GIF from the Animation Factory
Geographical stories of interest from the newspapers. Get that clippings file started!
I always recommend it to my Year 12 and 13 students. Do they listen ?
"95% of geography teachers use news stories in the classroom"
2004
SEPTEMBER
The start of my new role as Head of Geography. The start of my 17th year of teaching !
Apologies for brevity of recent sections - I've been busy!
Another month, another hurricane in Florida - this time Frances - the BBC site put up a page it usually does with any natural disaster asking for people's eyewitness accounts. The page is HERE.
CNN has better coverage (and if you have Sky check out the news channels like Fox. There's also help on the web: FLORIDA DISASTER has some useful advice. It also has advice on keeping safe, and a page where you can check the status of the roads - when I checked, several of them were closed due to 'debris' and others were blocked for other reasons.
Hurricane IVAN has moved through the Caribbean now.
Norwich Union is moving 950 jobs to Asia. The BBC have a report on the latest outsourcing. The local news report covered the story too.
Tropical Storm JEANNE has caused devastation in Haiti and over 1000 deaths with mudslides. This shows the contrast between MEDCs and LEDCs: Jeanne isn't even classed as a HURRICANE, but caused many times more deaths than Ivan in the USA the week before.
Colleague Mr. Stone passed some news that it appears global temperatures (in the lower atmosphere) are currently LESS than the long term average - perhaps we're heading for a short term COOLING cycle.
Mt. St. Helens rumbles back to life, and a Magnitude 6 earthquake in California. Information on the BBC News and USGS sites.
OCTOBER
Final weather forecast presented by the BBC's Michael Fish.
Announcement that thousands of new homes are to be built in the South East of England. This has been linked to the need to house certain 'key workers' (which includes teachers of course...) - several issues have been explored in the news, including the effect on water supplies.
Immediately, the protests and arguments against such a massive house building scheme started to appear. A range of newspaper articles, and reports on 'Countryfile' and such programmes.
Gherkins - what are they like ? Well, they're green knobbly vegetables which are pickled. Read a great recent article in 'The Times' which looked at the effects of new supplies from Asia which have been affecting French gherkin farmers.
Tremendous storms during half term week in Devon and Cornwall. A reminder that the BBC's LOCAL news areas have some great stories to refer to.
NOVEMBER
Fireworks are beginning to become a feature of our evenings, especially in big cities. How much atmospheric pollution is produced on Bonfire Night and the days on either side by fireworks and bonfires ?
Interesting snippet tucked away at the bottom of a column in 'The Times': WIND OF CHANGE.
"Wind farms can significantly change local climate, a study has shown. The Princeton University report found air turbulence near a wind farm in Oklahoma led to a rise in temperatures, wind speeds and the rate of evaporation of soil moisture." (The Times - 04/11/04) - in the same paper there was a letter from Professor David Bellamy arguing against wind farm developments.
The FORESTRY COMMISSION's site has an AUTUMN section which shows the state of the leaves in each of its forests. You can click on the map to see what state the leaves are in a particular area. This idea of leaf colour being a factor in planning a day out is particularly strong in New England in the USA. There's also a page which explains WHY LEAVES CHANGE COLOUR. Call 0845 3673787 for a free pack. One more effect of GLOBAL WARMING could be the release of more of the red colour chemical in leaves, which will mean a more spectacular autumn display.
Great image of the installation of an artist called Michael Wolf which includes over 16 000 toys made in China, collected from various toy shops and boot sales. In amongst the toys are pictures of the Chinese factory workers who make 75% of all toys. The WEBSITE which illustrates the process is here. I used this as the basis for a wall display, along with the results of a survey on TOYS in pupils' houses. This is a fabulous piece of work: The Real Toy Story....
Eco special issue of 'The Observer' magazine: great article on the effects of climate change in the UK.
A G2 special issue on China in 'The Guardian'. The front of the supplement asked the question "What will become of China's 100 million only children ?". Other items in the supplement investigated the regional inequalities which exist. An excellent resource. ('The Guardian' - 09/11/04)
Interesting article on the BBC site about why meetings are so boring... Powerpoint is blamed for many boring meetings and the article goes into details on what makes speakers dull. Check it out on the BBC website... Of course I'm never boring (wake up at the back!)
Article on the effects of an aging population on job promotions. There is no longer any guarantee of increasing responsibility with age. Some younger managers fear older workers.
VISION OF BRITAIN site created by historical Geographers launched this month, and suffered from the same problems as the PRO Census site: too many visitors. This has been tackled though and I certainly found it working when I visited the first time - but not the second time.... It offers the chance to investigate your local area, and I was impressed by what it was able to tell me about the village where I live.
Earlier in the month there was a large earthquake in Japan. One of the secondary effects of this earthquake was the impact on ponds where the Japanese bred KOI CARP. These carp are particularly important in Japanese culture and an appeal has been launched to raise money to fly the carp out of the danger area. There are some dramatic images on the SAVE THE NIISHIKIGOI site, linked to from THIS BBC news article.
Why not head here, and download the BAND AID 20 single.
The BRITISH LIBRARY's COLLECT BRITAIN site is a largely historical archive, but there is plenty to see at the CRACE collection of London maps page for example, and coming in December 2004 are PICTURE THE SCENE and BRITAIN UNCOVERED sections.
Interesting article on the after effects of Hurricane Ivan. Island resorts have used the insurance payouts to revamp their hotels. Clear up continued for over 2 months, cruise ships are returning to the Caribbean and 95% of hotels are open again. The article went on to look at a number of Caribbean locations and give information on their recovery:
Grenada: Over 90% of buildings in Grenada were destroyed, and half the 90 000 population were made homeless and 39 killed. The Red Cross and Oxfam and various volunteers were involved in the rebuilding - many skilled craftsmen were offered free holidays to the island in exchange for their labour. Many of the spice farms have been ruined however, and people are still living in tents.
Cayman Islands: Little Cayman reopened to tourists almost immediately after, but Grand Cayman was worse affected. Many hotels brought renovations forward. The white sand beaches are still there, and the curfew which was imposed to stop looting is now only for 5 hours during the night...
Jamaica: 90% of hotels and attractions are open even in Negril (which was damaged by 30 foot high waves which filled buildings with sand) (The Observer, 14/11/04)
Is Geography really the 'worst taught subject' at Primary schools ?
This was the conclusion of a recent OFSTED document. There was an interesting page on the CBBC Newsround site which gave the opinions of several school students (or people saying they were...) on what they thought of their Geography lessons (and teachers in some case... they're always to blame of course in any situation like this...)
The page included a GEOGRAPHY QUIZ: one question in the quiz asked how fast the earth was spinning... OK.
According to the comments that followed, the students wanted more of the following things:
"current affairs we really need to know"
"interesting things around the world"
"we go on good field trips out of school"
"more about current affairs, like the war in Iraq"
"things that are more relevant to us today, like what causes famines"
"things like not taking, discussions, role play, quizzes and loads of other stuff"
and less of the following:
"too strict"
"copying out of textbooks"
"colouring in maps"
DECEMBER
What to get for Christmas ? How about buying a present for someone who has very little. Concern is a charity which helps people in LEDCs, and can be reached at the Guardian's website.
Another idea is to visit the website of FARM AFRICA. They offer the chance to buy a chicken for Christmas.
E-mail from Michael Wolf, the artist behind 'The Real Toy Story'.
glad you enjoyed “the real toy story.” it was
the most popular exhibition in hk this fall. thousands of people
came to see it, many of them children and teenagers who had never visited an art
exhibition before.
Can the planet feed us ? Part of 'Planet under Pressure' series. BBC NEWS SITE article.
Alex Standish at it again. Following on from an article in 2002 in 'Spiked' magazine, he has now published an article in the TES: "Time to put Geography back on the map". This suggests several reasons for the 'decline' in Geography. Like his earlier article, there was discussion on the Geography forum
Coming up to the end of the year, and GeographyPages visitor statistics are looking very healthy.
Interesting article in 'The Observer' suggesting that there need to be some changes made to the G8: the group of wealthy nations of the world.
According to the article (The Observer, 19/12/04), Germany, France, Italy and Canada should be thrown out, and China should be added. They would join USA, UK, Japan and the 'Eurozone' to form a slimmed down G5.
Excellent article in same issue of 'The Observer' by Will Hutton. Called 'Why weep for our lost factories' it explores the issues behind outsourcing. It makes some excellent points about the move from manufacturing in the UK towards tertiary and quaternary activities.
Very interesting article in 'The Guardian' about a huge new dome that has opened in East Germany. It is housed in an airship hangar that was built by a failed company, and is like a huge version of Centre Parks.
Toll on the Skye Road Bridge to be removed ! A victory for local campaigners. I've had my car sticker in support of this for some years now. Not everyone thinks its good value for money though.
Interesting article on Chinese toy factory workers.
They are striking and leaving factories to find alternative employment.
Factory operators are struggling to offer the lowest prices which is forcing some of them out of business.
Guangdong Province in Southern China is the toy making area.
According to the estimates, 80% of Christmas trees and 75% of toys put under them are produced within a 50 mile radius of Shenzhen port.
There is a dense area of hangar sized factories churning out many gifts in addition to toys.
International retailers and manufacturers outsource to this area.
The labour costs are amongst the lowest in the world.
More than 80% of workers are migrant workers from the countryside.
(The Guardian, 24/12/04)
Shenzhen is close to Hong Kong, and was designated a Special Economic zone in 1979, which was the trigger for spectacular growth. In 1980 it had a population of around 30 000 people, now it has a population of 10 million ! It is often known as 'The Miracle City'. It is on the opposite side of the Pearl River delta to Hong Kong. Over 100 000 different types of toys are produced in the city, and there are over 1000 toy manufacturers.
Christmas Day
Had a look at the statistics for GeographyPages for Christmas Day. Apparently had 416 visitors, 1599 hits and 12468 Kbytes of data transfer for the day.
Boxing Day
As with Bam last year, the Christmas season brought a major earthquake. This time, the area hit was S.E Asia. The earthquake was apparently a strength of 8.9 on the Richter scale and was on the sea bed near Sumatra. The earthquake generated a tsunami which spread outwards and hit the coast of Sri Lanka and southern India. Thousands dead in this area. Tsunami waves can travel in deep ocean at 400-500 miles per hour, and the energy is transmitted through the ocean generating waves as it nears shore.
Report on the earthquake, which will link to other pages soon enough HERE.
http://www.oxfam.co.uk/what_you_can_do/give_to_oxfam/donate/asiaquake1204.htm - OXFAM page with a chance to donate to victims of the Asian Earthquake Floods and Tsunami.
Remarkable story of holidaymakers who saw the sea retreating - a classic sign of a tsunami about to arrive is at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4125741.stm
BBC IN DEPTH PAGE now available.
