April 22, 2013
News Digest: Husky Green Awards, oceanbound on Earth Day, join Trash-in Wednesday, spring-clean your inbox
Husky Green Awards announced
Husky Green Awards went to seven individuals and teams, with winners announced April 19 during the kick-off event for Earth Day on the University of Washington campus.
The award, now in its fourth year, recognizes students, faculty and staff who have demonstrated leadership, initiative and dedication to environmental stewardship and sustainability. A new award this year, the Husky Green Legacy Award, went to the UPass Advisory Board.
Other winners are:
- Duncan Clauson, graduate student, Evans School
- Sunni Wissmer, undergraduate student, College of Built Environment
- Victoria Rice Bean, operating room nurse, surgical department, UW Medical Center
- Brenda Nissley, Harborview Medical Center
- Green Wall, College of Built Environment
- Facilities Construction Shop 54, Facilities Services
Oceanbound on Earth Day
Oceanographers with the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory leave on Earth Day aboard the UW’s Thomas G. Thompson to redeploy two ocean monitoring buoys in the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary. Two teachers will join the cruise and share the experience via blogs and Skype chats with their classrooms in Lake Quinault and Bainbridge Island.
Chief scientist Matthew Alford will be collecting data on deep-ocean waves, while Jan Newton will be gathering real-time data on ocean acidification. Six UW graduate students are also onboard. Follow Alford’s blog for updates on the cruise that runs through April 26.
Annual ‘UW Trash-In’ Wednesday
April 24, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Red Square, volunteers will suit up and sort through one day’s worth of trash from around the UW campus. The annual UW Trash-In is a fun and insightful way to explore how much compostable and recyclable material is still being thrown away on campus.
After a brief introduction to the sorting process, volunteers are given cover-up suits, gloves and shoe covers, and sent to a sorting station. Bags of trash are emptied onto tables and volunteers sort materials by type into nearby bins for compost, mixed containers, mixed paper and garbage. There’ll be music, sorting games and challenges.
“Even avid recyclers or composters can learn a lot at this event,” said Jennifer Perkins with the UW Environmental Stewardship and Sustainability office. “Plus, there is a lot of laughing and dancing. I never knew how fun sorting trash could be.”
Don’t just save everything: Tips to spring-clean your inbox
We tend to keep nearly all email thinking it will be useful someday. But usually old emails are just obsolete clutter that slow our Outlook accounts and make it hard to find what we actually need.
For most UW employees, 70 to 80 percent of email messages can be deleted, according to email policies provided by UW’s Records Management.
Taking a closer look at how to comply with the university’s requirements for keeping records, UW Human Resources staff have come up with some tips for downsizing inboxes:
- Click on “Rules/create rule” to automatically move mail into designated, organized folders.
- Create “Quick Steps” and apply them with one click to do things such as create a task with a start and end date, change a message’s status, or flag a message.
- Use the “Clean up” function to remove redundant emails whose content is included in other messages.
- Once an email has been read or acted on, file it or delete it immediately.
- On the File tab, periodically check the bar under “Mailbox Cleanup,” and if you don’t have much storage left do a more extensive purge of email folders and messages, especially those with attachments.
Read more tips on records management in an article by UWHR’s Human Resources Records Management Group.
