Over the last week the examination boards have released DRAFT syllabuses for the new GCSE courses. These are for first teaching from September 2016, with examination from Summer 2018. However if your school does a three year Key Stage Four this will be for first teaching from September 2015.

Although the specifications still need to be approved by OFQUAL and therefore there will be some changes it provides an initial incite into government thinking.

I have created a one-page word document overview which is downloadable below.

Comparison of New Geography GCSE Specs

Draft Specifications

These have been provided here for ease of access – the most up to date version can be found on the examination board websites.

AQA Draft Spec

Edexcel A Draft Spec

Edexcel B Draft Spec

EDUQAS A Draft Spec

EDUQAS B Draft Spec

OCR A Draft Spec

OCR B Draft Spec

This was the first lecture I went to on the Friday morning and was a useful subject knowledge update.

The lecture was given by Professor Gerd Masselink, Professor of Coastal Geomorphology at Plymouth University.

Gerd began the talk by stating that last witner (2013-14) was fantastic for storms whereas this year, winter (2014-15) was disapointing, though I would imagine property owners and businesses in the south-west would feel differently!

Coastal Risk is caused by Hazard x Exposure, and coastal risk can take the form of erosion, damage to property, flooding and financial loss.

In the storms that cause the most damage large waves are found at the South of hte pressure system.

Fistral Beach, Newquay (source)

10m waves are 100 times more powerful than 1m waves.
In the four months between December 2013 and April 2014 there were 20 events where a 6m wave height was exceeded. The impact was larger when tide was high. Specific key events were Hercules 6/1/14 and Petra 5/2/14.
The 2013-14 winter was the most energetic period in the last 60 years (far exceeded the 1990 winter which was the previous highest).
The storm impact was not just a regional event; it also impacted Soulac, SW France.

Images of Damage

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The destruction of the SW Railway line at Dawlish cost between £1-20 million per day, the total cost over 60 days has been estimated between £60 million and £1.2 billion.

How can you compare impact of storm event?

• Beach survey – profile.
• Real time kinematic GPS
• Airborne LIDAR survey (from before or after)

These allow the researcher to quantify the sand lost (erosion) or gained (accretion).

In some beaches after the storm event a 1m strip of beach lost 200m of sand.

Where has the sand gone? (and will it come back)

1. Offshore Accretion – primarily happened in the North Coast. The sand was washed to 3-4m off low tide level. It is not lost and some is making its way back.
2. Alongshore (around the corner) – primarily happened on the South Coast, for example at Slapton.
3. Onshore (over the top) – particularly a feature of gravel beaches, where sediment is washed over the top. There is no natural mechanism to recover the sediment can only be returned by humans.

Conclusion

Storm waves are related to the Atlantic pressure system; storm frequency, intensity and path will be effected by climate change (this year two major storms have missed the SW as the centre of the storm was further North).

Storm impacts show a larger geographic variability – the North Coast with offshore sediment transport and beach erosion, has already half way recovered, and it is expected to be fully recovered within two years. The South Coast had longshore sediment transport and beach rotation will not recover unless there are storms of the same magnitude in the opposite direction.

Increase in coastal hazard due to climate change because of sea level rise, increased storminess (more and more energetic).

There can be be a decrease in exposure to coastal hazards due to coastal management this includes, zonation, protection and managed realignment.

Gerd also shared details of the following website: http://www.channelcoast.org/southwest/, the Plymouth coastal observatory which contains beach profile data.

This post was based on my own notes and any errors are my own.

This is a one of a series of posts on the GA Conference 2015; the main post is here.

This are the notes from the second book that I have been reading about the decline in American political parties.

• Parties have increasingly seen their major campaign services slip away one by one as historical eras and the nation’s needs have changed. Party services have also been severely curtailed because of modern technology. Candidates are relying increasingly on the mass media, public opinions polls, and public relations experts instead of the parties. The parties thus being challenged by non-party political actors for the delivery of campaign services.

• The function of the American political party can be summarised in six points:
  1. Educating the public.
  2. Mobilising and structuring the vote.
  3. Aggregating and articulating interests.
  4. Formulating policy
  5. Organising the government
  6. Recruiting leadership and providing campaign support for candidates.
• A number of changes in the parties’ environment have helped to bring about their decline. These changes have occurred since World War I and may be summarised as follows:
  1. Changes in the party-clientele relationship: The replacement of patronage systems with merit appointment programs.
  2. Changes in the electorate: The increasing education and political sophistication of the voter.
  3. Development of the “new politics”: The replacement of the candidate’s traditional campaign techniques with the political management firm’s use of public opinion polls, advertising techniques, and mass media.
  4. Changes in the government-electorate relationship: The increasing role of government in dispensing social and economic aid to its clientele.
  5. Changes in the relationship of parties to other political organisations: The proliferation and growth of alternative political and interest groups.
  6. Changes in finance: The new legislation limits parties in their acquisition and expenditures of campaign funds.
• Contemporary parties have lost their historical role of socialising Americans into the political system.
• Absentee ballots are available to those who cannot vote in their districts on election day. The complexity of the process, the need for far sighted planning, and the tendency of businessmen and travellers (often Republicans) to cast absentee votes leads to a majority of absentee votes being cast for Republican party candidates.
• Since the 1960s voters have shown their disdain for parties and candidates either by crossing party lines or by staying at home. In 1974 only about one in three Americans of voting age bothered to vote.Among those who did, ticket-spiting was at an all-time high.
• Parties perform several basic functions that are aimed at either promoting or blocking legislation:
  1. They  select leaders who are responsible for advancing the business of the chamber.
  2. Party leasers help choose those who will fill subsidiary leadership positions.
  3. The leaders appoint members to the various committees.
  4. The leaders control the legislative agenda.
  5. The leaders serve as liaison between Congress and the executive branch.

• The image below explains some reasons for incumbent advantage (click for larger image)

As part of my teaching of Political Parties in the US Politics I have been reading a couple of notable texts on the theory of political parties. This is the notes from the first.

• “Political parties in America have a peculiar status and history. They are not part of our written Constitution. The Founding Fathers, in fact, were determined to do all they could to see that they did not arise. Washington devoted much of his Farewell Address to warning his countrymen against “the dangers of the party in the state.”
• By 1970, half again as many called themselves political independents as had done a generation earlier. In the 1968 election, more than half the voters reported splitting their tickets.
• But the heritage of the Eisenhower era has not been so easily obliterated. Once broken, the links between the public and the political parties, the government and teh parties, have not mended. The fateful separation between national policy and party responsibility that began sixteen years ago continues today.
• Traffic jams, smog, pollution, crime, inflation and a dozen other problems measure the failure of the government to anticipate, to identify and to remedy the unwanted side effects of America’s prosperity and growth.
• The dirty little secret of American politics in the 1970s is that every single essential service we depend on some public agency to provide is seriously under financed. In an era of general affluence, we are simply not paying enough in taxes to maintain the necessary basic community service.
• The classic, academic distinction between parties and interest groups was given us by the late V.O. Key, Jr “Pressure groups seek to attain the adoption of those policies of particular interest to them; they do not nominate candidates and campaign for control and responsibility of the government as a whole. Their work goes on regardless of which party is in power in the state, city or nation. Theirs is a politics of principle. “We must be partisan for a principle and not for a party,” and Samuel Gompers, speaking for the American Federation of Labor. “Labor must learn to use parties to advance our principles and not allow political parties to manipulate us for their own advancement.”
• An interest group that is old and well established has an advantage over one that has just been formed. One that has a single narrowly-defined objective, directly related to the economic well-being of its members, is likely to be better financed and more successful than a group with a long agenda and an altruistic approach to issues. The first rule of interest group government is to “look out for yourself.” This means to the extent we rely on interest groups we resign ourselves to a significant degree of stagnation and selfishness in our public policies.
• What is true of the South is true of the nation as a whole: It is not a single bloc of voters, but many such blocs which have cut loose from all their past allegiances and are on the move. While the South has been growing more Republican, New England and some suburbs have been growing more Democratic. Blacks have shown increasing political independence; like other minority groups – the Mexican-American, the American Indians – they have demonstrated their growing political consciousness by showing their willingness to shift partisan alignments in order to achieve their own specific goals. As the members of congressional Black Caucus said in 1971, “We do not intend to have our vision obscured by partisan blinders where the interests of our constituents … are concerned.”
• Presidential press conferences have been carried live on television for fifteen years; each of the last four Presidents has used the medium more extensively for speeches than his predecessor. Senators, governors, congressmen, mayors all do their TV “reports to the people.” Political expenditures for purchased television time increased sevenfold between 1952 and 1968-one of the major reasons for the inflation in campaign costs. Television not only bypasses the party as the middleman in political communication, it tends to de-emphasise the party as part of the political process.

This book is an interesting and quick read, I first discovered Alan Cumming through his work as Eli Gold in the ‘Good Wife’.

There were a couple of quotes that I wanted to note down:

On the Eurovision Song Contest

“And tonight, as though the showbiz gods could tell that I needed levity and sparkle and wacky Euro froth, was the night of the Eurovision Song Contest!!

Most Americans of course have never heard of this great institution and I can only feel sorry for them. I know this because I sen almost all my down time between takes in the movie Sky Kids playing Eurovision trivia with Antonio Banderas, much to the bemusement of the crew in Austin, Texas. They looked at us as though we were members of a cult, and in a way, we are. IT is part of my pop DNA, it is a rite of passage, a touchstone, and eventually it transcends its awful shallow shininess to become a communal nostalgic shrine to which we make our annual drunken pilgrimages. It’s like Christmas or Thanksgiving but without the family feuds and with a pretty racy bpm. I grew up with it, and I will almost certainly die with it, or perhaps from it. IT fave us ABBA, people!!! Celine Dion won in 1988, representing Switzerland!!

I have often thought that if Americans were more exposed to this wonder there would not only be a huge surge in the understanding of British wit and irony, but they would perhaps be able to appreciate without shame the value of a good old-fashioned tacky pop song. I feel my American friends are so very worried about seeming gauche or vulgar when it comes to pop music. It’s only when certain styles of music are placed within the ironic context of retro that Americans can fully enjoy them. We Europeans have never had that problem. Sometimes the lowest common denominator is a positive thing, and people can bond over their love of pop trash.”

On Long Haul Flights

“I love long flights. The feeling of being completely unreachable is something I savour, and the limbolike state of being, having departed but not arrived, somehow allows me to catch up with myself, to regroup and check in. It’s a little contrary to think that I look forward to careering through the skies in a metal-fatigued box in order to gain some feeling of inner calm, but that’s the way I roll”