In a recent post on my personal blog, I talked about television content delivery and pricing. What I didn’t mention in that post, particularly when I talked about the lack of choice, is that there is another option for content delivery (besides cable/fiber and satellite): one can get the content online, through a service such as Hulu or Apple TV.

To start off 2010, we're invited to join a new “Hot Topics” feature, which will periodically focus the bloggers on a particular topic. The first Hot Topic is this:

The Upcoming Decade in Science

What will the new decade bring in the world of science? What will happen by 2020 in your field?

Making predictions is always a dicey thing, and perhaps most so in the field of computer science. The good thing about knowing that is that one can pretty much “wing it”. If one gets it right, it’s cool. If not, well, no one really expected one to.

So let’s put on some wings, and see whither we fly.

I’ve been critical of patents that seem to have been issued for ideas that don’t represent much innovation (most recently, this one, and see more discussion here), extending existing “prior art” only a little, or not at all. Many patents, particularly for computer software, describe things that are neither novel nor non-obvious.

On my regular blog, I recently commented about a specific patent that I don’t think should have been issued, and I referred to a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision that limited patent protection for “ordinary innovation[s]” that “yield predictable results”. I picked on the particular patent that I did only because it’d just been brought to my attention; I think a very high proportion of the software patents that are out there should not have been issued.

One criticism of science that we often hear is...

Wait.

You know, criticism of science is still a phrase that seems odd to me. When I was growing up, we never thought to criticize science, in general. Of course, there’d be things that scientists got wrong, and we were critical of those as individual items. But that, we knew, is how science is — we’re always learning new things about what we thought we knew. It’s a strength of science.

Several weeks ago, New Scientist ran a story about some mathematical modeling work that a couple of researchers in Mexico did. They modeled public transportation systems, and investigated the clumping effect that causes buses and trains that are supposed to be evenly spaced to wind up traveling in irregularly spaced clusters:

Public transport vehicles — underground trains, for example — set off from the start of their routes equally spaced. The problem starts when one is briefly delayed, making more time for passengers to accumulate at stations further down the track. Since passenger boarding is the main factor delaying trains, these extra people slow the train even more.