“It was something I was interested in,” Kingsley, a PHS member, said. “I’ve donated to Toys for Tots before.”

Kingsley and other members helped Zany Brainy, a toy store in Crossgates Mall, collect money for Toys for Tots by wrapping gifts for customers and encouraging them to donate towards the charity.PHS helped to raise about $50 in one day out of more than $600 raised by Zany Brainy, Kingsley said. Kingsley and PHS members will participate in the program again this year.

PHS was created in 1991 to bring honors students together in an effort to improve the community. Members are re-quired to maintain a GPA of 3.75 or higher, and to perform a mini-mum of 10 hours of community service per semester. “This organization is not just a line on a resume,” Jonathan Estreich, the president of PHS, said. “We are committed to service in the University and Albany communities.”

Usually when members find a project they really like, they will often go beyond the required 10 hours of service, Estreich said. “We encourage our members to find community service that interests them.”

PHS members have volunteered for other programs besides Toys for Tots, including the Ronald McDonald House, The New Day Art Institute, Don’t Walk Alone, Daughters of Sarah Nursing Home and the Equinox Thanksgiving dinner, in the past.

PHS is only one of the many University organizations that have improved the community through volunteer service in a trend that shows more and more students volunteering.

Project Renaissance, the athletic teams, and the fraternities and sororities are among the many groups that give of their time and energy. Project Renaissance members exchanged letters with students at School 2 in Troy as part of the program’s curriculum. Recently, the University students visited their pen pals at their school.

“I could see that they were very happy when we walked in,” Ken Metty, a Project Renaissance student, said. “They were all smiling and having a good time.” Metty has coached youth soccer teams, and said that he loves working with children. He plans to volunteer again in the future.

The Troy students asked their pen pals questions about things like their families and their favorite foods, then they switched places and the University students asked the questions.

Megan Downey, another student involved in Project Renaissance, felt they really helped the kids. “A lot of them don’t see a lot of positive things in their lives and this gives them something to look forward to,” she said.

Athletes and coaches from the soccer, lacrosse, basketball, softball and baseball teams introduced children to their respective sports when they hosted the Kids Sports Challenge as part of the Times Union’s Race for Literacy Oct. 14. Each sport hosted mini-clinics designed to teach kids both the athletic and scholastic aspects of sports.

The members of the 13 fraternities under the Inter Fraternity Council (IFC) are required to perform 15 hours of community service. On Oct. 29, the IFC hosted the Bachelor Charity Auction to raise money for the American Federation for Teen Suicide Prevention. They raffled off CDs, computer software, and a trip to Cancun in drawings held throughout the night. They also ‘auctioned off’ two bachelors from each fraternity. Jay Freilich, the president of the IFC, said they raised about $1,100.

NYS Teacher Caliber Lowest in Its Cities, Says UAlbany Study
By Vinny Reda
The quality of teachers in New York State is much worse in urban areas, where teachers with no prior experience and with fewer qualifications are an increasing proportion of new hires and where black and Latino students are more likely to have lower quality teachers than typical white or non-poor students.

These are among the findings in a study conducted by two University at Albany faculty members and one doctoral student for the New York State Educational Finance Research Consort-ium and released earlier this month. It is titled “The Labor Market for Public School Teachers: A Descriptive Analysis of New York State’s Teacher Workforce.”

The study of 30 years of state teaching records by Hamilton Lankford, associate professor of economics; James Wyckoff, associate professor of public administration; and Frank Papa, a UAlbany doctoral student in public administration and policy, details how teachers in New York City and the state’s next four largest urban areas - Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Yonkers - are more likely to lack certification, to have failed certification exams, and to have attended less competitive colleges.

“This pattern is particularly true for New York City, and it has remained stable over the last 15 years,” said Wyckoff. The report shows that qualification differences in smaller city regions - such as Albany-Schenectady-Troy - and their suburbs are less dramatic, with the areas of difference being in overall experience and in past failure on certification exams.

The report also states that while salaries for starting teachers in New York City are about 25 percent lower than those for teachers starting careers in the New York suburbs - representing an increasing pay gap since 1990 - salaries of public school teachers in the four other metropolitan areas of the state are equal to or higher than those paid to teachers in nearby suburbs.

Another striking finding is that first-time teachers in New York City are not only far more likely to leave the New York public school system than are teachers from other areas, but they are far less likely to then become public school teachers in any other New York public school. Overall, said the report, teachers who leave the school where they began their careers are generally higher quality teachers than those who remain.

An article about the study was featured in The New York Times Nov. 5.

Genetic Fingerprinting is for the Birds
By Greta Petry
When behavioral ecologist Jerram Brown started studying the Mexican Jay in 1969, could he have envisioned himself one day using genetic fingerprinting to establish the paternity of this social bird? Perhaps not. Yet he is doing just that.

“One trend that is developing is the use of molecular techniques to study behavior. We identify the paternity of the jays using a method that is similar to genetic fingerprinting but employs microsatellites,” he said.

Why would this be necessary? This is, after all, the world of birds, and not humans, and no jay will be sued for paternity.

As it turns out, Brown and his wife, Esther, who shares much of the work, have found that the female Mexican Jay mates with more than one male. In fact, 60 percent of the mothers have young in the nest with two or more fathers. As if this weren’t complicated enough, sometimes the mother leaves her young altogether to the care of helper birds, and she goes off to start a second brood.

“We look at what are the advantages to the female Mexican Jay of mating with more than one male. Is the second male genetically superior to the first?” Brown asked.

His current work on The Fitness Consequences of Extra-pair Fertilizations is funded by a $296,661 grant from the National Science Foundation that began in March and runs through February of 2003. Another study on Microsatellite DNA Analysis of Parentage was funded with a $104,000 grant that was completed in 1998. Most of his funding over the years has been from the NSF.

Both studies are examples of the types of questions sociobiology seeks to address. “Everything I have done in my life is related to sociobiology in an ecological context. We look at the origins of biodiversity through natural selection,” said Brown, who joined the University in 1978. He noted that his study of the Mexican Jay is the longest continuously running study of any bird by one person.

Brown has had a remarkably diverse research career, with significant contributions in neurobiology, ethology, evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology and sociobiology. In all of these areas, the hallmark of his work has been insightful thinking that has, in each case, brought new clarity to major conceptual issues in the field. He spearheaded the first international meeting of practitioners in the emerging field of behavioral ecology in Albany in 1986, and is generally recognized as the world’s leading theoretician in the areas of cooperative and communal breeding in vertebrates. Earlier this year, he was one of three winners of the Excellence in Research Award.

“The bottom line is that at this school, the biodiversity program grew out of the behavioral ecology focus, as it did at other schools, and (sociobiologist) Edward Wilson is the best example,” said Brown.

Another example of a behavioral ecologist is Jane Goodall, who studied how natural selection produces differences in behavior among the apes. “Most scientists think it is interaction with the environment through natural selection that causes differences in behavior among species,” Brown said.

In 1975 he published The Evolution of Behavior, which has been ranked among the 10 most important books in animal behavior by the Animal Behavior Society. This book helped pave the way for the explosive development of the fields of behavioral ecology and sociobiology that occurred during the 1980s.

Brown’s work has attracted graduate students from around the world. He currently works with four of them and serves on the dissertation committees of six others.

“We bring good students to the University. One of my students turned down a $25,000-a-year fellowship at Harvard. He is exceptional,” said Brown. “We’ve had excellent students from all over the world: England, Germany, India, Taiwan, China, Colombia, Chile, and Venezuela. One of our alumni, Stuart Strahl, Ph.D. ’85, is vice president of the National Audubon Society. Another is on the faculty of the National Taiwan Normal University.”

Brown’s study of Mexican Jays is conducted in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona; field researchers stay in Portal, Ariz., at the Southwestern Research Station of the American Museum of Natural History.

“The birds live primarily in large groups of 5 to 25. Several pairs will breed in the same territory. Many of the birds are helpers who do not breed but who help feed the young. We colorband their legs and take blood samples,” Brown said.

In addition to allowing observers to record the behavior of individuals, colorbanding made it possible to acquire detailed knowledge of the reproductive success, dispersal and survival of individuals each year.

“We have birds that are 20 years old. We can tell who mated with whom and who their offspring are,” said Brown, who earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. “We know many things about them. Mothers incubate their own eggs exclusively. The whole group hangs around in the same territory and defends it all year. Ninety percent of the offspring, if they are still alive, stay with their parents for the first year.”

In the fall Brown teaches Behavioral Ecology for advanced undergraduates and graduate students. Each spring, he teaches a two-credit course on Animal Social Systems, which is condensed into the first quarter. In March he leaves for Arizona, where he returns to record the latest data on the jays.

First Report is Released on the Changing Face of State and Local Government Workforces in the 1990s
By Vinny Reda
In an eight-year period of declining state and local government workforces in the 1990s, women’s share of this shrinking pie grew slightly, with downsizing hitting the lowest paying jobs hardest, and all groups of women except African Americans experiencing gains in the highest paying jobs.

These are some of the findings in a new study from UAlbany’s Center for Women in Government, which analyzed state-by-state data from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s biennial surveys covering 1990 through 1997. (The latter was the latest year for which data were available.)

Professional and protective service jobs in state and local governments increased during the covered period by 8 and 10 percent, respectively, according to the report. “Downsizing hit the lowest paying jobs hardest, affecting both women and men in those jobs,” said Catherine White Berheide, a Skidmore College sociologist on sabbatical at the Center for Women in Government and editor of the report.

“While this was occurring, however, the proportion of jobs increased significantly for Latina (26 percent), Asian American (26 percent) and American Indian (19 percent) women,” she said. African American women showed only a modest gain (1.5 percent) in state and government workforces, while white women’s proportion actually declined 3 percent.

In the professional job category, Latina women’s share showed the greatest increase of any group between 1990 and 1997, 53.7 percent. In the highest paid job category - officials and administrators - all groups of women experienced gains except African American women, who lost 5.3 percent of these leadership positions.

The report includes a state-by-state breakout of percent of change for women in state and local government jobs by race, ethnicity and region. “To fully understand the complete pattern of job gains or losses, it’s important to see where they occurred,” said Berheide. “For instance, downsizing hit the Northeast and Midwest workforces hardest, while workforces in the South and Far West regions actually grew.”

The report’s publication was supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation. The Center for Women in Government was founded at the University in 1978. Through research, training, teaching and networking, it aims to strengthen women’s role in public policy, advance equity for women in the workplace, and inform policy makers on issues related to women, children and families.

Home Page/ Front Page/ Campus News/ Features/ Sports/ Date Book