Technology
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Background: Video chat is now relatively widespread. Frequently, people on a chat will be muted and/or have their video off. The Issue: The terminology for “a person is muted” is straightforward: “muted.” However, English currently lacks short terms for “I am muted” versus “I have the audio turned off for the remote speaker.” Additionally, there…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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Background: Sometimes, office workers who are retired (or unemployed, or even on vacation) miss certain elements of the office environment. Much of this is probably rose-tinted nostalgia, but maybe we can capitalize on it anyway in order to create a valuable service. Proposal: There are three elements to this system, which we will call the…
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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…
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Background: When discussing a topic, it’s convenient to have “shorthand” terms for complicated concepts: e.g. “absolute monarchy” or “representative democracy.” The issue: Somehow, English completely lacks a term for describing the upcoming governments of the future—there is NO quick way to describe “a dictatorship, but the (human) dictator rules over the citizenry using an army…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 