Huntsman Brings Campaign to GW

John Huntsman, Jr. discussed his economic and foreign policy with students.

Republican presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman spoke before a packed Jack Morton Auditorium Tuesday night, marking the first visit by a 2012 presidential candidate to the GW campus since President Obama's in April.

The former Utah governor and ambassador to China spoke on fixing an ailing economy, reducing the "heroin-like addiction to foreign oil" and strengthening diplomatic ties with allies like Israel and India.

"All I want... is a foreign policy that says we're going to lead with economics," Huntsman said.

His plan for economic recovery would include the repeal of the Dodd-Frank Act and "Obamacare," a focus on domestic natural gas production for transportation and the adoption of a flat tax like the one his "good friend Rick Perry" talked about earlier in the day. He criticized President Obama's handling of the economy, including bailing out businesses seen as too big to fail.

"Capitalism without failure is not capitalism," Huntsman said.

Huntsman vocalized his support for continued counter-terrorism initiatives, claiming, "We must remain vigilant." But he also announced that he would bring home the 100,000 troops currently serving in Afghanistan.

Looking towards the general election, Huntsman attacked President Obama's "hope" campaign as a message of style over substance.

"You can win on a mantra, that don't mean you can lead," he said.

Though critical of the current president, Huntsman made no apologies for leaving his job as Utah governor to accept President Obama's nomination for ambassador to China.

"I worked for President Reagan, I worked for President Bush, I worked for President Bush," he said. "I'm of the firm belief that when your president asks you to step up and serve in a time of war, during a time of economic hardship, you stand up and put your country first."

Jack Morton quickly reached its 260 person capacity for the College Republicans-sponsored event. CR members could RSVP for priority seating prior to the event, while coordinators granted non dues-paying members entry on a first-come, first-served basis.

Huntsman spokesman and GW alumnus Tim Miller said his candidate does well with youth voters because of the sense that he includes them in the debate on topics such as the national debt.

"He's doing a lot of college visits," Miller said. "He has a positive message that resonates with young people."

Following the speech, students swarmed to the front of the auditorium, clamoring for a picture with the presidential candidate.

"I liked how moderate he was," GW senior Veronica Brown said. "He really spoke to me as a less right-wing Republican."

Despite polling below 2 percent in most national Republican primary studies, Huntsman maintains a focus on youth voters. He appeared on the popular Colbert Report Monday and jokingly requested that Stephen Colbert join him as his vice presidential running mate.

Huntsman is the second 2012 presidential candidate to campaign at GW this year. President Obama revealed his budget deficit reduction plan in the Jack Morton Auditorium shortly after announcing his candidacy in April. Republican candidates Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich both came to campus in February, several months prior to officially announcing their runs for the Republican presidential nomination.

"I don't think this is his year," GW sophomore Daniel Ceisler said, "but I don't think this is the last we'll see of Jon Huntsman."

- Joseph Rabinowitz

Professor Reveals Findings on Child Development

Dr. Rochelle Newman gave a lecture this past Thursday in Funger Hall on how early perceptual abilities from infants can later affect how they process language.  Newman, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, received her bachelor's in speech pathology and now studies language processing in adults.

Dr. Newman discussed how one thing infants often recognize when they are four and a half years old is their name. This serves as a sign that their auditory system is in development.


"What happens is you use a sound that an infant knows and see if they can recognize it," Newman said.  "They may not know what it means to them, but they know it's a sound pattern they hear fairly often."

When sounds are funneled down the ear canal, they strike the same area. According to Newman, this differentiates from sight because when something hits our eyes, it reaches different sensor receptors.


However, because an infant's auditory system is not as well-developed as an adult's, an infant cannot separate different sources of sound.  This is especially noticeable when infants are in noisy environments.


"We might expect that infants would have difficulty in noisy environments," Newman said.  "We know that second language learners who have less knowledge about the language have problems in noisy environments. Infants will suffer the same problem."


Newman demonstrated this with the headturn preference procedure. A child would sit in a parent's lap, a light would flash and a voice would say the infant's name, often over noise. In cases where the infant would recognize the sound as familiar, they would pay more attention to it.


"When testing with older infants around nine months to 13 months, the amount of time they spent looking at the source saying their name increased," Newman said.


The results of this experiment, Newman explained, showed that infants younger than nine months may not be able to acquire useful speech information in real world settings. By developing perceptual skills over time, they can better develop their language skills.


One of these particular skills is segmentation, which is an infant's ability to separate streams of speech into individual words.


"This is important because parents don't just talk to babies," Newman said.  "There aren't pauses in the words when speaking the same way there are breaks when typing a sentence."


The other skill is statistical learning: an infant's ability to recognize consistent patterns in what they hear.


Newman's ongoing work includes a large, longitudinal study with infants that critically examines what skills that develop during infancy are particularly important and how they correlate with sound.

President Obama to Address Nation's Students on Wednesday

President Obama will deliver his annual back-to-school address this Wednesday at Benjamin Banneker Academic High School.  The speech will allow the president the opportunity to speak to students not just in the District, but across the nation as well.  This is the third year that the president will make a speech addressing the nation's students.

In a press release, Press Secretary Jay Carney said that in past speeches, the president encouraged students to study hard and take responsibility for their education, and urged them to set goals and be the authors of their own destinies.

Critics of the president's speech took issue with his addresses to students in the past.  In 2009, some parents threatened to remove their children from class during the speech, while others saw it as nothing more than political rhetoric.

This year, Banneker made Newsweek's list of America's Best High Schools.  Ivory Sherman, a 2008 graduate of Banneker, said she is glad to see the President reaching out to public schools.


"Many have said that Obama delivering his back-to-school speech is his way of pushing his political agenda, but I disagree," Sherman said.  "President Obama should be applauded because he is reaching out to future generations, which should be done more often."

One teacher who spoke on conditions of anonymity said that lots of students are anticipating the speech.


"I'd say we're excited to have the president visit, but I think he gets more out of this- an urban public school backdrop- than we get out of it," the teacher commented.  "I think kids will remember he was here and that they saw him, but I doubt he'll encourage kids to stay in school here more than they already do anyway."