Politics roundup: Gingrich shakes up GOP race heading into Florida

22 Jan 2012, Posted by Walker Schiff in News, 0 Comments

Sophia Palenberg/The Chronicle

Gingrich Takes South Carolina

After two impressive debate performances last week, Newt Gingrich found himself over 12 percent above Mitt Romney after the votes were counted this past Saturday in the South Carolina GOP primary.  Gingrich garnered just over 40 percent of the vote while Romney took just under 28 percent. Following Romney, Rick Santorum took 17 percent and Ron Paul took 13 percent of the vote.

Gingrich’s win comes as a surprise since Romney looked to have the nomination locked down after taking both Iowa—the Iowa results have since been changed as uncounted votes showed that Santorum truly won the state—and New Hampshire, the first two states to hold primaries. Polls published after Romney’s New Hampshire win, a week before the South Carolina primary, showed Romney with a comfortable lead in the Palmetto State.

Gingrich’s surprise win stems from Gingrich’s performances in the two debates in the week leading up to the election. Gingrich debated like a candidate with nothing to lose, attacking everyone from Romney to the debate moderator for asking him personal questions. Gingrich’s outlandish debate performances won him South Carolina and helped him cement his position in the race as the anti-establishment, anti-Mitt Romney candidate.

Republican Primary Race Moves to Florida

Florida, the fourth state to hold its GOP primary race, will have their election day next Tuesday, Jan. 31. In almost every poll published since the beginning of January, Romney has held a double-digit leads over Newt Gingrich. Having said that, Newt’s momentum from winning South Carolina will almost certainly carry over to the Sunshine State.

Most pollsters had Gingrich with leads over 20 percent during his mid-December surge so it is clear that Gingrich has the capacity to take Florida. The question is whether or not Gingrich has the resources and time to turn it around.

Gingrich has a couple factors going against. First, Florida is a big state and big states generally favor candidates with more money and better organized campaigns. Romney’s campaign is clearly better organized and funded.

Second, early voting is very popular in Florida. Many voters have already cast their ballots in Florida and those votes would not be affected by a late Gingrich surge. Some analysts would argue, though, that early voters are generally the voters that have their minds set and wouldn’t be affected by a late candidate surge.

Though Gingrich faces hurdles, Florida is by all means still up for grabs. Many people still see Romney as the inevitable nominee, but a Gingrich win in Florida could shake up the political establishments view of this race.

Late Update: The first Florida poll since the SC primary just came out and it has Gingrich up 9.

Strength in numbers

22 Jan 2012, Posted by Ashley Mooney in News, 0 Comments

Gary Sheng/The Chronicle

With group fitness, those trying to lose some winter weight don’t have to sweat in solitude anymore.

Group fitness classes are available for free to students at both Wilson and Brodie Recreation centers throughout the year at multiple times a day. Classes offered include various types of yoga, weight training, dance, cycling and other cardio or toning exercises.

“The group fitness classes at Duke are great because, no matter your fitness level, they’re always challenging enough to make you feel good and want to come back,” senior Allyson Morton said.

Senior  Morgan Carney teaches the most popular group fitness class offered—Cardio Dance—Lisa Jindra Wright, coordinator of group fitness and physical education instructor, wrote in an email Sunday. She added that the Carney averages 70 students per class.

Carney, a dancer since she was three-years-old, said she began teaching Cardio Dance her freshman year.

“[It is] hard to say my favorite aspect [of the class]… I just love it in general!” she said. “It’s not a workout for me—it’s an awesome dance party with fun music and a ton of friends.  The hour long class flies by every time.”

Morton also noted that the class draws in people who don’t want to work out on their own.

“It’s a dance class to top 40 hits with your friends, and if you feel shy or insecure about shaking it or jumping up and down, the feeling quickly goes away when you see people of all ages and genders also doing it,” she said.

Other popular classes include Body Tone and Zumba, Wright said, which usually have 30 to 50 participants.  She added that group fitness recorded over 13,000 participants overall in the Fall.

This semester, Wright said, Duke will be offering a new format for the hip-hop and Bhangra-hip-hop fusion classes. They have also added a 45-minute express indoor cycling class and Kripalu yoga­.

According to the Duke Recreation and Physical Education website, Kripalu Yoga practice focuses on breath and meditation along with standard yoga poses.

Some specialty classes are also offered for a small fee, Fitness Directory Mary Ann Dobbins said. One is Cardio and Core, a small-group personal training class, which combines walking and running intervals with Pilates-type core exercises.

Regardless of one’s skill level or interests, group fitness classes offer an array of opportunities to anybody looking to get in shape.

“I started going to the group fitness classes to change up my workout and do things out of my comfort zone,” senior Ellie Proussaloglou said. “I love to run, but fitness classes are a great way to do something new.”

An enlightening blackout

22 Jan 2012, Posted by Annie Wang in News, 0 Comments

Special to The Chronicle

Up until a couple of days ago, few Duke students had heard of PIPA, Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011, or SOPA, Stop Online Piracy Act, until an internet blackout shed light on the issue.

Both bills were introduced in Congress in late 2011 to deter online piracy. The public, however, was largely unaware of this legislation until Wikipedia decided to shut down its site on Jan. 18, 2012 in protest. For 24 hours, the online encyclopedia was unavailable for use. Instead, the site redirected visitors to another page and urged them to contact their local representatives in opposition to PIPA and SOPA.

Organized by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation Sue Gardner, the blackout was planned to raise awareness and inform the public about the bills before Congress votes on this issue January 24. Other sites, such as Reddit and Boing and Boing, also closed their sites on Wednesday with similar aims.

Online search mogul Google did not shut down its search engines, but instead the company elected to black out its famous logo on its homepage. Upon clicking on the blacked-out logo, visitors were encouraged to sign an online petition.

Google later reported that 4.5 million users signed its petition on Wednesday in opposition to SOPA. Wikipedia executive Gardner reported that 162 million visitors viewed its blacked-out homepage.

The PIPA and SOPA bills were designed to prevent piracy and illegal transmission of data. Google, Wikipedia, and others agree that piracy must be deterred but view this particular legislation as potential censorship.

Duke students seemed to agree with these online companies and expressed a consensus in opposition to the bills.

Some students perceived this legislation as a violation of their First Amendment rights.

“PIPA and SOPA is essentially censorship, something we simply do not tolerate in America,” freshman Katie Simmons explained.

Others saw it as a threat to the internet itself.

“The beauty of the internet lies in its open nature and universal accessibility,” senior Hamid Ali said. “Hindering it any way would strike at what makes the internet so powerful for humanity.”

Duke students were generally supportive of the actual blackout, the inconvenience aside.

“I support the self-censorship of websites in protest against government censorship of websites,” freshman Jesse De Luca said.

In response to this widespread opposition to PIPA and SOPA, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that the vote for PIPA will be delayed. Representative Lamar Smith also agreed to postpone the vote.

This Week in Chronicle History: poor dormitory security and faculty recruiting

19 Jan 2012, Posted by Andrew Luo in News, 0 Comments

Andrew Luo/The Chronicle

Swipe access to dorms and magnetically-locked fire exits were not always security measures available to Duke students. 30 years ago, university heads faced some major concerns regarding student safety on campus.

In a front-page article published on January 23, 1979, two Chronicle reporters snuck around the University after one a.m. when all buildings were supposed to be locked. Not only did they gain entrance into the building, but the reporters also easily accessed over 80 percent of the dorms. On East campus, fire escapes were left unlocked in Alspaugh, Bassett, Giles, Jarvis and Wilson, while side doors were propped open in Aycock and Wilson. A similar situation arose on West campus, where the reporters not only discovered more unlocked doors but also broken locks. As Richard L. Cox, former Assistant Dean of Student Affairs explained, students were paid to lock all the doors in the dorm. Indeed, with 83 reported dormitory thefts in the second semester of 1978 alone, the security system of the past was “faulty at best.”

Andrew Luo/The Chronicle

Ten years later, in a January 12, 1989 issue, The Chronicle wrote about a Duke effort to recruit from a diminishing pool of black faculty members. At the time, though aggressive recruiting efforts for minority professors were becoming more and more common among universities, many educators saw recruitment as the “shortsighted answer to a far-reaching problem.” As Ron Eisenberg, Vice President of public affairs at the Council for Advancement and Support of Education explained, “you can’t fill the need for faculty until you encourage more youngsters to go to college.” The underlying goal is to prevent minority students from dropping out as early as high school and going on to pursue a college education. As for Duke University, the faculty nonetheless approved a resolution requiring each department to add at least one black faculty member by 1993. Similar resolutions were approved at schools ranging from Miami University of Ohio, Bucknell, and Purdue.

Pop Culture Grid: Lau vs. Yim

19 Jan 2012, Posted by Annie Wang in News, 0 Comments

Duke University boasts a variety of scholarship programs based solely on merit, two of them being the University Scholars Program and the Robertson Scholars Program. The former was created in 1998 and serves to promote interdisciplinary study and the latter was created by a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduate named Julian Robertson in 2000. The Chronicle’s Annie Wang asked a scholar from each program—Joyce Lau and Jeannie Yim, respectively—enough to figure out the key differences between the two. 

Sophia Palenberg/The Chronicle