You plan to move to the Philippines? Wollen Sie auf den Philippinen leben?

There are REALLY TONS of websites telling us how, why, maybe why not and when you'll be able to move to the Philippines. I only love to tell and explain some things "between the lines". Enjoy reading, be informed, have fun and be entertained too!

Ja, es gibt tonnenweise Webseiten, die Ihnen sagen wie, warum, vielleicht warum nicht und wann Sie am besten auf die Philippinen auswandern könnten. Ich möchte Ihnen in Zukunft "zwischen den Zeilen" einige zusätzlichen Dinge berichten und erzählen. Viel Spass beim Lesen und Gute Unterhaltung!


Visitors of germanexpatinthephilippines/Besucher dieser Webseite.Ich liebe meine Flaggensammlung!

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Tuesday, February 6, 2018

Department of Tourism Winter Escapade brings in more tourists

By Helen Flores (The Philippine Star) | 

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Tourism officials and participants in the Winter Escapade 5 from Canada and the US pose in front of Jose Rizal’s monument.
MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Tourism (DOT)’s annual Winter Escapade – one of the agency’s most successful promotional programs in collaboration with the Department of Foreign Affairs – has again brought hundreds of tourists, mostly balikbayans from the US and Canada, to the country this week.
Philippine Ambassador to Canada Petronila Garcia said this year a total of 250 tourists, including Canadians, have joined the 10-day tour with stops in the cities of Bacolod and Davao.
Now on its fifth year, Winter Escapade has brought in over a thousand tourists, resulting in increased tourism revenues and investments, Garcia said.
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DOT data show that the average expenditure of the Canadian tourists during their 10-day stay in the Philippines is Canadian $4,000 to $5,000 or a total of Canadian $1.046 million (P42.8 million).
“In terms of presenting a good image of the country, this (Winter Escapade) is very important,” Garcia told The STAR during the welcome lunch for participants held at the Ayuntamiento de Manila in Intramuros on Saturday.
“Sometimes we get bad reputation,” she said, referring to travel advisories issued by some countries against the Philippines due to peace and order.
Headlines ( Article MRec ), pagematch: 1, sectionmatch: 1
“If it’s a group (tour) organized by us, people are not afraid and word of mouth spreads that the Philippines is a good place to go,” she said.
Garcia noted that the person who brought Canada’s Tim Hortons in the Philippines was a participant of the Winter Escapade last year.
The envoy said aside from “good value,” Winter Escapade brings tourists to different places every year.
Garcia said more Filipino-Canadians would like to join the annual tour to escape the cold February winter of Canada but they have to limit the number of participants due to lack of hotel rooms in some areas in the country.
Carmen Barcena, head of the Ceremonial and Protocol Services at the Federal Government of Canada, is joining the tour with her 16-year-old son, Napoleon.
“I think it’s an interesting way to be introduced to the diversity of the Philippines, the culture, the people, the food… This way you’ll have full access to places you never knew existed,” she said.
Napoleon said he intends to post all his pictures on Instagram and Facebook so his friends and classmates in Canada would be enticed to visit the Philippines.
Forty-year-old Jeremie dela Paz, who was born and raised in Montreal, said the Winter Escapade is a good opportunity to allow foreigners “to enjoy the opulence of the country.”
“Often people are focused on the poverty of the Philippines. But the Philippines is multifaceted. We’re not just a poor country. We have a lot to offer, we have a lot of ingenuity here, we have a lot of beauty, world-class amenities and activities,” he said.
Dela Paz said aside from his family, he also brought his Canadian partner, who is from Quebec, to personally experience the rich Filipino culture.
“Even if we’re not born in the Philippines, no matter what we do we’re always Filipino,” he said.

Does our social media betrays our mood?

My column in MINDANAO DAILY -
the Mindanao-wide published newspaper.

Clues to the state of your mental health may be hiding in plain sight – in the tweets you send and the Facebook updates you post. There it is in your Facebook timeline or Instagram gallery – a digital footprint of your mental health.

I was shocked but - on the other way also very interested checking out more on BBC. This February, BBC Future is exploring social media’s impact on mental health and well-being – and seeking solutions for a happier, healthier experience on these platforms. 

One thing is really clear: it’s not hidden in the obvious parts: the emojis, hashtags and inspirational quotes. Instead, it lurks in subtler signs that, unbeknownst to you, may provide a diagnosis as accurate as a doctor’s blood pressure cuff or heart rate monitor.

For those who see social media mainly as a place to share the latest cat video or travel snap, this may come as a surprise. It also means the platform has important – and potentially life-saving – potential. Following the BBC:  in the US alone, there is one death by suicide every 13 minutes. Despite this, our ability to predict suicidal thoughts and behavior has not materially improved across 50 years of research. Forecasting an episode of psychosis or emerging depression can be equally challenging.

But data mining and machine learning are transforming this landscape by extracting signals from dizzying amounts of granular data on social media. These methods already have tracked and predicted flu outbreaks. Now, it’s the turn of mental health.

Studies have found that if you have depression, your Instagram feed is more likely to feature bluer, greyer, and darker photos with fewer faces. They’ll probably receive fewer likes (but more comments). Chances are you’ll prefer the Inkwell filter which converts colour images to black and white, rather than the Valencia one which lightens them.

Even then, these patterns are hardly robust enough in isolation to diagnose or predict depression. Still, they could be crucial in constructing models that can. This is where machine learning comes in.

While checking out all these details, I try to recall my last posts and reactions in social media. Maybe at this moment, you think about yours too.

Allow me to share more with you, my dear readers: researchers from Harvard University and the University of Vermont used these techniques in their recent analysis of almost 44,000 Instagram posts. Their resulting models correctly identified 70% of all users with depression. compared to a rate of 42% from general practitioners. They also had fewer false positives (although this figure drew from a separate population, so may be an unfair comparison). Depressive signals were evident in users’ feeds even before a formal diagnosis from psychiatrists – making Instagram an early warning system of sorts.

Meanwhile, psychiatrists have long linked language and mental health, listening for the disjointed and tangential speech of schizophrenia or the increased use of first-person singular pronouns of depression. For an updated take, type your Twitter handle into AnalyzeWords. It’s a free text analysis tool which focuses on junk words (pronouns, articles, prepositions) to assess emotional and thinking styles. From my 1017 most recent words on Twitter, I’m apparently average for being angry and worried but below average on being upbeat – I have been pretty pessimistic about the state of the world recently. Enter @realdonaldtrump into AnalzyeWords and you’ll see he scores highly on having an upbeat emotional style, and is less likely than average to be worried, angry, and depressed.

The behaviour we exhibit online can be used to inform diagnostic and screening tools – so the opinion of Chris Danforth, University of Vermont.

But far beyond this quick and sometimes amusing scan of emotional and social styles (AnalyzeWords tells you if you’re more “Spacy/ValleyGirl” than average), researchers are exploring profound questions about mental health.

Telling signals of depression include an increase in negative words (“no”, “never”, “prison”, “murder”) and a decrease in positive ones (“happy”, “beach”, and “photo”), but these are hardly definitive. Taking it a step further, researchers at Harvard University, Stanford University and the University of Vermont extracted a wider range of features (mood, language and context) from almost 280,000 tweets. The resulting computational model scored highly on identifying users with depression; it also was correct in about nine of every 10 PTSD predictions.


The ratio of positive to negative words was a key predictor within the model, says Chris Danforth, one of the researchers and Flint professor of mathematical, natural and technical sciences at the University of Vermont. Other strong predictors included increased tweet word count.

What to do with all this information? Empowerment would be a good start. 

Reservations persist more broadly in this field, though, especially around privacy. What if digital traces of your mental health become visible to all? You might be targeted by pharmaceutical companies or face discrimination from employers and insurers. In addition, some of these types of projects aren’t subject to the rigorous ethical oversight of clinical trials. Users are frequently unaware their data has been mined. Yes, include me in. And -maybe- you too!

As privacy and internet ethics scholar Michael Zimmer once explained, “Just because personal information is made available in some fashion on a social network, does not mean it is fair game for capture and release to all”.

BBC news made me very thoughtful: Data mining and machine learning offer the potential for earlier identification of mental health conditions. Currently, the time from onset of depression to contact with a treatment provider is six to eight years; for anxiety, it’s nine to 23 years. In turn, hopefully we’ll see better outcomes. Two billion users engage with social media regularly – these are signals with scalability. As Mark Zuckerberg wrote recently while outlining Facebook’s AI plans, “there have been terribly tragic events – like suicides, some live streamed – that perhaps could have been prevented if someone had realized what was happening and reported them sooner.”

Quoting BBC again - and here, I really strong agree: mental health exists between clinic appointments. It ebbs and flows in real time. It lives in posts and pictures and tweets. Perhaps prediction, diagnosis and healing should live there, too.

See you in Facebook and Twitter. Or email me: doringklaus@gmail.com. And you can also follow me in LinkedIn - or just visit my www.germanexpatinthephilippines.blogspot.com or -my relaxing place- www.klausdoringsclassicalmusic.blogspot.com .