UO E-clips, Oct. 8

UO arena plan faces 'doable' time crunch (The Oregonian): The University of Oregon's basketball arena project will miss by three days its self-imposed deadline of Nov. 3, when officials said work would need to be started to make a November 2010 opening. And UO is one land-use appeal from missing it by six weeks. That was the upshot of a 21/2-hour public hearing Tuesday at Eugene City Hall on UO's application for a conditional-use building permit, which a hearings official said she would rule on by Nov. 6. "It's tight," said Jim Bartko, a UO senior associate athletic director who has worked for years on the arena project. "Everybody on our team, though, thinks that it's still doable."

Neighbors want UO arena terms verified in print -- then a permit (Register-Guard): If the University of Oregon does get the green light to build its $227 million basketball arena, the people living closest to it want more than just a promise that the UO will abide by a set of conditions aimed at blunting the pavilion’s spillover into their neighborhood. They want it in writing. In comments to a city hearings officer Tuesday, neighborhood residents credited the UO for coming to the table to work out a plan for dealing with parking, traffic and other effects from the 12,500-seat arena east of campus and south of Franklin Boulevard. But it was clear there are still trust issues among neighbors, who pointedly asked that the university’s obligations be finalized in a legal document before it gets a conditional use permit that will allow construction to begin.

Fuzziness on the road to physics Grand Unification Theory (Innovations Report and PhysOrg.com): Leave it to hypothesized gravity to weigh down what physicists have thought for 30 years. If theoretical physicists, led by the University of Oregon's Stephen Hsu, are right, the idea that nature's forces merge under grand unification has grown fuzzy. At issue are grand unified theories that first appeared in the 1970s. They have suggested that, at short distances or high-energy scales, electromagnetic forces, strong forces, which bind quarks in protons and neutrons, and weak forces, which drive nuclear decay, will coalesce into a single unified field. Indications of this idea could appear at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Forget Logic; Fear Appears to Have Edge (New York Times): The technical term for it is “negative feedback loop.” The rest of us just call it a panic. How else to explain yet another plunge in the stock market Tuesday that sent the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index to its lowest level in five years — particularly in the absence of another nasty surprise? … Anybody searching for cause-and-effect logic in the daily gyrations of the market will be disappointed -- even if the overarching problem of a crisis of confidence in the global economy is now becoming clear. … the market has become a case study in the psychology of crowds, many experts say. In normal times, it runs on a healthy mix of fear and greed. But fear now seems to rule, with investors often exhibiting a Wall Street version of the fight-or-flight mechanism -- they are selling first, and asking questions later. … At this point, any spreadsheet analysis of underlying and intrinsic values of stocks becomes meaningless, and concern for preserving wealth overrides the desire to grow it -- what some may call greed. “With negative emotions we tend to have a desire to change the situation,” said Ellen Peters, a senior scientist at Decision Research in Eugene, Ore. But “when things are good there is not much desire to change.” [Peters hold a courtesy appointment with the UO]