State-Society-Culture Dynamics

Since March, I have been crowing about the success of the quarantine as a State led effort to mitigate the SARS -COVID2 epidemic. For this, I have been using the geometric average of the daily growth rates of cases, because that was the most available, and growth of the number of cases tended to show clearly whether the disease was on a massacre rampage, or that we were turning the tide, and "flattening the curve". See the blog post dated March 30, 2020 (We are Winning! Part 2) I had an intense interest in the curve because I really wanted a partial lifting of the quarantine, or at least a modification of the extended community quarantine, or ECQ, which for all practical purposes of confining the citizenry to their homes, was like a martial regime imposed control: curfew from 8 pm to 5 am of the next day, no movement outside of the house, and ONLY for the one authorized to shop essential supplies, nobody.  And, of course, that this movement to the store was only on certa...

As exercise in program/project evaluation (and to calm my nerves as a citizen who feels under siege with this lockdown), I have analyzed the daily incidence of infected cases. And as a netizen, I have posted on my FB page a truncated table showing the declining infected rates, and crowed, WE ARE WINNING! The short analysis focused on the declining infection rates from the inflection on March 24. two days straight. I know, two days are too short a period to draw conclusions from, but as the lockdown and extended lockdown were already implemented, I thought should see some real trends. I immediately received comments from a high school classmate who was (is?) a VP for promotions in one of the biggest services group in the country. I also got comments, also almost instantly, from former college students who are now professors, and government consultants on their own. The most incisive of all their comments was that the data set from which the analysis proceeded is too small to draw...

5/11/2019 (2) steve the vagabond and silly linguist - Facebook Search Steve the vagabond and silly linguist May 9 at 6:31 PM · The history of "-y" in English When I first learned that English was a Germanic language, I didn't really know what that meant. English and German seemed nothing alike to me. I wanted to know what it meant to be a Germanic language. English's history is quite colourful with many of characters and lots of plot developments. The reason Modern English is so different to Modern German is because languages change over time. People learn a language from those around them. If people can move around they bring their language with them and their speech patterns can affect the speech patterns of people elsewhere. English and German share a common ancestor, but since there is a sea between England and Germany any changes that happened in English or German over time were much less likely to affect the other. The earliest Germani...

Because it HAS TO maintain its commitment to scientific surveying, inlcuding probability sampling, I consider the output of Social Weather Stations (SWS) as RELIABLE. This regardless of the political leanings of its head, Dr. Mahar Mangahas, who is known as critical of the administration. Both of these factors, to me at least, make its output also reliable. I highlight two important findings of SWS which might make light of the current dark mood prevailing on our (oh so) political minds. Admittedly, it makes us giddy expressing our peeves and (oh so) emotional observations on our current politics. A little memeing (is there such a word?) there, a little trolling here, a few well considered posts and commentary make our day. I know of some friends who log in to Facebook the first thing after relieving themselves in the urinal. And you have heard of course of that poor cabinet member who Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (GMA) claims almost did not sleep and kept to Facebook before he croak...

Go ahead. Scream “Superstition!” at the top of your lungs. I think that spectacular celestial events such as the total solar eclipse tomorrow (Asians will be in the night side of the planet when it happens, and therefore will not be seeing it) are reminders to us. “Calls for attention”, if you will. “Signals”, “beeps”, “alarms”...”warnings”? Celestial semioticists (astrologers for you who prefer it straight) don’t call them “signs” for nothing. Before anything else, here are the facts. The exact moment of the eclipse will be at 6:31 pm, Universal Planetary Time (Greenwich, UK), and Americans (the US) will see or feel the darkening of the sun as early as 10 am. The geographic details have been worked out and is being discussed all over the Net. I’ll try to download and post here the graphs and the GIF (copyrighted Sinclair 2000) of the path of the eclicpse by Strickling (posted at Wikipedia). Back to the “signs” now. On a purely observational level, they are noti...

PHOTO CREDIT: Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balangiga_massacre. Retrieved August 3, 2017 You think President Duterte is a ruthless killer of drug users, and a political dictator. Well, we can continue to debate this, and I think that for some time in the future, we will. But one very good thing for this President is that he is a Filipino, a nationalist who unlike the Filipino of Bulosan and Ileto, is a remembering Filipino. His SONA of 2017 included a request for the Americans to return the bells of Balanginga, attended by a retelling of the American massacre of Filipinos in Balangiga, Samar, an initiative that left me momentarily stunned at the deep sentiments of this man who is proving to be a maverick President. When this President remembers, he remembers “historically”, in the sense of a sociological fact, not merely “personally”, much in the sense of C. Wright Mills concept of social issue as against mere personal trouble. It is in this light that I...