Technology
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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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Teachers: help your shy and introverted students engage in discussion with the HELM OF UNRELENTING GAZE, the newest and most valuable teaching fad.
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Background: One problem that educators face is that, with so many students in a lecture hall / classroom, it can be difficult to easily interact with these students on a one-on-one basis. Specifically: Students are far away. Quieter students are difficult to hear. It’s hard to single out a specific student to talk to. Less…
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The issue: It’s quite slow and annoying to unlock a regular rotational combination lock. Also, it’s easy to overshoot your target number and have to enter the combination all over again. There are alternative types of locks, but few of them have the same form factor as the ubiquitous rotating-dial combination lock. Fig. 1: This…
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