Archive for: July 2008

IOTD is a source of prior art, whatever you may think of its value. Amongst those of us who would rather compete in the spheres of ideation and product development than in the courts and who think that worthwhile research has to be publicly available, such defensive publishing is becoming more widely accepted.

Alternatives to the Patent Arms Race: An Empirical Study of Defensive Publishing

This article by Joachim Henkel and Stefanie Pangerl is based on an empirical study of defensive publishing. It relies on 56 interviews with intellectual property experts and finds that 70% of the companies in its sample make use of defensive publishing. It argues that defensive publishing will be used more actively in the future since it can contribute to solving the aggravating problems of the patent arms race, of an increasing likelihood of inadvertent infringement, and of patent trolls.

I have to admit to an interest in building models…aircraft, tanks…almost any kind of warlike machinery interests me enough to want to recreate it as a plastic miniature. I don’t understand it either: but at least I’m not alone.

There is a subset of model buyers that likes to keep their construction kits in-box, pristine, unassembled. That’s fine (if a little obsessive) until they happen to own a very rare (and valuable) kit. Today’s invention is a way to build it without ever having to separate the components from the virginal sprue.

The contents of a box of parts would be laser-scanned whilst still attached to that holy sprue. This would result in the creation of a 3-D computer model of the components which could be ‘detached’ and assembled in silico to build a virtual 3-D model.

This could then be passed to a rapid prototyping device in order to create (and sell) unlimited reproductions of a very rare model design.

Another nice feature is the ability to make those versions at different scales…so if you only have a 1/24 scale model of the 1973 Airfix Hawker Hurricane, you can use that to create a highly-detailed 1/72 squadron.

I’m tired of throwing away lots of disposable razors, without even knowing whether the blades are blunt. I use a razor once or twice and the whole ‘system’ clogs with a concretion of stubble, skin cells and old soap -making it effectively unusable, even after running it under water at high pressure.

I’ve talked before about the blade cleaning problem…hard-to-clean blades are actually a feature of their underlying business model.

Today’s invention is a washable mouthpiece which snaps onto the rear face of disposable razors. The user blows hard into one end. Air travels in between the blades and dislodges whatever residue there is into the sink (Probably best to do this before everything has dried to a fibre-matrix composite material).

The short passage between mouthpiece and razor would be filled with small-diameter tubes -so that the pressures at their outlet ends would be uniform (thus avoiding the problem of air simply by passing parts of the gap between razor blades which are blocked by gunge).

Children seem to develop a taste for less than healthy food partly because of the visually exciting packaging in which it is often served them.

Today’s invention is a pre-printed cardboard roll of highly-coloured, comic-like images -containing puzzles, links to interesting websites, competitions, factoids, stories, games etc. This material would be age-indexed so that one could buy a roll designed specifically for 8-10 year-olds for example.

The rolls would embody serrations to allow the pressing out of sections which could then be folded into food containers. In this way, fruit and other healthier edibles might be supplied to youngsters in a wide variety of attractive, exciting wrappers.

This certainly saves on running the dishwasher and, using edibles dyes and cardboard, the containers can themselves be eaten.

The AC adaptor on my laptop is woeful, from many perspectives. Let’s leave aside the fact that it runs hot enough to fry an egg…even the latest generation of transformers are way too heavy for a device that is supposed to be mobile.

Part of the weight is in the adaptor cable. A fat one runs from wall socket to device and a thin one runs from device to laptop. What determines the relative lengths of these sections? Well, it’s important to have enough total length that one can work without being right up against the wall and enough flexibility at the wall end that the plug can actually get in the socket.

Beyond these factors, there is freedom to reduce the weight of the adaptor system by minimising the fat cable length and maximising the thin one. Today’s invention is to create adaptors with a few cm of input cable and around 2m of thin output wire. Much less to cart about, marginally less wasted resource and significantly less annoying to roll up.

Middle class Victorians, schooled in the social graces, would have had the ability to provide, at soirees, some kind of small personal performance or ‘turn’.

Today’s invention is a website which allows people to resurrect this tradition by uploading a small film of themselves doing a single, 30-second turn (direct from eg their mobile phone).

This allows people to show a different side of their personality than might be apparent in the office. Individuals who wanted to could enter their email address and postal region so they could be invited to perform again at forthcoming social gatherings in their area.

The popular press carries a story almost every week about how some parent has been arrested for taking pictures of his own children at a school sportsday. The accusation is always that even an innocent photographer might unwittingly publish images of other people’s children on a public website. The thought of paedophiles downloading those images for their own purposes naturally fills parents with a range of emotions from distaste through horror to outrage.

Today’s invention is therefore a camera which can only take pics of the faces of one’s own children.

Certain digital cameras (‘familycams’?) would be available only eg in fluorescent green, so that only this type could be used to photograph children at events without someone objecting. A photographer would first need to take a fixed number of photos of each member of his/her family. These would be stored as exemplars in the camera.

When taking photographs later, the camera would automatically detect all faces in the shot and obscure any that were not within the family set.

On a good day, I can run for an hour or so without needing an ambulance. I’ve noticed that it’s enormously easier to keep running if I don’t do the instinctive thing of lowering my chin to my chest and ‘digging-in.’ My assumption is that lifting my head allows easier breathing, but whatever the reason, this really helps me cover ground with very much less effort.

Today’s invention is a neck brace -just like those used by people with whiplash injuries, except that this is an ultra-lightweight version with multiple air holes in it to avoid temperature build-up during exercise.

This might also be combined with a pair of sunglasses in which the bottom edges of the lenses are completely obscured -forming vertical blinkers which discourage the tendency to stare at the ground a metre ahead.

I’ve spent some time thinking about ways to deal with rats. There are numerous approaches, from gassing to poisoning but still rats remain a problem for two main reasons: they eat huge amounts of food and they are also vectors for some pretty nasty diseases.

Any extermination device really needs to attract a rat, kill it and clear the trap for the next victim. All of this to be achieved at minimal expense, of course.

Today’s invention is a delayed-action trap based on the action of wild barley or foxtails. These grasses shed seeds which are barbed and work their way through the fur and skin of a huge range of mammals -eventually killing them if left untreated. I suggest creating a trap in the form of a narrow tunnel into which protrude the seed-barbs of living grasses. A rat squeezing through the box to reach some bait would embed many such barbs in its fur…eventually leading to its death.

The grasses would grow in a tray surrounding the tunnel and would naturally re-seed themselves several times a year. It might be possible to have separate trays for a number of species, with overlapping seeding seasons. A more advanced version would perhaps make use of grasses genetically engineered to have even more penetrative seed barbs.

There is a serious problem to do with people carrying knives and getting drawn into using them to ‘settle’ conflicts. Some of these are sold as hunting or ‘survival’ knives, whilst many others are just kitchen knives borrowed in an attempt to appear tough.

In order to cut the numbers of knives which are available for stabbings, today’s invention is a coloured plastic disc, containing adhesive, which, once applied to the point of a blade, is almost impossible to remove.

Each disc is about the size of a £1 coin and comes with a deep slot in its outer circumference (looking as if a partial attempt had been made to separate the two faces of a coin). Into this, the point of a knife can be inserted. When the disc is pierced by the point of a knife entering the slot, it exudes a small volume of one-part epoxy adhesive which permanently bonds the blunting device to the knife point.

The cutting edge of the knife is still available for legitimate uses, but the point can’t now be used to stab anyone.