May 05, 2004

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Palo Alto Online

News digest

A Wednesday groundbreaking will mark a milestone in the six-year effort to provide a center where the homeless and near-homeless on the Midpeninsula can come for services ranging from coffee and a shower, to counseling and even some housing.

The Opportunity Center of the Midpeninsula should open early in 2006 at 33 Encina Ave. in Palo Alto, off El Camino Real between the Palo Alto Medical Foundation and Town and Country Shopping Center. The Rev. Jeff Vamos of the Community Working Group, which has been planning the new center, invites the public to come at 10 a.m. May 5 "to celebrate the milestone."

"I have been waiting for a long time for a project like this to come along. I think our community has really needed to pay more attention to the problem of homelessness," said Susan Packard Orr, honorary chairman of the capital campaign. "This is way past due." The Packard Foundation has given $1 million to the campaign.

More than 600 homeless people stand to benefit from the new center, according to estimates by the Community Working Group. These include more than 150 people who visit the Palo Alto drop-in center operated by InnVision/Urban Ministry, and more than 50 women and children served by the Clara-Mateo Alliance at its Elsa Segovia Center at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Menlo Park. The center will also help people at risk of becoming homeless through job loss or family emergencies.

Jim Burklo, formerly of Menlo Park, will be honored as a catalyst for helping the homeless in local communities. Now a resident of Sausalito, Burklo worked with and for the homeless for eight years with the Urban Ministry, and later as a campus minister at Stanford.

"We tried for years to find an indoor drop-in center," Burklo said. "Not for love nor money -- and there was no lack of either -- could we find anyone to rent to us. This effort has been blessed and it's so wonderful to see it finally happen."

-- Marion Softky & Jane Knoerle
Train group endorses tax

The rail Passenger Association of California has endorsed the effort to renew the San Mateo County half-cent sales tax for transportation improvements. The tax, which will be on the November ballot, has raised $1.2 billion since Measure A was first passed in 1988.

Future Measure A expenditures will go toward improving Caltrain service by building new stations and electrification of the line.

Measure A funds may also be used for connecting the train to the East Bay to reduce automobile congestion on the Dumbarton Bridge.

-- Don Kazak
Stanford, IBM sign pact

Stanford University and IBM are joining forces on the advanced research and creation of new high-performance, low-power electronics in the emerging field of nanotechnology called "spintronics,'' university officials announced.

To formalize the union last week, scientists from Stanford and IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose announced the creation of the IBM-Stanford Spintronic Science and Applications Center, which will be known as "SpinAps'' for short.

"SpinAps researchers will work to create breakthroughs that could revolutionize the electronics industry, just as the transistor did 50 years ago," said Robert Morris, IBM vice president.

Since its inception, the microelectronics industry has progressed by shrinking circuitry. According to scientists, this approach is becoming much more difficult, time-consuming and expensive, and there is now a worldwide search for new ideas that can deliver improved performance in smaller sizes than is possible with conventional designs.

Spintronics controls the spin, or magnetic orientation, of electrons within tiny structures made of ultra-thin layers to produce new advantages in building such circuitry.

"The SpinAps scientists will dramatically hasten progress from theoretical concept to experimental verification and from new-device ideas to product prototypes,'' Stanford's Jim Plummer, dean of the School of Engineering, said in a prepared statement.

Research at the SpinAps Center will involve about a half-dozen Stanford professors, a similar number of IBM scientists, up to 10 graduate students working at both IBM and Stanford, three or more postdoctoral researchers and two or more visiting faculty.

Bay City News Service

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