Porous borders

Dear Mr.

President: During the series of Senate hearings about how dismissed Bamban, Tarlac Mayor Alice Gou was able to leave the country, one of the resource persons said that one of the reasons is that we have “porous borders”. I think that there is nothing new with that, because that is a reality that we could not avoid, considering that we are an archipelagic country. However, what could be a cause for concern, is that if that porousness could enable fugitives to get out, it could also enable terrorists and even hostile foreign agents to come in. Because our borders are naturally porous, there is probably no way to fully prevent the exit of fugitives, and the entry of terrorists. However, it would be realistic to assume that we could do the next best thing and that is to minimize both the exits and the entries. And how could we do that? I do not have a ready design yet, but I believe that we could do that through a mix of manual and digital systems. If there is a will, there is a way. I believe that no matter how difficult it is, there are always ways to make our borders “less porous”, so to speak. Of course, some investments would have to be made, but what is the price of our national security and our sovereignty. Besides, we may already have the budgets for that allocated in our police and military agencies, and all it takes perhaps is proper planning and execution. As a matter of fact, we may already have the necessary equipment inside our government agencies, and all that is needed is systems integration. Believe it or not, we may already have an army (or an air force) of drones that are owned by private companies and individual hobbyists, and many of them might be willing to deploy their assets to become our “eyes in the skies” at no cost to the government. We have already seen this noble behavior among the boat and yacht owners who volunteer the use of their assets and join the auxiliary navy or coast guard. As far as I know, there are so many information and communications technology (ICT) systems that could be used to enhance border monitoring, such as internet of things (IOT) sensors, Doppler radars, sound navigation and ranging (SONAR) equipment and light detection and ranging (LIDAR) equipment. Aside from that, there are many official and commercial sources of satellite data, among which is www.planet.com. As a matter of fact, some of these data and equipment may already with our own government agencies, such as NAMRIA, PHIVOLCS and PHILSPACE. Mr. President, even without newly allocated budgets, I believe that the government could already work with what they have, to start a project that could begin with plain and simple systems integration. I also believe that the DFA could be very instrumental in acquiring equipment from foreign agencies and organizations such as UNDP, UNIDO, NASA, JICA and ICAO. I personally know several scientists from DOST and NAST who would be willing to help with this project, and I am willing to help the government in putting this together if they want me to.

 

Pathways to professions

Dear Mr. President: Perhaps the problem of the so-called “mismatch” in the job market has already come to your attention? According to the statistics, every year, there are thousands of college graduates who could not find jobs, while there are supposedly thousands of jobs that could not be filled, because the qualifications of the job applicants supposedly do not meet the requirements of the prospective employers. I know that there could be many possible solutions to the said problem, but may I present to you one solution that could possibly work? For lack of a better term, I am temporarily calling it “Pathways to Professions” (P2P). This is not a new idea, because as far as I know, there are already some countries that are already doing it. What is new however, is that very recently, artificial intelligence (AI) is now being used to match the profiles of the prospective employees with the “wish lists” of the prospective employees, hence removing or avoiding the mismatch problem. Again, for lack of a better term, it could be said that the prospective hires are already “spoken for” by the prospective employers, as if they are already “betrothed”, to liken it to a wedding engagement. In a manner of speaking, the “betrothed” person is already technically an employee of the company because of the “engagement”, like the way that a cadet of the Philippine Military Academy (PMA) is already technically an officer of the armed forces even if he or she is still studying. From an overall perspective, it is cheaper for the employers to adopt this approach, because it will save them money from the high costs of recruitment. Aside from that, it will save them money from the high costs of attrition, due to high employee turnovers caused by too many new hires that are not the perfect fits for the job openings. In these cases, it is not only the employers who suffer, but also the employees, because they must look for new jobs again, once they resign or if they are fired from their jobs. Based on my own experience, it is a good practice to invite graduating students to genuine “On the Job” (OJT) training programs. What I mean by “genuine” is that it really must be a real OJT program where the student gains by gaining new knowledge. What I mean by “fake” are those haphazard assignments where students are just asked to make coffee and make photocopies. I have supervised many OJT programs myself, that is why I know what I am talking about. What happens in a genuine OJT program is the employers will get a chance to discover who the good candidates are, and they will also be able to measure and validate their skills. On the other hand, the students will also be able to get an inside view of who the better employers are. This could be a two-way street, because it could become a “seller’s market” if the prospective employee is a prized catch. Mr. President, with your help, you could convince the employers in both the private sector and the government to implement this idea of using AI to solve the problem of job mismatch. For this idea to really work, they should provide an allowance to the OJT participants, at least to cover their transportation and meal expenses. Sad to say, there are some companies that are not giving anything to their OJT participants, and some companies are even charging the students, for them to be accepted into the OJT programs.

 

Recycling electronic waste

Dear Mr. President: It appears that there is no existing government program right now that addresses the problem of collecting and disposing of electronic waste. Electronic waste includes not only personal computers, workstations, servers and mobile phones, but all machines and devices that have processors, keyboards, keypads and memory units. The problem is many of these wastes contain toxic materials that are toxic to the environment. In the private companies, it is very easy to get rid of these wastes because they could auction these off easily. That is not the end of the problem however, because no one knows what they do with the toxic remains after they extract the valuable materials such as metals, such as gold even. Probably, they could end up in the dumpsites or landfills. It could still be a problem if the toxic wastes would end up in the landfills, because of leaching. In the government side however, it would be more difficult to get rid of the electronic wastes, because the properties would have to be declared first as “unserviceable”. That is a vague terminology, because some of these properties are still repairable so to speak. So, the remaining alternative is to auction them off, a process that could take a long time. The more logical choice, however, is to donate these to the local government units (LGUs) that may have the budgets to repair them. Among the LGUs, it is obvious that the first class and second class LGUs could afford to buy their own computers, but it is a big challenge for the third class, fourth class and fifth class LGUs to do that. In general, however, most of these lower class LGUs would have the budgets to repair the “unserviceable” computers. If not, they could probably get donors to raise the money to pay for the repairs. Another idea is to donate these “unserviceable” computers to TESDA, so that the vocational schools could use them for actual computer repair. There is no better alternative to learning computer repair through actual hands-on exercises. I have seen that happen in my entire career, from the time I was the ICT manager of DFA, to the time that I was the ICT manager of PCSO. Personally, I find much enjoyment in bringing back dead computers to life. If not TESDA, I know of some NGOs that are very good at repairing “unserviceable” computers. I could vouch for these NGOs, because I have already tried their repair services. As a matter of fact, they not only repair these “broken” units, but they could also upgrade them, so that they could become faster and better. In theory, most of these “broken” units could be repaired. The only concern is that as a rule, the costs of repair should not be more than half the value of new units. Mr. President, there are only two choices when it comes to LGU computerization. Either they are given money to procure new units, or they are given money to repair the old units. Without working usable computer units, they could not computerize. Without computerization, they could not move forward to digitalization. If you would want it Sir, we could try this out with a few “unserviceable” units from any National Government Agency (NGA), so that we could enable a lower-class LGU to computerize and digitalize.