Affordable and Accessible System Reliability Tools for Developing Countries: A Capacity Building Exercise in the Philippines

There is no doubt that the Civil Service is as much concerned as business organizations with maintaining a sustainable and current skills inventory through capacity building that engenders employee commitment which translates to effective service delivery. This is readily evident from the regular capacity building initiatives and government reforms such as professionalization, rightsizing and restructuring geared towards improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the civil service. But even with the measures, stakeholder dissatisfaction with the commitment of civil servants continue to resonate. Based on a survey design involving 261 senior civil servants selected from eight ministries in five states of the South-East geo-political zone of Nigeria, this study investigated the influence of capacity building on employee commitment. The study utilized structured questionnaire in data collection and simple linear regression in testing the hypotheses. The findings of the study show that: there is positive and significant relationship between employee training and affective commitment of civil servants; and there is a positive but weak relationship between employee mentoring and normative commitment of civil servants. The study therefore concludes that capacity building influences employee commitment. Even more significantly is the fact that the different strategies for capacity building vary in terms of their relationships with dimensions of employee commitment. It is therefore necessary for the government through the civil service commission to focus on incremental, rather than structural system-wide, reforms that target employee competencies and engagement. This will not only improve employee involvement in the capacity building exercise but will also guarantee a better focus on the behavioural outcomes. This is particularly important for such capacity building methods as informal mentoring that is long-lasting but with less dramatic effect. The government should therefore consider formalizing mentoring in the civil service.

Background How does your Health Information System (HIS) measure up to others in the EU? How can you empower national HIS players with an objective peer-reviewed HIS assessment? Nine InfAct partners engaged in a capacity building exercise where experts in rotating groups of three countries performed peer assessments of each other’s national HIS. Using a WHO Europe adapted and refined tool, assessors analysed the HIS of a country (data collection, processing, analysis, dissemination and use) and exchanged practices in an intensive 2-day schedule of interviews with established key stakeholders. Objectives The aim of the peer assessment is three-fold: to test the feasibility of a peer-review HIS assessment, to map heath information inequalities across EU MSs, and to strengthen the knowledge of HIS players. Results Two cycles are now complete and the feedback is overwhelmingly positive - from assessors and hosts alike. So far, the HIS assessment has been a major success in its ability to systematically and concisely analyse a HIS. It identifies gaps in the HIS through desk review and interviews, and provides a SWOT analysis and SMART recommendations to address these gaps. Additionally, this exercise has shown the ability to increase stakeholders’ awareness of their role in their national HIS, and to build new networks within and between MSs. The exercise is also perceived as an opportunity for cross-fertilisation of ideas and exploration of methodologies on how to address specific challenges. This will stimulate actions to improve national HISs, and will lead to the identification of good practices which can then be used by other EU countries. Conclusions By bringing together key HIS stakeholders from different countries and stimulating the improvement of HIS and the exchange of good practices, InfAct contributes to capacity building in the EU, which in turn may lead to the reduction of health information inequalities between countries.

Currently, task support information in aircraft maintenance is mostly provided using paper-based solutions, which are burdensome, slow and prone to error. Aircraft maintenance documentation contains vast amounts of information irrelevant for the task at hand and even for the simplest tasks multiple documents need to be consulted. Next to these issues with the documentation itself, Aircraft Maintenance Technicians (AMTs) have very limited on-site access to support information. These factors lead to 15–20% of hands-on-aircraft time being wasted on acquiring the right information or not using maintenance documentation for task support at all, risking maintenance error. This paper describes the development of a system for a first level of contextualization of maintenance documentation to simplify the retrieval of task support information. Combining a tailor-made ontology with a relational database system for Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA), maintenance documents relevant to a specific aircraft registration mark can be identified. The system contributes to the research field of knowledge management by using OBDA for selecting relevant maintenance documents stored in a regular file folder. Future work will focus on increasing the level of contextualization, development of a mobile tool for on-site access and prototype verification and validation in an operational environment.

Access to secure water sources has become one of the biggest challenges for human sustainability. Climate change and associated droughts make it difficult to guarantee the usual water source and move to groundwater use or to the re-use of treated wastewater remains unviable due the lack on the capacity of monitoring water quality. Moreover, reusing treated wastewater from repositories near anthropogenic sources represents a risk of high concentrations of emerging contaminants. The strategies involve a higher risk of encountering toxic elements with a heavy burden on human and environmental health. New accessible and reliable tools are required to detect any hazard from the waterbodies in real time to ensure safe management and also to decrease mismanagement or ilegal water discharges. One of the available options is to look into enzyme-based biosensors that can detect toxic elements in the water. The proposed biosensors require sensible elements to be accessible and durable for their proper function. The present revision shows in first place, the actual need of real time monitoring due the different sources and effects of emergent pollutants. Secondly, describes how enzymes can be immobilized for its application in biosensors and the rol enzymes play as bioreceptor element in biosensing. Thirdly, describes the transduction methods that can be observed, and finally the actual application of enzyme biosensors for the detection of different toxic elements. According to the presented literature enzyme-based biosensors have been successfully applied for the detection of a wide number of pollutants reaching detection limits comparable to traditional methods such as up to 0.018 nM of mercury. Furthermore, laccase seems to be the more applied enzyme in literature, but positive results are not limited to this enzyme and other candidates have been explored showing good detection rate.

This article examines the contribution of a knowledge mobilisation project to the practice and delivery of community safety in Scotland. There is no statutory responsibility for the delivery of community safety in Scotland and no governmental definition of its object. The longstanding and emergent challenges faced by community safety partnerships in Scotland, however, mirror those encountered in other jurisdictions. The Building Safer Communities project, through a range of capacity building exercises inclusive of the development of web-based resources and the establishment of practitioner fellowships, sought to address some of the information and training needs underpinning these challenges. The establishment of this initiative rested in its timeliness in relation to broader policy and practice developments, established academic-practitioner partnerships and its resource base. The outcomes (the engagement with knowledge mobilisation resources and their impact on practice) and sustainability of this endeavour, however, are subject to the very same challenges that provoked its establishment.

BackgroundIn 22 July 2011 a lone wolf terrorist managed to massacre 77 people, mainly youngsters participating in a political youth camp at Utøya Island outside Oslo. To meet the situation...


 
 
 The Advocacy on Women’s Education and Empowerment (AWE) Project is a community action program based in the Philippines that was implemented after participation in the 2016 Community Solutions Fellowship for Global Leaders—a professional leadership development program for community leaders across the world that involves a four-month fellowship with a nonprofit organisation or local government agency in the United States. The inspiration for the AWE project was the Girls Getting Ahead in Leadership (GGAL) program of the Women’s Initiative for Self-Empowerment (WISE) in Minnesota. The AWE project empowers young women through a series of capacity building exercises, beginning with personal self-awareness, leadership development, conflict management, peace circles and gender and human rights. This provides opportunities for female social work students and young social workers to reach their full potential as gender and human rights advocates and leaders in the Philippines. This paper aims to highlight the role of social workers in gender and human rights advocacy at the local and international level, details the experiences, lessons and challenges of running a project which builds the capacity of young women, and promotes the role of higher educational institutions in building the skills and competence of future leaders.
 
 

Organizational politics is omnipresent phenomenon and cannot be ignored. It has the potential to make or break an organization. Literature is filled with the significance of the political strategies, its influence on leadership, power plays and even the management at all the levels. However, the context in which the term is commonly used is partial and many are disdained by the shady behavior it conjures. Current analysis of the literature testifies that most of the researchers and scholars corroborate the negative opinions of the people regarding organizational politics and see it as a manipulative and self-serving malevolence. It won’t be wrong to emphasize the importance of the capacity building exercise which is required by the researchers to eliminate the sole pejorative view of this construct.
 The primary goal of this research is neither to negate the dysfunctional aspects of organizational politics nor to make a sudden paradigmatic shift in organizational politics’ establishment as an absolutely functional and positive but, to provide the readers with a balanced and neutral facet of the phenomenon. In order to accomplish this goal a qualitative mode of inquiry will be opted and grounded theory approach will be taken to come up with some explanation for this. Data will be collected from the academic sector of Pakistan and interviews will be conducted from the faculty members from various domains. The qualitative inquiry might offer some pattern and logic to the current literature which appears to be lopsided in its attempts in explaining the phenomenon. 
 Keywords: Organizational politics, functional organizational politics, dysfunctional organizational politics, qualitative

Decreasing battery life in subthalamic deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's disease with repeated replacements: Just a matter of energy delivered?

The Agricultural Microbiomes Thinkathon, held on 12 August 2023, in Denver, CO, U.S.A. brought together early-career and established scientists from academia, government, and industry to explore new approaches to microbiome research design, integration, and application. Organized by the U.S. National Science Foundation-funded Agricultural Microbiomes Research Coordination Network (AgMicrobiomes RCN), this community-based workshop emphasized collaborative thinking, interdisciplinary dialogue, and the cocreation of research ideas. Participants engaged in team-based activities aimed at transforming microbiome data into knowledge and actionable outcomes. Through structured breakout sessions, they developed research questions, interpreted microbiome datasets, and proposed projects focused on improving plant health and agricultural sustainability. These projects reflected systems thinking, practical applications, and shared interests in microbial function, plant–microbiome interactions, and data-informed management strategies. The Thinkathon demonstrated the value of workshop formats that move beyond passive or technical training to emphasize critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity. As microbiome data become more accessible and computational tools grow increasingly complex, the ability to pose thoughtful questions and connect research to real-world outcomes is essential. By combining active learning with interdisciplinary team science, the Thinkathon model provides a replicable framework for building capacity, empowering early-career scientists, and advancing innovation in agricultural microbiome research. [Formula: see text] Copyright © 2026 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license .

The 2022 Global Deep-Sea Capacity Assessment is a baseline assessment of the technical and human capacity for deep-sea exploration and research in every coastal area with deep ocean worldwide. From 200 to nearly 11,000 meters below sea level, the deep sea encompasses the single largest—and arguably the most critical—biosphere on Earth. Globally, two-thirds of all exclusive economic zones combined have water depths between 2,000 and 6,000 meters, making this a particularly critical depth range to access. This study includes information for 186 countries and territories, analyzed by subregional, regional, and income groups. The data were collected through both an online survey and manual research. We found that globally, 52% of respondents agreed that exploration and research were considered important in their community. A third of respondents agreed they had the in-country technology to conduct deep-sea exploration and research, and half agreed they had in-country deep-sea expertise. Survey results revealed that the most important challenges worldwide are funding, access to vessels, and human capacity. The top three global opportunities for deep-sea exploration and research were training opportunities, less expensive data collection technology, and better data access and analysis tools. This assessment provides the baseline information necessary to strategically develop, equitably implement, and quantitatively measure the impact of deep-sea exploration and research capacity development over the coming years. It is now possible to measure the evolution of deep-sea capacity over the next decade, an important indicator of progress during the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development.

Due to difficulty in early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) related to cost and differentiated capability, it is necessary to identify low-cost, accessible, and reliable tools for identifying AD risk in the preclinical stage. We hypothesized that cognitive ability, as expressed in the vocal features in daily conversation, is associated with AD progression. Thus, we have developed a novel machine learning prediction model to identify AD risk by using the rich voice data collected from daily conversations, and evaluated its predictive performance in comparison with a classification method based on the Japanese version of the Telephone Interview for Cognitive Status (TICS-J). We used 1,465 audio data files from 99 Healthy controls (HC) and 151 audio data files recorded from 24 AD patients derived from a dementia prevention program conducted by Hachioji City, Tokyo, between March and May 2020. After extracting vocal features from each audio file, we developed machine-learning models based on extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), random forest (RF), and logistic regression (LR), using each audio file as one observation. We evaluated the predictive performance of the developed models by describing the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, calculating the areas under the curve (AUCs), sensitivity, and specificity. Further, we conducted classifications by considering each participant as one observation, computing the average of their audio files’ predictive value, and making comparisons with the predictive performance of the TICS-J based questionnaire. Of 1,616 audio files in total, 1,308 (81.0%) were randomly allocated to the training data and 308 (19.1%) to the validation data. For audio file-based prediction, the AUCs for XGboost, RF, and LR were 0.863 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.794–0.931), 0.882 (95% CI: 0.840–0.924), and 0.893 (95%CI: 0.832–0.954), respectively. For participant-based prediction, the AUC for XGboost, RF, LR, and TICS-J were 1.000 (95%CI: 1.000–1.000), 1.000 (95%CI: 1.000–1.000), 0.972 (95%CI: 0.918–1.000) and 0.917 (95%CI: 0.918–1.000), respectively. There was difference in predictive accuracy of XGBoost and TICS-J with almost approached significance (p = 0.065). Our novel prediction model using the vocal features of daily conversations demonstrated the potential to be useful for the AD risk assessment.

Multi-frequency bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) compared to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for estimation of fat-free mass in colorectal cancer patients treated with chemotherapy

Sinusoidal obstruction syndrome (SOS)/hepatic veno-occlusive disease (VOD) is a fatal complication after hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. We previously reported the usefulness of an ultrasonographical (US) scoring system, the Hokkaido US-based scoring system consisting of ten parameters (HokUS-10): (1) hepatomegaly in the left lobe and (2) right lobe, (3) dilatation of the main portal vein (PV), (4) hepatofugal flow in the main PV, (5) decreased velocity of the PV, (6) dilatation of the para-umbilical vein (PUV), (7) appearance of blood flow signal in the PUV, (8) gallbladder (GB) wall thickening, (9) ascites, and (10) increased resistive index of the hepatic artery, for the diagnosis of SOS/VOD. However, the reliability of this system among operators remains elusive. Therefore, we prospectively evaluated the reliability of HokUS-10. Twenty-four healthy volunteers and 40 patients with liver dysfunction were enrolled. Inter- and intra-operator reliabilities were analyzed using three sonographers. The median concordance rate of HokUS-10 among three sonographers and intra-operator in 24 volunteers was 92% (95% CI: 73-98%) and 98% (95% CI: 92-100%), respectively. In all 64 cases, in terms of the reliability between two sonographers for three representative US parameters (amount of ascites, GB wall thickening, and appearance of PUV blood flow signal), the median concordance rate was more than 98% (95% CI: 86-106%). The inter- and intra-reliabilities of HokUS-10 were excellent. Thus, US might be a reliable tool for SOS/VOD diagnosis.

The growing threat to user privacy related to Android applications (apps) has tremendously increased the need for more reliable and accessible app analysis systems. This paper presents AspectDroid, an application-level system designed to investigate Android applications for possible unwanted activities. AspectDroid is comprised of app instrumentation, automated testing and containment systems. By using static bytecode instrumentation, The growing threat to user privacy related to Android applications (apps) has tremendously increased the need for more reliable and accessible app analysis systems. This paper presents AspectDroid, an application-level system designed to investigate Android applications for possible unwanted activities. AspectDroid is comprised of app instrumentation, automated testing and containment systems. By using static bytecode instrumentation, AspectDroid weaves monitoring code into an existing application and provides data flow and sensitive API usage as well as dynamic instrumentation capabilities. The newly repackaged app is then executed either manually or via an automated testing module. Finally, the flexible containment provided by AspectDroid adds a layer of protection so that malicious activities can be prevented from affecting other devices. The accuracy score of AspectDroid when tested on 105 DroidBench corpus shows it can detect tagged data with 95.29\%. We further tested our system on 100 real malware families from the Drebin dataset \cite{drebin2014}. The result of our analysis showed AspectDroid incurs approximately 1MB average total memory size overhead and 5.9\% average increase in CPU-usage.