Culture
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Background: In many situations, such as political debates, the first day at a new school, or the first day on a job, making a good first impression is extremely important. The issue: Unfortunately, it’s hard for a newcomer to reliably make a great first impression if other people aren’t already predisposed to like them. Proposal:…
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Background: One of the most common complaints about nearby construction is the potential for new structures to block the views of existing residents. The issue: Existing residents in a neighborhood occasionally attempt to block nearby construction (often coming up with extremely implausible reasons as a smokescreen), when the real reason is that they just don’t…
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Background: In many cities, there are a large number of “almost-a-parking-spot” locations (for example, between two driveways) that can only fit an extremely small car. Additionally, most popular models of small cars have gotten substantially larger over time. For example, a 1959 Mini Cooper is 120 inches long, while a 2005 model is 143 inches…
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The issue: When a person takes a shower, it is often the cast that some fraction of the water leaving the shower head lands directly on the shower floor without hitting the shower-taker (Figure 1). This “off-target” water is totally wasted. Proposal: Thanks to advances in computer vision and inexpensive electronics, it is now possible…
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Background: In the post-online-shopping world, there are now nearly innumerable purchasing options for every style of item. If a person wanted to buy a particular style of baseball cap in the pre-Internet world, they would have the following option: Go to a store Purchase one of the, say, 4 or 5 suitable caps that are…
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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: English has a wide variety of rarely-used short words that are extremely useful in various word games (e.g. Scrabble, Words With Friends, Bananagrams), and not in very many other situations. Specifically, there are (in the 1993 FreeBSD dictionary that comes with Mac OS X), a total of: 139 two-letter words 1294 three-letter words 4994…
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Background: Laptop privacy screens (or “monitor filters”) reduce the viewing angle of a laptop screen in order to prevent evildoers from snooping on sensitive information on your laptop (Figure 1). The issue: Unfortunately, these privacy screens have a few downsides: They are inelegant to attach. Often, the attachment points block a small amount of screen…
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Background: Closed captioning (e.g. [Wind howling] or [Ominous footsteps] in a movie) supplements traditional subtitles with information beyond just dialogue. For a movie, this information is usually sufficient: a viewer doesn’t usually need to know exactly how loud the wind was howling, or which direction the footsteps are coming from. The issue: Unfortunately, in video…
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When using a computer, phone, or tablet, it is occasionally the case that a user must type in numbers. Typing numbers on a computer with a 12-digit physical numeric keypad is fast and easy (Figure 1). Unfortunately, laptops frequently no longer have these hardware keypads, and smartphones and tablets never did. The issue: The “soft”…
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