Coming soon: Revamped UW faculty/staff and UW Today Web pages will feature a variety of changing stories, videos, news feeds, and events; highlight current date and weather; and be refreshed more often. A beta release of the Faculty & Staff Insider provides standing links to key newsletters (HR Resource and IT Connect), the Red Square Cam, selected lectures, and other content of interest to faculty and staff. The new UW Today page (launching soon) will encompass the entire UW, with feeds for news, sports, KEXP, KUOW, Twitter, and Facebook, plus videos, community photos, and more.

Boeing's engineering innovations are shrinking its domestic carbon footprint by 25 percent, and the company is leading worldwide industry efforts to enable zero carbon growth for air travel. This story will be featured in the 2011 Engineering Lecture Series—Re-Engineering Aerospace: Flying Cleaner, Greener, Smarter—airing on UWTV. Watch “Shrinking the Aerospace Carbon Footprint” with UW alumna and Boeing Vice President for Environment, Health and Safety Mary Armstrong on December 21 at 6:00 p.m., or online any time. The full three-part series will be available online in January.

WebQ now provides greater participant management features so you can track who has started, viewed, or submitted your online survey, and when. You can use WebQ to quickly build and administer online surveys and quizzes, and either view results online or download them for further analysis. WebQ is one of the Catalyst Web Tools, designed to aid communication and collaboration in teaching, learning, research, and everyday work for anyone in the UW community. Learn more about tracking survey participation.

Interested in holiday food traditions in other countries? Curious about the history of gingerbread? Wondering what to eat for Kwanzaa? Check the Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, featuring entries by historians, anthropologists, and other food researchers. This is just one selection from the extensive eBook collection provided by UW Libraries.

The UW Student Technology Fee Committee is now accepting proposals from UW units for projects that help meet the technology needs of UW students in furthering their educational and research goals. There are six main funding categories: computer labs, remote computing, frontier technology, machinery and research equipment, collaborative and portable, and software. Read the Request for Proposals for details and submit yours by January 11, 2012.

Online tools for collaboration and sharing scientific information are radically shifting how scientific discoveries are made, but are cultural barriers prohibiting their use by some? Quantum computation expert Michael Nielsen, author of the recently published book Reinventing Discovery—The New Era of Networked Science, on December 8 delivered the UW Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Distinguished Lecture, now online.