Hans does religion, babies and boxes.

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

Jelly baby Game with S4

Jelly babies teach us about population change.

Last 200years changed the world

Jelly Baby population game

A dreich Friday afternoon was livenend up by use of the poulation game with Miss Muir introducing the topic. Hope you enjoyed it folks and will remember the factors affecting population structures in different countries.
Jelly Baby population game on PhotoPeach

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.

EMDC or ELDC?

I know I have posted this before but I think considering the post below it is relevant to put this in again. Love the fact that the educators are almost as good as chimpanzees! No comment please from you Carrick lot I may throw a banana at you!

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 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.

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.

Life in a Slum

Sanitation in Ethiopia's capital city- Addis Ababa leaves a lot to be desired - and it is the poor who are most at risk. The World Health Organization estimates that 64% of people in Ethiopia have to do the toilet outdoors. People need to be educated on how to take good care of the water they fetch to avoid contamination. The UN has declared 2008 the International Year of Sanitation. When will things improve? How? What an we do? Read the BBC article here. Also have a look at previous posts on this including one comment that gives you an additional site to access. All good reading.

Old Age

Nice site here on life expectancy and some of the problems of an ageing population . Thanks to Alan Parkinson for highlighting this one. Use the links to see the case studies and just browse. Good for Development and Health at Higher and Int 2 as well as good background reading for S Grade.
I like the bit about why women live longer. They haven’t put in my answer – “Superior intelligence!!!!” Yeh I know everyone is groaning. Notice I’m not apologising though.
Link here

India baby girl deaths 'increase'

The number of girls born and surviving in India has hit an all time low compared to boys. ActionAid suggested the increasing use of ultrasound technology may be a factor in the trend.
The document says that Indian woman are put under intense pressure to produce sons, in a culture that predominantly views girls as a burden rather than an asset.
It says many families now use ultrasound scans and abort female foetuses, despite the existence of the 1994 law banning abortion of girls because of this.

Japan wrestles with ageing problem

Each day Matsu Yamazaki goes out of her small house in Tokyo to walk through busy streets to work at her family's grocery shop.
It would be unremarkable except for the fact she is 103 years old!
Pensioner numbers growing
For Japan that is the problem - by 2055 the government is predicting pensioners will be around half the population.
The numbers of the very oldest are growing steeply and that means rising costs.
Just under a third of Japanese people over the age of 85 have Alzheimer's or some other kind of dementia, a very similar rate to the UK.
So the increase in the very oldest has created unprecedented pressures.
The growing proportion of the elderly are a significant political influence in Japan.
No party can afford to ignore their votes.
The dilemmas faced by Japan now lie ahead for all the major economies whose populations are also ageing.
A rapid growth in the very oldest can create a heavy burden for families, and a financial headache for governments.
Read the rest here. Watch the video on this page too. Sorry can’t download this one.

Child Labour

programme on BBC1 tonight on this.
Will this put you off buying cheap clothes?
Do you care?
Should you care?
Let me know what you think. Watch it if you can. If not then try BBC iPlayer to catch up later. Only available in the UK though- sorry everyone else.

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.