Technology
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Background: Imagine a boat: but someone added a canopy, and now it travels underwater (Fig. 1). Now you’ve got a submarine! That’s all the background you need. (Actual submarine construction may be somewhat more complicated.) The Issue: There has been interest lately in putting sails on oceangoing vessels again: this is proposed as a cheap…
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Background: People frequently listen to music during their day-to-day activities. In olden times, a person was limited to whatever was playing on the radio, but in the post-iPod world, it’s very straightforward to load up an entire day’s worth of personalized music ahead of time. However, such music can’t react to the events of the…
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Background: Most standard “utility” programs (word processors, spreadsheets, photo editors…) haven’t been substantially improved since approximately 2005. The Issue: Unfortunately, in order for the companies that sell these programs to survive, they need to somehow get paid. But this is a difficult argument to make when the 1997 version of a spreadsheet program is essentially…
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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,…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 