UK Black Population Facts 2016

While black people have been part of the UK population for several centuries, there are still issues around their full assimilation into the wider population.

In 2016:

45% of black children grow up in poverty, but just 25% of white children do.

White children are more likely to get 3 A level passes and more likely to get offered places at top universities with the same predicted grades.

There are no black judges sitting in the British Supreme Court or High Court; there are no black generals in the British Army.

While 4% of the population is black, only 2% of MPs are black.

Source: Figures quoted in reviews of a BBC TV programme in Nov/Dec 2016

Eco Tips for the Whole House

Here are some general tips.

• Turn heating thermostat down by one degree.
• Fit thermostatic valves on radiators.
• Don't heat rooms you are not using.
• Fit electricity saving light bulbs.
• Turn lights off when you leave a room unless other people are still there.
• Organise plugs so it is easier to switch things off at the wall socket.
• Use strip plugs and multiway adaptors with individual switches.
• Switch to a green energy supplier.
• Recycle anything you can.
• Re-use anything you can.
• Donate or sell unwanted items rather than put in refuse collection for landfill. 
• Fix any leaking taps.
• Buy recycled products when you can.

Various sources

Eco Tips in the Utility Room

Utility rooms or areas are increasingly common as areas for domestic appliances.

• Only run dishwasher on full load.
• Only run washing machine on full load.
• Don't wash clean clothes - many items can be worn a few times before needing washing.
• Use environmentally friendly washing powders and dishwasher tablets.
• Dry clothes outside or on an inside line rather than using a tumble dryer.

Various sources.

Self Learning Children in India

In many rural villages in India most children go to school but learn relatively little. Deep education inequalities persist, especially in the quality of education. The 2014 Annual Status of Education Report shows that almost a third of rural children aged six to eight in India cannot even recognise letters yet.

The Hybrid Learning Program was developed by Madhav Chavan and Rukmini Banerji of Pratham, one of India's largest non-profit organisations working in the education sector. Tablets without an internet connection were preloaded with a wide range of locally relevant content and given out in 400 villages with a reasonable number of pupils who could read. Village members were required to do two things - have children who will organise themselves into groups of five, and have an adult responsible for charging the tablet computers every night.

Worried that children would use the tablets for playing and having fun rather than focusing on the preloaded educational content, the team put passwords on the tablets that only allowed access to to the Pratham content. But the team soon discovered that playing and having fun was exactly the point.
The children quickly found a way to hack the system and bypass the passwords and in no time at all over 50% of all the tablets no longer were password protected. Children were doing a wide range of things. They were very interested in Pratham's educational content and they were also busy making their own - videos, songs, downloads perhaps from visitors' phones or computers via file sharing.

Closing the gap in essential academic skills is important but to really leapfrog forward, marginalised children need the opportunities to develop a much broader set of skills, including "learning how to learn". Digital fluency and academic mastery are important, but secondary to the ability to learn new things, use strategies to tackle a new problem, seek help, find solutions. In traditional schools students are so conditioned to have teachers give them the answer that it is a fundamental shift for them to approach learning in this new way. The hardest part of implementing the programme has been training Pratham staff not to give children the answers or fix problems, but to let children figure things out on their own. A mindset shift not only for the children but also the adults.

In the first three months of playing with the tablets there has been, according to the project's monitoring data, an 11% increase in pupils' core academic skills such as reading in children's mother tongue, reading and speaking in English, and science.

Source: Indian children invent their own lessons by Rebecca Winthrop, BBC News website, 16 Nov. 2016 [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37618901].

Gender Predominance and Violence

Research at the University of Utah analysed the effect of men/women ratio on crime rates in 3,082 US counties using census and crime data from 2010. The study focused on men and women of reproductive age and five types of crime: murders, assaults, rapes, sex-offences and prostitution.

"For all types of offence analysed, rising proportions of men correlated with fewer crimes - even when accounting for other potential contributing factors such as poverty."

It seems that when there are fewer women, men see them as a more valuable resource - and their behaviour becomes more 'dutiful' to win and keep a female partner. When there are many women, men adopt promiscuous behaviour, which in turn brings them into conflict with other men.

Animal studies show similar patterns. "When females are abundant and males rare, males are more violently competitive, more promiscuous and less likely to invest in offspring."

Studies at the Univestity of Texas show that when women outnumber men, there are more short-term relationships, higher divorce rates and increased reluctance to commit to one partner.

These studies have implications for crime prevention. Current policies aimed at reducing violence and crime by reducing the proportion of men in male-dominated areas may backfire.

Source: Men get violent if women are aplenty by Andy Coghlan in New Scientist, 8 Oct. 2016