Religious Diversity and Covenantal Pluralism in the Philippines

In spite of the enduring dominance of Catholicism in Philippine society, religious diversity increasingly characterizes its social and political life. This diversity is predominantly Christian, given the rise of evangelical, independent, and even nontrinitarian churches around the country. Is covenantal pluralism possible? This article answers this question by focusing on what Filipino Christians believe about religion and pluralism. It draws on the 2018 ISSP Religion module to analyze the relationship between denominational affiliation and attitudes about religion and coexistence. Our argument is that Filipino Christians, as a whole, are divided on whether they can live amicably with one another. Two observations substantiate this point. First, Catholics believe that religion brings conflict and that religious people tend to be intolerant more than do members of other churches. Second, in comparison to Catholics, Protestants/Evangelicals and Nontrinitarians are more inclined to believe that practicing religion fosters friendships. Taken together, these dispositions present challenges and opportunities for covenantal pluralism in the country. This article ends by reflecting on covenantal pluralism as a relational call in a society where emerging religious minorities are increasingly influential and competitive

A Critical Review of Multi-hole Drilling Path Optimization

Hole drilling is one of the major basic operations in part manufacturing. It follows without surprise then that the optimization of this process is of great importance when trying to minimize the total financial and environmental cost of part manufacturing. In multi-hole drilling, 70 % of the total process time is spent in tool movement and tool switching. Therefore, toolpath optimization in particular has attracted significant attention in cost minimization. This paper critically reviews research publications on drilling path optimization. In particular, this review focuses on three aspects; problem modeling, objective functions, and optimization algorithms. We conclude that most papers being published on hole drilling are simply basic Traveling Salesman Problems (TSP) for which extremely powerful heuristics exist and for which source code is readily available. Therefore, it is remarkable that many researchers continue developing “novel” metaheuristics for hole drilling without properly situating those approaches in the larger TSP literature. Consequently, more challenging hole drilling applications that are modeled by the Precedence Constrained TSP or hole drilling with sequence dependent drilling times do not much research focus. Sadly, these many low quality hole drilling research publications drown out the occasional high quality papers that describe specific problematic problem constraints or objective functions. It is our hope through this review paper that researchers’ efforts can be refocused on these problem aspects in order to minimize production costs in the general sense