Human footprint is associated with shifts in the assemblages of major vector-borne diseases

By: SHARON A. REGULAR Teacher III Vicente N. Chavez Memorial Central School

(NO WAY OUT. Murder suspect Singbi Hassan, 45 (left), is arrested in Indanan, Sulu on Friday (March 17, 2023). One of the country’s wanted persons, he carried a PHP250,000 reward for his arrest. (Courtesy of Zamboanga City Police Office)

Importance of reading to learners

By NEELYN E. ALCANTARA Teacher I City Central School

INSTILLING a love of reading early gives a child a headstart on expanding their vocabulary and building independence and self-confidence. It helps children learn to make sense not only of the world around them but also people, building social-emotional skills and of course, imagination.

It helps grow their vocabulary and their understanding about the world. The closeness of snuggling up with a favorite book leads to an increase in self-confidence and imagination and helps children gain a wealth of knowledge from the books you share. And it only takes 15 minutes a day of reading together to nurture this growth.

Reading is necessary for learning so instilling a love of reading at an early age is the key that unlocks the door to lifelong learning. Reading aloud presents books as sources of pleasant, entertaining and exciting formative experiences for children to remember.

Children who value books are more motivated to read on their own and will likely continue to hold that value for the rest of their lives.

Reading exposes us to other styles, voices, forms and genres of writing. Importantly, it exposes us to writing that’s better than our own.

Teen Center first official visitors

By: Merichil T. Gador

The first ever Teen Center of Puerto National High School was visited last March 11, 2023 by the personnel of the Community Improvement Division (CID) of the City of Cagayan de Oro led by Michael Abrogar, Population Program Officer II. They came to assess the preparedness of the Teen Center to carry out its purpose of serving student needs especially in social concerns such as guidance and counselling, adolescent sexual reproductive health, teenage pregnancy and drug awareness and prevention. They also provided materials for the advocacy. Their visit marked the commitment and partnership between the school and the city government in addressing the pressing issues concerning sexual education in an effort for a proactive awareness on the effects, threats, prevention and interventions to the teenage community. Additionally, Puerto National High School recently won one of the Top 3 Overall Winners of the Pasigarbo 2022: PopDev Club Festival of Talents sponsored by the City of Cagayan de Oro thru CID. The school’s very own PopDev president Ms. Jacel Mae Javier Sausal was also given recognition and acknowledgement for securing a place in the Top 3 Best PopDev Club Leaders in the competition.

Hassan, with a PHP250,000 bounty, has two pending warrants of arrest for murder with no bail recommended issued by two courts in Zamboanga City, dated May 14, 2002 and

3 rebels surrender In Zamboanga Sibugay, three members of the New People’s Army (NPA) separately gave themselves up to authorities.

Col. Richard Verceles, operations chief of the Area Police Command - Western

How learning engineering hopes to speed up education

By: BRENT RAULLY A. OLACO Teacher III Luz Banzon Integrated School SCHOOL

TEACHING in school is often done without any formal training. Mimicry of others who equally untrained, instinct and what feels right tend to provide the guidance. As a result, teaching is not up to code.

There are widespread beliefs about the best way to teach and learn that have been proven wrong by science yet they persist. Reading back over a textbook or taking lecture notes with a highlighter at the ready is often done by students but these practices have proven of limited merit and in some cases even counterproductive in aiding recall. And while many educators believe that word problems in math class are tougher for students to grasp than ones with mathematical notation, research shows that the opposite is true. Today, students frequently work in digital environments to read course materials, take tests and complete assignments. Those activities often leave data trails, making it possible to quickly measure how well a section of an online textbook is conveying the knowledge a teacher hopes to impart or whether the material needs to be revisited and revised.

For instance, an online biology textbook may include a short section about protein synthesis followed by a question. If few students answer the question correctly, the software can flag the professor or the textbook author to consider revising the content to make it clearer. And as they revise, they can see how long learners spent looking at that passage and other details about how they moved through the digital tool since every action leaves bread crumbs to analyze. Even so, we’re still a long way from having a mature practice of learning engineering in place. But proponents of the approach say they are beginning to build the infrastructure necessary for their moonshot of turbocharging the speed and quality of learning.

New method accelerates data retrieval in huge databases

By: LILIBETH C. BAGAS Teacher III Mambuaya Elementary School Mambuaya, Cagayan de Oro City

RESEARCHERS used machine learning to build faster and more efficient hash functions, which are a key component of databases.

Hashing is a core operation in most online databases, like a library catalogue or an e-commerce website. A hash function generates codes that directly determine the location where data would be stored. So, using these codes, it is easier to find and retrieve the data.

However, because traditional hash functions generate codes randomly, sometimes two pieces of data can be hashed with the same value.

This causes collisions — when searching for one item points a user to many pieces of data with the same hash value.

PREDICTING how increasing intensity of human–environment interactions affects pathogen transmission is essential to anticipate changing disease risks and identify appropriate mitigation strategies. Vector-borne diseases (VBDs) are highly responsive to environmental changes, but such responses are notoriously difficult to isolate because pathogen transmission depends on a suite of ecological and social responses in vectors and hosts that may differ across species. Here we use the emerging tools of cumulative pressure mapping and machine learning to better understand how the occurrence of six medically important VBDs, differing in ecology from sylvatic to urban, respond to multidimensional effects of human pressure. We find that not only is human footprint—an index of human pressure, incorporating built environments, energy and transportation infrastructure, agricultural lands and human population density—an important predictor of VBD occurrence, but there are clear thresholds governing the occurrence of different VBDs. Across a spectrum of human pressure, diseases associated with lower human pressure, including malaria, cutaneous leishmaniasis and visceral leishmaniasis, give way to diseases associated with high human pressure, such as dengue, chikungunya and Zika. These heterogeneous responses of VBDs to human pressure highlight thresholds of land-use transitions that may lead to abrupt shifts in infectious disease burdens and public health needs.

The importance of feeding program

By MARICRIS N. MAKIJI SST II

SCHOOL feeding as initiated by the Department of Education is not enough for our school-aged children to have proper nutrition. The Philippines has lots of colleges offering nutrition courses and degree holders of these programs can certainly help out the massive number of public schoolchildren in the country. And it is worthy to note that private schools must do their part to churn out nutritious food to their students in their respective cafeterias. Well the phenomenon is not just limited to elementary schools actually. To sustain the nutrition of their students, high school students must also be entitled to nutritious food as well. That’s why it must be discouraged for school canteens to sell sodas and other non-nutritious stuff.

Instead, commissaries must be told to cook only nutritious food such as egg and cheese on a soft wheat ball, breakfast sandwich, hot oatmeal with warm peach topping, bagel served with jelly and cream cheese, apple mini-loaf, cheddar cheese stick, blueberry pancakes served with syrup, turkey sausage patty, cheese omelet soft wrap served with salsa, granola served with yogurt and craisins, turkey chorizo, breakfast burrito in taco sauce, etc. Healthy food such as this should be served in schools in the Philippines, not junk ones.

Education with a built-in learning loss

By: LEONIDA ALABA JABUNAN Teacher II Consolacion Elementary School Consolacion, Cagayan de Oro City

It takes much longer to find the right one, resulting in slower searches and reduced performance.

Certain types of hash functions, known as perfect hash functions, are designed to place the data in a way that prevents collisions. But they are time-consuming to construct for each dataset and take more time to compute than traditional hash functions.

Since hashing is used in so many applications, from database indexing to data compression to cryptography, fast and efficient hash functions are critical. So, researchers from MIT and elsewhere set out to see if they could use machine learning to build better hash functions.

EVEN students from private schools have not been spared from learning degeneration brought about by the pandemic. This research focused on the most essential learning competencies on three subjects: science, mathematics and English. But even before the pandemic struck, there was already research whose results are no less appalling.

Organizations that are involved in international assessment revealed that learning loss is evident among our students. Learning loss refers to the effect of the total disregard of the importance of having a good foundation in learning.

Teachers must be trained to be conscious that teaching in whatever level and subject they are is actually the activity of building a foundation for students that serves as a preparation for capacitated learning for the next grade level. Diligence on this consciousness is an antidote to the possible learning loss.

In other words, not being able to lay a strong foundation in learning that results in learning loss is akin to erecting a building and beginning its construction on the second or third floor.

It would be too costly and maybe even irreparable when something like this happens in education constitutions. Learning loss also refers to the continuous accumulation of learning gaps which diagnostically predicts a poor performance on the next grade level of learning.