UMW Awarded National Service-Learning Grant
The Center for Teaching Excellence and The Center for Honor, Leadership and Service were awarded a 2012-2014 service-learning seminar grant through the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) and the Bringing Theory to Practice Project.
Dr. Mary Kayler (Director, Center for Teaching Excellence and Innovation), Dr. John P. Broome (Assistant Professor, College of Education) and Christina Eggenberger (Director of Service, Center for Honor, Leadership, and Service) received funding to host a seminar entitled, “Civic Engagement: Recasting and Drawing Upon a Wider Net.”
The seminar to be held in late January is designed to bring together faculty from the College of Arts and Sciences, College of Education, and College of Business along with UMW students and local community members to explore and strengthen the role of civic engagement within UMW and with the broader community.
For more information, contact Dr. Mary Kayler, mkayler@umw.edu
Xiaofeng Zhao Presented at Annual Conference
Xiaofeng Zhao
Xiaofeng Zhao, assistant professor in the College of Business, presented “Implementing Statistical Process Control for Customer Waiting Time” at the Decision Science Institute’s annual meeting in San Francisco on Nov. 18. The paper, co-authored with Hui Zhao, has been published in the peer reviewed proceedings. Xiaofeng Zhao also chaired the session on quality management tools.
Knick and McGhee Present at Regional Summit
Susan Knick
Susan Knick, director of conferences and scheduling, and Abbie McGhee, coordinator of community events, recently delivered presentations at the 2012 Regional Summit of the Association of College Conferences and Events Directors – International. The summit was attended by members of institutions of higher education from Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and D.C.
Knick’s presentation, “9-1-1, What’s Your Emergency?” focused on emergency planning and preparations for events and conferences. She has been invited to deliver an extended version of this presentation to the 33rd Annual International Conference of the association this March in Toronto, Canada.
McGhee’s presentation, “No Money, no problem, free online resources, tips and tricks,” focused on free online software that can be used in every day applications.
Abbie McGhee
UMW Orchestra Goes Global (The Free Lance-Star)
Homework Helpers
College of Education students tutor area children — and collect textbooks for a good cause.
Jack Bales Publishes Article in Baseball Journal
Jack Bales, Reference and Humanities Librarian, had his latest baseball article, “‘It Was His Fairness That Caught Wrigley’s Eye’: William L. Veeck’s Journalism Career and His Hiring by the Chicago Cubs,” published as the lead article in the spring 2012 issue of the peer-reviewed Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture. By poring over original source materials, Bales corrected long-held beliefs of how Cubs owner William Wrigley, Jr. met and hired sportswriter Veeck in 1918. He also uncovered new information about Veeck’s early newspaper career. Bales spent a week this summer at the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown, New York, working on several projects. He has shared his findings with other baseball scholars, and his research was mentioned in the December 3 issue of Sports Illustrated.
Dave Toth and Collaborators Publish Papers
Dave Toth, assistant professor of computer science, and his collaborators published two papers in the Journal of Computational Science Education (http://www.jocse.org/). The new issue was released December 1. “Using Supercomputing to Conduct Virtual Screen as Part of the Drug Discovery Process in a Medicinal Chemistry Course” describes how Toth and his collaborator, Dr. Jimmy Franco of the Merrimack College Chemistry Department, taught students in Dr. Franco’s Medicinal Chemistry course how to perform virtual screening with a supercomputer to identify potential drugs. Toth and Franco are finalists for the 2012 Undergraduate Computational Engineering and Sciences (UCES) Award for on this work. The winners of the award will be announced in February 2013 at the SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering. “A Performance Comparison of a Naive Algorithm to Solve the Party Problem using GPUs” describes research Toth and his former student at Merrimack College, Michael Bryant, did with GPUs.
Revised Holiday Schedule 2012-2013
The 2012 Winter Holiday Schedule has been revised. In appreciation for your continued dedication and hard work, President Hurley has awarded an additional day of recognition leave. The winter holiday will now begin on December 20, 2012. The University will be closed on Friday, December 21, 2012.
The 2013 Holiday Schedule has also been revised to reflect the Governor’s additional day of leave. The University will be closed on Friday, March 8, 2013 for Spring Break. If you have questions regarding this schedule, please contact the Office of Human Resources at 654‐1214.
Please see the detailed schedule at: http://www.umw.edu/documents/document/umw-holiday-calendar/.
Office Sustainability Tip of the Week
With Thanksgiving over and some of us still recovering from the craziness of Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, Two-For-One Tuesday, Warehouse Blowout Wednesday (OK, I admit, I may have made some of these titles up….), this is the time of the season where we inevitably start thinking about mail more often than we usually do. Sending out and receiving holiday cards, heading to the Post Office on your lunch break to mail gifts, wondering if your nieces and nephews will get their presents in time for Christmas, anxiously looking out the window for the mail carrier wondering where YOUR present is…we tend to start thinking a bit more about “the mail” than we usually do around this time of year.
So with mail on our minds, do you know how much UNWANTED mail we receive each year? There are estimates that the U.S. Postal Service sends out approximately 90 billion pieces of unsolicited mail/advertising every year. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that about 44% of this mail is tossed away, unopened. So maybe we should take a moment to think about the junk mail we receive in our own offices. Do you continually receive mail addressed to former employees? Catalogs or newsletters from companies that have no relevance to your department? Advertisements for products and services that you have absolutely no interest in? There are services out there (http://www.catalogchoice.org, http://ecocycle.org/junkmail, http://www.greendimes.com, and many others) that you can look into to help reduce the amount of unsolicited mail that you receive from companies . But perhaps the most effective and simplest way to stop getting these items might be to contact the customer service telephone number or send an e-mail to the company’s website and request to be taken off of their mailing list. Companies likely have no more interest in sending unwanted mail to you than you have in receiving it. Spending the few minutes it takes to make a phone call or send out an email seems well worth the time, energy, and waste involved with continually receiving and disposing of unwanted mail. In addition to the obvious waste of paper, think of all the energy needed to haul away all of this unnecessary mail each year. It’s also important to consider how to go about reducing the amount of junk mail that you receive at home. If you want to reduce the volume of unsolicited mail you receive in your own home, Direct Marketing Association (http://www.dmachoice.org) is a free service that helps you manage your mail preferences to reduce the likelihood of receiving mailings from companies/services that you have no interest in.
Hopefully this week’s entry has given you something to think about the next time you open up your mailbox and curiously find a three pound catalog from a North Dakota Soy Candle company (no offense intended towards soy candles OR North Dakota). If you have any suggestions for things we can all do differently each day to create more sustainable office environments, please feel free to leave a comment or email me the idea to be featured in a future Tip of the Week.
The PCS Action Group members for the “Office Sustainability Tip of the Week” are Kevin Caffrey, Elizabeth Sanders, Robert Louzek, and Dre Anthes.
Last week’s tip of the week: Green Thanksgiving