DAILY TITAN The Student Voice of California State University, Fullerton T
Volume 93, Issue 49
NEWS 3
How history remembers Einstein OPINION 5
An activist’s allies are his strength FEATURES 8
Titan pays her way through school SPORTS 10
Basketball programs get new coaches
dailytitan.com
THURSDAY, MAY 9, 2013
LOCAL | Missing student
Search continues for CSUF student Maribel Ramos, an Army veteran, has been missing since last Thursday TIM WORDEN Daily Titan
Community members have expanded the search for a Cal State Fullerton student and Army veteran who has been missing for a week. Campus officials from University Outreach and Veterans Certification have begun a campaign to search for Maribel Ramos, 36, a criminal justice major, who was last seen May 2. A makeshift resource center has been set up in Langsdorf Hall Room 540 near University Outreach, where Ramos works as a coordinator with student veterans. The room is equipped with maps, posters and resources for people to aid the search for Ramos. The civilian search effort is headed by University Outreach assistant director Delia Tijerina and veterans certification officer Brenda Estrada. About 30 volunteers searched on Tuesday, focusing around Ramos’ house in Orange, according to Estrada and Tijerina. Dozens continued searching Wednesday. Estrada said the search pairs scour possible places Ramos may have gone as well as area trails. “Yesterday we had a group of volunteers that went out and pretty much targeted the area where she lives. We did bus stops, we did businesses, we pretty much went everywhere with fliers,” Estrada said. SEE MISSING, 4
Photo Illustration by ROBERT HUSKEY & JOHN PEKCAN / Daily Titan
Online cheating is a growing concern with the emergence of online education embraced by the Cal State University and University of California systems.
Technology combats online cheating ProctorU and TurnItIn are being used to reduce cheating in online courses KEVIN BLACKBURN Daily Titan
The Cal State University and University of California systems are looking to bolster their online education programs in order to make room for the growing demand of students
enrolling in California institutions while combatting online cheating. Private colleges, public universities and corporations have widely embraced online education, investing millions of dollars to tap into the vast pool of potential students. Next year’s CSU budget contains $10 million in online strategies in an attempt to get students through highdemand or over-crowded courses. Although online courses have ex-
CAMPUS | Competition
isted for more than a decade, the debate over cheating has heated up in the last year with the emergence of massive open online classes (MOOCs), according to a Los Angeles Times article. The article included that MOOCs can accommodate thousands of students in one class, making it difficult to reduce cheating. Despite worries about online deception, studies show that there is not
much difference in the amount of cheating that occurs in online versus real classrooms. A 2010 study in the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration found that 32.7 percent of online students self-reported cheating at least once on a test, compared to 32.1 percent of those in on-campus classes. A Cal State Fullerton junior, who preferred to be left anonymous,
admitted to cheating on a test he had in a past class that had a large amount of students. “I cheated in classes with a lot of students, I’d pull out a cheat sheet or take out my notes because it’s hard for a teacher to look over all the students,” the junior said. “I would think an online class with that many students would be even easier to cheat.” SEE CHEATING, 2
CAMPUS | Science
Professor researches pupfish behavior The small fish species inhabits Earth’s harshest aquatic environments LAUREN DAVIS Daily Titan
ROBERT HUSKEY / Daily Titan Mariann Howland, 22, a psychology major, (center) is flanked by her advisers Jason Baker and Rachel Fenning inside the psychology observations lab. Howland is one of 10 CSUF students that will compete on Friday and Saturday.
Students gear up for competition
Participants will present creative capabilities of research at national event ANDY LUNDIN Daily Titan
Ten Cal State Fullerton students are scheduled to compete against
students from the 22 other Cal State Universities in a national research competition Friday and Saturday. The 27th annual CSU Student Research Competition will be held at Cal Poly Pomona, where students will contend by exhibiting their academic research and creative capabilities via an oral presentation to an audience
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and a panel of professional experts. The competition is to be grouped into several different categories, including education, creative arts and design, social and behavioral sciences and physical and mathematical sciences. SEE RESEARCH, 2
A biology professor from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo spoke on his research about the behavior and flexibility of pupfishes, a small sized fish species in the Death Valley region of California and Nevada, in McCarthy Hall on Wednesday. Sean Lema, Ph.D., discussed “phenotypic plasticity,” which is the flexibility of pupfishes to show different structure in different environments among the several species of pupfishes in Death Valley. Lema said the two main goals of the pupfish research is to better understand how organisms are connected to their environment in an effort to comprehend how species change over time, while also helping to conserve the many imperiled pupfishes that evolved in deserts. “The other thing is receptors,” said Lema. “We are trying to un-
ROBERT HUSKEY / Daily Titan Sean Lema, Ph.D., discusses phenotypic plasticity of pupfish in different environments among the several pupfish species in Death Valley.
derstand more of this system and how you can couple and decouple these different traits in evolutionary context and in plasticity context, that are regulated by the same hormone by looking at different
ABT receptor regulations.” Lema said his interest in pupfishes developed when he would take camping trips to Death Valley SEE PUPFISH, 2
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