Department of Tourism Winter Escapade brings in more tourists

By Helen Flores (The Philippine Star) | Updated February 6, 2018 - 12:00am

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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.

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“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 .

Philippines Volcano seen from space ...

... in satellite images

• By ALEXANDRA FAUL

Feb 1, 2018, 5:42 PM ET

ESA

WATCHPhilippines volcano seen from space in satellite images

• Email

Mount Mayon on the island of Luzon in the Philippines has seen lava flowing from eruptions over the past few weeks. The volcano's seismic monitoring network has detected a total of 273 volcanic earthquakes, 15 tremor events and seven rock fall events, according to a report released today.

The latest activity caused light grey plumes of ash which could be seen from space, images of which were captured Tuesday by the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite.

The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology has reported sporadic lava-fountaining events and significant ash fall in surrounding areas. The Province of Albay's Provincial Information Office has reported more than 84,000 people have evacuated their homes and are staying at local shelters.

Bullit Marquez/AP

The super blue blood moon, behind volcanic ash cloud, sets before dawn as lava cascades down the slopes of Mayon volcano during a sporadic mild eruption around 200 miles southeast of Manila, Philippines, Feb. 1, 2018.more +

Time-lapse video captures power of Mayon volcano

Philippine couple takes wedding photos in front of active volcano

Erupting volcano in Philippines forces evacuation of thousands of villagers

The Provincial Information Office has sent inspection teams to areas affected by the recent eruptions to conduct an assessment. Loud booming sounds can still be heard and danger is still imminent.

A Level 4 alert remains in effect for the Mayon Volcano as scientists believe more eruptions are possible.

Poe denies pushing for Facebook ban in Philippines

By Audrey Morallo (philstar.com) 

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During the resumption of the fake news probe Tuesday, Sen. Grace Poe, the chair of Senate public information and mass media panel, said that the Congress “cannot legislate thought control.” Senate PRIB/Alex Nuevaespaña, File

MANILA, Philippines — Sen. Grace Poe denied on Thursday that she was pushing for a ban on Facebook in the Philippines, insisting that this is the disinformation that the Senate is trying to combat in its hearings on the so-called “fake news.”

Poe said that banning the social media site in the Philippines was counterproductive, and the video showing her supposedly pushing for such a prohibition was simply untrue, according to the senator.

“These are the products of fake news factories we are trying to combat. The Philippines now has a big industry bent on twisting the truth,” Poe said in a Facebook post.

“This is fake news. This is not true. First of all, that’s counterproductive. It’s wrong. This is really disinformation,” Poe said in a television interview.

READ: 'Fake news cultivates a culture of lying'

Poe, however, conceded that they could not stop the proliferation of information online even if the Facebook video, which she said was “spliced” to make it appear as though the senator wanted to ban the use of the social media network, had already been seen by many people.

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“What’s appearing on social media, of course, we cannot stop it from spreading,” she said.

During the Senate hearing on the spread of false information, Poe insisted that both the government and its offices involved in communication bore great responsibility in preventing the spread of disinformation.

Poe broached the possibility of setting parameters for official government platforms, so these would not be used as platforms for the spread of “hateful” propaganda.

Poe, the chairperson of the Senate Committee on Public Information and Mass Media, also stressed that Congress could not pass laws on the proliferation of spurious information and data.

She also cited the case of Communications Assistant Secretary Mocha Uson, who maintains a widely popular blog site and has been accused of spreading wrong data and information to her online followers.

During the hearing, Poe also emphasized the accountability of social media networks if they failed to address offensive speech and hateful propaganda disseminated through their platforms.

She also urged Filipinos to be discerning and critical in consuming information found online to separate truth from lies.

“We should be able to inform the citizens that they should be able to cross-check information that they get online,” Poe said.

“We’ve come up also with our own video of the proceedings, because [the video circulating online] was spliced,” the senator added.

Poe also wants to compel Facebook executives to attend the next hearing of her panel to discuss the “algorithms” that it uses to control the information that appears on the news feed of their users.

She noted that some European governments have already initiated a crackdown on wrong information and compelled social media networks to flag illegal, hateful, defamatory and racist expression within 24 hours.

Kraftwerk win Grammy Award ...

... for best electronic album

Kraftwerk, the pioneering German band, has won the Grammy for best dance/electronic album. The band already won a lifetime achievement award four years ago.

Kraftwerk's "3-D The Catalogue" won best dance/electronic album at the Grammy Awards on Sunday ahead of the main ceremony.

It was among dozens of categories awarded before the televised show at New York's Madison Square Garden on Sunday night.

The Düsseldorf-based group, known for its robotic-like style since the 1970s, assembled its winning album from retrospective performances given at museums, including New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Those recordings were remastered to exclude extraneous crowd noise, unlike traditional live albums. The word 3-D in the title refers to glasses given to audience members.

The multimedia package includes eight CDs and a vinyl record, providing surround-sound versions of Kraftwerk's classic tracks such as "The Robots," "Pocket Calculator" and "Trans-Europe Express."

Kraftwerk co-founder Ralf Hütter

Other competitors in the category best dance/electronic album were "Migration" from Bonobo, Mura Masa's self-titled album, "A Moment Apart" by Odesza, and "What Now" by Sylvan Esso.

The band was awarded a Grammy for lifetime achievement in 2014.

'Beatles of electronic dance'

Kraftwerk was formed in Düsseldorf in 1970 by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider and is credited with influencing music styles such as electropop, Detroit techno, and hip-hop.

In 1974, its title ''Autobahn" broke worldwide into the English-speaking top charts.

In 1997, the New York Times described Kraftwerk, already nearly three decades old, as the "Beatles" of electronic dance music.

Solar Slowdown?

SOLAR SLOWDOWN?

In my opinion: solar is the best. But, even living in the Philippines since 19 years now, it seems to be so difficult to get solar panels installed. One thing is - of course - the question of price and the terrible price gaps. 

Just now, the United States, the European Union and India are all slapping tariffs on Chinese solar panels, accusing Beijing of dumping. Does this trade war risk killing the nascent solar power industry?

 

The global solar industry is reeling this week following the Trump administration's announcement that it will impose a 30 percent tariff on imported solar panels, mainly from China.

The US Solar Industries Association said this will result in the delay or cancellation of billions of dollars in solar investments, and the loss of 23,000 US jobs this year.

Despite the dramatic predictions, the solar industry likely knew the announcement was coming. The European Union has set roughly equivalent tariffs on imported Chinese panels, which were renewed in September 2017.

Another indication was how earlier this week, India set a whopping 70 percent import duty on Chinese and Malaysian solar panels.

Brussels, Delhi and  Washington all allege that China has been "dumping" the panels on their markets — selling them at artificially low prices and taking a loss in the short term in order to kill competitors in rival markets. 

Indeed, China's solar industry has benefited from export. But when consumers, like you and me, get even a small breath of chance of benefits?

That's how we stand today: SolarWorld Americas, the largest US solar panel manufacturer, first called for the US to impose such tariffs three years ago. The move fits with US President Donald Trump's protectionist promises.

But other parts of the US solar industry have been pleading with the administration to not follow Europe's lead, saying it would cripple their young but fast-growing businesses. They convinced a bipartisan group of 16 US Senators and 53 House members to write to Trump last year asking him not to impose the tariffs.

The US has set such tariffs before, in 2014, but ran afoul of World Trade Organization rules. South Korea has said in will likely challenge these new tariffs with the WTO.

Are we experiencing a global solar slowdown? I am afraid, yes. Heaven forbid!

While US and European solar panel manufacturers have said the tariffs are necessary to make a level playing field, solar installers, generators and users say thanks to the tariffs, those manufacturers may not have any customers left.

"While tariffs in this case will not create adequate cell or module manufacturing to meet US demand, or keep foreign-owned Suniva and SolarWorld afloat, they will create a crisis in a part of our economy that has been thriving," said Abigail Ross Hopper, president of the Solar Industries Association. This "will ultimately cost tens of thousands of hard-working, blue-collar Americans their jobs," she added.

She predicted that the tariffs could cut forecast solar installations this year by nearly 20 percent, to 9 gigawatts from 11 gigawatts. "It's just basic economics: If you raise the price of a product, it's going to decrease demand for that product."

US solar companies have pointed to the experience of their counterparts in Europe, where anti-dumping duties have been in place on Chinese solar panels since 2013. The industry association SolarPower Europe has said the EU tariffs have added at least €500 ($622) to the cost of a household installation.

"These policies have been tried in many parts of the world, and in not one case have the measures lead to more jobs, more manufacturing and more value," said James Watson, SolarPower Europe's CEO. "In essence, trade measures are a blunt tool with many unforeseen consequences on solar manufacturers of other crucial elements of the value chain."

Let's face this: solar power has been massively expanded in the US over the past several years. How about in the Philippines?

The US is the world's fourth-largest solar market after China, Japan and Germany. Zvi Schreiber, CEO of online freight marketplace Freightos, noted that the tariff is going to cause disruption in global trade patterns for these products — which could have the effect of shutting down new solar projects around the world.

"There will be shifts in demand," he said in an interview. "It's not just the solar panels themselves — today any product they manufacture includes dozens if not hundreds of materials."

Even if the playing field isn't level at the moment, Schreiber questions whether Washington and Brussels are cutting off their nose to spite their face, risking killing off an industry that does environmental good in the name of free trade — and risking a trade war with China in the process.

"Of course, the big loser is the environment," he said. "If China is willing to subsidize solar panels, we should all say 'thank you very much,' because that's going to help our planet — which is more important than whether it's fair."

That's something that benefits all of us. 

Eight years of German support for Philippine forests on Panay Island

By German Embassy Manila/Philippines

Tuesday, 23 January marked the successful closure of German government support provided for Panay Island under the “ForClim”, the Forest and Climate Protection in Panay Project. Running since 2010 and financed with almost 6M Euros (app. 360M Php) of German government funds, “ForClim”, aimed at helping Philippine government and municipal administrations to protect the forests on Panay and secure their rich biodiversity and to develop ways to sustainably use them. Through “ForClim” activities island dwellers were introduced to ways to better profit from their natural resources in a sustainable way while contributing to the global effort to avoid greenhouse gas emissions. Under “ForClim”, experts of German development cooperation agency GIZ and of specialist consultancy GFS teamed up with counterparts from the Philippine Department of the Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) and administrations of almost two dozen municipalities on Panay. While “ForClim” ends, its results and spirit will continue to lead the future work of Philippine authorities.