UW Strike vs NIH Salary Caps — Postdocs deserve better pay — Let’s fix the system

Science ran a story on the current UW labor strike for postdoc and research staff salaries. The story mentions that “The strike comes on the heels of a change in state law on 1 January, which mandated that overtime-exempt salaried employees at organizations with 51 or more employees be paid at least $65,484 annually—which is…

Launching the UW Center for Environmental Health Equity (UW CEHE)

Last week, we officially launched a new center at the University of Washington. The UW Center for Environmental Health Equity is one of 17 US EPA and DOE-funded Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers (TCTACs). The UW CEHE is a $12 million initiative to serve Region 10 states (Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington). The center provides…

Soundscape Field Recording Research

Learning resources Here are some resources I found for making high-quality audio field recordings: https://acousticnature.com/ https://soundxplorer.com https://mindful-audio.com Low-cost all-in-one field recorder You’ll find recommendations for low-cost (<$200) all-in-one field recorders, such as the Zoom h1n. The issue with these is that they require setting gain levels. I tested the Zoom h1n, and the nice thing…

An Emoji Keyboard for Mac

There are Instructables online for making your own emoji keyboard using an inexpensive numeric keypad. However, the guide is for PC, and uses a PC-based sottware called AutoHotKey to remap keyboard keys to different values. I’m mostly a Mac user, and there are lots of options for accessing emoji. Most Mac users already know that…

Earth Day Air Fair

It was great to join the Air Fair hosted by DRCC, and to spend the day with the Duwamish Valley community. There were a number of tables at the Fair, each one providing information and activities related to environmental quality and justice. Community members came by the learn and share their experiences, and pick up…

NIOSH e-News on the WA workers heat exposure study

NIOSH e-News had a nice summary of the recent paper by Flunker et al., on heat exposures experienced by WA workers. The NIOSH e-News summary is available here. The paper is… Flunker, J.C., Zuidema, C., Jung, J., Kasner, E., Cohen, M.,Seto, E., Austin, E., Spector, J.T. (2022) Potential impacts of different occupational outdoor heat exposure thresholds…

Pollution Prevention for WA State

I was looking at US EPA’s P2 program yesterday, which has a very data-rich tool to identify potential opportunities to reduce the toxic release inventory across the US. The tool is called the “Pollution Prevention (P2) Environmental Justice (EJ) Facility Mapping Tool” [here’s the link to it]. There’s a lot going on with the web…

Tribal Roundtable for the Environmental Health Disparities Map

It was great to present at the recent Tribal Roundtable hosted by WA Dept of Health to discuss the Washington Environmental Health Disparities Map and ongoing tribal consultation. In the presentation, I spoke about how the EHD map is an ongoing process, in which we should continue to seek the best methods and data to…