Technology
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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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Background: Health care is expensive—but it could be cheaper, if labor were cheaper (apparently somewhere between half and two-thirds of costs go to salaries). The issue: Unfortunately, doctors and nurses will probably remain relatively expensive—but what if we can recruit cheap labor to do some of the tasks that normally require a highly-trained medical professional?…
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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…
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Erase all of written history to hide our shameful alphabet-based mistakes from the future! After reading this, you will think Fahrenheit 451 is an instruction manual.
also that X-is-an-instruction-manual is already a joke about 1984, ambiguity, ambiguous letters, Celcius 233, Centipede 233, Centrigrade 233, erase the mistakes of the past, Fahrenheit 451, fix Latin letters, fix the English language, letters, never learn from the past, that one movie Equilibrium I guess
The issue: Latin-based writing systems—like the one your’e reading right now—have a serious problem: many letters and numbers look exactly the same! The most obvious example (Figure 1) is probably “l” (lower-case “L”) and “I” (upper-case “i”). Benefits: Fixing these duplicated symbols, perhaps with the proposed new symbols in Figure 3, has a number of…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 