I have been a journalist on staff at Wired and the San Francisco Chronicle covering business, technological trends and breakthroughs and the culture that surrounds all of it. My background is in molecular biology so I love any story that has a science or neurology angle, but all of it is fascinating and awesome. Here are way too many clips.
Selected articles for Wired while on staff.
Weird science: Using page rank to clean toxic waste, A computer interface for your biceps and Can you really sequence DNA with a thumb drive?
Hardware: The memristor debate, A breathing battery and 3-D printing
Software: Why the GUI will never replace the command line
Business: Interviewing David Sacks right after Microsoft bought Yammer and How engineers disappear into the Twitter collective
Profile: A young genius developing compressed energy storage
Popular tech: Facebook gave me the exclusive on the tech behind Timeline
Trends: Microsoft builds gamefication into their programming tools
Patent law: Covered the Google-Oracle Java/Android trial from start to finish
Patent litigation: Wrote daily from the trial and broke the verdict(s)
Everything else: My feed at Wired
Freelance
The Atlantic: Twitter’s Verified Subculture, Tricking facebook’s algorithm and when the government wanted a database of everyone’s IQ.
NPR: Harnessing supercomputers to cure diseases
MIT Technology Review: (ALL) Recognizing tumors with with computers, how to trick machines into “seeing things“, travel app that scans Instagram photos to analyze the true mood of a bar or restaurant, an algorithm that helps robots walk of injuries or how to turn a regular camera into a 3D depth camera.
Backchannel: Assessing why photo filters woo our minds into love, a hacker building tools to stop online harassment, on the course at the first officially recognized first person drone race, the era of #Fumblebrag and a profile of the Underground Internet Music Archive.
Matter: A look back on the decline of TaskRabbit and the promise of the renting economy
VICE: How Shining Light Into the Brain Can Switch On an Erection or Switch Off Pain
Modern Farmer: Tomatoes that grow 24 hours a day, farmers embracing Arduino microcontrollers to manage their farms, history of patents on soil crushers and how drones are being used out on the range.
CITEWorld: (ALL) The hunt for electric bacteria and researchers printing computer memory to paper
Computerworld: The evolution of the computer key and keyboard
Selected works from The San Francisco Chronicle while on staff.
I have written about future trends like drone operating systems, 3D printed circuit boards, 3D printed guns, flying cars, Bitcoin, search engines using language vectors, quantum cryptography, 3D televisions and wearable technologies.
Or straight business stories like Netflix’s rise, Google’s traffic management, Apple’s ebook issues, the US selling technology to Iran, Facebook’s phone, FCC broadband issues and Twitter bridging itself to television via acquihire.
More serious ones like whether Silk Road could have been legal, whether we can stop fake online reviews, being the IT guy in war-torn Africa, how easy the US could cut Internet access, the rise of Russian entrepreneurs, digital tools to improve democracy, why big tech companies don’t admit they’re in it for the money and Google crying ‘moonshot’.
Or business essays like what kind of business is Medium and why Zynga is failing (in napkin math).
Or culture pieces like what EB White and New York can teach us about ‘The Internet’, homeless people looking for tech tools, getting off the grid, what Twitter represents, how Twitter carries social debates like gun control and why tech journalists should disclose the gadgets they use.
Or less serious stories like the underworld of Twitter parodies, life of bad information on the Internet, the most unexpectedly successful category on Kickstarter, a defense of Burning Man and how analyzing meta data would have busted Paul Revere.