Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Advance Courses in Disaster Management


The experiences of recent major disasters, such as the results of the twin typhoons, Pepeing and Ondoy in the Philippines, the recent earthquakes in Indonesia, the Indian Ocean tsunami and the massive earthquake in Pakistan, and the discouraging trend of disasters around the world have made it clear that a holistic approach to Disaster Management is needed to substantially reduce disaster losses. It is not only the response to deal with the consequences of disasters that has to be more effective and professional, but even more so the efforts to assess and reduce risks beforehand and to recover after. Disaster situations call for facilitators,planner, trainers and managers. This prompted the University of Copenhagen and the University of Lund into a partnership to bring a truly unique response to this development concern.They began offering a flexible Masters and PhD programmes on Disaster Management.

The programme present the three main processes of Disaster Management: Disaster Risk Reduction, Response and Recovery – all have distinctive objectives and are equally important and overlap each other, and will have to be incorporated in all Disaster Management decisions. Further should Disaster Management decisions be based on a socially, politically, culturally, economically and environmentally sustainable foundation. The Master of Disaster Management programme is aimed at providing the appropriate skills for disaster management at a national and international level in areas of natural and man made disaster, climate change, and terrorism. You can download the application form is here.

Meanwhile, the three year PhD programme is offered via the Centre for Advanced Security Theory (CAST) in the Copenhagen School of Global Health and Oresund Center for Disaster Research at the Faculty of Health Sciences. CAST is a research centre under the University's excellence programme, placed at the Department of Political Science. It aims to bring together researchers from a wide range of disciplines to explore, compare and refine the methods, concepts and principles, each discipline uses in assessing its kind of threats, dangers and risks. The Oresund Center for Disaster research, a joint center between Lund University and University of Copenhagen, is to provide some of the theoretical background used in the teaching on the Master of Disaster Management www.mdma.ku.dk. This PhD student will act as a bridge builder between the two initiatives. Main supervisor will be from the Faculty of Health Sciences and co- supervisor will be from the Department of Geography and Geology.

The Copenhagen School of Global Health aim to coordinate and improve health research and training at the University of Copenhagen, in collaboration with local and global partners. The Expression of Interest form can be downloaded from here. For additional inquiry, contact: Ass.Prof. Peter Kjær Jensen of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark Tel: (+45) 35 32 76 88

Thursday, January 8, 2009

WDR 09 is Out! See BBC Documentary

Please be informed that the World Development Report 2009 documentary--"Slums and Money" will be aired by BBC. The film is about 45 minutes long and will feature some of the world's foremost economic development thinkers. Featuring some of the world's foremost economic thinkers - from Nobel laureate Paul Krugman to anti-poverty campaigner Jeffrey Sachs - 'Slums and Money' explores the arguments for and against.


The possible broadcast times in Thailand and Laos would be on: (a) Saturday 10th January- 21:10, (b) Sunday 11th January- 15:10 (re-air), and (c) Monday 12th January- 01: 10 and 09: 10 (re-air). Please consult BBC for the actual timing (http://www.bbcworldnews.com/Pages/Programme.aspx?id=247).

The World Development Report provides in depth analysis of a specific aspect of development. It is published annually and is available for free at: http://www.worldbank.org/wdr or http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/EXTWDRS/EXTWDR2009/0,,menuPK:4231145~pagePK:64167702~piPK:64167676~theSitePK:4231059,00.html

Philippine Holidays 2009

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo signed Proclamation 1699 last December 24, 2008 setting the dates of 2009 regular and special holidays.

This year, the following regular holidays shall fall on the following dates:

April 6 (Monday, in lieu of April 9) - Araw ng Kagitingan
April 9 - Maundy Thursday
April 10 - Good Friday
May 1 (Friday) - Labor Day
June 12 (Friday) - Independence Day
August 31 (Monday) - National Heroes Day
November 30 (Monday) - Bonifacio Day
December 25 (Friday) - Christmas Day
December 30 (Wednesday) - Rizal Day

Meanwhile, the Special (Non-Working) Holidays for 2009 shall fall on the following dates:

August 21 (Friday) - Ninoy Aquino Day
November 1 (Sunday) - All Saints Day
November 2 (Monday) - Additional (Non-Working) Day
December 24 (Thursday) - Additional (Non-Working) Day
December 31 (Thursday) - Last Day of the Year

Friday, January 2, 2009

A Laptop in Your Pocket



Wow... The minimalists are winning the war against laptop weights and sizes. As facilitators, we use to lug lots of weights and space for our laptop and its accouterments---only to discover that the training venues’ laptops are even better than what we have. But we tried several solutions before. We placed all our data in one flash drive and use the laptop available on-site. We also deposited our files in a remote internet site and downloaded them when we are on-site. But really, the feel and experience are not the same. We still longed for our original working environment.

Now, how about the idea of cloning and then placing your entire desktop computing environment on your portables like your iPods, USB flash drives, external hard drives, USB-enabled cell phones, and USB-enabled digital cameras. Wow, this is certainly a welcome change! What do you need to achieve to achieve this? RingCube Technologies introduce the MojoPac that supports popular applications such as Firefox, Microsoft Office, Photoshop, and other popular games.

MojoPac works even if any on-site laptop does not have the required software. This is the advantage of cloning your working environment in a USB so you can just plug it in. Moreover, it will use the resources of its host laptop but will save all the changes you made on your USB drive. No modifications are made on the host laptop either. You can view a demo on how to run MojoPac here.

To setup the MojoPac, you need to download and run the installer and select a USB device attached to your laptop, whose working environment you like to clone. Once installed, MojoPac creates an executable in the root of that device along with an autorun file that gives the user the option of starting the MojoPac environment automatically when the device is plugged in. Once this application is started, a new Windows Desktop (with its own wallpaper, icons, shell, etc.) is started up in the virtualized MojoPac environment. Any application that runs inside this environment runs off the USB device without affecting the file system of the host laptop. You can watch this video to learn more.

You can install most applications on the portable storage device by simply running the installer inside this environment. You can switch between the host environment and the MojoPac environment via the MojoBar at the top of the screen. When you are done with the applications, you can just exit out of MojoPac and eject the USB device. To run the applications on a different laptop, you do not need to reinstall the application. All your settings, applications, and documents function the same irrespective of which laptop the portable storage device is connected to.