IAN Press has added the capacity of electronic books, which enhances access to IAN publications. Electronic books provide an environmentally friendly format, reduce the cost to readers, avoid shipping costs and delays and avoid having books going out of print. Hard copy books are also available and there are various occasions when the hard copy books will be a preferred format. But ebooks will likely become the standard in the future, and IAN Press is proud to be adding this capacity.

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The Chesapeake Bay Program has a long history of setting goals, and unfortunately an equally long history of NOT reaching these goals. The initial Chesapeake Bay Program goal, set in 1984, was for a 40% reduction in nutrient loads entering the Bay, specifically nitrogen and phosphorus. In spite of considerable investments in various nutrient reduction activities, this original goal has not been met, yet a variety of new goals have superseded these original goals.

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Ricky Arnold, a former graduate student at Horn Point Laboratory, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, stopped by Cambridge, Maryland on his way to the Wallops Island NASA facility. Ricky's last time in Cambridge was his thesis defense, nearly twenty years ago. Since his thesis defense, Ricky has lived in several countries, including Indonesia and Morocco, but has been in Houston, Texas for the past 6 years.

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This blog post discusses the seminar given by Dr Heath Kelsey, of EcoCheck, at the IAN Seminar Series on April 22, 2010. A wide ranging discussion of bacteria, viruses and contaminants in water and shellfish followed the seminar. Typical of discussions of bacteria in water or shellfish, the issue of the different methods was raised. The Most Probable Numbers technique used for faster turnaround (hours) was contrasted with the Membrane Filtration method which takes ca. 24 hours.

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IAN has developed an intern program: a short-term, immersive and experiential education in science communication applications. IAN interns typically come from a diversity of good undergraduate programs and many of them go on to a diversity of good graduate programs following their IAN internship. IAN interns develop a range of job skills, master various software, and fully integrate into the IAN program for several months and up to a year.

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A group of Integration and Application Network staff taught a one day science communication course at the Oxford Cooperative Laboratory on April 19. Bill Dennison, Jane Thomas, Jane Hawkey and Caroline Wicks covered the principles of science communication and provided lectures, activities, demonstrations and exercises for creating conceptual diagrams, PowerPoint presentations, and design/layout of posters and newsletters. Overall, there was a lot of material packed into the one day course.

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The Erasmus Mundus program, a European Union sponsored educational initiative, has a joint Master's program in Water and Coastal Management. The Master's program includes a lecture based phase, which Tim Carruthers has taught twice; once in Faro, Portugal at the Universidade do Algarve and once at the Universidad de Cadiz, in Cadiz, Spain. Following the lecture phase of the thesis, which is held at different participating universities in Europe, students produce a thesis project.

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The University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science has embraced the concept of scholarship defined as discovery, integration, application and teaching (Boyer, 1990). Discovery can be defined as learning new things; integration as putting this learning into a knowledge context; application as using this knowledge; teaching as transferring this knowledge to others. The Integration and Application Network was created to focus on the integration and application components of scholarship.

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The grading system used in the EcoCheck environmental report cards is a simple, systematic ranking scale. The one hundred point scale is divided into five equal categories; A (80-100), B (80-60), C (60-40), D (40-20) and F (20-0). Furthermore, the grades have a plus and minus scale, so that the upper 5 points of the 20 point range results in a plus score and the lower 5 points of the 20 point range results in a minus score.

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The concept of Chesapeake environmental literacy derives from a series of programs that have established various literacy principles, for example, ocean literacy (www.coexploration.org). These programs have distilled the essence of what an informed person needs to know, thus informing both formal (e.g., classroom) and informal (e.g., museums) educators.

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