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SPORTS — 7

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Tuesday, February , 

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SERVING THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA SINCE 1899

Syria strife hits home With war-torn nation facing uncertain future, students struggle to cope By Amer Taleb

World-famous neurosurgeon visits campus

FOR THE DAILY WILDCAT

By Danielle Salas

A

rmed with only a stick on the outskirts of his Syrian neighborhood, Mohammad Hilou would keep watch at night and warn people if he saw the Syrian military approaching. They came one night, and they took Hilou with them. His body — riddled with bullets and with a hole drilled in his head — was found the next morning. He was married, with two children. “He wasn’t a hard-line revolutionary, just a normal person,” said Osamah Eljerdi, a molecular and cellular biology junior who described his relative’s gruesome death. “But he felt obligated to protect his neighborhood.” Hilou is among the thousands of Syrians who’ve been killed by their government since the revolution started a year ago. Government control makes it difficult to communicate with anyone in Syria. In Lebanon, which borders

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AMER TALEB / FOR THE DAILY WILDCAT

Graduate student Matt Flannes, who teaches a class on the Arab Spring, listens to a student discuss foreign SYRIA, 2 intervention in Libya. The students also debated whether or not the U.S. should intervene in Syria.

Campus groups vie for share of $1.5 million in fee money On first day of hearings, Student Services Fee Advisory Board allocates $810,600 By Stephanie Casanova

SURGEON, 2

Breaking down the numbers

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The Student Services Fee Advisory Board granted $232,000 to Project RUSH, $225,900 to a new academic probation program and $161,500 to Scholarship Universe during its allocation hearings on Monday. The Student Services Fee is an annual, $80 charge assessed to all UA students. The board then partitions out that money to campus groups. Based on conservative estimates for fiscal year 2013, the board will allocate about $1.5 million, though organizations have requested about $2 million. The board allocated $810,600 of that on Monday, easily passing some proposals while making changes to or denying others. Project RUSH, a project that created jobs and a speedier process for students to call financial aid with questions, was granted their funding yearly for two years without much debate. A third year of funding was turned down to maintain flexibility of future funds, said Daniel Altomare, a senior studying business economics and history and co-chair of the board. After much debate, the board passed a request for funding that will assist a pilot program, Pathway to Academic Student Success

For Dr. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa, an ex-migrant worker and world-renowned neurosurgeon at John Hopkins University, patients are inspiring and provide enriching personal histories. The UA’s neuroscience department welcomed Quiñones-Hinojosa on Monday to learn about his life and experiences. John Hildebrand, neuroscience department head, opened the 45-minute presentation on Quiñones-Hinojosa by speaking about his “indomitable and optimistic spirit.” “Having such an optimistic spirit is important in his field of work where every patient will die — even after surgery,” Hildebrand said. Quiñones-Hinojosa said he is passionate about working in an intense field such as neurosurgery and finds his patients motivatonal. Migdalia Gonzalez, a biochemistry senior, attended the presentation and said she hopes to one day work in the same field as Quiñones-Hinojosa. “I heard about him six or seven years ago, and I thought he was so inspirational that we are so similar,” she said. “My parents are from the same place he is and I’m also working in a neural science lab.” Gonzalez’s parents are migrants from Mexicali, Mexico, and arrived in the states in the 1980s, which is around the same time Quiñones-Hinojosa migrated to the San Joaquin Valley at the age of 19. Quiñones-Hinojosa grew up as the middle child and attended first grade at the age of 5, which was around the same age he also began working at a gas station to help support his family. By age 11, he began working in cotton and tomato fields and continued to do so after arriving in the United States. After he moved to California, he started taking English as a second language courses at the local community college, and after becoming a U.S. citizen was able to attend the University of California, Berkeley. He later attended Harvard University where he saw his first open brain surgery, which inspired him to become a neurosurgeon.

UA GROUPS

2011

2012

• Safe Ride

$140,000

$9,500

• Project RUSH

$112,900

$232,000

• Student Transitions

$55,100

$134,200

• Next Steps Center

$0

$88,500

In total, $810,600 has been allocated out of $1.5 million. The rest of the $80 per-student fee will be allocated Friday. Source: Student Services Fee Advisory Board

Probation Program, which is intended to help students on academic probation maintain good grades and stay in school. Many board members were concerned that the program requires students to take initiative and go to these classes, which is unlikely for students on academic probation to do unless their reliance on financial aid is enough of an incentive. “I think that it’s a good start for a pilot program being that our retention rates are not as high as we would like them to be here at the University of Arizona,” said Blanca Delgado, a public health junior. “Even though it is a

voluntary approach, I think that it may be a wakeup call for some students.” Scholarship Universe requested $350,000 in funds to both maintain and expand its website. The program’s application focused on expanding Scholarship Universe and trademarking it for sale to other schools, something the board members found problematic. After discussing the effectiveness and common problems of the website, the members decided expansion was unnecessary and not something student

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SERVICE FEE, 3

Grads’ business turns tables into tablets By Kyle Mittan DAILY WILDCAT

A pair graduates from the Eller College of Management have developed a digital menu service that allows restaurant patrons to browse, order and pay for meals from their table using electronic tablets. JusTouch, a company founded by May 2011 graduates Josh Banayan and Jarrod Carr, started out as a project for the entrepreneurship program during their senior year and quickly became a company of its own. After placing second in the college’s year-end showcase competition, Banayan and Carr quickly gave up their own post-graduation plans to instead pursue a future as entrepreneurs. “Jarrod was supposed to go to law school, and

I was supposed to get my third major and come back for another semester,” said Banayan, who was studying entrepreneurship and management information systems when he co-founded JusTouch. “Both of us decided to scratch that … we launched the company as soon as the program was done.” The service itself implements its own devices and software into today’s restaurant setup to create a system that allows waiters and waitresses more time to focus on customer interactions and less time on the technical aspect of taking orders and payments, according to the JusTouch co-founders. When customers go to a restaurant using the JusTouch service, the hostess seats the patrons and hands them a 10-inch or 7-inch tablet, depending on the location. A restaurant’s entire

menu can be accessed from the device. Currently, the company’s two interfaces consist of food and wine. From the menu, users can filter their search by factors like price or type, and can see pictures of each selection, its nutritional information and make changes to the meal accordingly. Much like an Internet browser, tabs for each customer are also available, allowing patrons to divide their checks between themselves, then swipe their credit or debit card on the device. The tablets themselves are manufactured in China, specifically for JusTouch. While the device may seem to replace a waiter or waitress, Banayan and Carr said that the system is meant to complement a wait staff, not supersede it. “Our goal is to keep the restaurant process as close to what it is now as possible,”

Banayan said. Additionally, Carr said they predict that tips for waiters and waitresses will go up, based on the logic that the technology will allow them to focus more on the customer. The device also allows for a number of options on what percentage to tip, ranging from 10 percent to 20 percent. Citing a study done on New York taxi cabs that implement the same tipping options, Carr said that tipping increased by 22 percent. JusTouch tablets, he said, will likely have a similar effect. There are currently two restaurants in Tucson that are using the JusTouch system. PY Steakhouse is offering its wine menu on the tablets, and a contract has been signed at Taco Bron in the Tucson International Airport, which should

MENU, 2


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