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Dawgs prepare for LSU

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NOVEMBER 9, 2012

LIFE | 6

Reflector The

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THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF MISSISSIPPI STATE UNIVERSITY SINCE 1884

IHL Board raises tuition, postpones decision BY MARY CHASE BREEDLOVE Opinion Editor

The College Board has postponed the discussion of a building fee for full-time students of Mississippi State University as well as the University of Mississippi. According to the Associated Press, Ole Miss said it would use the money from the building fee to pay for the renovation and expansion of

its student union. MSU said it would use the money to pay for a new building with 90,000 square feet of classrooms and a 60,000 squarefoot parking garage. Bill Kibler, vice president for Student Affairs at MSU, said in an email the fee will generate a source of revenue MSU can use for construction projects that are not able to be supported by state bond funding. “Examples might be our planned new class-

room building as well as possible future projects on student facilities such as the Sanderson Center and the Colvard Student Union,” he said. The building fee would cost full-time students $50 and would generate an estimated $1.83 million annually for Ole Miss and $1.7 million for MSU. According to Associated Press, it is likely the proposal will return as early as this month. Kibler said the Institutions of Higher Learn-

ing staff postponed the bill for financial analysis. “It is my understanding that the IHL staff wanted to conduct some additional financial analysis of the two proposals from MSU and UM in order to be able to reconcile any differences and assure that the fees are structured the same,” he said. Kibler also said the fee is not proposed as a time-limited fee and is proposed to add to student tuition in the 2013-2014 academic year.

Obama win no surprise to political analysts BY JAMES TOBERMANN Staff Writer

At the end of polling on Tuesday, incumbent President Barack Obama was declared the winner of the election with 303 electoral votes to Gov. Romney’s 206. Obama also won 50 percent of the popular vote, while Romney captured 48 percent. Rob Mellen, assistant professor of political science, said these results closely match the predictions made by political science professors across the country.

“Most everything went exactly as political science professors expected,” he said. Mellen said the race was expected to be close, and those forecasting the results knew the race would hinge upon certain key states. “We knew the popular vote would be within one to two points, and we predicted that Obama would win 300 to 330 electoral votes,” he said. Mellen also said the outcome of the election represents a triumph in the use of mathematical modeling based on known

factors such as the state of the economy, unemployment rate, weighted averages from polls and changes in Gross Domestic Product. “What happened yesterday was a victory for political science and forecasting models,” he said. “The models were pretty stable all year leading up to the election.” Nate Silver, noted statistician and poll analyst for The New York Times, used data analysis to model the projected outcome of the election on his blog, FiveThirtyEight. SEE OBAMA, 2

Humane Society hosts open house to advocate ownership insight, awareness BY LIZZIE SMITH Contributing Writer

The Humane Society located on 510 Industrial Park Road is having an open house on Saturday, Nov. 10 from 10 a.m. 2 p.m. to promote pet ownership and awareness. Ardra Morgan, administrative assistant at the Mississippi State University foundation and the mentor for the Day One Program, will be setting up in front of Piggly Wiggly on Nov. 9 to hand out flyers promoting the open house. The members of Day One will be addressing what to expect at the open house, specifically pet ownership. “There are other things involved with ownership other than getting a cute puppy or kitten,” Morgan said. The Day One program began in the fall of 2007 and is for the fall semester of incoming freshman. Stephen Williams, program manager at the Office of Student Leadership and Community

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Engagement, said the office accepts up to 300 students. “The focus is leadership, education and the importance of community service,” Williams said. The program has 47 action teams, and each student is supposed to gain 20 hours of community service each semester. While the program supports other community projects such as Vickers Personal Care Nursing Home and Habitat for Humanity, they also have been working with the Humane Society for four years. Morgan, who has been a member of Day One for four years and a member of the Humane Society for eight, said while the main objective of the open house is being a responsible pet owner, it also will involve the community. “It will talk about how to get involved with the community, pet ownership and the needs of the shelter,” Morgan said. SEE SOCIETY, 2

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JAY JOHNSON | THE REFLECTOR

Darius Taylor has been preparing for two years to launch the site he hopes will get him attention from social giants.

MSU students start new social media network BY ZACK ORSBORN Life Editor

In the middle of a social media revolution, emerging social networks can often times lose significance in the cloud of Twitter birds and Facebook thumbs. Darrius Taylor, senior business information systems major, bravely started a brand new social network geared toward Mississippi State University’s students called collegeShift. Releasing the beta version, which accumulated over 400 members in September 2011, Taylor has programmed and coded every aspect of the website’s alpha version released two weeks ago with now over 200 members. When asking himself what defined MSU, Taylor said he realized the students were the most important part of the university. Soon, his concept began to grow as he noticed there was not a place for students to connect dynamically and find out about events, parties, clubs or organizations.

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“I wanted collegeShift to be a community where everyone could come only at Mississippi State and get to know each other to build a foundation,” Taylor said. After surveying 540 students about the appearance and user interface from the beta version, Taylor spent an entire summer teaching himself how to code and program as well as researching what students and organizations around campus wanted. Because starting a website is not cheap, Taylor said he could not have started the project without the funding he has received for the website. “C-Spire gave $2,000 to the project, and I got around $500 from the competition I was in. My marketing team talked to 32 businesses, and 24 of them said they were interested. Eight of them said they would immediately start paying $25 to $50 dollars a month as a subscription fee,” he said. “Our overall goal is to create a network that we can sell to colleges at $1 per student.” He said he has developed new features specific to collegeShift.

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“It’s only for your respective college, so you can only get in if you have an msstate. edu account,” Taylor said. “And there’s a ranking system. On Facebook, there’s a like system and once you like something, it’ll move down, and you never see it again. But with collegeShift, once you rank somebody, you get points that ranks you on a leaderboard that shows you who is the most popular.” Along with the leaderboard and ranking system, Taylor said he wanted to create newer features other static websites do not possess. “We are in the process of adding a featured called The Shift. I feel like the direction that websites are going are made up of subtle actions. Websites are static, unlike video games,” he said. “If you are on Facebook and not touching the page, it’s not giving you anything. With The Shift, if you don’t touch the computer for five minutes, it will cycle through posts on your screen.” SEE SHIFT, 6

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