Publications

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.

In this study, a liquid gel bandage for wound treatment was synthesized using a combination of tannic acid and polyethylene glycol (TAPE). Agar was added as a stabilizer based on the physical properties of the formed product. Ethanol was chosen as solvent based on the resulting drying rate and mixing consistency. The liquid bandage was characterized in terms of its drying, adhesion, and swelling. Also, its antimicrobial and cytotoxic properties were evaluated. The final formulation had a drying time of 5 minutes, a T-peel adhesion yield point of 591.6 Pa, and a swelling ratio of 64%. The gel was also observed to be anti-microbial towards both S. aureus and E. coli, as well as exhibiting cytotoxic effects. Overall, the gel proved to have comparable properties to previously studied liquid bandages yet can be produced at a significantly lower cost.

Access to clean water is one of the targets in the UN Sustainable Development Goals. However, millions of people are still without basic water services, predominantly in rural areas in developing nations. Previous studies have investigated the environmental impacts of water provision, but they mostly focused on large-scale urban systems. This paper considers for the first time the life cycle environmental impacts of different water supply options applicable to remote communities in developing countries. Focusing on the Southeast Asia-Pacific (SEAP) context, a cradle-to-grave approach is followed to estimate the impacts of locally-sourced groundwater, surface water and desalinated seawater as well as externally-sourced bottled water. The results reveal that surface water is environmentally the most sustainable alternative. Locally desalinated water, powered by diesel electricity, has two orders of magnitude higher impacts than surface water. However, externally-sourced water in plastic bottles is the worst option with 4–155 times higher impacts than desalinated water and up to three orders of magnitude higher impacts than surface water. This is largely due to the impacts related to the production of bottles. Doubling their recycling would reduce the impacts by 7–23% but bottled water would still be environmentally the least sustainable option. Although water in single-use bottles currently provides only 3% of the water supply of a representative remote community in the SEAP region considered in this study, it accounts on average for more than 50% of the total impacts from water consumption. By 2030, population increase could lead to greater reliance of remote communities on bottled water and 60–73% higher impacts of water consumption per household. Relying solely on local surface, ground and water desalinated using solar power and avoiding bottled water would reduce the impacts by 33–99% relative to the current situation. This would also improve considerably water availability and security in remote communities. The findings of this study will be of interest to national and local governments developing future policies aimed at increasing access of remote communities to clean water.

Access to clean cooking fuels and technologies is essential for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly in developing countries, to minimise human health and environmental impacts. This paper assesses for the first time the environmental sustainability of household cooking, focusing on remote communities in developing countries in the Southeast Asia-Pacific (SEAP) region and considering both life cycle and local impacts. To guide rural development policies, the impacts of the following cooking fuels are considered: liquefied petroleum gas, kerosene, wood, charcoal, crop residues, biogas and electricity. Both the present situation and three future (2030) scenarios are evaluated on 18 life cycle impacts, as well as on local environmental and health impacts caused by cooking. The results show that electricity is the worst option in 13 out of 18 life cycle categories since it is generated from diesel in off-grid communities. Biogas from manure is the best fuel with 16 lowest life cycle impacts. Biomass fuels can have lower life cycle impacts than fossil fuels but they have high combustion emissions which lead to higher local environmental and health impacts. Future scenarios with higher biomass utilisation have up to 47 times lower life cycle impacts than at present, but 4–23% higher local impacts. Health impacts related to fuel combustion are higher in Vietnam, the Philippines, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar compared to the other SEAP countries due to regional background pollutant concentrations and health trends. A fuel mix with liquefied petroleum gas, biogas and renewable electricity offers considerable reductions in 13 life cycle impacts compared to the present situation, while also reducing local health impacts by 78–97%. A self-sufficient fuel mix with local biomass and renewable electricity would reduce 17 out of 18 life cycle impacts, but all local impacts, including on health, would be 11–28% higher than at present. The results from this study can be used by policy makers and other stakeholders to develop policies for clean cooking in remote communities and reduce both environmental and human health impacts.

Considering how much protein is loaded into the process, the crosslinking solution concentration and the weight percentage of the alginate/hydroxyethyl cellulose coating material, this study presented the details of optimization of the microencapsulation process. Optimization was done with an objective of maximizing the encapsulation efficiency of the microparticle fabricated using external ionotropic gelation method. Results showed that the process is capable of achieving around 75% encapsulation efficiency when protein loading is around 15 wt%, alginate/hydroxyethyl cellulos is about 2 wt% and the CaCl₂ solution should be 3 wt%. This was done using Box-Behnken methodology wherein the predicted model was found to have good predictive capability. Analysis also showed that the process is affected by how much protein drug is loaded into the system and the interactions between crosslinking solution concentration with bovine serum albumin (BSA) loading as well as the strong relationship between alginate/hydroxyethyl cellulos concentration with itself.

A methodological challenge for researchers performing content analysis on social media data involves deciding on a sampling procedure for obtaining content to be analyzed with least sampling error. The study used and recommended two different kinds of elementary unit—post and day—that allow probability sampling of Facebook data, regardless of whether the sampling frame of all posts within the time period of interest is obtainable. Four sampling designs for post as elementary unit and five for day as elementary unit—including three commonly used sampling options for content
analysis: simple random sampling without replacement (SRSWOR), constructed week sampling, and consecutive day sampling—were employed on Facebook data mined from Mocha Uson Blog from 2010 to 2018. Estimates for parameters, such as measures of user engagement and proportions of topic-related posts, were obtained at increasing sample sizes. Sampling designs for each elementary unit were evaluated by comparing the normalized area under the coefficient of variation curve (NAUCV) over the different sample sizes. For post as elementary unit, with content type as the stratification variable, stratified random sampling (StRS) using Neyman allocation based on total user engagement is
recommended (average NAUCV = 31.28%). For day as elementary unit, SRSWOR is recommended (average NAUCV = 42.31%).

This paper aims to contribute to the scarce literature describing the grammar of Iraya Mangyan — a language primarily spoken on the island of Mindoro — by providing a description of how focus and aspect are expressed in the language. Similar to most known Philippine languages, Iraya makes use of affixes that attach to verbs to mark focus. In terms of expressing aspect, the language uses both synthetic and analytic means, and is closely linked to the type of focus affixes that verbs may combine with. When compared to previous descriptions of the verb morphology of the language, the current data seem to indicate that a shift has been occurring in Iraya’s verb focus and aspect paradigms. Differences in the features described might be due to dialectal variations; however, they could also be indicative of attrition in the language as the number of its speakers continue to shrink. A description of the language situation in the area where fieldwork for this study was conducted is also provided.