Fashion
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Background: Humans frequently wear metal adornments that have a small chance of being caught on something. Under most circumstances, this is fine, but occasionally this may lead to situations with a high probability of disaster (e.g. operating a lathe while wearing a dangly necklace). The issue: Somehow, it is still the case that very little…
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The issue: In large cities, there are many perils for pedestrians: cars, bicycles, motorcycles, horses, etc. Even the sidewalk is not a safe zone from scooters and bicycles! At night, the problems are even worse, since pedestrians are generally un-illuminated and are frequently wearing all-black coats in the winter months. Proposal: Since many commuters carry…
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Background: Liability law is extremely complicated and counterintuitive. However, one common factor is that it appears to generally be beneficial—or legally required—for the owner of a potential hazard to warn others about that hazard (e.g. the omnipresent California Prop 65 warnings: “Warning: This location contains chemicals that are known to cause cancer”). The issue: Unfortunately,…
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The issue: When selecting an individual for a job, an unavoidable aspect of the process is the physical appearance of the candidate. A job candidate might be unfairly penalized because of preconceptions about their age / sex / race / etc. Not only is this unfair to the candidate, but the overall situation also opens…
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Background: Some gangs are known for wearing specific colors. The issue: It occasionally happens that a non-gang-affiliated passerby’s clothing happens to match local gang colors by chance, which can lead to various unfortunate encounters. Proposal: Although it is unlikely that any existing gang will change its colors, if creating a new gang, a new “gang…
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Background: In a hypothetical future where self-driving cars are increasingly common, they’ll have to do a really good job of automatically distinguishing between things that require sudden braking (e.g. a person in the roadway) and things that are OK to hit (e.g. a tumbling empty cardboard box). The issue: This is a hard problem. When…
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The issue: Using a cell phone outdoors can present two main problems, as shown in Figure 1. Specifically, you may be far from a tower (and thus, get poor reception) and the harsh light of the noon sun may make it very difficult to read the text on your phone, especially with the recently-popularized “dark…
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Background: A lot of kitchen tools have a non-electric version that is hand-cranked: for example, a coffee grinder, ice-cream maker, mixer, or salad-spinner. Additional common hand-powered items include the can opener and pepper mill. The issue: Unfortunately, many of these tools are slow and inefficient to operate by hand. However, if there were some way…
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Background: On many web sites for automotive parts (e.g. Amazon, AutoZone), you can specify the exact car that you own. Then, the web site will only show results that work with that car (Figure 1). Fig 1: You can specify the details of the cars in your “garage” and will only see car parts that…
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Background, part 1: Clothing catalogues occasionally provide a summary of the clothes that a model in an advertisement is wearing; usually this will be a piece of text that looks something like “Get this Look: Jeans $100, Shirt $40, Weird Socks $10.” This is a good system: the company can sell you more clothing this…
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