Instituto Cervantes pays Online Tribute to Spanish actress Angela Molina

Wazzup Pilipinas!


This February, Instituto Cervantes de Manila will treat Filipino film buffs to the film series “Ángela Molina”, an online tribute to one of the main contemporary Spanish actresses. This film cycle will be shown through the Instituto Cervantes channel on the Vimeo platform (vimeo.com/institutocervantes) and freely accessible for 48 hours from their start date and time.

Ángela Molina is one of the most outstanding actresses in Spanish cinematography. She started her career in the middle of Spain’s transition to Democracy and has kept working until today. Her career has been marked by her participation in numerous international films, of which her collaboration with Buñuel was arguably the peak. On the occasion of such a brilliant career, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will award her the Goya Award of honor at the 2021 edition of these Awards.

The film series, composed of three films that marked Angela Molina’s career, will kick off on 13 February, Saturday, with the screening of La sabina (available for 48 hours until Monday, February 15 at 3 AM). The movie, a Spanish co-production with Sweden, was directed by José Luis Borau in1979. It is about an English writer who moves to a Spanish town with the aim of changing his life. There he decides to investigate the life of a wandering man who lived in the 19th century, since it is said that he was killed by a dragon woman, known as "La Sabina".

The film series will continue on 20 February, with the drama La mitad del cielo (1986), directed by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón --a fundamental director in Ángela Molina's career, who will star in several of the films he made during the Transition years, such as "Camada negra" (1977), "El corazón del bosque" (1979) and "Demonios en el jardín" (1982). La mitad del cielo is about Rosa, a woman who travels to Madrid after the Civil War to open a restaurant that transforms to a political and intellectual center of the capital. The movie bagged the Golden Shell at the San Sebastián Film Festival and Ángela Molina received the Silver Shell award for best actress.

Finally, the musical Las cosas del querer (Jaime Chávarri, 1989) will conclude the film cycle on February 27, which will be available for 48 hours until Monday, February 29 at 3 AM. When the Spanish civil war ends, Mario, a homosexual singer, a pianist and his girlfriend Pepita come together to form a group, which will become famous throughout the entire Spain. The trio’s brilliant career will take them back to Madrid, where their worst moments will come; the aristocracy of the capital, bored and in search of strong emotions, does not forgive and throws itself against Mario for his homosexual condition, while Pepita's mother conspires to separate her from her pianist boyfriend... Aside from letting us listen to Spanish folk music from the 1930s and 1940s, the film depicts the historical setting and makes a poignant criticism to the moral and sexual subversion of this post-Civil War period.

The films, presented by Instituto Cervantes in collaboration with the Embassy of Spain in the Philippines, will be in Spanish with English subtitles. Admission is free. For further information and updates on this film series, please check out Instituto Cervantes’ Facebook site (www.facebook.com/InstitutoCervantesManila) or the event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/161791552193592



For further information about the cultural program of Instituto Cervantes please log on to Instituto Cervantes’ website (http://manila.cervantes.es), or Instituto Cervantes Facebook page www.facebook.com/InstitutoCervantesManila.

Microsoft Unveils New Employee Experience Platform — Microsoft Viva — to Help People Thrive at Work

Wazzup Pilipinas!


Company reimagines fragmented $300 billion market to bring tools for employee communications, wellbeing, learning and knowledge discovery into the flow of work

Microsoft Corp. on Thursday announced Microsoft Viva, the first employee experience platform to bring tools for employee engagement, learning, wellbeing and knowledge discovery, directly into the flow of people’s work. Viva is designed to help employees learn, grow and thrive, with new experiences that integrate with the productivity and collaboration capabilities in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams.

“We have participated in the largest at-scale remote work experiment the world has seen, and it has had a dramatic impact on the employee experience,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. “Every organization will require a unified employee experience from onboarding and collaboration to continuous learning and growth. Viva brings together everything an employee needs to be successful, from day one, in a single, integrated experience directly in Teams.” 

The announcement comes as economic and social trends are driving durable changes in workforce engagement. Amid the shift to an increasingly distributed and digital work environment, demand has grown for solutions that support corporate culture, knowledge discovery, on-the-job learning and employee wellbeing. Analysts size the nascent Employee Experience Platforms (EXP) category at $300 billion in annual spend. It spans what is today a fragmented market of services, infrastructure and hundreds of tools, many that go undiscovered and underutilized by employees at the companies that have invested in them.

“As the world of work changes, the next horizon of innovation will come from a focus on creativity, engagement and wellbeing so organizations can build cultures of resilience and ingenuity,” said Jared Spataro, corporate vice president, Microsoft 365. “Our vision is to deliver a platform for the employee experience that helps organizations create a thriving culture with engaged employees and inspiring leaders.”

Microsoft Viva builds on the power of Teams and Microsoft 365 to unify the employee experience across four key areas — Engagement, Wellbeing, Learning and Knowledge — in an integrated experience that empowers people to be their best. Today, Microsoft is announcing an initial set of modules in Viva that will provide built-in capabilities, integrations from a strong and growing ecosystem of Viva partners, and platform extensibility that will enable customers to integrate their existing employee experience systems and tools with Viva to make them more accessible and discoverable to employees:

• Viva Connections provides a personalized gateway to your digital workplace where employees can access internal communications and company resources like policies and benefits and participate in communities like employee resource groups, all from a single customizable app in Microsoft Teams. The Connections app for Teams will be available on desktop in public preview the first half of 2021 with a mobile app coming later this year.

• Viva Insights gives individuals, managers and leaders personalized and actionable insights that help everyone in an organization thrive. Personal experiences and insights, visible only to the employee, help individuals protect time for regular breaks, focused work and learning, as well as strengthen relationships with their colleagues. Managers and leaders can see trends at team and organization level, as well as recommendations to better balance productivity and wellbeing. The insights are aggregated and deidentified by default to maintain personal privacy. In addition, a new dashboard allows organizations to combine employee feedback from LinkedIn’s Glint with collaboration data from Viva Insights, enabling leaders to more accurately identify where teams may be struggling, proactively adjust work norms, and then quantify the impact of those changes over time. In addition to using data and signals from Microsoft apps, customers will also be able to incorporate data from third-party services like Zoom, Slack, Workday and SAP SuccessFactors. The Viva Insights app in Teams and the new Glint and Viva Insights dashboard are now available in public preview.

• Viva Learning makes training and professional development opportunities more discoverable and accessible in the flow of work. It aggregates all the learning resources available to an organization in one place, including content from LinkedIn Learning; Microsoft Learn; third-party providers including Skillsoft, Coursera, Pluralsight and edX; as well as an organization’s own content library. From traditional learning courses to microlearning content, users can discover, share, assign and track a wide variety of learning as a natural part of the workday. The Viva Learning app is now available in private preview, and starting later this year Viva Learning will offer integrations with leading learning management systems, including Cornerstone OnDemand, Saba and SAP SuccessFactors.

• Viva Topics delivers a knowledge discovery experience that helps people connect to information and experts across the company. Using AI to reason over a customer’s Microsoft 365 data, and with the ability to integrate knowledge from a variety of third-party services such as ServiceNow and Salesforce, Viva Topics automatically surfaces topic cards within conversations and documents across Microsoft 365 and Teams. Clicking on a card opens a topic page with related documents, conversations, videos and people. Viva Topics is now generally available as an add-on to Microsoft 365 commercial plans.

“Microsoft Viva is a groundbreaking Employee Experience Platform, ushering in a new enterprise software category that focuses entirely on the daily needs of employees at work,” said Josh Bersin, research analyst and noted expert on employee experience technology. “Viva will enable companies to integrate their fragmented workplace tools and provide them in the flow of work.”

A global network of services partners, including Accenture, Avanade, PwC and EY will provide consulting and advisory services to help customers optimize their existing employee experience investments by bringing them together with Microsoft Viva.

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

DOTr unveils Cutter Head of the first Tunnel Boring Machine for Metro Manila Subway Project

Wazzup Pilipinas!

The underground works for the ‘Project of the Century’ – the Metro Manila Subway – will finally commence soon as the Department of Transportation (DOTr) unveils the gigantic Cutter Head of the first Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) to be used in the line's construction.

The unveiled Cutter Head will be attached to "Kaunlaran," the first of six TBMs intended for use in the partial operability section of the subway. The unveiling was held during the Arrival Ceremony at the Manila North Centre Port Terminal today, 05 February 2021.

The Cutter Head is the largest and heaviest part of the TBM, weighing 74 tons. Its main purpose is to break, cut, and grind rocks and soil by rotating its 36-piece disc cutter, composed of 15 pieces of single and 21 pieces of twin Roller Cutter (RC).

“This Tunnel Boring Machine symbolizes its name, ‘Kaunlaran’. Today, we ask you as we applaud the coming of ‘Kaunlaran’ – I ask you in joining us in riding the Philippines’ first metro subway dahil ito ‘ho ay paglakbay papunta sa kaunlaran,” Department of Transportation (DOTr) Secretary Arthur P. Tugade said in his message.

The arrival of the first TBM Cutter Head signals the continuous arrival of the other TBM equipment and materials. On the following days of February 2021, the remaining parts of the machine will arrive and will be transported at the site for assembly. This will be followed by the conduct of a mandatory operational test prior to the lowering and main drive underground that is expected to be done in the third quarter of this year.

A total of 25 TBMs will be utilized for the Metro Manila Subway Project (MMSP). Each TBM has an outer diameter of 6.99 meters, 95 meters in total length, with approximately 700 tons in total weight. These enormous TBMs play an integral part in building the subway as they will be used to dig underground and lay out the tunnels. The TBMs can excavate through a variety of ground conditions, from hard rock to sand.

Meanwhile, the Transportation Chief also stressed that he will continue to challenge the railway sector and its private partners for the partial operability section of the project to be completed before 2021 ends.

“I know that I have pressured you, and I have pressured you so hard in order to have this project. But as I thank you, I assure you: I will pressure and push you harder so that we will achieve the partial operability [of the MMSP] at least in my target, December of this year; at worst, in the target of the contractors, February of next year,” Secretary Tugade said.

Guests present in the ceremony who included delegates from the Japanese government, Cabinet secretaries, government officials, and private partnershave have expressed their support for the realization of the much-awaited subway project, which is one of the flagship projects of the Duterte Administration's “BUILD, BUILD, BUILD” program.

“We will continue to support the Philippine government by utilizing our state-of-the-art technologies, and ensuring a fast and sure approach,” Japan Ambassador to the Philippines Kazuhiko Koshikawa expressed.

“I congratulate the DOTr, the JICA [Japan International Cooperation Agency], and the Japanese government for this historic and momentous event. Sa wakas po, magkakaroon na tayo ng subway. We were the first to have the LRT in the whole of Asia and although we were a bit delayed in having our subway, now we can say we have truly modernized our transportation in this country. The arrival of this equipment is significant because it contributes further to what I have described as the ‘Renaissance of Philippine Infrastructure,” Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque noted.

To note, the proposal to build the first subway line in Metro Manila was conceived way back in September 1973 in a study conducted by JICA's predecessor, the Japan Overseas Technical Cooperation Agency.

“On our part in this endeavor, we assure you that JICA will do everything it can to support the Philippine government and the DOTr, not only for this project, but for all the other partnerships under the BUILD, BUILD, BUILD program amidst the difficult condition we are experiencing due to COVID-19,” JICA Chief Representative Eigo Azukizawa said.

The MMSP is the first underground railway system in the country that will provide the most modern mass transportation in the National Capital Region (NCR), from Valenzuela City to Bicutan, Parañaque, and NAIA Terminal 3 in Pasay, and will further stretch across North and South zones of the Greater Capital Region.