Slashdot Mirror
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...
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!
...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.
Yeah, go tell it to my IT department and they will politely tell you to fuck off. Approved devices only. Also, I don't want to push my tablet computer across a conference table so somebody else can read it. Much easier with a piece of paper. And what if I want to print a copy for everybody? Take 5 tablet PCs?