Online vocational education: a Philippine experience

This paper presents the online educational model and initial results of the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) online program in the Philippines. The program was launched in March 2012, with an attempt for wider reach and to reduce the expenditures incurred by the trainees. To date, TESDA offers four online courses with over 40,000 registered users (3,000 for at least 10 countries outside the Philippines). TESDA’s re-designed online education model has two main features: 1) Short-term courses are broken down into job-centered micro-courses; and, 2) Center-based skills training now follow a “learn-practice-certify-employ” hybrid approach. Current and future developments on the project will also be presented

A Study on the Post Pandemic Marketing Mix Responses of Micro Food Businesses in Laguna, Philippines

The study identified the marketing mix responses of micro-businesses and the respective reasons for implementation within Laguna, specifically in Cabuyao and Santa Rosa City. Subsequently reviewing the market and environmental factors and the marketing mix of the food industry, the researchers pursued a qualitative case study, data saturation, key informant approach, and thematic analysis in interviewing and interpreting the responses of ten micro-businesses. Product Development (Improvement) in the product variable; Cost-based Pricing in the price variable; and word-of-mouth, personal selling, digital media, and network media in the promotion variable, while being near to suppliers and consumers when the distribution is concerned. This is in place of the consumer’s frugality and decreased demand, raw material shortages, and supply constraints due to restricted importations, Ukraine and Russia conflict, price inflation/fluctuations causing the commodities’ price increase, customer bargains, consumer complaints, consumer demographics, consumer preferences, consumption of technological mediums, and the competitor’s post-pandemic marketing mix responses

Crowd sourcing through social gaming for community driven ontology engineering, results and observations

In developing ontology, expert driven approaches lack the scalability to accommodate the vast amount of data on the web. As such, the community is being tapped to build ontologies to cope with highly dynamic data sources. Common problems (like difficulty of the task, quality of output, and incentives needed to motivate the community), as discussed by other authors, are considered. In this paper, we discuss observations on our approach to improve the quality and sustain community ontology refinement though the use of social gaming and interaction. Current observations show that profile and knowledge of the concept in question, understanding and expressivity of the relationships play a key role in the quality of the result

Kinetics of Human Mutant Tau Prion Formation in the Brains of 2 Transgenic Mouse Lines.

Importance:Accumulation of the protein tau is a defining characteristic of several neurodegenerative diseases. Thorough assessment of transgenic (Tg) mouse lines that replicate this process is critical for establishing the models used for testing anti-tau therapeutics in vivo. Objective:To define a consistent mouse model of disease for use in future compound efficacy studies. Design, Setting, and Participants:In this time course study, cohorts of Tg and control mice were euthanized at defined intervals. Collected brains were bisected down the midline. One half was frozen and used to measure the tau prion content, while the other half was fixed for immunostaining with anti-tau antibodies. All mice were maintained at the Hunters Point Animal Facility at the University of California, San Francisco, and all experiments were performed at the Mission Bay Campus of the University of California, San Francisco. Study animals were PS19, homozygous and hemizygous Tg(MAPT*P301S), and B6/J mice. The study dates were August 9, 2010, to October 3, 2016. Main Outcomes and Measures:Tau prions were measured using a cell-based assay. Neuropathology was measured by determining the percentage area positive for immunostaining in defined brain regions. A separate cohort of mice was aged until each mouse developed neurological signs as determined by trained animal technicians to assess mortality. Results:A total of 1035 mice were used in this time course study. These included PS19 mice (51.2% [126 of 246] male and 48.8% [120 of 246] female), Tg(MAPT*P301S+/+) mice (52.3% [216 of 413] male, 43.8% [181 of 413] female, and 3.9% [16 of 413] undetermined), Tg(MAPT*P301S+/-) mice (51.8% [101 of 195] male and 48.2% [94 of 195] female), and B6/J mice (49.7% [90 of 181] male and 50.3% [91 of 181] female). While considerable interanimal variability in neuropathology, disease onset, and tau prion formation in the PS19 mice was observed, all 3 measures of disease were more uniform in the Tg(MAPT*P301S+/+) mice. Comparing tau prion formation in Tg(MAPT*P301S+/+) mice with B6/J controls, the 95% CIs for the 2 mouse lines diverged before age 5 weeks, and significant (P < .05) neuropathology in the hindbrain of 24-week-old mice was quantifiable. Conclusions and Relevance:The assessment of disease progression using 3 criteria showed that disease onset in PS19 mice is too variable to obtain reliable measurements for drug discovery research. However, the reproducibility of tau prion formation in young Tg(MAPT*P301S+/+) mice establishes a rapid assay for compound efficacy in vivo