by magnolia_eic | Feb 12, 2010 | Headlines, Local News / Bohol Balita
Buenavista, Bohol — Headed by Municipal Mayor Elsa Tirol, LGU officials and staff, the town of Buenavista launched its Eco-tourism Business Center last February 11, 2010, in line with their foundation day celebration. The building, located on top of a hill in Barangay Dait, provides a scenic view of the town.
LGU officials say that this project will help develop tourism in Buenavista. The building will serve as a receiving area for tourists who want to visit the Cambuhat River. It will also serve as a display area for products made by members of the Great Women Project, and other residents who would like to showcase their goods. The building, officials added, once completed, can also be used as an office and as function rooms for social gatherings.
Among those who attended the program were Governor Erico B. Aumentado, Vice governor Julius Herrera and representatives from DOST, DENR, DOLE, BIPC, and NDA. The agencies each promised help to the people of Buenavista.
Aside from the launching, Buenavista also celebrated its Talaba Festival.
by magnolia_eic | Feb 12, 2010 | Election 2010, Headlines
Kidapawan City — A Liberal Party campaigner in Carmen, North Cotabato was slain by unidentified armed men Thursday afternoon, police said Friday.
Victim Edwin Bandila, was driving a motorcycle with his wife when shot at in front of the Carmen nunicipal cemetery around 5:30 in the afternoon.
Authorities are still trying to determine the motive behind the killing. Manny Pinol, North Cotabato Vice-governor said the local LP leadership could not think of any other reason, but politics.
Click here for full article from Inquirer.net
by magnolia_eic | Feb 12, 2010 | Election 2010, Features, Opinion, Tech Talk
The May 2010 elections is the first time that counting of ballots will be automated by the COMELEC. The system is now practical with the availability of cellular service throughout most of the country. It has many advantages over the manual process but many are concerned if it will really eliminate cheating.
The Automated Elections main advantage is that it eliminates many steps taken in the past where where manipulation can happen resulting to “dagdag-bawas”.
By automating the counting, the system eliminates the tedious and very error-prone manual counting process. The public school teachers should really be happy that they don’t have to deal with it after everyone has voted because at the end of the voting period, the counting is also done because the votes are recorded as soon as the machine accepts the ballot from the voter. All voters should feed their ballots to the machine directly and not through someone else, to ensure that your ballot will not be replaced.
By automating the submission of the results to a central location, the system eliminates another error-prone and easy to manipulate procedure. In the past, the ballot count is submitted by the precincts to the municipal or city hall and then aggregated. Then the provincial results are aggregated up to the national level. It takes quite some time before the ballot count is eventually consolidated on the national level, and this gives the manipulators a lot of time to do their magic tricks. Now, the individual counting machines can submit their results to the national level on a near real-time basis thus preventing any count manipulation or errors in between the precinct and the aggregation center.
The automated system also includes audit trails which allow the authorized persons to trace any suspicious changes on the system and identify the culprit. In the manual procedure, there is limited audit trail capability, if any.
Electronic jamming systems would be impractical to setup on a scale that can significantly affect the results and may be futile because the system uses cellular service which has its own interference mitigation capability. To be effective at jamming the transmission, you would need to have a jamming system per precinct that is always on all the time. Anytime you turn it off and the automated counting machine can have a chance to send its data and it only takes a few seconds to send all the data in the machine’s memory. The best it could do is probably delay the transmission but not totally prevent it.
The technology that will be used in the May 2010 elections would certainly make it very difficult to manipulate results unless you are able to access the system directly with the proper user privileges. But even that would not be straightforward because the data storage technology used in systems like this store data in multiple copies and have multiple backups taken at regular periods stored in multiple locations. And COMELEC for sure would be wise enough to have a few of these locations undisclosed just in case the known locations are compromised.
Cheating would be very difficult to orchestrate with the automated counting system implemented. But there are still many ways to manipulate votes like vote-buying and coercion. So each Filipino should value his vote and consider it a sacred right guaranteed by the constitution of the Philippines in order to prevent or minimize this kind of manipulation. — J. Auza
by magnolia_eic | Feb 12, 2010 | Announcements
The 12th National Convention of the Philippine Society of Information Technology Educators (PSITE) will be held this coming February 24-27, 2010 at the Bohol Plaza Resort and Restaurant, Dayo Hill, Dauis, Bohol, with the theme: “IT Academia in the Next Decade”. 250 IT educators are expected to attend this year’s convention.
Convention talks include IT Education in the Philippines, Addressing ICT Education Gap through Partnerships, Information Technology Academic Core, ITE Undergraduate Thesis / Project Framework among others. There would also be presentations from Microsoft Philippines, Intel Philippines, CHED and others as sponsors of this event.
All IT instructors are then invited to participate in this annual gathering and be part of this rare event here in the province.
For more details, please visit http://psite.usjr.edu.ph and register online or you may contact Ms. Amie Rosarie Cubeta-Caballo, Dean of the College of Computer Science of Holy Name University at (038) 412-3764 loc 401 or through email at amyats@yahoo.com or accaballo@hnu.edu.ph.
by magnolia_eic | Feb 11, 2010 | Election 2010, Headlines, National News
Malacañang doused water on speculations that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has supported Sen. Manuel Villar and the Nacionalista Party’s presidential candidate instead of the administration’s own standard-bearer.
Gary Olivar, deputy presidential spokesperson, said Ms Arroyo remained a strong supporter of former Defense Secretary Gilbert “Gibo” Teodoro, the presidential candidate of the ruling Lakas-Kampi-CMD.
Moreover, the Palace spokesperson advised presidential candidates to leave Ms Arroyo out of the picture, arguing that she has her own campaign to run in the second district of Pampanga.
Olivar said the president is not campaigning for that level and asked politicians not to run their campaign the President’s expense.
He urged candidates to focus on issues and not drag the President into their campaign. (PIA)
