Culture
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Background: Baseball is one of the few [1] sports where the playing field is not standardized: The outfield can vary substantially in size and shape from ballpark to ballpark. The presence / absence of fences can change the possibility of an out-of-the-park home run. This adds up to the strange situation where a home run…
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Background: When packing a box for shipping, some objects can stack perfectly with no wasted space. However, some common shapes—for example, cylinders (e.g. toilet paper rolls) and spheres (e.g. oranges)—can’t be packed without wasted empty space in the box (Figure 1). Proposal: If someone orders a set of products that don’t pack together,…
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Background: Certain types of vending machines are capable of squeezing oranges and dispensing the freshly-squeezed orange juice right there at the machine. Generally speaking, these machines actually show you the oranges through a transparent window, so you can see the orange-juice-making process. Most of these machines proclaim that you are getting “100% Orange Juice” or…
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Background: Running a business is expensive, and employee wages are usually a huge fraction of total costs (see Figure 1). However, these jobs can’t always be eliminated: many jobs still REQUIRE a human employee, and jobs that require an on-site presence can’t be outsourced. Proposal: Some jobs require an on-site presence and are difficult to…
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The issue: Sometimes, a representative for a company causes a public relations disaster by saying something dumb on camera (Figure 1). Obviously, we’d like to avoid this. But although it’s easy to avoid interview disasters over email (just have a PR department filter the outgoing emails), this doesn’t work for real-time in-person interactions. Proposal: Fortunately,…
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Background: When giving a presentation on a large screen, there are two popular options for calling attention to specific areas of a slide deck: Physically gesture at the screen (or use a laser pointer, as seen in Figure 1). Use the laptop trackpad to move the mouse pointer / arrow around. The issue: The trackpad…
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The issue: During a conference call, it can be difficult to position multiple people in such a way that everyone is actually in-frame. Usually, either: Only one person fits into the frame, or: Everyone is extremely far from the camera, so 95% of the screen area is taken up by a conference table. Figure 1…
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Background: People occasionally forget to lock the door before leaving the house, or leave a stove on by accident, or any number of other things. “Internet of Things” aficionados often suggest that you could, say, turn on and off your stove from your phone, but now someone on the Internet thousands of miles away can…
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Background: Some new phones (and laptops) have the ability to detect an authorized user’s face and unlock the phone without requiring a PIN. Often, if you have something stuck in your teeth, people won’t say anything. Then, hours later, you realize that you had, say, a huge leaf of lettuce in your hair the whole…
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The issue: Sometimes, one must make a difficult decision in life, or convey bad news to someone. This can be stressful! Proposal: But what if these hard decisions could be outsourced? With this new system, if you find yourself in an unpleasant situation while messaging someone, you can press a button on the program to…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 