The New York Restoration Project is conducting a series of teacher training workshops in northern Manhattan in June. They are open to all educators.

Wednesday, June 11, 11 a.m.-1 p.m. - Parks as Classrooms at Fort Tryon Park, led by Jill Weiss, Environmental Education Consultant.

Monday, June 16, 2-4 p.m. - New York City drinking water supply - its quality and history, led by Kim Estes-Fradis, Education Director of the Department of Environmental Protection, teacher center at IS 90 (Jumel Place and Edgecomb Ave.) or at PS 5 (call to confirm).

All workshops are free of charge. Educational materials will be provided and refreshments served.

Please contact Jane Jackson, NYRP's Director of Programming, at 212-333-2552 or jjackson@nyrp.org to register and for more information.

A one-day workshop for 4th through 12th Grade Teachers. Sponsored by US Fish and Wildlife, NY Sea Grant, and the Great Lakes Program.

The Erie Canal has historically played an important role in the introduction of invasive (exotic) plants and animals into and between the Great Lakes, Hudson River, and the Finger Lakes watersheds. Learn about the Erie Canal and invasive species and how you and your students can help prevent their introduction and spread.

Tuesday, July 29th - Lockport - (Includes a boat tour of the canal) - 10:00 - 3:00 pm

Thursday, August 21st - Chittenango Landing Canal Boat Museum - Half-day session, no lunch provided - 12:00 - 3:30 pm

Come join us for hands-on activities and a demonstration of biological sampling techniques that could be used with your students for a monitoring program. Classroom materials (and lunch provided for Lockport session) - free!

For more information and registration, contact:
Helen Domske, New York Sea Grant, Great Lakes Program (716) 645-3610, e-mail: hmd4@cornell.edu or Mike Goehle, US Fish and Wildlife Service (716) 691-5456, e-mail: mike_goehle@fws.gov

Web users who stick to one or two search engines and learn those well will have better results for their queries than users who try the same query or various engines, a Penn State researcher says.

"There are no wholesale rules about structuring a query that will work on multiple search engines," said Bernard J. Jansen, assistant professor of information sciences and technology (IST). "And what works on one engine, such as narrowing a query, can have the opposite effect on other search engines."

The research is detailed in the paper, "The Effects of Search Engines and Query Operators on Top Ranked Results," presented recently at IEEE's International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and Computing." Jansen's co-author is Caroline Eastman, Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina.

The researchers' central question was how the use of query operators or markers, such as "and," "or," "must appear" and "phrase," affected searches on three popular Web engines. Information retrieval experts argue that searches with those markers will yield better results and more relevant information, but only about one in 10 Web users write queries with those operators, Jansen said.

To determine the effectiveness of the query operators, Jansen and Eastman selected 100 queries with markers from the transaction log of a major Web search service. These were first submitted to Google, America On-Line Search (AOL) and Microsoft Search (MSN) with the top 10 results noted for comparison. After removing the query operators, the queries were resubmitted to the search engines. If the results were different, then the query operators were doing their job of providing better results. But on average, 60 percent to 70 percent of the results were the same whether the query had markers or not, a result that surprised him and others, Jansen said.

Furthermore, different markers yielded different results depending upon the search engine. The "or" was the only operator to significantly change the results from Google while the number of results with "must appear" returned identical results fewer times on MSN than on Google and AOL. That's why users who understand how best to search on one or two engines should employ them until systems designers figure out how to personalize information retrieval, Jansen said.

"We need to find something beyond Boolean markers that recognizes when someone is having term problems and that can change a phrase to something else without the user even knowing," he added. "Personalization of systems and intelligent systems would better help users."

Useful Websites

The below websites on invasives contains lots of info and links.

Invasive Species Management:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/invasivespecies/

Great poster and factsheets:
http://www.aphis.usda.gov/oa/invasive/invasive.html

Wildlife Counts Software

Demonstration version available free at: http://www.wildlifecounts.com

This could be a fun and interesting learning experience for school classroom use. This program uses computer generated images to simulate aggregations of wildlife, and greatly enhances the user's ability to quickly estimate large numbers of animals. Earlier versions of the Wildlife Counts software have been in use by educational institutions, wildlife enthusiasts and professionals for many years. It has now been updated with vastly superior computer graphics resulting in screen images that are often difficult to distinguish from photographs.

By using this tool, observers are able to practice the art of estimating wildlife populations and receive immediate feedback from the computer allowing them to increase their accuracy and efficiency. Inexperienced observers usually have counts far below the actual number of animals. This computer program quickly helps observers to improve their counts.

Educators use this program to give students experience with one of the common duties of a wildlife biologist. It also is a fun way for students to learn statistical concepts such as mean, variance, and bias using their own estimation data.

Lake Ontario Environmental Science

Shipboard Course on Lake Ontario
Sunday, July 20 - Saturday 26, 2003

Join us aboard the US Environmental Protection Agency's "Lake Guardian" for a hands-on, experiential course to study Lake Ontario. Participants will board the ship in Buffalo, NY, and cruise through the Welland Canal before spending time on the waters of Lake Ontario.

The ship will return to Buffalo, NY at the end of the cruise.

Cost: $1,000 for 3-graduate credits at Niagara University, plus $175 for food & supplies.

Application Materials: Interested teachers must send their name, address, phone, email, school name and address along with a 1-2 page application letter. This letter must include related course work and educational experiences, rationale for taking this course and how they will infuse the Great Lakes materials into their classrooms.

COURSE WEB SITE: http://faculty.niagara.edu/wje/ontario.htm

For more information or to apply contact:
Helen Domske, Associate Director - Great Lakes Program at SUNY Buffalo, NY Sea Grant Extension, 716-645-3610, hmd4@cornell.edu

Pillaging Pike

Northern pike are popular fish in some parts of North America but they're unwelcome intruders in others. Northern pike are aggressive freshwater fish, and they have a reputation as good fighters among recreational anglers. But northern pike are not popular everywhere. Southcentral Alaska is one of those places.

The pike are native to the northern and far western parts of Alaska. But they've invaded watersheds in the southcentral part of the state. The invasion was started by illegal stocking and helped along by floods. Alaska wildlife officials say the pike are now chewing up some populations of native fish.

Dave Rutz is a biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and he manages fisheries in the southcentral part of the state.

"In these shallow, weedy, interconnecting lakes, where there's no place for prey to go, no place for them to be able to spawn without getting surprised, those systems just get completely wiped out."

Rutz has seen pike populations explode. Twenty years ago, he did surveys by plane over a watershed that included Alexander Lake. He says it has changed completely.

"I used to fly surveys in the early '80's when the pike weren't that prolific yet. In one particular system, we had probably three to four thousand spawning sockeye salmon, another ten thousand king salmon upstream of that lake.

Rutz says the same thing has happened elsewhere in Alaska. The northern pike is now listed as one of Alaska's biggest problems with invasive species.

Credit: Earthwatch Radio at http://ewradio.org