youth vote rises in N.H. primary

Upon returning from winter break, you might have noticed something missing from campus. Gone are members of political campaigns who recruited voters from outside of dining halls and inside the MUB. Signs urging students to vote have diminished, campaign phone calls to dorms have ceased and the political candidates who once targeted Durham as an essential campaign stop have moved on to other states. The New Hampshire primary is over, and life at UNH seems substantially quieter.
In the aftermath of the Jan. 8 primary, many students find themselves wondering how great a part their votes played. While John McCain’s victory in Durham mirrored the overall statewide results for the Republican Party, Barack Obama’s win on the Democratic side in Durham contrasted with statewide results favoring winner Hillary Clinton.

Obama’s local win may have been aided in large part by a surge of voting by absentee ballots in Durham. The town experienced a small voter turnout on the actual date of the primary.

“Our ‘Get Out the Vote’ effort concluded in getting over 330 students to vote early in Durham by absentee,” said Morgan O’Neill, a junior physics, political science and international affairs major from Washington who volunteered for the Obama campaign.

The Obama campaign was one of several groups that encouraged students to register to vote in Durham. Their tactics included canvassing dorms, tabling in the mail room, and personally driving students to Town Hall in order to register.

Bridget Farmer, a sophomore political science and international affairs major from Massachusetts, took advantage of the opportunity to vote by absentee ballot in Durham.

“I think having the campaigns involved made the process of registering easier because the people who drove us to the polls and helped us fill out the forms were excited that we were registering and voting,” said Farmer. “There’s something to be said for solidarity: If all the other kids are registering and excited to vote, it’s bound to spread.”

According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, a research group based in the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, the youth vote rose sharply in New Hampshire’s primary. Almost 85,000 people under the age of 30 voted on Jan. 8 this year, which is a huge leap from 30,770 people in 2004.

When asked what her motivation behind voting by absentee in the primary was, Bridget Farmer simply cited the fact that she was allowed to.
“I voted because I have a right to, and because there are people in other countries who are trying to gain that right,” said Farmer. “I couldn’t just ignore it.” —Krista Diamond

UNH mathematician gets ready to walk down the red carpet

When most people think about the Grammy Awards, they think about the most talented musicians in the world. They think about the best song they heard the previous year or their favorite band. They think about the red carpet, glamour and, of course, that really shiny trophy in the shape of a vintage record player. However, one thing that most people do not associate with the Grammy Awards is a mathematician.

On Sunday, Feb. 10, Kevin Short, a mathematician and professor at UNH, will be walking down the red carpet with the chance to receive a Grammy for his restoration of a 1949 wire recording of a live Woody Guthrie concert.

“You don’t exactly expect that as a mathematician,” said Short. “Being able to say that you are a Grammy-nominated mathematician is so unusual.”

Short’s journey into music restoration started with his discovery of Chaotic Compression Technology. With this discovery, Short was able to stabilize a chaotic system with very little information, allowing the chaotic systems to produce over 26,000 different wave forms that turned out to resemble musical instruments.

“We actually just started playing them out of speakers,” said Short. “One of these wave forms might sound like an electric guitar, while another one might sound like a pipe organ. It sounded really cool, so people started asking me, ‘Can you use these wave forms to represent music that has really been recorded from true instruments?’ And I was successful there.”

Through his discovery, Short was able to produce music files that were four times smaller than MP3s, which are small enough to send to a cell phone. UNH filed for patents of Chaotic Compression Technology in 1998. Shortly thereafter, Short used his discovery to start the company Chaoticom, which is now known as Groove Mobile.
Short has also worked on restoration of the Grateful Dead classic “Live at the Cow Palace” from 1976 and the audio restoration of the movie “Close Encounters of the

Third Kind.” The Woody Guthrie concert was monitored by Guthrie’s wife, and the two went back and forth telling stories—stories that Short could not understand, at first.

When Guthrie’s songs would play, Short could not hear the lyrics.

“Suddenly, after I restored (the recording), I could hear everything perfectly. Well, not perfectly, but I could understand the story and I could understand the lyrics and that was pretty exciting,” said Short.

He is looking forward to his trip to the Grammy Awards.

“It is a lot of hard work,” said Short. “It has historical value. It’s not commercial music, so to have them recognize this is sort of nice.”