Publications

Background. The Philippine educational system, including LIS education, was adversely affected by the current pandemic that the whole world is experiencing. Objectives. This paper discusses the unique challenges that UP SLIS has encountered in its transition from blended learning to a fully remote learning environment. It also presents strategies SLIS has adopted to overcome these challenges and ensure the quality of LIS education that it has committed to delivering to its stakeholders. Methods. The UP SLIS as an LIS educational institution is examined as a case study. Insights and perspectives from the Dean as the administrator of the School and an SLIS faculty member are analyzed and presented. Results. There are prevailing challenges in LIS education in the context of the elements of the teaching and learning process and external influences to LIS educators and students that further complicate the challenges that they have to overcome since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, the familiarity of LIS educators and students with the use of technology and online platforms in the delivery of courses, as well as the awareness of alternative resources within the purview of limited resources, helped with the adjustment to the sudden transformation from traditional to a remote learning/teaching modality. Contributions. Learnings may be generated from the exposition of experiences and the actions taken by UP SLIS in coping with the challenges brought about by the pandemic. Likewise, the presentation of the authors’ actual experiences as LIS educators serves as documentation of the efforts in managing an LIS school and addressing the extraordinary challenges in such a critical period.

The objective of this Forum is to complicate the usual depictions of Global South mega-urban regions. Neither the sure-fire means of realizing the aspirations of majority populations nor as a descent into chaos, the massiveness of Southern cities offers many different dimensions and implications.

Aim. This study was aimed at validating the Filipino version of AD8 (AD8-P). Methods. Community-dwelling Filipino older persons aged ≥60 years, together with their informants, participated in this study. Psychologists independently interviewed the informants with AD8-P and administered the Filipino-validated Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE-P) and Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA-P) to the older persons. Neurologists and geriatrician conducted physical and neurological examination and Clinical Dementia Rating™ (CDR™) to determine cognitive diagnosis and were blinded with the results of AD8-P. Dementia was diagnosed based on DSM-IV-TR criteria. AD8-P discriminatory ability to screen for dementia was evaluated according to DSM-IV-TR diagnostic criteria for dementia. Results. A total of 366 community-dwelling Filipino older persons aged ≥60 years, 213 with normal cognition and 153 with dementia, and their informants were included in this study. Majority (90%) were at the mildest stage of dementia. Area under the receiver-operating-characteristic curve (AUROC) for AD8-P was 0.94 (95% CI 0.92 to 0.96), demonstrating excellent overall predictive power to screen for dementia. The optimal AD8-P cut-off score with best balance sensitivity (91.5%) and specificity (77.9%) was ≥3. Conclusion. AD8-P demonstrated good psychometric properties to screen for dementia, even at the earliest stage of cognitive decline.

The chapter examines the counternarratives of persons arrested in the Philippine war on Drugs during the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte. In analyzes the detainees’ accounts of suffering and surviving violence or coercive force, which include physical intimidation and beatings, verbal and psychological abuse, torture, and death threats while under arrest and detention. The chapter problematizes the meanings inherent in violence based on the detainees’ subjectivities in terms of their sense of agency, or lack of it, as actors involved in the unfolding violent encounter with the police. Understanding violence from the subjectivities of perpetrators and its victims can help understand its modalities and development. It can inform law enforcement practices in terms of improving negotiation skill, diagnosing high tension risk-scenarios, deescalating pathways to violence, and recognizing actual needs previously unidentified. New learnings from the detainees can lead to insights on preventing the erosion of trust in the police as duty bearers in the forefront of the criminal justice system.

 

Short story published in Revolt Magazine PH.

Accessible at https://revoltmagazineph.ink/2020/07/27/ang-pangatlong-sulok-sa-triangul....

A review of the print and digital editions of the CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art, 2nd ed. published by the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

Bioadhesives have much potential in the medical field as an alternative to sutures in internal surgery. They are easier to use and have better long-term results. Improvement of a new class of adhesives, tannic acid-polyethylene glycol (TAPE), was done by mixing it with gelatin, since it was found that TAPE alone could not be applied to certain internal applications like in inguinal hernia. It failed to close a fresh inguinal hernia sac. Characterization tests were done on the new material, TAPE-gelatin, which proved to have a tissue adhesion strength of 0.41 MPa which is 5 times greater than fibrin glue, good blood biocompatibility with blood clotting index of 97.46%, burst pressure strength that can withstand 1000 mL that is 10 times more than the volume in the peritoneal cavity, and cheaper, with a production cost of Php28.50, than commercially available bioadhesives, which can reach up to Php2,000 – Php30,000 per application. With its desirable properties, cheaper production cost, and large potential for scalability, TAPE-gelatin as a new candidate for medical adhesive was established.

Libraries are sometimes the least priority of a public school, a state university, a local government unit or an enterprise. With the efforts of its administrators and help of the innovative librarians, these libraries could solicit book donations and other information products, collaterals, library equipment and furniture if they have the right contact person – the CSR managers from the generous donors. More often than not, these libraries try to squeeze in the meager funds they get from their institutions and try to work it out based from their day-to-day needs.

This paper presents 14 organizations / corporations that are active in responding to the needs of their beneficiaries. Each organization / corporation has outlined their CSR mission in changing the lives of their “customers” by giving back what they have earned.

This paper shares the CSR initiatives of Philippine corporations and non-government organizations in uplifting the reading habits and shaping the knowledge culture of the Philippines by involving and cultivating library programs and extension services to the greater public.

In this paper, we draw the profile of a citizen who possesses both a pragmatic spirit and a cosmopolitan élan; a citizen who – following the modern notions of a moral and political agent – is a rational and autonomous individual. This citizen is an immigrant. We start by showing that the immigrant, whether driven to move by economic or political need, is potentially an engaged and active citizen. Drawing upon John Rawls’ individualist notion of the self as well as upon the Communitarian concept of the individual, this paper presents the contemporary philosophical notions of who an ideal citizen is in this global or cosmopolitan era. With the help of Seyla Benhabib’s position on immigration and her analysis of the scarf affair in France, we argue for the political potential of immigrants and how this potential enriches our notion of citizenship. We contend that a more cosmopolitan approach leads to a creative and more flexible notion of citizenship.

Keywords: citizenship; migration; immigration; political agency; democracy; cosmopolitanism

The edited volume assembles chapters on topics that focus on crime and criminal punishment in the Philippines based on research works conducted by social scientists. These include chapters on indigenous justice systems, the colonial history of criminal punishment, the legislation of the death penalty, an ethnography on drug users, drug trafficking and markets in Asia and the Philippines, crime victimization and fear of crime among Filipinos, inmate gangs in Philippine prisons, community-based programs against drugs, and representative perspectives on the war on drugs from law enforcement, jail system and the arts.

This paper introduces ‘beneficiary citizenship’ as a way to understand a form of urban citizenship that has emerged from shifts in state–citizen relations. Through the case of state-initiated urban community gardens in Metro Manila, it examines beneficiary citizenship as conditionally granting urban dwellers welfare, entitlements or recognition in the city in return for their transformation into good, responsible citizens. Beneficiary citizenship captures the dual forces of neoliberal technologies of government and alternative citizenship claims that are simultaneously present in various participatory and community-centred state projects. Case study gardens established in a resettlement housing project, in a poverty reduction programme and in a gated village in Metro Manila all seek to cultivate good citizen traits deemed worthy of being granted recognition in the city through a transformation of self and the community. Yet, beneficiaries in these projects also use their good gardener/citizen subjectivity to mobilise ends different from those intended by garden projects as technologies of government. Community gardens therefore become spaces where urban dwellers articulate citizenship by combining various strategies granted by their participation in the projects, exceeding attempts to order and contain urban life.

Data assimilation (DA) techniques are powerful means of dynamic natural system modeling that allow for the use of data as soon as it appears to improve model predictions and reduce prediction uncertainty by correcting state variables, model parameters, and boundary and initial conditions. The objectives of this review are to explore existing approaches and advances in DA applications for surface water quality modeling and to identify future research prospects. We first reviewed the DA methods used in water quality modeling as reported in literature. We then addressed observations and suggestions regarding various factors of DA performance, such as the mismatch between both lateral and vertical spatial detail of measurements and modeling, subgrid heterogeneity, presence of temporally stable spatial patterns in water quality parameters and related biases, evaluation of uncertainty in data and modeling results, mismatch between scales and schedules of data from multiple sources, selection of parameters to be updated along with state variables, update frequency and forecast skill. The review concludes with the outlook section that outlines current challenges and opportunities related to growing role of novel data sources, scale mismatch between model discretization and observation, structural uncertainty of models and conversion of measured to simulated vales, experimentation with DA prior to applications, using DA performance or model selection, the role of sensitivity analysis, and the expanding use of DA in water quality management.

Small-scale off-grid renewable energy systems are being increasingly used for rural electrification, commonly as stand-alone home systems or community micro-grids. With the variety of technologies and configurations available, it is not clear which options are sustainable for remote communities. This study investigates the life cycle environmental sustainability of both home and community installations, designed as part of this work, which utilise diesel, solar, and wind resources coupled with battery storage. A total of 21 system configurations (six home systems and 15 micro-grids) have been designed and optimised for a prototypical rural community in the Philippines, considering both stand-alone and hybrid systems. Life cycle assessment (LCA) considering 18 potential impact categories has been carried out to compare the environmental impacts associated with electricity production of each option. At the household level, hybrid solar photovoltaics (PV)-wind systems with storage have 17–40% lower impacts than the equivalent stand-alone installations per kWh generated. Batteries are a major environmental hotspot, causing up to 88% of the life cycle impacts of a home energy system. Among the community micro-grid options, the PV-wind-lead acid battery hybrid system has the lowest impacts in many categories, including climate change, ozone depletion, and acidification. Comparing equivalent architectures for single-household and community-scale installations, PV systems are environmentally more sustainable if installed individually in households, while larger turbines in community micro-grids are environmentally better for wind utilisation. The results suggest that a household-scale PV system integrated within a micro-grid with community-scale wind turbines and Li-ion batteries is environmentally the most sustainable configuration.