UO E-clips, May 29

Editorial: The flagship? (Albany Democrat Herald, editorial follows in its entirety): In an announcement about a three-hour documentary movie concerning its history, the University of Oregon describes itself as a “world-class teaching and research institution and Oregon flagship public university.” No question about the world-class education to be obtained there, but what about the “flagship”? The flagship normally is the biggest vessel in the fleet, the one that carries the admiral in command of the whole shebang. Many years ago, the board of higher education moved the office of its chancellor from Eugene to Portland for several reasons, and one of them was to counteract the notion that the University of Oregon was in command of the state college system. The biggest school in the state system is Portland State, with a 40,000 student headcount to roughly 24,000 each at the UO and Oregon State. So who’s the flagship now?

Oregon physicists don't flip spin but find possible electron switch (Innovations Report, Germany): Physicists in recent years have been pursuing a variety of routes to tap electron spins for their potential use in quantum computers that can perform millions of computations at a time and store immense quantities of data or for use in emerging optic devices or spintronics. "Spin is another dimension of electrons," said Hailin Wang, a professor of physics at the UO. "The electronics industry has depended on electron charges for more than 50 years. To make major improvements, we now need to go beyond charges to spin, which has been very important in physics but not used very often in applications."