No sex please we're Japanese

Here is the video we saw in class.It is a terrible title but there are some interesting comments made in it. Catch up if you missed it or watch again to revise some of the information and think about how this relates to the Scottish situation our country is in at the moment.

Hans does religion, babies and boxes.

Hans Rosling explaining the ways of the world in his own special way. Fantastic stuff as usual.

Chinas One Child Policy

Last 200years changed the world

China's one child policy - Success or not?

This is an excellent article on this topic that we cover with S4 population and S5/6 at all levels for Development and Health. Have a look and see what you think.
China's Policy.

Favela Life - A positive view

Population of the UK hits 60 million

Find more videos like this on Key Stage 3 Geography Ning

India’s disappearing slums

Not because they are improving them, however but because the authorities want the land for other things such as building roads or new hotels before the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Is this the answer? Some are provided with new homes but the majority don’t get any help at all. The authorities say they are there illegally and should go.

China

BBC Scotlands China Series has a lot of good info on China. Good for S4, 5 and 6 to revise from.

Polish in Britain

Short clip here from the BBC programme on British reaction to Polish wokers in Britain. Worth a look for Higher.

see here

Refugees in the Congo - Africa

Regional war fear as 50,000 homeless in Congo in two days
More than 250,000 people have been made homeless since the latest bout of fighting erupted. In total, aid groups say they are struggling to reach people fleeing fierce fighting between government and rebel forces. The Congolese government has refused to negotiate with the rebels.
Aid workers were unable even to reach the camp, and reports were reaching Goma that its inhabitants had begun to run away. Hundreds of thousands fled Goma, the regional capital which sits on the border with Rwanda , and the surrounding countryside in a mass exodus last week. “People are just trying to stay safe. It’s muddy and wet and a lot of people are sick,” said one local aid worker. The refugees were in desperate need of help. A woman clutching her young children and looking for shelter said: “We are helpless, powerless. “We do not believe anyone will treat us well. I am too afraid to go home, but who will feed us here? We feel abandoned.” The Save the Children charity, which was forced to pull out of Goma after government troops went on the rampage last week, sent an emergency team back into the city yesterday. A priority is reuniting families split up in the chaos.

Read more about this terrible situation here and read the excellent BBC summary, as ever here. Watch the video. WARNING! It is disturbing – think about how YOU would feel in this situation.

India - the fate of girls

This video is a bit long but you will get the idea. Some people think 10 million baby girls have been aborted in India.

Listen to this BBC programe if you can - it is only a few minuted long. Compare this to China.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=mnmtKLQRh6g

In some ways this is a very old tale. Long before medical abortion became available, unwanted girls were killed after birth or not given enough food and medicine to survive. But modern technology has changed that. Ultrasound machines, which make it possible to determine the gender of a fetus, have spread from big city hospitals to small country clinics. Portable machines are taken to remote villages by motorcycle.

Here is another video.

Polish Migration to the UK

A couple of videos here highlighted by Richard Allaway. Great stuff for Higher, Int 2 and S grade. Will the return to Poland of all these immigrants be bad news for Britain? Who will fill all the jobs? Are there enough people here available to do the jobs vacated by the Poles? Will it be better for Britain with less pressure on the health service and schools? What about the lack of tax being paid now by the immigrants? Lots to consider in these two short films.

Development and Health

Two great movies here on the population topic. Just think of the first as a warning folks!
Population control?


Condom advert, India

Britain causes crisis in China

Why? Read here and here and now watch this video here from India’s Mumbai to see recycling in action. Let the video go on to each separate part. The photos are especially good with this one.

Population growth

The Independent has a great article today on population growth and covers a huge amount we introduce at S grade and Higher. Int 2. Read the summary here and the original article if you can because this comes up a lot in exams!

A country's population is determined by three things: how many people are born, how soon they die and how many leave or enter the country.

A leading medical journal recently called for British couples to stop having so many children to 'reduce global warming'. But much of the rest of Europe has a different problem: declining birthrates and ageing populations. A child born today in the UK will be responsible for 150 times more greenhouse gas emissions than a child born in Ethiopia. When Thomas Malthus first published his gloomy Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 he had others than himself in his sights. Human populations grow exponentially whereas food reproduction expands in a linear fashion (it's the difference in maths between multiplication and addition) so disaster always looms, in the shape of disease, war or famine, to balance the population out. The magic figure for demographers is 2.1 births per couple. That, allowing for the fact that some girls die before they reach child-bearing age, is the figure at which a population replaces itself. In Europe the last time that fertility was above replacement level was in the mid-1960s. But now, for the first time on record, birthrates in southern and eastern Europe have dropped below 1.3 – well below the 1.5 which the United Nations has marked as the crisis point. If things continue the population there will be cut in half in just 45 years. In Italy, one recent survey put it at 1.2. Cities such as Milan and Bologna recorded less than 1, the lowest birthrates anywhere. Things are as bleak in Japan. There the total fertility rate declined by nearly a third between 1975 and 2001, from 1.91 to 1.33. The average family size has remained the same, but there are fewer families. Half of Japanese women have not married by the age of 30, and 20 per cent of them are not marrying ever.
But it is not just the developed world. The birthrate is plummeting in east Asia. China's rate is down from 6.06 to 1.8 and declining. South Korea has slashed government spending on birth control. Singapore is now offering tax rebates to couples with more than two children. Japan is piling money into nurseries and childcare.

There is still rapid population growth in many parts of the world. Birthrates are still very high in Africa. At their peak in the 1970s Kenya had a growth rate of 4.1 per cent, which was doubling its population every 17 years. The rate is down but 11 African countries still have a whopping growth rate of 2.6 per cent a year. Populations in Uganda, Burkina Faso and Congo will treble or more by 2050. And India is set to leapfrog China as the world's most populous nation by 2050 when its population is expected to top 1,750,000,000 people. (China will be 1,400 million, and the third biggest, the United States, around 420 million.)

But in the UK, France, the Netherlands and Scandinavia birthrates, which declined steadily between 1900 and 1960, are creeping up again. In the UK, despite a rapidly declining population in Scotland, the overall fertility rate is 1.8 and rising. In Holland it is 1.73. Sweden's has risen to 1.9, with the rest of Scandinavia at 1.8.

The usual story is when people are poor they have lots of children. When half your kids die before they grow up and you need to have lots to make sure there is someone to look after you in old age. If it takes one person all day to plough or weed the fields, or fetch the firewood, or find grazing for the goats, or carry the water and pound the grain, then you need a big family. And if there is no contraception available you don't have much choice anyway.
But when you get richer family sizes start dropping. The health of your children improves. You have savings for your old age. Girls go to school, get jobs outside the home, marry and have babies much later. Contraception becomes available. You move to the city where you don't need so many children to do the household chores. Make people richer and the population falls.

Not everyone believes this though. Twenty years ago fertility started to decline in Nepal and Bangladesh when they were still poor. Korea wasn't rich when fertility declined. By contrast the Gulf oil states continued with high birthrates long after they got huge wealth.

There's been an extraordinary change in 20 years and it comes from a combination of factors - It is delaying the age at which women marry. It used to be 14 or 15; now it's 21 or 22. Another factor is the success of NGOs [Non-Governmental Organisations]; 20 million households in Bangladesh have access to micro-finance, and in half of them, the money goes to the women. Then there has been education for girls encouraged by programmes that gave cereals to families whose girls went to secondary school and 'cash for education' female stipends." Bangladesh has now surpassed the Millennium Development Goal on education and now has more girls in secondary education than boys.

Low-birth Europe is faced with an ageing population, a pensions crisis, later retirement, changes in work patterns, shrinking cities and a massive looming healthcare cost. Nations of children with no siblings, cousins, aunts or uncles – only parents, grandparents, and perhaps great-grandparents – will face the burden of paying for the care of a massive older generation. Meanwhile high-birth Africa will remain stuck in a vicious circle unless it gets economic growth, agricultural reform, improved world trade terms, infrastructure investment, better health and education systems, more girls into school and a wider availability of family planning.

Baby boom?

Here are some interesting statistics. The 'replacement' fertility rate, to maintain population, is 2.1
Iraq 4.3

UK 1.8

USA 2.1

Afghanistan 7.1

Hong Kong 0.95

What does the future hold?

Read the whole of this excellent article on this here.

Baby hope for earthquake parents

China is sending medics to offer reverse sterilisation operations to parents who lost their only children in the recent earthquake. Under China's one-child policy, parents who lose a child or have one with disabilities are allowed a second baby. The authorities in Sichuan province estimate about 7,000 of those killed in the 12 May 2008 quake were only children.

Gapminder video
Great one here on the contrasts between EMDCs and ELDCs. Only 4 mins long too!
The Interactive section of this site http://www.gapminder.org is brilliant for Higher, Int 2 and S grade. Take your time to look at all the different “bits” and read all the graphs. You never know what graphs they will use in the dreaded exams!!!
Use the maps in the Gapminder World section and play about looking at different countries. Check out the rapid progress of China and India in recent years and compare especially to USA and the UK. Look at some African nations too as well as Brazil. Lots to see.
This video shows what life is like in some slums. Not pleasant but good revision folks. Hope you realise how lucky we ALL are in Britain.

Migration

What if all the Poles went home? Read this BBC article to see if Britain could cope without our migrants.
This could prove particularly sticky for the construction industry The bigger problem is that we won't be able to find enough labour.
The effect of a Polish exodus could be even greater for the agricultural sector. Expensive strawberry crops have been left to rot last summer as there weren't the migrants to pick them. David Frost, chief executive of the British Chambers of Commerce, says it's not just the skills that make Poles attractive to employers. "There is an attitude and work ethic problem in certain parts of the UK where people do not see the need or have the desire to work."
Read the whole article here.

Migration link

Migration video here to watch made by pupils in the S of England. A few wee spelling mistakes but it is still good. Ok I like the David Bowie bit in the middle but the info is OK too! You might prefer the Killers bit. No taste.
See the postings on Sat 15th March and then go to the migration video.
http://geographyjazz.blogspot.com/