ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATION AWARENESS AMONG TRICYCLE DRIVERS IN DIGOS CITY, PHILIPPINES

<p>As humankind progresses into an age of heavy economic change, motor vehicle ownership rapidly increases, significantly altering Earth's biogeochemical composition, resulting in environmental pollution and loss of ecological stability. Given the need for global action, this study, however, investigated the level of environmental awareness in terms of environmental laws and environmental city ordinances in Digos City, Philippines. A quantitative-descriptive method was utilized in employing the study. A modified self-made questionnaire was administered to 200 tricycle drivers of Digos City, Philippines. Results revealed that older tricycle drivers and those who have long experiences have better awareness on environmental laws and city ordinances compared to young tricycle drivers and those who have shorter experiences as tricycle drivers. Thus, there is still a great need for heavy reinforcement regarding environmental legal frameworks, especially among young tricycle drivers in Digos City, Philippines.</p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0996/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Innovations on Dementia Advocacy among Students of a Medical University in Taiwan

In 2017, Taiwan established Dementia Action Plans 2.0 to respond to the World Health Organization's call to increase dementia awareness and support for dementia carers. However, efforts have not yet been made to educate and increase dementia literacy on the younger generations. This paper addressed the outcomes to increase knowledge and information about dementia and caregiver resources to university students. 93 students participated in a two-day workshop on dementia literacy, followed by two months of advocacy in Taichung City, Taiwan. Students were divided into 14 advocacy groups and the outcome reports were categorized qualitatively using content analysis. The results showed that students were from nine departments and over one-quarter having a dementia loved one in the family. Four innovative categories were developed, including (1) dementia literacy for students and the public; (2) dementia friendly action plans; (3) dementia caregiver’s advocacy and (4) reducing dementia stereotypes. Highlights included students using social media to promote dementia literacy, face-to-face experiences to inform public education, dementia education on early onset dementia and using diverse bio-psycho-social angels to evaluate dementia. Students expanded advocacy to many social media, innovations and target areas, including Facebook, Instagram, Google spreadsheet, stickers, postcards, illustration of children’s books and public announcement. This paper revealed that younger generations used many advocacy methods that were thinking outside of the box. In conclusion, dementia is no longer an elder’s business but young adults can bring technological, inter-generational and cultural innovations into fulfilling the goals of Dementia Global Action Plans.

Bayesian Covariance Representation with Global Informative Prior for 3D Action Recognition

For the merits of high-order statistics and Riemannian geometry, covariance matrix has become a generic feature representation for action recognition. An independent action can be represented by an empirical statistics over all of its pose samples. Two major problems of covariance include the following: (1) it is prone to be singular so that actions fail to be represented properly, and (2) it is short of global action/pose-aware information so that expressive and discriminative power is limited. In this article, we propose a novel Bayesian covariance representation by a prior regularization method to solve the preceding problems. Specifically, covariance is viewed as a parametric maximum likelihood estimate of Gaussian distribution over local poses from an independent action. Then, a Global Informative Prior (GIP) is generated over global poses with sufficient statistics to regularize covariance. In this way, (1) singularity is greatly relieved due to sufficient statistics, (2) global pose information of GIP makes Bayesian covariance theoretically equivalent to a saliency weighting covariance over global action poses so that discriminative characteristics of actions can be represented more clearly. Experimental results show that our Bayesian covariance with GIP efficiently improves the performance of action recognition. In some databases, it outperforms the state-of-the-art variant methods that are based on kernels, temporal-order structures, and saliency weighting attentions, among others.

Video Captioning Based on Both Egocentric and Exocentric Views of Robot Vision for Human-Robot Interaction

Robot vision provides the most important information to robots so that they can read the context and interact with human partners successfully. Moreover, to allow humans recognize the robot’s visual understanding during human-robot interaction (HRI), the best way is for the robot to provide an explanation of its understanding in natural language. In this paper, we propose a new approach by which to interpret robot vision from an egocentric standpoint and generate descriptions to explain egocentric videos particularly for HRI. Because robot vision equals to egocentric video on the robot’s side, it contains as much egocentric view information as exocentric view information. Thus, we propose a new dataset, referred to as the global, action, and interaction (GAI) dataset, which consists of egocentric video clips and GAI descriptions in natural language to represent both egocentric and exocentric information. The encoder-decoder based deep learning model is trained based on the GAI dataset and its performance on description generation assessments is evaluated. We also conduct experiments in actual environments to verify whether the GAI dataset and the trained deep learning model can improve a robot vision system

Prevalence of blindness and its major causes in sub-Saharan Africa in 2020: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Background: Global studies show that the prevalence of visual impairment and blindness continued to rise despite the implementation of strategies outlined in the Global Action Plan, aimed at reducing these by the year 2020. Vision impairment impacts negatively on one’s independence, opportunities, and quality of life. Therefore, knowledge of the prevalence, and the major causes of blindness impairment in any population, is vital in designing strategies to address this public health challenge. Methods: Literature mapping evidence of vision impairment was searched for on PubMed, Google Scholar, and EBSCOhost databases MEDLINE, Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition, Health Source – Consumer Edition, CINAHL, and Academic Search Complete. Studies that were searched for included peer-reviewed and grey literature published in English from various countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Results: Only 77 studies with 191,173 participants, contributing data from 26 countries within SSA, met the inclusion criteria for the final review. The overall pooled prevalence estimate (PPE) of blindness from the selected studies was 10% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 8.0% – 11.0%). West Africa and East Africa had the highest prevalence. The identified leading causes of blindness were cataracts (46%; 95% CI: 40% – 52%), followed by glaucoma (14%; 95% CI: 11% – 18%). There was a high level of heterogeneity in most pooled estimates (I2 ˃ 80%, p < .001). Conclusion: The prevalence of blindness in SSA has increased in all four regions with most cases being avoidable. Policymakers should prioritise blindness prevention programmes, ensure enabling health systems, and provide the necessary resources towards reducing blindness in SSA.

2. Looming Tragedy

Ecologists have applied the concept of “carrying capacity”, the population of a species that an ecosystem can support, to human populations. Ecological limits to growth in population and the economy dominated environmental concern in the 1970s and beyond. More recently they have been supplanted by the idea of planetary boundaries, based on the stresses that the earth system is capable of absorbing, several of which (including biosphere integrity and climate change) have already been transgressed, suggesting the system is in grave peril. This chapter also considers the points of critics of the idea that there can be limits, then analyzes the political implications of limits and boundaries, from the authoritarianism associated with some 1970s thinkers to the need for cooperative global action to the more democratic possibilities that could be associated with degrowth and planetary boundaries.

The Progress of Global Antimicrobial Resistance Governance and Its Implication to China: A Review

China has great potential for engaging in global actions on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) control. This study aims to summarize the process of global AMR governance and provide relevant policy recommendations on how China could take more initiative in the global AMR governance. We searched for academic articles and official document published or issued before December 2020 in e-journal databases, official websites of major organizations, and the relevant national ministries. This review revealed that global action on AMR control has experienced three stages: (1) The beginning stage (1980s and 1990s) when actions were mainly sponsored by high-income countries and AMR surveillance was focused on hospitals; (2) The rapid development stage (2000–2010) when global AMR governance began to concentrate on joint actions in multi-sectors, and developing countries were gradually involved in global actions; (3) The comprehensive stage (2011 to present) when global actions on AMR have covered various fields in different countries. China’s AMR governance has fallen behind at the beginning but recently began to catch up with the global trend. The central government should take a far-fetched view, act decisively and positively towards the global efforts of addressing AMR to play a more active and greater role on the international stage.