UO E-clips, Dec. 22-26

HOLLY SPRINGS, N.C. -- Their clothes hang in the closet, their crib sheets are neatly smoothed, and their toys sit on shelves, still wrapped in plastic. Maverick and Catalina were supposed to have arrived at their new home in Holly Springs months ago, but the babies, now 11 months old, remain in a foster home in Guatemala. They were to have been among more than 4,700 children from the impoverished Central American country adopted by U.S. residents in 2007. Instead, they are among thousands whose adoptions are threatened by changing laws and political strife. Guatemala, which had become the second-largest source of internationally adopted children in the U.S., behind China, will cut off the flow of children by the end of the year. Those with adoptions in progress stand in uncertain territory, unsure when they will get the children whose pictures have been arriving in the mail for months. T.J. Palazzolo and Amber Sauer of Holly Springs have spent 18 months and thousands of dollars trying to adopt from Guatemala. They were paired with the children they named Maverick and Catalina just a few days after they were born, Maverick in late January and Catalina in mid-February. … More than 15 percent of U.S. adoptive parents now turn to foreign countries for children. International adoption has risen sharply in the past two decades, as parents look for healthy infants who can be adopted quickly with no strings attached. … Many in Guatemala began to see international adoption as rich Americans buying poor children -- a complaint made in many of the countries that have become popular with U.S. adopters. "Adoptions involve commerce; money is changing hands," said Ellen Herman, an adoption historian at the University of Oregon. "And you're talking about people who have a huge amount of money relative to the average family in the child's society."

Thinking small - getting better performance from less material - was a big budget item for Oregon in a recent defense appropriations bill signed by President Bush. The Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute, which is headquartered at the Hewlett-Packard campus in Corvallis and has several Oregon State University scientists among its ranks, has $7.7 million in new federal funding for continuing projects. While the collaborative group has received $37 million in state funding since 2003 -- including $9 million in the current biennium -- it previously had received only $1.9 million in direct funding from the federal government, said Skip Rung, ONAMI’s executive director. “It’s a huge deal,” he added. About 150 scientists from OSU, the University of Oregon, Portland State University and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory collaborate through ONAMI.

LA Times: Many people feel a warm glow when they make a voluntary donation to charity, but fundraisers know not to depend just on that. They know they'll get more if they tap into the human desire for more concrete rewards. A hospital, for example, might promise that anyone who gives $1,000 to $2,499 to a building drive will get his or her name on a plaque in the building. Faced with such a range, William Harbaugh, an economist at the University of Oregon, has shown that "almost everyone" would donate $1,000, he says -- that is, the minimum to get the reward. Another popular fundraising approach is the lottery -- for every dollar they give, donors buy a chance to win a prize. In a study conducted during a real-life door-to-door fundraising campaign and published in 2006 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, researchers found that lotteries raised about 50 percent more than regular solicitations. The increase was largely due to greater participation. People were about twice as likely to donate when doing so bought them a chance to win a prize.

Pittsburgh Tribune Review: Margaret Zamboni heard the jingling bells, reached into her purse and dropped a handful of coins into a Salvation Army donation bucket. It's that time. Americans donate about $50 billion to charities between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day, roughly half of the cash donations that are made annually in the country, according to the monitor group Charity Navigator. When asked why she gave, Zamboni, 76, of Ross said the answer is simple: Giving just feels good. "Like, holy cow," she said. "I'm going to heaven!" Such feelings of joy -- even while giving away hard-earned cash -- are not uncommon. In fact, they might be biological. Researchers studying the science of giving say donating money triggers a euphoric reaction in the brain. "When you give, the part of your brain that encodes pleasurable feelings fire -- they get busy," said Bill Harbaugh, an associate professor of economics at the University of Oregon. "When you help others, it brings a neural reward in a very concrete, measurable way." That "neural reward" is released in the same part of the brain associated with the feelings of joy humans get from eating sweets or having sex, he said. Harbaugh and fellow researchers at Oregon -- including a professor of psychology -- have used functional magnetic resonance imaging to monitor neural reactions resulting from such altruistic behavior. He recently took a group of students, gave them $100 each, then scanned their brains while telling them that portions of their money were being siphoned off to a local food bank. The scans showed sudden activity in the nucleus accumbens, a collection of neurons in the front part of the brain, Harbaugh said. "It's an evolutionarily ancient part of the brain; even lizards have the nucleus accumbens," he said. "In lizards, it responds to basic rewards, like when it gets a particularly juicy bug. "In humans, we showed that when we give money, that same region of the brain fires, just like a lizard getting a bug, or a human when it gets food," Harbaugh said.

Wall Street Journal: Early indications that Christmas sales have been decent -- though not spectacular -- suggest that Americans may be opening their wallets wider than consumer-confidence barometers have been signaling they would. With the economy sending mixed signals, the issue of how well those barometers predict consumer behavior has taken on greater-than-usual significance this holiday season. Amid widespread concerns that a credit crunch will tip the nation into recession, economists have been poring over sentiment indicators and retail-sales data, looking for clues about consumer spending -- by far the biggest contributor to the U.S. economy. … while the surveys show confidence has plunged in recent months, a resurgence in spending during the final weekend of the holiday shopping season appears likely to bring a sigh of relief to many of the nation's retailers. The apparent resilience of consumer spending only adds to the growing skepticism about the usefulness of consumer surveys. Part of the problem is the age-old debate between causation and correlation. Jeremy Piger, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Oregon who studied consumer sentiment while working at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, explained that early academic studies of consumer surveys found that there was a correlation between the level of consumer confidence and future economic activity. But, he said, later studies "got more sophisticated." They took a close look at other economic data released each month to see whether the confidence surveys, in and of themselves, had any predictive power. "The answer has pretty uniformly been, 'No,'" he said. The consumer numbers reflected other developments, on jobs and prices, for example.

The Register-Guard: Still novel-shopping for Christmas? You need look no further than your nearest bookstore, and your nearest major university, if you live in the Eugene-Springfield area. Of the 46 works of fiction on The New York Times list of the “100 Notable Books of 2007,” announced earlier this month, only one is by an Oregon author. That would be “Bearing the Body,” by University of Oregon creative writing professor Ehud Havazelet. And if you don’t think this is “big deal” stuff in the literary world, here are some of the other names on that relatively short list of what the Times considers the best works of fiction in the world that were published in the past 12 months: Mario Vargas Llosa (“The Bad Girl”), Richard Russo (“Bridge of Sighs”), Philip Roth (“Exit Ghost”), Don DeLillo (“Falling Man”), J.K. Rowling (“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”) and Alice Munro (“The View From Castle Rock”). Not bad company for a first-time novelist.

Ottawa Citizen: The handcuffs would have made an encore difficult. Moments after a November performance in an Oregon concert hall, 28-year-old Ottawa violinist Joseph Tang was arrested backstage on federal fraud charges. On Thursday, the United States Department of Justice announced that Tang, who had been pursuing graduate studies at the University of Oregon, was charged last week with mail and wire fraud relating to the sale and consignment of fine musical instruments in San Francisco. Tang appeared in a U.S. District Court in San Francisco on Monday and was indicted on two counts of wire fraud and eight counts of mail fraud. Each count carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Tang is now free on bail. The indictment alleges Tang presented himself as a broker of expensive violins and violas and bilked instrument collectors and dealers out of thousands of dollars. He is accused of selling instruments on consignment and failing to pay the owners, lying about receiving instruments that dealers had shipped to him, sending different instruments to buyers than were promised, and lying about refunding money.

The Oregonian: Ehud Havazelet's office is quiet and cluttered, a perfect place to write. There are more DVDs than books; Havazelet loves movies and keeps only the writers he might consult for inspiration: Isaac Babel, Flannery O'Connor, 19th-century Russian masters. His desk is clear except for a laptop, and his eyes are clear and unwavering. Outside, the wettest storm of the year makes the gutters overflow and covers the sidewalk with branches. Havazelet wears a scarf around his neck and keeps the heat cranked up to fight off colds. He's lived in Corvallis for almost 20 years, since he took a post teaching creative writing at Oregon State University. He switched to the University of Oregon in 1999, where he's an associate professor, and drives to Eugene once a week to teach a graduate workshop. He hasn't written much lately, not since his first novel, "Bearing the Body," was published in the fall. … The reviews were the ones every writer dreams of receiving. Francine Prose called "Bearing the Body" an "extraordinary first novel" in The New York Times Book Review and said Havazelet "is a writer who takes huge risks, who challenges us -- and himself -- to love those who are the most unlovable, the most deeply and humanly flawed." In the Los Angeles Times, Susan Salter Reynolds wrote that Havazelet "knows how to make his fiction a true mirror." (The praise wasn't unanimous: The San Francisco Chronicle called it a "badly managed novel.")

The Oregonian: Ehud Havazelet's novel "Bearing the Body" makes great use of its twin settings of New York and San Francisco. The streets of New York (primarily neighborhoods in Queens) are protagonist Sol Mirsky's domain, the world he successfully navigates. In contrast, San Francisco, where Sol travels after his son David, a charismatic heroin addict, dies there, remains confusing and mysterious. Both Sol and his younger son, Nathan, a struggling doctor, go to San Francisco after David's death. Shortly after their arrival, they become separated and for much of the novel both characters wander that city's hills, literally and figuratively lost. Havazelet, who teaches creative writing at the University of Oregon, is the author of two highly acclaimed story collections, "What Is It Then Between Us?" and "Like Never Before." Much of his work explores the bond and tension between fathers and sons, the mercurial attachment of lovers, and the far-reaching effects of violence. … All of the characters in "Bearing the Body" carry the weight of memory. Sol survives the Nazi camps. His brother Chaim (as well as the rest of his family and community) does not, and Sol, despite his desire to die, has to live:

Editorial, Eugene Register-Guard: A new market study does nothing to damage the University of Oregon’s bid to persuade the state Legislature to approve the school’s use of $200 million in state-backed bonds to build a new basketball arena. But the report makes clear that Eugene falls near the bottom of the list of Pac-10 cities in terms of market strength, and there is no guarantee that a new facility would be able to generate sufficient revenue to cover all of its operating and debt-service costs. The limitations of the Eugene market might normally be a major hurdle for the university to overcome in its quest to replace 81-year-old McArthur Court. Its population is 340,613, compared with a median of 3.7 million in other Pac-10 markets. Eugene-area residents have significantly fewer dollars to spend -- $38,000, compared with $44,000 in other Pac-10 cities. As the report bluntly puts it, the UO faces “challenges and limitations with respect to the size of the local market, its buying power and its corporate base.”