, and their sexualities viewed in the different societies of Southeast Asia? Previous studies have been limited by the reliance on data from university students and other non-representative samples, with little comparability across countries in the region. This research brief addresses this gap by comparing attitudes toward lesbians and gay men and about lesbian and gay sexualities in six Southeast Asian countries using nationally representative survey data. Combined data from the World Values Survey (total n = 9,182 respondents from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam) indicated that many Southeast Asians reject lesbians or gay men as neighbors, with the most homonegative attitudes to be found in Indonesia (66%) and Malaysia (59%), compared to relatively less rejecting nations like Thailand (40%), Singapore (32%), Vietnam (29%), and the Philippines (28%). Same-sex sexuality was least acceptable, based on a moral justifiability measure, among Indonesians, followed by Vietnamese and Malaysians. Singaporeans, Thais, and Filipinos were the least rejecting of lesbian and gay sexual orientations in the region. We also explored a number of established correlates of homonegative attitudes in each country, including gender, age, educational attainment, and religiosity.
The rapid growth of Philippine cities has brought a host of problems and challenges, including sprawl, environmental degradation, unemployment, lack of adequate housing, increased vulnerability to hazards, and an overall decline in the quality of life of urban residents. As Mega Manila expands, its peri-urban fringes face the pressure of conversion to urban land uses, while core urban areas grapple with various urban issues on zoning and land use change. Given these issues, land use plans and policies serve as important sites of intervention in moving toward urban sustainability. Beyond issues of enforcement on the ground, this paper argues for the need to examine, evaluate, and refine the guiding framework for land use planning.
We propose three ways of approaching urban land use planning and policy based on a review of relevant documents and field research in two case study sites. First, we emphasize the need to broaden sustainability as a guiding framework for land use planning by emphasizing social equity and justice as a crucial component of sustainable development. Considering these may promote community interests that do not necessarily fit within an economic growth or ecological integrity imperative. Second, we advocate building on efforts to improve community participation in land use planning. Our field accounts suggest opportunities for further participation of communities in crafting land use plans and related projects. Third, we suggest including other spatial approaches and imaginaries practiced by local communities in everyday life. We identify the merits of a deeper engagement with communities and use the example of community mapping as a tool for planning land use. Increasing community participation and incorporating other planning methods will contribute to better realizing social equity in planning for just sustainability in cities.
Urban socioecological risk, like other urban metabolic processes, embodies relations between the city and the non-city. In this paper, I trace the production of urban risk within and beyond the city through the lens of the hazardscape using the case of Metro Manila and Laguna Lake in the Philippines. Building on recent interventions in urban political ecology that seek to map the terrains of extending urban frontiers, I examine the processes that construct city and non-city spaces in urbanization through flood control. I synthesize narratives of the material-discursive production of risk mediated by infrastructure with histories of landscape and livelihood change in an urban socioecological frontier to make two related arguments. First, discursive constructions of city and non-city and the material flows that connect them shape the production of urban ecological risk, with material consequences for non-city vulnerabilities. Second, infrastructure plays an important mediating role in the production of hazardscapes. The intersection of flows of water, discursive urban imaginaries in state plans, and livelihoods in Metro Manila and Laguna Lake exemplifies metabolic relations that reveal the spatio-temporal connections of cities with landscapes that make their functioning possible.
The Indigenous Peoples Education (IPEd) Curriculum Framework was drafted by the Philippines’ Department of Education (DepEd), and implemented as part of the Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013 after years of continuous dialogue with community elders and other stakeholders. The adoption of this framework seeks to fulfill the government’s mandate in providing indigenous peoples the right to a culturally appropriate educational system, which integrates and promotes indigenous knowledge systems and practices (IKSP), to affirm and strengthen the cultural identity and bonds of the indigenous youths to their cultural community and heritage. It aims to provide an educational framework that is culturally rooted and responsive to the indigenous communities’ specific social, educational, and environmental contexts. To achieve its objectives, the IPEd Curriculum Framework provides guidelines on key areas in education, including: (1) Curriculum design, competencies, and content, which are anchored to the communities’ IKSP, worldview, and their indigenous cultural institutions. These must also strengthen and affirm the indigenous cultural identity, as well as revitalize and enrich IKSPs and indigenous languages; (2) teaching methodologies and strategies that must be in line with indigenous learning systems; and (3) the development of culturally appropriate learning resources, which should integrate IKSPs, and must be written in the language that is to be determined by consultation with the community. This must be in line with the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education Policy (MTB-MLE), which emphasizes the use of the primary level learners’ mother tongue. The present study looks at how the IP Ed Curriculum is being implemented in indigenous communities in Oriental Mindoro, and what challenges local schools, which offer primary education to indigenous children in this region, face in implementing this framework in the communities they serve. The island of Mindoro, which is located off the southwestern coast of Luzon, is home to eight indigenous groups collectively known as Mangyan. This study focuses on IP schools in four out of eight of these groups, namely the Iraya, Hanunuo, Buhid, and Bangon groups. Of particular interest to the researcher is the level of language vitality, and the use of these groups’ indigenous languages in school instruction and in the production of learning resources. The extent to which the implementation of this framework fulfills its objectives among the indigenous youths in these four communities will be assessed, and whether its implementation instills a sense of wellbeing and empowerment in the students will also be explored.
In this study, we demonstrate the feasibility of spray-depositing exfoliated graphene on flexible polyimide (PI) and rigid (soda lime glass) substrates for optoelectronic applications. The water contact angles of the substrates increased by 13% (for PI) and 49% (for glass) when the surfaces are pretreated with hexamethyldisiloxane, which significantly improved the adhesion of the films. Raman spectral analyses confirmed a minimum of 15 and a maximum of 23 layers of exfoliated graphene deposited on the substrates. After deposition, the films were exposed to 13.56 MHz radio-frequency plasma containing an admixture of argon and nitrogen gases. Plasma treatment modified the electrical properties with a response analogous to that of a rectifier. A 39% increase in transmittance in the visible region was also observed especially for glass substrates after plasma treatment without a significant change in film electrical conductivity.
Upon contact with a polymeric material, microparticles from the polymer may adhere to a silicon (Si) substrate during device processing. The adhesion contaminates the surface and, in turn, leads to defects in the fabricated Si-based microelectronic devices. In this study, Si substrates with artificially induced high-density polyethylene (HDPE) contamination was exposed to 13.56 MHz radio frequency (RF) plasma utilizing argon and oxygen gas admixtures at a power density of 5.6 W/cm2 and a working pressure of 110 Pa for up to 6 min of treatment. Optical microscopy studies revealed the removal of up to 74% of the polymer contamination upon plasma exposure. Surface free energy (SFE) increased owing to the removal of contaminants as well as the formation of polar groups on the Si surface after plasma treatment. Atomic force microscopy scans showed a decrease in surface roughness from 12.25 nm for contaminated samples to 0.77 nm after plasma cleaning. The smoothening effect can be attributed to the removal of HDPE particles from the surface. In addition, scanning electron microscope images showed that there was a decrease in the amount of HDPE contaminants adhering onto the surface after plasma exposure.
We postulate a dynamic spatio-temporal model with constant covariate effect but with varying spatial effect over time and varying temporal effect across locations. To mitigate the effect of temporary structural change, the model can be estimated using the backfitting algorithm embedded with forward search algorithm and bootstrap. A simulation study is designed to evaluate structural optimality of the model with the estimation procedure. The fitted model exhibit superior predictive ability relative to the linear model. The proposed algorithm also consistently produced lower relative bias and standard errors for the spatial parameter estimates. While additional neighbourhoods do not necessarily improve predictive ability of the model, it trims down relative bias on the parameter estimates, specially for spatial parameter. Location of the temporary structural change along with the degree of structural change contributes to lower relative bias of parameter estimates and in better predictive ability of the model. The estimation procedure is able to produce parameter estimates that are robust to the occurrence of temporary structural change.
In modeling count data with multivariate predictors, we often encounter problems with clustering of observations and interdependency of predictors. We propose to use principal components of predictors to mitigate the multicollinearity problem and to abate information losses due to dimension reduction, a semiparametric link between the count dependent variable and the principal components is postulated. Clustering of observations is accounted into the model as a random component and the model is estimated via the backfitting algorithm. Simulation study illustrates the advantages of the proposed model over standard poisson regression in a wide range of scenarios.
High dimensional predictors in regression analysis are often associated with multicollinearity along with other estimation problems. These problems can be mitigated through a constrained optimization method that simultaneously induces dimension reduction and variable selection that also maintains a high level of predictive ability of the fitted model. Simulation studies show that the method may outperform sparse principal component regression, least absolute shrinkage and selection operator, and elastic net procedures in terms of predictive ability and optimal selection of inputs. Furthermore, the method yields reduced models with smaller prediction errors than the estimated full models from the principal component regression or the principal covariance regression.
We introduce panel models and identify its link to spatial-temporal models. Both models are characterized and differentiated through the variance-covariance matrix of the disturbance term. The resulting estimates or tests are as complicated as the nature of the said variance-covariance matrix. Some iterative methods typically used in computational statistics are also presented. These methods are used in conducting statistical inference for spatial-temporal models.
We introduce panel models and identify its link to spatial-temporal models. Both models are characterized and differentiated through the variance-covariance matrix of the disturbance term. The resulting estimates or tests are as complicated as the nature of the said variance-covariance matrix. Some iterative methods typically used in computational statistics are also presented. These methods are used in conducting statistical inference for spatial-temporal models.
