New published pieces out in the world

My review of Kathy Sawyer's "The Rock From Mars: A True Detective Story on Two Planets" has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle's Sunday book review.

An excerpt:
The quest for life on Mars tends to conjure spectacular visions of alien encounters and the universe's explosive first moments. The work of searching, however, is for the most part a tedious business undertaken by highly driven scientists who spend their careers hunched over keyboards beneath the fluorescent lights of anonymous, labyrinthine complexes. It is the latter aspect of the quest that Washington Post science writer Kathy Sawyer concerns herself with in "The Rock From Mars: A True Detective Story on Two Planets."

"The Right Stuff" it's not. However, if you can overcome your disappointment in the lack of hotshot astronauts and continue reading, you'll gain insight into the fascinating way that scientific research is conducted in the United States. And while there aren't any little green men (unless you count daylight-starved Ph.D.s), plenty of quirky characters, tense showdowns and celebrity cameos -- Carl Sagan, Dick Morris and Al Gore all get into the action -- keep the story moving along.
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The February/March 2006 edition of the CITRIS Newsletter, which I write, has also been published. In it I look at how a brand-new campus like UC Merced offers scientists research opportunities they wouldn't have at more established places, as well as a feature on the emerging new academic and research discipline known as "Services Science." As I explain, services "now accounts for 75 percent of the workforce in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 50 percent in Brazil, German, Japan, and Russia, according to IBM Research. Yet there are only a few academic courses and very little research devoted to it."

An excerpt from the latter article:
One of the first and most challenging tasks at hand, however, is defining exactly what is meant by "services." As an academic discipline, services is brand new; questions outnumber answers.

"Looking at services is akin to the blind man looking at the elephant. We know it's there. We know it's big. But we're not exactly sure where it is or even which way it's going," says Professor Patrick Mantey, Founding Dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering and Affiliate Director of CITRIS.

Because services are produced and consumed simultaneously, they are difficult in many cases to quantify. Also challenging is the fact that "services" has, traditionally, served as a catch-all term for jobs that don't fall into manufacturing or agriculture. But as Righter points out, "take those out and it's still a huge world. So we have to figure what unifies services."
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Also, a bit late, but I was honored to be asked to write a profile of Rich Silverstein, the more visual half of the incredible creative partnership of Goodby, Silverstein, & Partners. The story appeared in Photo District News' annual Legends issue in January.
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