Technology
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Background: In the Western custom known as “the handshake,” two individuals greet each other by smooshing their hands together, transmitting every disease (Figure 1). Additionally, this custom can serve as a mini-battle between people with differing ideas of handshake firmness. Fig 1: A clammy and moist hand is offered for your approval. The issue: There…
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Background: You’ve probably heard of a “washer-dryer” combination, an existing one-stop-shop appliance for cleaning clothes. What if we extended this philosophy to other categories of home appliances? Proposal: Sometimes, a frozen food requires a lengthy defrosting period. So if you want to eat that item, you must laboriously: Remove the item from the freezer Place…
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Background: Supposedly, the proliferation of ubiquitous GPS has lead to humans being worse at navigating, the presence of calculators has rendered most people incapable of doing even basic mental math, and the existence of written language has made humans worse at remembering things more generally. Proposal: In order to combat this “things are too easy”…
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The issue: Many companies (especially tech-related ones) are located in extremely expensive cities. If a company in a major metropolitan area could easily relocate to a nearby but outlying area, then employee salaries could be cut by 25%, yet the employees would still have more after-tax/rent income. So essentially, the company would both be more…
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Background: Essentially all major programming languages exclusively use keywords written in English. (For a couple of exceptions, see the addendum at the end.) But this doesn’t have to be the case! Proposal: By using symbols instead of words, we can convey a concept both more concisely and more easily across languages. See below for a…
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The issue: Currently, the loss or theft of an unencrypted laptop can be a huge pain for an employee and/or their company. If a laptop gets stolen out of a person’s car, or just gets forgotten in a train or cafe, it’s entirely possible that the laptop owner will now have to change all their…
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The issue: Many computers are unable to handle letters that don’t fall into the set of Latin characters used by English. Even though the Unicode standard has greatly improved multi-character-set accessibility, problems still arise: A character might not exist in a chosen font. For example, “Egyptian Hieroglyph of a bird catching a fish” is probably…
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The issue: Gathering data for scientific studies can be difficult. So why not tap into the world of VIDEO GAMES to conduct experiments on willing participants for no additional monetary cost! Normal scenario: Researcher: “I wonder what factors lead to a person trusting Person A instead of Person B?” or: Researcher: “I suspect that—all else…
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The issue: If you’re wearing headphones, it can be difficult to hear when someone is trying to get your attention. (Similarly, it can be heard to get the attention of someone wearing headphones without startling them.) Proposal: Headphones could have a small microphone on them with a processing unit that could listen for certain words.…
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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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