LAST week, news reports carried the announcement of Education Secretary Armin Luis-tro that Science would be dropped from the subjects being taught at the Grade 1 level. This decision of the Department of Education (DepEd) is based on the design of the K+12 curriculum and the department’s efforts to decongest the Basic Education Curriculum. Instead of Science, the Grade 1 curriculum will focus on “oral fluency” and include learning areas on the Mother Tongue, Filipino, Edukasyon sa Pagpapakatao, MAPEH (Music, Art, Physical Education and Health), Mathematics, Araling Panlipunan (Social Studies) and English. Science will be introduced as a subject only when the student comes in at Grade 3.

Yesterday marked the birth anniversary of Andres Boni-facio, Filipino nationalist, revolutionary and Supremo of the Katipunan. His anniversary yesterday was marked by protests actions in the metropolis by workers and peasants due to the ever increasing costs of living nowadays. Pressed by current economic concerns, people made the celebration of his birth also a time to reflect on the value of heroism in our time.

THE trend to democratize is inherent in many technologies especially in information technologies which makes the communication and consumption of information more and more participatory in nature.

The preliminary results of a recent study by the Department of Science and Technology Science Education Institute (DOST-SEI) show that the “brain drain” phenomenon continues and has even worsened during the past few years. According to DOST-SEI Officer in Charge and Deputy Director Dr. Leticia Catris, the number of emigrating science workers from the Philippines has ballooned to around two and a half times compared to the figure 11 years ago. In 1998, there were 9,877 outbound science workers from the country. More than a decade after in 2009, the number has grown by 148 percent to 24,502. More than half of these are health professionals and nurses while a fifth are engineers.

The pot for the Grandlotto 6/55 prize remained elusive as of last Monday’s draw. It has risen already to around P574 million last time and would likely breach 600 million. The large pot is a big payoff for the stream of bettors that line up the Lotto outlets everyday. Their dream is to get this prize for just P20 per combination.

An urgent appeal to President Benigno Aquino III and the Philippine Legislature to effect a thorough, independent, and transparent investigation on the killing in Kananga, Leyte of Leonardo Co, a renowned Filipino scientist, and his two companions

Sign up at http://www.justiceforleonardco.org

Every semester, I get the op-portunity to lecture about national industrialization and its relation to science and technology development at several Science, Technology and Society classes in the University of the Philippines in Diliman. I discuss about the need to develop domestic industries, not only to provide local employment and goods, but also to push for local science and technology to flourish outside the academe and have an impact on a larger part of Philippine society.

"Pagtitiyak ng Produktibidad ng Sakahan at Seguridad sa Pagkain sa Gitna ng Nagbabagong Klima"

I recently got hold of an English translation of Boris A. Kordemsky’s The Moscow Puzzles: 359 Mathematical Recreations, which was first published in 1956. In American mathematics and science writer Martin Gardner’s introduction, the book was said to be “the best and most popular puzzle book ever published in the Soviet Union.” Being a fan of brain teasers myself, I immediately flipped through its pages and was surprised that I was already familiar with some of the puzzles involving matches and coins, some of them I learned from my brother and my father. What struck me the most, however, is the puzzle I found I remembered to have been taught me by my own mother.

Yesterday marked the turnover of the helm of government to the new president Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino 3rd. There are immense challenges that he must face—from his daang matuwid to undoing the decades-long underdevelopment that our people face. How far President Aquino’s campaign for reform will reach will depend on how far he is willing to go to reverse the policies that have kept this situation in place.