Publication Date: Wednesday, December 21, 2005
News Digest
News Digest
(December 21, 2005)
Fiber-to-the-Home Trial ends
A four-year-old trial that provided cable television and high bandwidth Internet access to about 70 Palo Alto households using fiber optic cables ended last Friday.
The project, known as the Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) Trial, was designed so the city could test running such a system. But Palo Alto is now considering partnering with a private company to provide the technology, rather than doing so alone, and the City Council voted to end the trial in July.
Residents in the trial, who paid $85 a month to the city, wrote e-mail postmortems to their neighbors last week, with one participant, Peter Allen, calling the switch-off the beginning of the "dark ages."
"The FTTH Trial went dark today, and I hope that you are faring well with this step back in time," he wrote.
The proposal for the city to request private partners to provide a citywide network is scheduled to come back to the City Council on Jan. 17.
-- Bill D'Agostino
SLAC 'reads' ancient Archimedes text
Scientists at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) have used a high-powered X-ray to read missing text in a 2,000-year-old document by the Greek scientist Archimedes.
Uwe Bergmann, Ph.D., who headed the project, said the scientists used a technique known as X-ray fluorescent imaging to identify iron traces hidden in the document.
Though about 25 percent of the original document had been covered over in gold forgery, Bergmann said he and his colleagues looked for iron because that was the main element in the original ink.
X-ray fluorescent imaging uses a high-powered X-ray to knock electrons, usually in orbit around an atom's neutron, out of place. If the ray is powerful enough, it can knock out an electron orbiting close to the neutron. This causes one of the electrons in the outer shell to fall in toward the neutron, emitting a so-called "fluorescent'' beam of a frequency unique to the element. The fluorescent beams register on a detector.
While scientists have been using this technique for several years for medical purposes, this is the first time it has been used to read a text. The text comes from a document written by Archimedes sometime before his death, during the fall of Syracuse in 212 B.C., Bergmann said.
One of the two treatises in the so-called Palimpsest describes how Archimedes combined pure mathematics with his own physical intuition to calculate the center of gravity of objects. The other describes how he learned how to deal with infinite sums.
"You could call it a form of integral calculus, which is usually attributed to (Isaac) Newton,'' Bergmann said. "It is not an exaggeration to say (these theories) were 2,000 years ahead of their time.''
-- Bay City News Service
Holiday Fund continues to grow
With one month to go in its two-month-long charitable campaign, the Palo Alto Weekly Holiday Fund drive has surpassed the halfway point to the goal of raising $300,000 for community nonprofit agencies.
As of this week, $177,020 have been contributed. A total of 392 donors have given $88,510, which have been matched by local foundations, including the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; and two foundations that prefer to remain anonymous.
The drive concludes in mid-January.
Now in its 12th year, the Weekly Holiday Fund supports local nonprofit organizations with $1,000 to $10,000 grants, which help individuals, children, families and the elderly. Last year, more than 600 donors gave to the fund, raising nearly $240,000 and supporting 36 nonprofit programs.
A donation form is located on page 22 of today's paper. Donations can also be made online at www.PaloAltoOnline.com. Click on the link for Palo Alto Weekly Holiday Fund Drive.
E-mail a friend a link to this story. | 
