blackshama's commentary on Philippine issues

What's my Sunday routine? I wake up a bit late at 7:30 AM After eating brekkie and the requisite glass of orange juice, I walk about a 2.64 km route (a mile!) to CTK (Christ the King Catholic Church) which is inside campus. It takes me about 20 minutes to travel the distance by foot. On the way, I get to see the spring flowers. But in winter, I got to see the bare trees. Mass On my last Sunday here, the Mass was for vocations. Appropriately, the Mass caps the academic year. Exams are due to be held and those who are candidates for graduation are busy wrapping up their school work. I know a few of these students. Also appropriately, the Mass caps the process of receiving new Catholics into the Church. We followed the process as a congregation, from the time the candidates were presented and when they were dismissed as catechumens. Later they were baptized and confirmed and then received communion. Some of the new Catholics decided to be one as adults. They answered a call. The homi...

The latest salvo in the Philippine language wars was fired early this week when a group of academics and cultural leaders petitioned the Supreme Court to prevent the President from implementing her executive order mandating English as a medium of instruction in science and math. The petitioners believe that this is unconstitutional. Manolo Quezon has given the sides why it is un(constitutional). Nonetheless Quezon's post has garnered more than a hundred responses. Obviously for the lively respondent blogger, the question of whether we should dump English or not was not the issue. The issue is whether school children should use Filipino to learn the basics of science and math, or to use English. Scientific studies in psychology, basic education and science education seem to suggest that numeracy and scientific thinking is more effective in the first language of the speaker. Only when the child has attained a more mature level of cognitive skills can English be introduced. In man...

Every year, on New Year's Day Lake Superior State University comes out with a list of words that should forever be "banished" from the English language. As the university would have it these words are banished for "for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness" Since I arrived in the US in December when I read the papers, I perused over the 2007 list. Some of the words are "Gitmo" combined celebrity names like "Brangelina" "Now playing in Theaters" "Awesome" "Undocumented alien" and my pet peeve "Ask your doctor" Well, Gitmo is army slang for "Guantanamo". During the Cold War, hearing the word "Gitmo" probably irritated only GIs assigned to that hardship post. Now civilians who are against George W Bush's policies are irritated too. I need not comment on "Brangelina" but "Now Playing in Theaters" was the subject of a comment from a lady "How often are...

U of Michigan Psychology Prof Richard Nisbett in 2003 wrote an intriguing book entitled "The Geography of Thought". This book says that the differences between Asians and Westerners are not mere cultural but cognitive. In short Asians and Westerners view the world differently due to different ecologies, culture and philosophy. In other words Asians and Westerners think differently. The conventional wisdom in psychology is that all people think the same, we can peel the cultural onion to find that at the center things are the same whether you are Japanese or German. Looks like Nisbett has cast doubt on this paradigm. He lists the probable reasons why Chinese excel in algebra and arithmetics but bomb out in geometry. (The first Jesuits in China noted that the Chinese had not much use for geometry (aside from surveying) as compared to the Greeks who used it to derive aesthetic principles). He also says that Asians find it so hard to remove an object from its context. The reverse...

The Philippine Daily Inquirer's on-line presence has become a veritable forum for interaction through its blogs. Mikaela On the science blog, a discussion was about the a 2007 physics graduate of the University of the Philippines, Mikaela Irene D. Fudolig. Physics graduates are not really newsworthy, but Mikaela is just 16 (an age when most UP students are freshies), a young woman, and best of all Summa Cum Laude. She enrolled in the university via a special program that recognizes giftedness. She had no high school diploma and did not take the UP College Admissions Test required of all aspiring freshies. She isn't the first. When I was a freshie in 1984, one of my fellow freshies was 12 yr old Perry Esguerra, a physics major. He is now a PhD in physics. The reactions range from unbelievability, to puzzlement, to the usual "honor grads don't know how the real world is". Many commented about her age (understandable) but many commented about whether she got assist...

For years the planet was just considered an inanimate rock on which we live. In fact it once was considered flat until people began traveling longer distances over the ocean, when it became apparent that it was round, more accurately an oblate spheroid. Now people think the planet is alive and James Lovelock has given her a name, Gaia that allows people to identify with her more easily. But now that we realize Gaia is alive, it is becoming very apparent the she is ill with a rising temperature. Climatologists have estimated that the planet's temperature has risen by 0.6 C (a conservative estimate) to as much as 0.75 C in the last 150 years. Approximately 0.2-0.3 C rise happened within the last 25 years (when advanced technology for remote sensing satellites were first developed). So when I was in high school, and punk rock was the craze, the world was a cooler place and I was much younger too. In some places, the temperature rise is even much greater than the global average. PAGASA...

I learned about the news that an American Peace Corps volunteer, Julia Campbell was missing after I returned to Baton Rouge from a spring break trip to snowy Cleveland right after Easter. The confirmation that she was dead came in the same week when 32 students and professors were massacred at Virginia Tech. The circumstances of their deaths are different but in some aspects the same. Their deaths were senseless and we are are left with the painful and unanswerable question "What more good could they have done, had they lived?" In my career, I have worked with ex-Peace Corps people, as well as ex-Australian Volunteers (the Aussie counterpart of the US Peace Corps) on matters relating to marine conservation. Volunteerism is an ethos that continues in these people long after their official volunteer days were over. While some people may consider these programs as "imperialist" and that the volunteers are really spies (an unfounded stereotype), reading Julia's b...

American universities have always been seen by the public as safe havens of free speech and tolerance. At times, expression within campus is somewhat dissonant from that outside of the university to the extent that townspeople at times don't get what the fuss is all about. Universities are not immune to senseless violence. The deadly shooting of 32 students and their professors at Virginia Tech has completely shaken every campus and town across the nation, if not all over the world. Students have been shot dead on campus such as what happened at Kent State in Ohio at the height of the Vietnam War protest. The fact that this happened on a college campus and not on a city street is what shocked America. Now everyone needs to take a close look at what really went wrong in the mind of 23 year old English major Cho Seung-Hui. While the gun control debate is expected to flare up, I hope the debate goes beyond guns. Issues like student safety on campus is of highest importance. How wil...

The senseless shooting that led to the death of 32 Virginia Tech students yesterday has reopened the usual debates that follow these tragic events. Gun control, race, immigration and social isolation are major concerns of American society. The alleged shooter Cho Seung-Hui, a 23 year old English major and Korean permanent resident was described as a loner, with much angst and anger who wrote "disturbing" plays. In fact some of his classmates suspected that he would eventually follow the path of the Columbine high school shooters in 1998. One of Cho's creative writing professors was concerned enough to approach university police and counseling. Nothing ever came out from this. College professors are usually advised to refer students with psychological problems to counseling. However a prof cannot drag a student to the counseling center. A student has to go on his/her own volition. Thus looking for the reasons why Cho did this horrible act which also led to his suicide is ...

With apologies to Simon and Garfunkel! Let us be brothers and travel this country together I ‘ve got the US Constitution here in my bag So we bought some McDonalds And my friend a magazine And we walked off to worship America Crikey! I said as we boarded the plane in New Orleans Louisiana seems like a dream to me now It took me 12 hours to standby for flights into the capital I’ve come to worship America Laughing in the lounge playing games with the colored faces He said the Arab looking man was really Osama Bin Laden I said be careful you may become racially profiled! Toss me an orange there's one in my carry on I ate the last one two hours ago! So I looked at the scenery, my friend his magazine And the Capitol rose over the suburban fields Crikey! I’m lost I said I don’t know what liberty really means now I’m empty and unfree and I don’t know why Counting the tourists at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial They've all come to look for America A...