Communication
-
Background: One popular animal-training technique is to give the animal (such as the killer whale in Fig. 1) a small reward immediately after it accomplishes a task. Proposal: Strangely, this approach—frequently-dispensed minor rewards—has rarely been attempted for humans. But with the increasing rate of remote work and the implementation of the dystopian surveillance state from…
-
Background: In the pre-Internet era, news was physically printed out on sheets of so-called “news” paper, which were published chronologically. As a result of these limitations, it was not possible to inform a reader of (say) July 1, 1910’s article about the merits of radium water that there would be a crucial retraction published on…
-
Background: Occasionally, a video meeting will be scheduled with a large number of participants. The Issue: Since the participants are usually only arranged based on who is actually present in a meeting, it can be hard to figure out exactly who has (and hasn’t) shown up, especially if the meeting has 10+ participants. For example,…
-
Background: Sometimes, people feel the need to win an argument no matter what, or to “save face” after being totally incorrect. Or maybe it’s the last question at a pub trivia night, and the championship is on the line! The issue: (Un)fortunately, it can be easy to be called out on factually-incorrect assertions (e.g. “I’m…
-
Background: Cell phone interfaces seem to inexorably become more complicated as time goes on. The issue: The 2010-era smartphone relied on a small number of obviously-interactable elements, but 2020’s smartphones are quite sophisticated (and complicated) from a UI standpoint, with finger-sliding gestures, multiple screens of icons, and even the possibility of splitting the screen to…
-
Background: When typing on a phone with an on-screen virtual keyboard, the auto-correct feature is essential. Strangely, this auto-correct / auto-complete feature has never been monetized! Proposal: In order to bring great deals to consumers and new advertising opportunities to companies, we describe the following auto-correct enhancement. Currently, auto-correct is boring and predicable. For example:…
-
Background: With the 2020 COVID plague, work-related video chats have become increasingly full of a large number of participants (Figure 1). The issue: Video chats have a problem that in-person office work does not: there is no convenient way for participants of an unreasonably-large video chat group to split off into subgroups. Instead, every discussion…
-
Background: It seems that nearly every electronic device with a camera or microphone is now Internet-enabled and can wirelessly send video and audio to the world. The issue: Due to the preponderance of electronic hardware in a modern household, it can be difficult which (if any) device is spying on you at that exact moment…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 