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College To Save Money By Switching Email Font
The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay has come up with an unusual way of saving money: changing their email font. The school expects to use 30% less ink by switching from Arial to Century Gothic. From the article: "Diane Blohowiak is the school's director of computing. She says the new font uses about 30 percent less ink than the previous one. That could add up to real savings, since the cost of printer ink works out to about $10,000 per gallon. Blohowiak says the decision is part of the school's five-year plan to go green. She tells Wisconsin Public Radio it's great that a change that's eco-friendly also saves money."
Only if people are printing emails...
E-mail should stay on e-lectronic media! Unless there is a genuine purpose to have a printed copy of an email, don't print it. Digital archives are much more cost effective than that overflowing file cabinet anyway.
Who was the genius there that had them using ink jet printers instead of laser? Probably the same genius that thinks this will save them money?
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Or, you could stop printing out all of your emails.
Oh, who am I kidding. We've still got professors at my school lecturing with transparencies they produced on typewriters. It's going to be years before the entirety of the faculty is willing to handle paperless communication.
--saint
professors think they are gods of there classrooms and can demand paper copies.
We also think we can demand proper spelling. Now bow before me!
Firstly, train your students that printing up emails is stupid.
Secondly of all, give the students access to community laser printers. We're talking about pennies per page versus small fractions of pennies per page to print (i.e. 10 cents versus 0.001 cents)
Thirdly, switch over to re manufactured inks and toners. If the students are aware that they can buy aftermarket inks and toners, there's another 50% savings off the top (AND it's "green"). There are good companies and there are bad companies. Find someone local. Its supports the nearby economy. If you have problems, you don't have to ship something back to China.
[disclaimer: I work in the reman industry. I'm biased. Lasers tend to be more reliable than reman'd inks. With lasers, you can disassemble everything and replace the parts. With inkjets, it's more like an artform. If the electronics fail (which they often do), the cart is SOL]
...if only for the fact that Century Gothic looks better than Arial.
Another approach would be to ban ridiculous gigantic .sig files, complete with name, email address, snail-mail, address, three phone numbers, URL, twitter link, facebook link, linkedin link, blog link, some kind of logo and a giant block of text mandated by legal. Oh yeah, and coded in HTML so it matches corporate colours. Ugh.
Sometimes I get emails where the sig is longer than the body of the freakin' email.
It has "holes" in the letters to save ink. So instead of 30% less ink usage this college would have about 45% less ink usage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecofont
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
You could also just tell people to stop printing out their emails.
Excellent!!! Can you also tell them to stop shouting, killing, being stupid, go to war?
...email has fonts?
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
I used to accept digital copies. I stopped, for a lot of reasons: unverifiable "I sent it, really, my email must not be working" excuses, file format incompatibilities, people emailing papers during the class sessions that they skipped so that they could finish them, etc.
The physical paper affords a lot of interactions as well - it's easy to gesture over a region of writing, circle it quickly, etc. Most digital versions of those gestures don't work (I could imagine - maybe - some of them working on a pad or tablet, but that's a stretch.) HCI research, trying to identify why an automation effort failed, observed the importance of physical writing in the care of hospital patients noted how much information was stored in the materials. Nurses could identify authors immediately from handwriting; density of writing often cued the dynamics of care; annotations connected writing to clarify the treatment plan, etc.
The biggest reason, however, is that I don't want to have to sit in an office to read and grade dozens of papers. I want to be able to do it on a plane, a train, a bus, on the beach, etc.
(or to use a more common vernacular, we're 'loosers').
And since most people can't tell the difference between loose and lose, most of them just wind up calling you a loser......ah, the stupidity of the masses.....