STRAIGHT FROM THE BIG CITY

Fighting five evils
IKE SEÑERES

There are many socio-economic problems present in the Philippines now as a developing country, but having to choose its battles, the United National Integrated Development Alliance (UNIDA) has decided to fight the five biggest evils namely poverty, sickness, hunger, criminality and illiteracy.

Fighting these five evils is one thing, but the more important thing is to bring in the solutions for these problems, namely shelter, health, agriculture, peace & order and education or SHAPE for short.

There is certainly more to poverty than homelessness alone, but shelter is definitely as good start, since housing costs account for one of the biggest expenses of all families. Besides that, UNIDA sees the potential of neighborhoods working together to fight poverty.

Since the SHAPE approach has been defined, the leadership of the shelter program has been assigned to the Inter-Charity Network (ICN), a founding member of UNIDA.

We are still in the process of establishing the United National Health Association (UNAHEALTH) to lead the health program of UNIDA, but the new dynamic electronic forms (DEF) technology obtained by alliance could fast track the organization, since the technology has a strong appeal to hospitals and clinics.

The ICN has also recently decided to spin off its SAMA-KABUHAYAN project into an independent organization, thus enabling it now to lead the agriculture program of UNIDA as a full pledged member organization.

As planned, the Citizen’s Foundation for the Prevention of Crime & Injustice (CFPCI) will lead the peace & order program of UNIDA. The good news is that the DEF technology will also appeal strongly to police stations and court houses.

As planned as well, the University Consortium for Resource Networking (UNICORN) will lead the education program of UNIDA. There is also good news that the DEF technology will appeal strongly to universities and schools.

While the issue of corruption has caught the attention of the entire country now, UNIDA maintains the advocacy that graft and corruption are crimes that should be fought along with the other four evils of our society.
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By always combining the three components of manpower-infrastructure-content (M-I-C), the United National Integrated Development Alliance (UNIDA) hopes to implement its five advocacies namely to Build Homes, Eat Right, Think Green, Stay Safe and Always Learn or BETSA for short. The combination of these five advocacies add up to the UNIDA way of building homes, eating right, thinking green, staying safe and learning always.

Through the Inter-Charity Network (ICN) which is its lead organization for the shelter program, UNIDA is aiming to build homes that are not just cheaper, but are also stronger, safer and smarter. The UNIDA way is to build homes that are not just affordable, but are also sustainable as these would enable homeowners to save on costs of living in the long run.

Through the United National Health Association (UNAHEALTH) which is going to be its lead organization for the health program, UNIDA hopes to promote the habit of eating organic and natural foods, aside from enabling hospitals and clinics to modernize their service facilities.
Through SAMA-KABUHAYAN which is its lead organization for the agriculture program, UNIDA hopes to promote the lifestyle of thinking green, by taking care of the environment, aside from enabling farms and ranches to modernize their agricultural productivity facilities.

Through the Citizen’s Foundation for the Prevention of Crime & Injustice (CFPCI) which is its lead organization for the peace & order program, UNIDA hopes to promote the culture of staying safe, aside from enabling police stations and court houses to modernize their information systems.

Through the University Consortium for Resource Networking (UNICORN) which is its lead organization for the education program, UNIDA hopes to promote the practice of always learning, aside from enabling universities and schools to modernize their teaching facilities.

As I explained in my previous articles, the BETSA advocacies are in tune with the five programs of UNIDA, namely shelter, health, agriculture, peace & order and education or SHAPE for short. Many development programs fail because of the absence of one of the M-I-C components. Knowing this, UNIDA will strive hard to bring these three together, by converging these towards full completion.
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You’ve met HAL, now meet EMIL. HAL (Heuristically programmed Algorithmic computer) is the fictional character in Arthur C. Clarke’s Space Odyssey saga, represented or presented only as his “eyes” that could be seen throughout the Discovery spaceship. EMIL is short for Electronic Multimedia Interactive Learning, a project of the University Consortium for Resource Networking (UNICORN) that will install electronic libraries in universities and schools in the Philippines.

You’ve also met ASIMO, Honda’s humanoid robot. Unlike ASIMO who took on a humanlike form, and unlike HAL who showed his “eyes”, EMIL is just going to be a cluster of personal computers (PCs) built around a room that will quadruple as a computer laboratory, an internet café, a business center and an audio-visual facility.

Unlike Ateneo de Manila’s Beowulf cluster, it will only handle simple online research tasks, and not complex computational science tasks. Simple as it is however, it is going to be as “sentient” as HAL was, being just a form of artificial intelligence that interacts with human users.

The Beowulf cluster was a successful attempt to group together ordinary personal computers to perform collective high performance computing tasks, short of what a Cray could possibly do, without spending as much. EMIL will also be built as a cluster, except that it will use “thin” clients, similarly performing the tasks of complete PCs, without spending as much.

The direction towards economical computing is very important for UNICORN, since it has the goal of making EMIL as pervasive as possible, meaning that it should be built in every school in the country, from the grade schools to the graduate schools.

In more ways than one, the client-server environment that uses “thin” clients is actually a re-incarnation of the mainframe environment, except that the “thin” clients have taken the place of the “dumb” terminals. The “secret” weapon of EMIL, the one that will make it intelligent is the new dynamic electronic forms (DEF) technology obtained by the United National Integrated Development Alliance (UNIDA).

A team of computer experts from UNIDA are now working on the design and architecture of EMIL, with the intention of piloting it in one of the UNICORN member universities in Metro Manila.