Conveniently located on Campus Drive, adjacent to the UCI campus, the Irvine Barclay Theatre is one of California's most imaginative performing arts showcases and will be the perfect location...

Conveniently located on Campus Drive, adjacent to the UCI campus, the Irvine Barclay Theatre is one of California's most imaginative performing arts showcases and will be the perfect location for this auspicious event. California Southern University will be welcoming graduates and their guests from all over the world to assemble at the Barclay Theater at 4:00 PM on July 25th, with the Commencement Ceremony taking place in the 756-seat Cheng Hall, renowned for its intimate atmosphere and superb acoustics.

To register for the 2010 CalSouthern Commencement Ceremony please call the Registrars office at 1.800.477.2254 Ext. 4216.

Click here to view the full article on the EdTech Magazine Website: EdTech - Focus on Higher ...

Click here to view the full article on the EdTech Magazine Website: EdTech - Focus on Higher Education

California Southern University and North Carolina State University would at first glance seem to have little in common.

One is on the West Coast in Irvine, Calif.; the other in the East, in Raleigh, N.C. One has its students take all their courses online; the other’s students mainly attend class in lecture halls and classrooms that span 10 colleges. One is 30 years old; the other is 120 years old.

But both have one essential thing in common: They have adopted and adapted cloud-computing environments — the delivery of scalable IT applications, services and infrastructure over the Internet — to serve the day-to-day processing and system demands of their students and faculty. In both instances, technologists at the two universities also embrace a new vision of the IT-user relationship that cloud computing engenders: Ultimate control over the processing environment lies in the hands of the end users.

From CalSouthern’s perspective, “it’s not just about whether you can create a school on the web,” says Kevin Mack, senior network engineer for the online university. “You have to be able to capture the sense of that student on the web and determine what you can give them to make them successful.”

That same notion of success is at play at NC State, which for the past five years has hosted a cloud that serves increasingly more users, both on campus and off. The cloud, known as the Virtual Computing Laboratory, (an open-source Apache project), gives its users the flexibility to pick the system components they want versus the components that a traditional IT infrastructure previously would have dictated to them, points out Mladen Vouk, head of the university’s Computer Science Department and its associate vice provost for IT. The VCL can support all types of user setups, from desktops and groups of classroom or lab computers to server collections and high-performance computing clusters.

Expanding Horizon

Although California Southern and NC State may be ahead of their time in higher education’s adoption of cloud computing, they will likely have plenty of company in the not-too-distant future, based on Gartner’s research. Gartner foresees broad use of cloud computing taking hold in higher education over the next two to five years, even though fewer than 1 percent of colleges are using cloud computing as a service now. Why? In part because education’s use of consortium and shared-services models will keep the acceptance hurdle low.

That’s definitely a view held by Indiana University CIO Brad Wheeler, who prefers the phrase “above-campus services” to describe cloud computing. “I am also confident that the long-standing trust and shared values among higher education gives us an opportunity for consortium sourcing that may provide superior, long-term economics over generic commercial offerings,” says Wheeler, whose university leads a group of 10 schools participating in the FutureGrid effort to develop the next generation of grid and cloud computing for researchers.

Jan-Martin Lowendahl, a Gartner research director, identifies cloud computing as a transformational technology for colleges and universities. When looking at cost reduction possibilites based on the 2008 CPU hours for the NC State program, he estimates that “a CPU hour cost of 27 cents could be reduced to 10 to 15 cents per CPU hour.” Given the tight budgets for most institutions and the continuing demands on IT, cost incentives will be a major driver, he says.

But economic factors alone won’t dictate a move to the cloud. Other motivators include the ease of serving distance learning; the perfect-storm possibilities when blending cloud, virtualization and blade technologies; and the need-it-now computing demands of users.

At a Distance

California Southern began as a correspondence school and made the transition to an online distance-learning environment.

Built around an HP ProLiant cluster running Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer virtual machines, the CalSouthern data center is home to about 35 virtual machines housed on 15 servers that host SQL Server, web and infrastructure services. The platform, while stable and served by a decent network connection, lacked failover in case of disaster and had limited on-the-fly expansion capability.

“We had to be able to plan for growth,” Mack says. “If we double the number of students, could we support that growth and could we support it fairly quickly — both from a data storage and a bandwidth perspective? We wanted the answer to be ‘yes.’”

The ultimate goal was high availability to support round-the-clock learners and the faculty that teach and mentor them. The IT team looked at collocation options for establishing a secondary site. Then, last year, as CalSouthern prepared to move from Santa Ana to Irvine, it began considering cloud computing, based on the recommendations of its chief IT supplier, CDW•G. “They were really hands-on in helping us” evaluate possible cloud services that fit the existing infrastructure and connected CalSouthern with the Terre­mark platform, says Mack.

The university signed service level agreements for guaranteed bandwidth and resources (storage, memory and processing power) over a 30-day period. As to storage capacity, “we’re at about 1 terabyte locally and about a half T in the cloud. It’s relatively inexpensive to move to the next level,” Mack says.

Being among a small vanguard of education cloud users is OK with Mack: “It’s fun to be Daniel Boone sometimes.”

More than 90% of reservations for use of NC State cloud resources are immediate. The Virtual Computing Laboratory provisions most of these services (more than 80%) within 30 seconds to 2 minutes. Less common requests might take 5 to 30 minutes.

Source: NC State VCL, vcl.ncsu.edu

Technology Trifecta

The return on investment is fairly straightforward, Mack says. “If you buy a new server, I don’t care who you are — you need a week to set it up and rack it and stack it.” Plus, there are other infrastructure expenses, migration costs and monthly recurring expenses.

Take that thinking and ramp it up several notches. “Nowadays, with one chassis of blades with 12 to 14 blades, you can support 200 users. That is very cost effective,” says NC State’s Vouk. That’s the dynamic at play in North Carolina, where the NC State cloud serves education users statewide. There are several institutions beyond the state’s borders — George Mason University; the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Old Dominion University; Southern University, Baton Rouge; and California State University, East Bay — that have or are implementing VCL-based clouds.

NC State runs a massive IBM Blade Center environment of 2,000 blades to support its dynamic cloud services, which rely on a reservation front end for users
to acquire cloud resources, referred to as images. Vouk notes that although the VCL mainly uses IBM blades, any type of blade can plug into the environment.

When the team began this effort, a chief hurdle was showing management that it could provide services efficiently. “We maintain these 2,000 boxes on a staff of less than half a dozen — very conservative in terms of resources,” he says.

Although virtualization was not fully mature when the VCL was launched in 2004, it now takes full advantage of virtual machines, and through its dynamic load-balancing capabilities, it reconstructs and repurposes blade resources to get maximum utilization from the installed base and to optimize provisioning.

Users In Charge

Whether in an institution- or consortium-run environment or a commercial cloud, users are in charge of their processing destiny.

True cloud computing “has to put the users in control. For the users, that’s a real breakthrough. They can now customize the hardware structure, operating systems and application stacks as needed to actually get their work done, and then save these configurations as images capable of being shared with other users in the cloud,” says Patrick Dreher, an adjunct professor in NC State’s Department of Computer Science and chief domain scientist for cloud computing for the Renaissance Computing Institute. RENCI is a University of North Carolina research institute with ties to Duke University, NC State and other UNC campuses. It applies technologies to problems identified by the state of North Carolina and to university research initiatives.

Cloud computing is “as much a business paradigm shift as a technology shift,” says Dreher. “It’s at the level of a transformational change in IT that only happens once or twice every decade.”

What became abundantly clear early on for NC State was that users want most services on the fly and from wherever they are working. Physical computer labs have become more about collaboration and academic socializing and less about delivering processing capabilities, says Vouk.

Meeting the cloud users’ needs requires more back-end boot-strapping by IT than in traditional computing infrastructures, Vouk says, but its automated. The VCL uses simple and composite image instances assigned to each user who places a reservation. An image instance (a copy of the master image), locked to a specific user’s IP address, is a stack that includes an OS, application software and possibly a hypervisor that only one authenticated user can reserve and modify.

“This is effective in conserving central IT resources and staff,” he says. “Plus, it empowers the end users. It’s a one-click system.”

In a commercial scenario, a similar approach prevails, explains Mack. CalSouthern’s IT staff can control every aspect of its cloud service: the OS, the firewall and the applications.

Both Vouk and Mack point out that this shift to user-driven computing does not absolve IT from its systems administration and management duties.

“You have to maintain service and provide adequate bandwidth,” Mack says. “It helps you work better with the resources that you have.”

Solving the Research Data Question

As universities and colleges continue to roll day-to-day computational services into the cloud, they will also push ahead on a major cloud issue crucial to academic users: managing voluminous data sets necessary for research.

Both the Renaissance Computing Institute in North Carolina and the Pervasive Technologies Institute at Indiana University have this processing conundrum in their sights.

The IU-led FutureGrid is not aimed at daily computational work, IU CIO Brad Wheeler says. “Rather, it is an experiment factory where cloud and grid computing environments can be simulated and tested on a massive scale.”

The driving questions address where data needs to reside and how to provide computational access for geographically distributed researchers. Today, the data sets for many projects are so large that it is impossible to transport them to different sites for computational processing and analysis.

It is more practical to build and test cloud computing images locally and then install the image near the location of the data set for analysis and modeling calculations, says Patrick Dreher, RENCI’s chief domain scientist for cloud computing. Researchers can then stop re-creating data sets or settling for computational operating systems and application stack environments at the remote site that are not customized to their requirements.

Again, it’s a question of scale: being able to flex infrastructure components dynamically and with immediacy, says Wheeler. “The software and systems will have to be developed that can immediately ‘manufacture’ a computation cloud that consists of X number of Intel cores at Y number of sites using OS and software configurations of Z for time period Q.”

Recipe for a Cloud Architecture

RENCI’s Patrick Dreher says seven main ingredients must be on hand for a successful environment:

1. A friendly end-user access interface (web-based and API-based)
2. Some form of authentication service
3. Some type of server for managing user requests, resource scheduling, authorization, security (multisite coordination), performance monitoring and virtual network management
4. A database with detailed cloud cluster node information and software license information
5. A management node supervising local installation resources and OS, plus application images
6. An OS and/or application image repository
7. Computational, storage and networking resources

Dr. Frederick Machado was born in Nicaragua, Central America. He moved to the States in 1980, after a revolution war that established a Communist government. With a B. S. in Education with a minor in Psychology, Fr...

Dr. Frederick Machado was born in Nicaragua, Central America. He moved to the States in 1980, after a revolution war that established a Communist government. With a B. S. in Education with a minor in Psychology, Frederick, who could not speak English, began to study the language and get acquainted with the American culture when he was 35 years old.

Soon after graduation, he moved to work for the State of California as a Clinical Psychologist. He is now employed by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in Wasco State Prison, Reception Center.

Dr. Machado also shared that he used two hypnosis inductions that he prepared for himself which worked well for him. They kept him focused on pursuing the goal, helped him develop a photographic memory, and got his anxiety and stress down to the lowest possible level. He has been experimenting with hypnosis for 35 years, and he advises the applicants to the Psychology licensing exams, to use this or similar techniques to be more successful in the preparation process.

Once again, we congratulate Dr. Frederick Machado on his amazing accomplishments and thank him for sharing his experience. Dr. Machado can be reached by email at: viegas@bak.rr.com.

Worcester, Mass., December 8, 2009

Worcester, Mass., December 8, 2009

Prior to coming to FCHP, Dr. Kasparian served as Director of Operations and Training for Catasys, Inc., a Los Angeles-based company that provides integrated disease management and treatment services for individuals struggling with addiction, and also has worked in behavioral health for almost 20 years as a treatment provider.

Dr. Kasparian received a doctoral degree in clinical psychology from California Southern University, in Irvine, California, a master’s degree in rehabilitation counseling from Assumption College, in Worcester, Massachusetts, and a bachelor’s degree in sociology and psychology from Albertus Mangus College in New Haven, Connecticut.

For many families, the holidays are a festive time. But for those caring for a family member, festive times might be fraught with depression, anxiety, stress and new challenges that many others do not face. Today there more than over 50 million caregivers in our country whose holiday season may fall into this category. Holidays mean so much to so many.

TWO — Ask for help and make sure you are open to accept it. Asking friends and families for help may be the hardest thing we face. As caregivers, we are way too quick to accept the role of hero, martyr or savior. Too often we have a “go it alone policy” and believe that we must take care of everything ourselves.

FOUR — Learn how not to take things personally. Sometimes when families get together we are “on our last nerve.” Make sure we realize that the people around us have their dramas and traumas too and their words, though hurtful, may have nothing to do with us. Sometimes the words may come from a person with stressful challenges of their own.

SIX — Plan your family’s activities with thought throughout the season. Roles and responsibilities are extremely important to explain to all involved. Ongoing family conferences throughout the holidays help maintain the boundaries necessary to the caregiving process so that no one feels out of control or inadequate. This is vital and should be done in person and as frequently as needed. Holiday family conferences are like tune-ups used to maintain the family car. This car needs to drive well, efficiently and for a long time. Schedule these conversations regularly before the wheels fall off.

EIGHT — Find humor everywhere you go. “Laughter Is the Best Medicine.” This is an old expression popularized by Norman Cousin’s book “Anatomy of an Illness,” in which he describes his battle with cancer and how he “laughed” his way to recovery. Laughter is a great tension-releaser, pain reducer, breathing improver, and general elevator of moods. Humor is so very valuable and a great elixir to get us through difficult or stressful times. Try to see the humor in being a caregiver during the holiday season. Start now. “How do you tell a caregiver from anyone else? It is the person who jumps off a cliff and someone else’s life passes before their eyes. . . Okay, not so funny. Make sure you find your own laughter to keep smiling in your own life. Your energy for others during the holiday season will only happen when you energize and empower your own life force today.

You can view some photos taken at this event on the CalSouthern F...

You can view some photos taken at this event on the CalSouthern Facebook page by clicking here.

COPHYLA is a worldwide leading non-profit organization that has been advancing USA's health care industry through quality education and services. The primary purpose of this community based organization in the State of California is to assist its participants who have graduated in Latin American and other countries obtain medical, dental, nursing license and/or technical certifications in order to practice medicine and/or enter the health care field as culturally, linguistic and experientially sensitive professionals to serve the Latino community. COPHYLA enters into articulation agreements with leading institutions to provide training to upgrade knowledge and skills for its members.

SPONSORS INCLUDED:

• The Consortium of Physicians from Latin America
• California-Mexico Project/Chicano & Latino Studies Department, CSULB
• California Southern University

Ask the Expert: Financial Happiness

Our expe...

Ask the Expert: Financial Happiness

Our expert, the author of “The Couple's Guide to Love & Money”, Dr. Jonathan Rich says frugality is not only chic, it's downright sensible and that makes people feel smarter. For more info: www.PsychologicalTesting.com

May 1 - 3, 2008: Los Angeles, CA / Marriott LAX California Association of Marriage and Family Therapist (CAMFT) 44th Annual Conference www.camft.org
Sunny, the CalSouthern Bear, met two of our newest students in the School of Behavioral Sciences ...

May 1 - 3, 2008: Los Angeles, CA / Marriott LAX California Association of Marriage and Family Therapist (CAMFT) 44th Annual Conference www.camft.org
Sunny, the CalSouthern Bear, met two of our newest students in the School of Behavioral Sciences at this event; Yuka Kawasaki and Shawn Schmitz. See their photos here.

April 10-13, 2008: Irvine, CA / Hyatt Regency Western Psychological Association (WPA) 2008 Convention - www.westernpsych.org
The Western Psychological Association was founded in 1921 for the purpose of stimulating the exchange of scientific and professional ideas and, in so doing to enhance interest in the processes of research and scholarship in the behavioral sciences. Membership in the Western Psychological Association is open to both students and professionals who wish to support these goals and who would like to be a part of the network that we have created to further them.
Click here to see some photos of CalSouthern at the WPA Conference, April 2008

April 4-5, 2008: Los Angeles, CA / The Westin LAX Airport National Association of Social Workers - California Chapter (NASW-CA) Annual Conference and Job Fair - www.naswca.org
Join your colleagues and friends to network during the workshop breaks and special events. Learn new ideas and approaches from working professionals, gain CEUs for pre-licensing and post licensed professionals, and meet with employment recruiters from throughout the state to research job opportunities within our profession.
Click here to see some photos of CalSouthern at the NASW Conference, April 2008

March 26-30, 2008: Honolulu, HI / Hawaii Convention Center Booth #506 American Counseling Association (ACA) (counseling.org/convention) Annual Conference & Exposition
CalSouthern's booth was buzzing with activity at the ACA's annual conference in Honolulu, Hawaii last week. Over 3,000 counselors came to the event from all around the world to learn more about the current trends in the industry, with many stopping by the CalSouthern booth to find out more about the School of Behavioral Sciences and the Doctor of Psychology degree program.
Click here to see photos of CalSouthern at the ACA Conference, March 2008
Click below to watch a video summary of this event:

February 11-14, 2008: Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America (CADCA) Washington D.C. / Washington Convention Center Booth #507 www.cadca.org 18th Annual National Leadership Forum: Sustaining Success in a Time of Change.
CADCA's Forum is the nation's largest training event for community coalition leaders and substance abuse professionals, featuring more than 100 workshops on key drug prevention and treatment issues. The theme this year is "Sustaining Success in a Time of Change," with the goal of helping drug prevention leaders find innovative solutions to today's problems.
Click here to see photos of CalSouthern at the CADCA Conference, February 2008

Boomer Show, Las Vegas NV - Oct. 6-7, 2007 www.boomersshow.com
National Youth Workers Convention, San Diego, CA - Oct. 19-22, 2007 www.youthspecialties.com/NYWC/2007
American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy Conference, Long Beach, CA - Nov. 2007 www.aamft.org
Click here to see some photos of CalSouthern at these 2007 events

• Bachelor of Arts in Psychology (BA)
• Master of Arts in Psychology (MA)
• Master of Science in Psychology (MS)
• Doctor of Psychology (PsyD)
• Juris Doctor (JD)
• Master of Science in Law (MSL)
• Associate of Arts in Liberal Studies (AALS)
• Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA)
• Master of Business Administration (MBA)
• Doctor of Business Administration (DBA)

What would you say makes California Southern University programs different and better than other comparable online programs?
CalSouthern is committed to continuing our rich history of personalized attention and prompt service to every student. We realize that our online students expect a personal touch, from enrollment through graduation, and our goal of creating a community for you is accomplished through our online and interactive learner website.
Another point where we differ is in the cost of education. Affordable tuition is one of the most important factors when students are deciding on which university to attend. With tuition as low as $140 per unit, you are able to start earning your degree without tuition cost keeping you from realizing your dreams.

There is some debate as to whether or not online degrees are as worthwhile as traditional degrees. What steps does California Southern University take to ensure that online students are receiving the same education that they’d receive in a classroom?
You wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between CalSouthern and a traditional brick and mortar facility when looking at different course syllabi and our list of approved textbooks. Our deans and faculty are highly respected leaders of the education community and many of our faculty members are professors and lecturers at the traditional universities as well. They are also working professional practitioners in their fields. Although brick and mortar has been the tradition in higher level education, major universities are now looking to us as a model to creating their own Distance Learning programs.

What would you say are some of the benefits of earning a degree online rather than in a traditional classroom?
Flexibility and personal attention are the top reasons to choose CalSouthern over a traditional institution or other distance learning universities. Flexibility is the basis of any online degree program and CalSouthern realizes that every learner is different when it comes to study time and staying in contact with Faculty Mentors and Advisors. As a student you can balance your study schedule around work responsibilities and family time by eliminating the need to commute to school, parking costs, and the time it takes to walk to classes. In addition, new classes start every month, so you don’t have to wait for the beginning of the semester.
Where CalSouthern differs from other online universities is that we pride ourselves in maintaining a high-level of communication with each and every student. Advisors, Faculty Mentors, and University Staff are available by phone and by email. Our Advisors are committed to helping you reach your degree goals.
Online universities can also be less expensive than traditional facilities and CalSouthern has proven to be one of the most affordable universities as compared to traditional and other online programs. Many of our students find the low cost of our programs as an added benefit and a major reason they choose CalSouthern.

Is financial aid available to students in your programs?
CalSouthern provides a number of payment options including interest-free monthly payments. In addition students are able to obtain financing from Sallie Mae. With the low cost of the tuition at CalSouthern, students have found our options to be very attractive for their budgets.

Do you have any advice for students enrolling in online classes for the first time?
When enrolling in any online program, you want to make sure that you are receiving the kind of personal attention that will help guide you through your educational goals. The Enrollment Advisors and Academic Advisors are proud to represent CalSouthern as leaders in personal one-on-one attention with all students.