Thursday, April 17, 2008
20080417_Live @ 55
The headlines were brought to you by Castrol Magnatec---Keeps your car at its peak longer.
Doctors have described as unethical, the behaviour of the operating team for “Jan-Jan” with Vicente Sotto’s media liaison officer, Dr. Emmanuel Gines, leading the pack in apologizing to the badly publicized florist. Hospital administration and respective regulatory boards are looking into meting out appropriate punishment---with licenses revoked for nurses found to be guilty of violating ethical standards and one doctor, Dr. Ariel Arias who is to be investigated. Jan-Jan is determined to file a ase against Vicente Sotto unless he's happy with the penalties impose dont he operating team, promising a legal battle. Doctors found violating medical ethics will be expelled from the Philippine Medical Association while the ombudsman launched its own fact-finding investigation. The nursing student suspected of posting the video at YouTube was not allowed to graduate and by Friday, we'll all hear from VSMMC on the results of their investigation. They're also to promise how they're going to prevent similar incidents from happening again PLUS reveal the list of doctors and nurses involved in the scandal.
In other news, Lima Peru's potato center asserts at their conference this month about the potato being the "food of the future." UN's Food and Agriculture Organization followed the same tack while declaring 2008 to be the International Year of the Potato. Here's what CNN says: FAO says Potato farming is ideally suited to places where land is limited and labor is abundant, conditions that characterize much of the developing world. Potatoes are nutritious, too: They have the highest protein content of root and tuber crops (around 2.1 percent), half the daily recommended intake of vitamin C, and a fifth of the recommended daily value of potassium. The rootcrop is the number 4 food crop worldwide. The Potato Center continues to develop new varieties like looking for ways to produce potato varieties that require less water for growing and have greater resistance to pests and climate change.
Filinvest---we build the Filipino dream.
Following the mudslide that wrecked households in Guadalupe and Sitio Dakit, Mayor Tomas Osmeña ordered developer Landco Pacific Corp.and Genvi Development to stop working on the 200-hectare Monterrazas de Cebu. Landco acknowledged the mayor's conditions for the revocation of the permit and continued working on the fifth detention pond. Landco is in the process of contructing all 25 to 30 detention ponds for the property which will each hold 2,500 cubic meteres of rainwater and detaine rainwater within the property. Landco is still working on the fifth detention pond and now promises that quality will be considered despite additional costs. Flood victims have been given monetary support along with basic supplies and a number are willing to be relocated. The City Council is due to meet today to discuss the declaration of Sitio Dakit as a calamity area.
STILL IN NEWS AT THE HOMEFRONT, CHED reports 31 higher education institutions have applied for a tuition fee increase for the upcoming schoolyear. The names of the schools have been withheld pending completion of their application papers. St. Theresa's College is new in the list.
NBI CLEARANCE. Wednesday, the NBI launched the Clearance Renewal Card or CRC which will be available in 150 Automated Clearance Machines (ACL) nationwide on the first of July. It takes just two to three minutes to apply for a CRC worth P120 each. For those of you who can't imaging what I mean, it works just like ATMs used by banks. Just that this one requires a fingerprint instead of a PIN number. This is good news for people who share the same name with individuals with criminal records. Starting July 1 all NBI clearance kiosks in malls nationwide will be converted to unmanned ACMs and will be open for the entire week including Saturdays and Sundays.
At Tuesday;s Tripartite Labor Conference in Malacañang, President Arroyo floats the possibility of exempting rice allowances from taxes. What we have now is a BIR regulation exempting taxes from rice allowance or subsidies of up to a thousand pesos. Arroyo wants non-wage benefits like allowances be exempted from taxes altogether. Other proposals were looked into, like extending of income tax exemptions for minimum wage earners through the passage of a bill; the condonation of penalties for housing and salary loans; the expansion of income augmentation program to cover workers in the public sector; accessibility and affordable of government housing programs; and the speedy resolution of labor cases.
All Batteries. More batteries, more power.
DID YOU KNOW? Rice accounts for 35 percent of the average daily calorie intake of about 65 percent of Philippine households, where each member eats 100 kg of rice a year. The wastage of rice at the household level is as important as the losses incurred at farm level. At farm level, about 12 percent of rice is lost. In households, wastage may be classified as quantitative and qualitative. We waste rice when we spill grains while washing them. In rural areas, villages let grains of rice spilled on the ground for chicken feed. Some allocate half of the family’s rice to their pets. We waste about 25,000 bags of rice every day, enough to feed more than 3.5 million Filipinos for one day.
Filling in for Captain Karyna.
155 All Batteries. More batteries, more power.
The Walt Disney Co. said Tuesday its Pixar animation studio is committing to 3-D and will release all of its movies in the format beginning with "Up" next year. Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter made the announcement in New York at a presentation of Disney's upcoming lineup of animated movies through 2012. He said Walt Disney Animation Studios will offer "The Princess and the Frog," a musical set in New Orleans, in the traditional hand-drawn format for release for Christmas 2009. Meanwhile, Pixar movies will be released in 3-D and the traditional two-dimensional format, beginning in May 2009 with "Up," about an elderly widower who embarks on a South American adventure.
ON TO ANOTHER TECH STORY, a survey of UK Net users by Broadbandchoices.co.uk indicated that more Brits expect next-generation broadband to enable them to DVD-quality fims as quickly as possible ahead of video calls, high-definition video downloads, and home surveillance. By quickly, the Brits mean downloads in 5 minutes. Interestingly, they don't quite know how much they're prepared to pay for extra services of this kind. UK and its Net regulator Ofcom is in the midst of consultation on the issue of future net services, the most important of which hinges on whether the UK is falling behind the rest of the world.
255 All Batteries. More batteries, more power.
Here's a reality check for everyone: the Philippines isn't known for good governance or fantastic mass transport systems. Today we made headlines the world over. Let me read you some of the headlines made by newspapers the world over about our little surgery fiasco:
US News & World Report headlines read, 'YouTube surgery video investigated."
CBS injected a more serious note with their headline saying,"Philippine Surgeons Goof Off on YouTube."
The nursing student allegedly responsible for the posting has taken the video off his YouTube. We'll all hear from VSMMC on the results of their investigation. They're also to promise how they're going to prevent similar incidents from happening again PLUS reveal the list of doctors and nurses involved in the scandal.
IN TECH NEWS, Software firm Symantec Internet Threat Security says that we're the third highest number of "bot-infected" computers in Southeast Asia, ranking just behind Malaysia and Singapore. From July to December 2007, Manila is the sixth highest among cities with bot-infected computers in Asia Pacific and Japan. This was a tremendous jump from the previous 83rd ranking of Manila in the last ITSR study for the first half of 2007. Bots are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet, including the sending of spam e-mail and even hosting a phishing Web site on an infected computer. The rise in number of "bot infections" could mean that cybercriminals could use networks of bot-infected computers to commit crimes on the Internet. This means that a hacker in Peru can use a computer with a bot script in the Philippines to take down a server in, say, Switzerland. The Symantec study also showed that the Philippines already ranked fourth in Southeast Asia for malicious activity, right behind Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. This includes bot activity, command-and-control servers, hosting of phishing Web sites, "spam zombies" and malicious code.
355 The headlines were brought to you by Castrol Magnatec---Keeps your car at its peak longer.
LITERATURE. JK Rowling has called for authors' rights to be protected in an angry outburst on the final day of a trial over an unauthorised Harry Potter encyclopaedia. In her second stint on the witness stand, Rowling told US District Judge Robert Patterson Jr that he if allowed the lexicon to be published, it would clear the way for countless rip-offs of her books, as well as the work of other popular authors. She has called Vander Ark's book "sloppy, lazy" work, unlike other Harry Potter companion books already published, which added original commentary and criticism. Small publisher RDR Books which created a book from the website, has argued that it is little different than any other reference guide to an important novel, and should be allowed to go to press without interference. Rowling told the court she was "vehemently anti-censorship," and generally supportive of the right of other authors to write books about her novels. But she said Vander Ark had "plundered" her prose and merely reprinted it in an A-to-Z format. Lawyers now have several weeks to file legal documents before a verdict is considered. Both sides have been urged to settle with the presiding judge saying the case reflected an emerging part of copyuright law with no lear precedents.
GRAIN RETAILERS are plagued with not having enough budget to tramsport rice to store outlets so the city government and the NFA will install additional rice outlets to answer to the demands. There used to be 30 operating outlets in Cebu City but as of now there are only 16. Of the 14 inactive stores, there are already 10 applicants interested.
455 Filinvest---we build the Filipino dream.
If you're on the verge of proposing marriage to your life-partner, here's how the geeks do it. A financial software programmer and blogger from New Jersey took a month to alter the code of the Nintendo DS Console to propose to his girlfriend. The girlfriend plays Bejeweled and as re-programming went, the screen went clear and a ring a dropped down when she reached a certain score. Of course, they followed this up with a nice dinner and everything else. Most companies frown on having their programs messed with but not Bejeweled-maker PopCap who instead of suing, will fly the newlyweds to the city as part of their honeymoon. PopCap will also supply the popular Bejewejed puzzle game as wedding tokens for the guests. Bejeweled is a popular puzzle game in which players arrange gems into chains.
EARTH WATCH. RecycleBank founder, Ron Gonen, says, "Recycling is something you can do today that has a significant environmental impact on the way you live. It touches your life." And he's made it worth its while for a lot of Americans by letting them earn redeemable points. Here's how it works: every family on a garbage route is issued a special container with a computer chip. When garbage trucks pick up the recycling, they weigh the container and record how much each family is recycling by weight. The more you recycle, the more RecycleBank points you earn, which can be redeemed for offers at merchants like CVS/pharmacy. It's that easy. Since RecycleBank launched in Philadelphia in 2006, its formula has led to unqualified success everywhere it has gone — and it now operates through much of the Northeast U.S. Recycling rates in one of the first Philadelphia neighborhoods that RecycleBank served rose from 7% to 90% in a matter of months and total waste sent to landfills is down considerably.
555 . . . brought to you by Caltex with the unbeatable cleaning power of Techron.
PREDATOR PRIESTS. Pope Benedict XVI on his first full day on the US Tour Wednesday berated US bishops for their poor handling of the child sex scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic church, but laid part of the blame on the breakdown of values in US society. Benedict told a gathering of bishops they had "sometimes very badly handled" the decades-old problem of pedophile priests. But he urged efforts "to address the sin of abuse within the wider context of sexual mores." The Pope is caaling or a determined, collective response, but did not outline any firm action that the Vatican intended to take to purge the church of pedophile priests. Instead, he had measured praised for the efforts made so far by the US church to heal the wounds left by the scandal.
Backstory:
The US church was plunged into the worst crisis in its 200-year history in 2002 when the Archbishop of Boston confessed he had protected a priest who had sexually abused young members of his church.
After the scandal blew up, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops drafted a charter for the protection of children and has issued an annual report outlining progress made in implementing the plan.
Last year, 689 new allegations of abuse were lodged, and the church paid out 615 million dollars (400 million euros) to settle child sex abuse cases involving members of the clergy -- 54 percent more than the previous year -- the annual progress report said.
Doctors have described as unethical, the behaviour of the operating team for “Jan-Jan” with Vicente Sotto’s media liaison officer, Dr. Emmanuel Gines, leading the pack in apologizing to the badly publicized florist. Hospital administration and respective regulatory boards are looking into meting out appropriate punishment---with licenses revoked for nurses found to be guilty of violating ethical standards and one doctor, Dr. Ariel Arias who is to be investigated. Jan-Jan is determined to file a ase against Vicente Sotto unless he's happy with the penalties impose dont he operating team, promising a legal battle. Doctors found violating medical ethics will be expelled from the Philippine Medical Association while the ombudsman launched its own fact-finding investigation. The nursing student suspected of posting the video at YouTube was not allowed to graduate and by Friday, we'll all hear from VSMMC on the results of their investigation. They're also to promise how they're going to prevent similar incidents from happening again PLUS reveal the list of doctors and nurses involved in the scandal.
In other news, Lima Peru's potato center asserts at their conference this month about the potato being the "food of the future." UN's Food and Agriculture Organization followed the same tack while declaring 2008 to be the International Year of the Potato. Here's what CNN says: FAO says Potato farming is ideally suited to places where land is limited and labor is abundant, conditions that characterize much of the developing world. Potatoes are nutritious, too: They have the highest protein content of root and tuber crops (around 2.1 percent), half the daily recommended intake of vitamin C, and a fifth of the recommended daily value of potassium. The rootcrop is the number 4 food crop worldwide. The Potato Center continues to develop new varieties like looking for ways to produce potato varieties that require less water for growing and have greater resistance to pests and climate change.
Filinvest---we build the Filipino dream.
Following the mudslide that wrecked households in Guadalupe and Sitio Dakit, Mayor Tomas Osmeña ordered developer Landco Pacific Corp.and Genvi Development to stop working on the 200-hectare Monterrazas de Cebu. Landco acknowledged the mayor's conditions for the revocation of the permit and continued working on the fifth detention pond. Landco is in the process of contructing all 25 to 30 detention ponds for the property which will each hold 2,500 cubic meteres of rainwater and detaine rainwater within the property. Landco is still working on the fifth detention pond and now promises that quality will be considered despite additional costs. Flood victims have been given monetary support along with basic supplies and a number are willing to be relocated. The City Council is due to meet today to discuss the declaration of Sitio Dakit as a calamity area.
STILL IN NEWS AT THE HOMEFRONT, CHED reports 31 higher education institutions have applied for a tuition fee increase for the upcoming schoolyear. The names of the schools have been withheld pending completion of their application papers. St. Theresa's College is new in the list.
- The other schools, mostly in Cebu City and the Cebu Province, include AMA Computer College-Cebu City, Asian College of Technology, Cebu Doctors’ University and Cebu Institute of Technology.
- Also in the list are University of Cebu-Main, University of San Carlos, University of San Jose-Recoletos, University of Southern Philippines and University of the Visayas (UV)-main campus. The highest proposed tuition increase is 20 percent by the UV-Pardo and UV-Minglanilla. [SSD]
NBI CLEARANCE. Wednesday, the NBI launched the Clearance Renewal Card or CRC which will be available in 150 Automated Clearance Machines (ACL) nationwide on the first of July. It takes just two to three minutes to apply for a CRC worth P120 each. For those of you who can't imaging what I mean, it works just like ATMs used by banks. Just that this one requires a fingerprint instead of a PIN number. This is good news for people who share the same name with individuals with criminal records. Starting July 1 all NBI clearance kiosks in malls nationwide will be converted to unmanned ACMs and will be open for the entire week including Saturdays and Sundays.
At Tuesday;s Tripartite Labor Conference in Malacañang, President Arroyo floats the possibility of exempting rice allowances from taxes. What we have now is a BIR regulation exempting taxes from rice allowance or subsidies of up to a thousand pesos. Arroyo wants non-wage benefits like allowances be exempted from taxes altogether. Other proposals were looked into, like extending of income tax exemptions for minimum wage earners through the passage of a bill; the condonation of penalties for housing and salary loans; the expansion of income augmentation program to cover workers in the public sector; accessibility and affordable of government housing programs; and the speedy resolution of labor cases.
All Batteries. More batteries, more power.
DID YOU KNOW? Rice accounts for 35 percent of the average daily calorie intake of about 65 percent of Philippine households, where each member eats 100 kg of rice a year. The wastage of rice at the household level is as important as the losses incurred at farm level. At farm level, about 12 percent of rice is lost. In households, wastage may be classified as quantitative and qualitative. We waste rice when we spill grains while washing them. In rural areas, villages let grains of rice spilled on the ground for chicken feed. Some allocate half of the family’s rice to their pets. We waste about 25,000 bags of rice every day, enough to feed more than 3.5 million Filipinos for one day.
- OTHER FACTS:
- The Philippines ranks third (100 kg a year) in rice consumption in Asia. According to Rice Awareness Teaching Module, a high-school home economics guide prepared by the Rice Media Advocacy Network Philippines (RMAN), the average person in Myanmar eats 195 kg of rice a year, while in Laos and Cambodia a person consumes 160 kg. The average European eats 3 kg, while the American, 7 kg.
- Three of the world’s most populous nations—China, India and Indonesia with a combined population of 2.5 billion, or half of the world’s—depend on rice for their daily meal, too, data from Asia Rice Foundation showed.
- Every year 50 million people are added to Asia’s ever-increasing population of 3.5 billion.
- What is eaten today is the “domesticated” rice grass, which belongs to the species Oryza sativa with more than 140,000 varieties listed so far. The other species is Oryza glaberrima.
- Rice domestication, or cultivation, had a vague historical origin although “the most convincing archeological evidence” was discovered in Non Nok Tha in Thailand in 1966, upon pottery shards bearing the imprint of both grains and husks of O. sativa.
- Migrants from China and North Vietnam were said to have brought the wetland-rice cultivation to the Philippines during the Second Millennium or about 4,000 years ago, said the Rice Awareness Teaching Module. [abs-cbn]
Filling in for Captain Karyna.
155 All Batteries. More batteries, more power.
The Walt Disney Co. said Tuesday its Pixar animation studio is committing to 3-D and will release all of its movies in the format beginning with "Up" next year. Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter made the announcement in New York at a presentation of Disney's upcoming lineup of animated movies through 2012. He said Walt Disney Animation Studios will offer "The Princess and the Frog," a musical set in New Orleans, in the traditional hand-drawn format for release for Christmas 2009. Meanwhile, Pixar movies will be released in 3-D and the traditional two-dimensional format, beginning in May 2009 with "Up," about an elderly widower who embarks on a South American adventure.
ON TO ANOTHER TECH STORY, a survey of UK Net users by Broadbandchoices.co.uk indicated that more Brits expect next-generation broadband to enable them to DVD-quality fims as quickly as possible ahead of video calls, high-definition video downloads, and home surveillance. By quickly, the Brits mean downloads in 5 minutes. Interestingly, they don't quite know how much they're prepared to pay for extra services of this kind. UK and its Net regulator Ofcom is in the midst of consultation on the issue of future net services, the most important of which hinges on whether the UK is falling behind the rest of the world.
255 All Batteries. More batteries, more power.
Here's a reality check for everyone: the Philippines isn't known for good governance or fantastic mass transport systems. Today we made headlines the world over. Let me read you some of the headlines made by newspapers the world over about our little surgery fiasco:
US News & World Report headlines read, 'YouTube surgery video investigated."
CBS injected a more serious note with their headline saying,"Philippine Surgeons Goof Off on YouTube."
The nursing student allegedly responsible for the posting has taken the video off his YouTube. We'll all hear from VSMMC on the results of their investigation. They're also to promise how they're going to prevent similar incidents from happening again PLUS reveal the list of doctors and nurses involved in the scandal.
IN TECH NEWS, Software firm Symantec Internet Threat Security says that we're the third highest number of "bot-infected" computers in Southeast Asia, ranking just behind Malaysia and Singapore. From July to December 2007, Manila is the sixth highest among cities with bot-infected computers in Asia Pacific and Japan. This was a tremendous jump from the previous 83rd ranking of Manila in the last ITSR study for the first half of 2007. Bots are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet, including the sending of spam e-mail and even hosting a phishing Web site on an infected computer. The rise in number of "bot infections" could mean that cybercriminals could use networks of bot-infected computers to commit crimes on the Internet. This means that a hacker in Peru can use a computer with a bot script in the Philippines to take down a server in, say, Switzerland. The Symantec study also showed that the Philippines already ranked fourth in Southeast Asia for malicious activity, right behind Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. This includes bot activity, command-and-control servers, hosting of phishing Web sites, "spam zombies" and malicious code.
355 The headlines were brought to you by Castrol Magnatec---Keeps your car at its peak longer.
LITERATURE. JK Rowling has called for authors' rights to be protected in an angry outburst on the final day of a trial over an unauthorised Harry Potter encyclopaedia. In her second stint on the witness stand, Rowling told US District Judge Robert Patterson Jr that he if allowed the lexicon to be published, it would clear the way for countless rip-offs of her books, as well as the work of other popular authors. She has called Vander Ark's book "sloppy, lazy" work, unlike other Harry Potter companion books already published, which added original commentary and criticism. Small publisher RDR Books which created a book from the website, has argued that it is little different than any other reference guide to an important novel, and should be allowed to go to press without interference. Rowling told the court she was "vehemently anti-censorship," and generally supportive of the right of other authors to write books about her novels. But she said Vander Ark had "plundered" her prose and merely reprinted it in an A-to-Z format. Lawyers now have several weeks to file legal documents before a verdict is considered. Both sides have been urged to settle with the presiding judge saying the case reflected an emerging part of copyuright law with no lear precedents.
GRAIN RETAILERS are plagued with not having enough budget to tramsport rice to store outlets so the city government and the NFA will install additional rice outlets to answer to the demands. There used to be 30 operating outlets in Cebu City but as of now there are only 16. Of the 14 inactive stores, there are already 10 applicants interested.
455 Filinvest---we build the Filipino dream.
If you're on the verge of proposing marriage to your life-partner, here's how the geeks do it. A financial software programmer and blogger from New Jersey took a month to alter the code of the Nintendo DS Console to propose to his girlfriend. The girlfriend plays Bejeweled and as re-programming went, the screen went clear and a ring a dropped down when she reached a certain score. Of course, they followed this up with a nice dinner and everything else. Most companies frown on having their programs messed with but not Bejeweled-maker PopCap who instead of suing, will fly the newlyweds to the city as part of their honeymoon. PopCap will also supply the popular Bejewejed puzzle game as wedding tokens for the guests. Bejeweled is a popular puzzle game in which players arrange gems into chains.
EARTH WATCH. RecycleBank founder, Ron Gonen, says, "Recycling is something you can do today that has a significant environmental impact on the way you live. It touches your life." And he's made it worth its while for a lot of Americans by letting them earn redeemable points. Here's how it works: every family on a garbage route is issued a special container with a computer chip. When garbage trucks pick up the recycling, they weigh the container and record how much each family is recycling by weight. The more you recycle, the more RecycleBank points you earn, which can be redeemed for offers at merchants like CVS/pharmacy. It's that easy. Since RecycleBank launched in Philadelphia in 2006, its formula has led to unqualified success everywhere it has gone — and it now operates through much of the Northeast U.S. Recycling rates in one of the first Philadelphia neighborhoods that RecycleBank served rose from 7% to 90% in a matter of months and total waste sent to landfills is down considerably.
555 . . . brought to you by Caltex with the unbeatable cleaning power of Techron.
PREDATOR PRIESTS. Pope Benedict XVI on his first full day on the US Tour Wednesday berated US bishops for their poor handling of the child sex scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic church, but laid part of the blame on the breakdown of values in US society. Benedict told a gathering of bishops they had "sometimes very badly handled" the decades-old problem of pedophile priests. But he urged efforts "to address the sin of abuse within the wider context of sexual mores." The Pope is caaling or a determined, collective response, but did not outline any firm action that the Vatican intended to take to purge the church of pedophile priests. Instead, he had measured praised for the efforts made so far by the US church to heal the wounds left by the scandal.
Backstory:
The US church was plunged into the worst crisis in its 200-year history in 2002 when the Archbishop of Boston confessed he had protected a priest who had sexually abused young members of his church.
After the scandal blew up, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops drafted a charter for the protection of children and has issued an annual report outlining progress made in implementing the plan.
Last year, 689 new allegations of abuse were lodged, and the church paid out 615 million dollars (400 million euros) to settle child sex abuse cases involving members of the clergy -- 54 percent more than the previous year -- the annual progress report said.
// posted by Unknown @ 9:06:00 AM 
