January 2012

Passengers at Frankfurt International Airport in Germany have the highest adoption rate of mobile-boarding passes of all six major airport hubs included in the 2011 SITA/Air Transport World Passenger Self-Service Survey with 37% of Frankfurt respondents having used a mobile boarding pass at least once compared to 17% worldwide. This is due to a combination of high service availability and the fact that the number of smartphones carried by passengers has more than doubled in Frankfurt in the past year, jumping to 54% of interviewed passengers compared to just 24% in the previous year's survey. A further 40% of passengers carried ordinary mobile phones. At Frankfurt, the smartphone is now a critical travel tool for 84% of business and first class passengers, and 89% of frequent flyers who take more than ten flights per year; 63% of business and first class passengers, and 58% of frequent flyers, had boarded with a mobile boarding pass at least once.

For the last few years, an alternate wireless network has been emerging in the U.S.; one not built by the mobile operators but by cable providers. Cablevision, Time Warner Cable, and Comcast have all launched numerous Wi-Fi hotspots in their service areas, and last week Bright House joined the club, turning on 2,000 outdoor and indoor hotspots across the state of Florida.

The Multiple Service Operators (MSOs) have latched onto the idea of Wi-Fi as a way of extending their home and business broadband services to customers on the go, and its paying dividends. Why haven’t their mobile counterparts followed suit? The obvious answer as to why mobile carriers haven’t been as quick to pull the trigger the trigger on Wi-Fi is that they don’t need it from a geographic standpoint. Their networks already cover every conceivable area they could hope to reach with Wi-Fi, so the business case for carriers isn’t coverage; it’s capacity. As more customers consume more network resources, they place tremendous loads on the network’s high-traffic zones.

A proposed shared-services agreement between two Toledo television stations could lead to the shuttering of one channel's news department and the creation of what media transparency advocates say is a move toward limited competition in local TV news.

WUPW-TV, Channel 36, is in the process of being bought by American Spirit Media, which has several ties to Raycom Media, the owner of WTOL-TV, Channel 11. The service-sharing agreement attached to the $22 million sale states that Channel 36 and Channel 11 would be able to share news staff and broadcasts. In addition to news, WUPW and WTOL would share access to studios, master control, technical facilities, maintenance, and promotional efforts. The practice, although increasingly common in small markets, has come under fire from media transparency groups and is being investigated by the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC has rules in place that prevent one company from owning multiple TV stations in midsized markets such as Toledo.

The New England Journal of Medicine marks its 200th anniversary this year with a timeline celebrating the scientific advances first described in its pages: the stethoscope (1816), the use of ether for anesthesia (1846), and disinfecting hands and instruments before surgery (1867), among others. For centuries, this is how science has operated — through research done in private, then submitted to science and medical journals to be reviewed by peers and published for the benefit of other researchers and the public at large. But to many scientists, the longevity of that process is nothing to celebrate. The system is hidebound, expensive and elitist, they say. Peer review can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly, and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information. It is an ideal system for sharing knowledge, said the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen, only “if you’re stuck with 17th-century technology.” Dr. Nielsen and other advocates for “open science” say science can accomplish much more, much faster, in an environment of friction-free collaboration over the Internet. And despite a host of obstacles, including the skepticism of many established scientists, their ideas are gaining traction. Open-access archives and journals like arXiv and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have sprung up in recent years.