Hana El-Samad: ‘A Star in Her Field’ To explain her research into the workings of cells, UCSF scientist Hana El-Samad offers an analogy from the world of machines. “Imagine a telephone or Internet network,” she says. “Despite their staggering complexity, packets of information find their destination on these networks and are interpreted correctly.” Cells work […]
Author: Dan Fost
The Wizard of O.co: San Francisco magazine, September 2014
The Wizard of O.co A decade after Moneyball, the cult of Billy Beane is alive and well—perhaps nowhere more than in Silicon Valley. By Dan Fost Sept. 26, 2014 Billy Beane is so over Moneyball. “I’m sort of sick of me,” the Oakland A’s general manager tells me over the phone in early August. You […]
UCSF Public Mission
In June 2012, I wrote an extensive report on all the ways that UCSF fulfills its mission of public service. One of the ways UCSF fulfills its public mission is providing access to pioneering care to patients with complex cases. Here, David Rowitch, MD, PhD, professor and chief of neonatology, and Sonia Bonifacio, MD, assistant […]
The IPO Shopping Cart: San Francisco magazine, May 2012
The IPO Shopping Cart Yes, it feels like 1999 all over again. But will the newly minted millionaires from Zynga, LinkedIn, Yelp, and Facebook burn through their cash the way many did in the bubblicious days of the dot-com boom? We talked to financial advisers, luxury sales folks, and people who survived the first bust […]
Opening Day in Oakland, With Prospects of Doubleheader of Anguish for A’s Fans: New York Times, April 6, 2012
Opening Day in Oakland, With Prospects of Doubleheader of Anguish for A’s Fans As the A’s take the field for their home opener Friday against the Seattle Mariners, the team’s overachieving glory days depicted in last year’s “Moneyball” starring Brad Pitt as General Manager Billy Beane are a warm, if distant glimmer. While Opening Day […]
Baseball’s Greatest Attractions: CNBC.com, April 4, 2012
Happy Opening Day! I really enjoyed assembling this slide show of small baseball-oriented businesses for CNBC.com’s Small Business site, in time for the start of another baseball season.The slide show received wide pickup on the Internet, including on Yahoo Sports, and received excellent traffic. Baseball’s Greatest Attractions The Greatest Experiences in Baseball As the major […]
From Bowling to Bars: Urban Baseball Parks Boost Business: CNBC.com, April 2, 2012
From Bowling to Bars: Urban Baseball Parks Boost Business Twenty years ago, the Baltimore Orioles did something that at the time ran counter to every trend in stadium construction: They built their new ballpark right in the heart of downtown Baltimore. That not only proved beneficial to the Orioles, who continue to draw crowds to […]
Merger With Investigative Unit Likely to Mean Major Shift in Bay Citizen Coverage: New York Times, March 29, 2012
Once a media reporter, always a media reporter. Although I had not written my media column in the San Francisco Chronicle for several years (I left the paper in 2007, but Media Bytes had ended well before that), The Bay Citizen assigned me the story of their own merger; because of an arrangement they had […]
Bay Citizen, Center for Investigative Reporting to Merge: The Bay Citizen, March 27, 2012
Once a media reporter, always a media reporter. Although I had not written my media column in the San Francisco Chronicle for several years (I left the paper in 2007, but Media Bytes had ended well before that), The Bay Citizen assigned me the story of their own merger. It was a good chance to […]
Top Fantasy Baseball Tips: Executive Travel, March 2012
Writing this story led me to the tip about pig farmer Lindy Hinkelman’s fantasy baseball expertise, which I wrote for the New York Times. Top Fantasy Baseball Tips Follow this fantasy baseball advice to build and manage a winning lineup. The movie Moneyball made it clear: Anyone with a computer, a head for stats and […]