Student participation is focus of debate changes News Tuesday March 3, 2015
Students to gain Dropbox storage
Baseball hosts Malibu for a midweek clash
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Sports
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Volume 97 Issue 19
The Student Voice of California State University, Fullerton
Professional lizard Student pride chaser: Jason Wallace focus in ‘Titans’
Fifty gigabytes of cloud storage to be free to students
Campus community gather to discuss strategic plan
SVETLANA GUKINA Daily Titan
DEVIN ULMER Daily Titan
The Cal State Fullerton Department of Information Technology is preparing to offer free Dropbox accounts to provide a better student-teacher file-sharing experience and increased storage to students. Students will receive an email invitation to register for their Dropbox account sometime this month, said Rommel Hidalgo, assistant vice president for information technology and IT division financial manager. In its pilot phase, the number of Dropbox accounts will be limited to 5,000, and students will have to register for the limited accounts on a firstcome, first-served basis, he said. The IT department spent $250,000 on Dropbox for faculty, staff and students. $41,000 of that amount paid for the 5,000 Dropbox accounts for students, Hidalgo said in an email. The free accounts will belong to students for the entire time they are enrolled in CSUF, Hidalgo said. The main goal of implementing Dropbox on campus is to provide cloud storage and facilitate better student-teacher collaboration, Hidalgo said, who is also a faculty member in the Steven G. Mihaylo College of Business and Economics. Faculty and staff were already given free Dropbox accounts with unlimited storage space in November. Chuck Grieb, a professor and program coordinator in the Department of Visual Arts, is already looking forward to the usage of Dropbox for students. SEE DROPBOX
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RUDY CHINCHILLA / DAILY TITAN
Site steward for the Desert Studies Center located in the Mojave National Preserve, Jason Wallace (above) makes sacrifices and lives a rugged life for his devotion to the desert and his reptile studies.
Zzyzx isn’t the end of the road not for Jason Wallace RUDY CHINCHILLA Daily Titan Sometimes the hustle and bustle of a big city—the noise, the cars, the people—is too much. Sometimes a person just has to get away from it all. Sometimes he takes a break by going on vacation. Sometimes he does so by relocating. Sometimes he relocates to the middle of the desert. “Everyone keeps showing up and it gets busier and busier and more and more congested, and I felt I did my part: I left, and I gave my spot to somebody else,” Jason Wallace said, recalling his decision to leave his hometown of La Habra. As the site steward of the Desert Studies Center—otherwise known as Zzyzx—in the Mojave National Preserve, Wallace is in charge of overseeing facilities operations, as well as collecting data on desert reptiles, a continuation of his thesis research. A graduate of Cal State
RUDY CHINCHILLA / DAILY TITAN
Jason Wallace inspects a desert horned lizard to demonstrate how to tell the creatures gender as part of his research to collect data on desert reptiles.
Fullerton with a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in biological science, Wallace has wandered off the beaten path, both figuratively and literally. Wallace knew from a young age that he was destined for the outdoors. His passion for nature would eventually have him chasing lizards out in the middle of the desert. Wallace’s path toward Zzyzx seems almost like a prophecy fulfilled. The 40-year-old herpetologist had always had some sort of connection with the Mojave
National Preserve, dating back to his days as a youth. Wallace recalls the trips he and his family took out to the National Preserve when he was a child. The family would leave home and arrive at Baker, California just in time for sunrise. They stopped at the Mad Greek restaurant, where they would eat strawberry pancakes or waffles before heading into the preserve. “I loved this whole area anyway. And then to see this place, also here, not realizing
I was driving by, as a kid, my future co-worker all those years ago,” Wallace said, “ ... is kind of trippy to think about.” That co-worker was Robert Fulton, site manager of the Desert Studies Center. Fulton and Wallace finally met when Wallace was doing his graduate research at the Desert Studies Center in 2003. “I don’t think he had any clue he’d end up here,” Fulton said. “It just kind of fell that way.” SEE DESERT
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Nearly 400 faculty members, students and administrators came together Monday for a discussion on how to bolster collaboration and heighten the experiences of CSUF students during this semester’s Titans Reach Higher Town Hall. The meeting, which addressed the university’s five-year strategic plan, focused specifically on high impact practices, student success teams and “Titan Pride.” President Mildred García opened the meeting by welcoming those in attendance before topics were discussed. Mary Ann Villarreal, director of strategic initiatives and university projects, identified high impact practices as those which increase retention and persistence of students. As part of the strategic plan, the university has an established goal of having 75 percent of students involved in at least one of these practices within their first year, as well as to add involvement in a subsequent practice related to their major. Part of the meeting was aimed at establishing what those practices were and how the university could reach its strategic plan goal, Villarreal said. “Today’s conversation is really to help identify what are people doing and how we are going to get there,” she said. Student success teams were another focus during the meeting. The purpose of the teams is to create an integrated process between student affairs and academic affairs in order to bridge the achievement gap and meet the goal of integrated SEE HALL
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A rotten smell for a beautiful bloom
After eight years the corpse flower graces us again NAYARA ASSIS Daily Titan
Cal State Fullerton has been home to an unusual flower, the corpse flower, for almost eight years. It started to bloom on Sunday, at 5 p.m. and was fully bloomed at midnight on Monday. When the corpse flower is in full bloom, it actually smells like rotting flesh, said Gregory Pongetti, the Living Collections curator of the Fullerton Arboretum. The plant is also known as titan arum or by its scientific name Amorphophallus titanum. “We had one bloom back in 2006, and we took pollen
from that plant and went down to another plant that was blooming at another botanic garden in San Diego, the San Diego Botanic Garden,” Pongetti said. “They took the pollen from the one that bloomed here, pollinated that flower and got a bunch of seed, and this is the result of that pollination effort.” There are a few indicators Pongetti looks for to tell when the flower will bloom. The flower will start to loosen at the top, then a little liquid comes from the base of the flower, which signals it will flower soon, he said. A successful pollination of the open flower is called an infructescence, where the plant looks like “a big corn cob” with fruits containing the seeds attached, Pongetti said. SEE FLOWER
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NAYARA ASSIS / DAILY TITAN
The Amorphophallus titanum before and after bloom in the Fullerton Arboretum. The flower is available for viewing and is expected to collapse within two days. VISIT US AT: DAILYTITAN.COM