Year: 2007

Whilst we wait for the arrival of the semantic web, it seems to me that search engines are not performing nearly as well as they might. When a web crawler examines a website, it can only form a very rudimentary view of what the important content actually is.

Today’s invention is a user generated salience measure.

Each time a webpage is loaded into a browser, a visitor would be asked, with a certain probability, whether they wanted to answer questions about the page (in return for entry into e.g. a prize draw).

If the response were positive, a user would be invited to click, in order, the five most important parts of the page (or the five most annoying ones).

These data would be stored over time, suitably encoded within the page itself. This would allow the possibility of automatically reconfiguring both the nature and structure of the content.

More importantly, the stored information would be read by crawlers visiting the page and used to help index its content more effectively (by weighting the words in the index according to the significance accorded them by users).

It’s ridiculous really that people who have paid for tickets on public transport don’t get to sit down (especially on long journeys).

Today’s invention offers an alternative in the form of flexible plastic seats like those which sometimes appear in playparks by way of replacements for traditional heavy wooden ones.

There are almost always handholds on the shoulders of seats bordering the aisle in a bus or train. Using these, to each seat on one side of the aisle would be attached permanently a flexible, rubberised seat/strap unit, so that it hangs down beside the seat when not in use.

Once the seats fill up, rather than have to stand, people can grab the free end of the seat and attach it to the handhold on the seat on the opposite side of the aisle. This would be achieved using a robust, easy to use clip…which would support a passenger’s weight but disconnect easily when flicked upward (e.g. when evacuation is suddenly needed).

This arrangement would be no less safe, in the event of say a fire, than having to fight one’s way past numbers of standing passengers. Sitting down might well result in fewer injuries when some kind of collision occurs.

It’s widely believed that the (unusual) whites of people’s eyes may have evolved to enable other humans to work out what is being stared at. Meaningful glances can sometimes be socially instructive and much less overt than blurting out “Look at that!”

For anyone who needs to avoid people knowing exactly where they are looking, however, today’s invention aims to help; based on the above information.

A pair of contact lenses, one all-white, one with a fake iris and pupil, are overlapped, joined and placed in one eye.

The white lens covers and obscures the natural iris but can still be seen through (as can the other, false iris). This arrangement gives the impression that the wearer is looking eg left, when in fact she’s looking straight ahead.

This could be useful to security staff and surveillance agents who want to monitor suspects covertly. Obviously both eyes’ lenses need to be similarly orientated to avoid drawing attention to an unnatural squint.

Heat treatment and thermal control is important in creating the required properties of forged products. This allows relief of internal stresses and grain structure control, which provide improved material properties.

Now that thermography is a commonplace industrial technique, today’s invention is to use this to help control the local properties within forged components. This could be achieved by directing a jet of coolant gas to provide computer-controlled, spot cooling of the hot regions in a forged workpiece (it doesn’t have to use air, if you are concerned about oxidation).

This would allow greater certainty about the local rates of cooling and thus help to form components with varying properties in different regions. A bearing surface could be specially hardened, whilst leaving a defined level of elasticity in the shaft section of a single, multiproperty forging, for example.

This would certainly require very high speed, very narrow gas jets in order to achieve refined cooling within the body of a thick-section component.

I once had a Yamaha motorcycle with wheel spokes which were curved (made of cast aluminium alloy). There was much tutting at the time, in the technical press, that this was an example of form over function.

In view of the fact that lots of today’s bicycles have several springs, swingarms and dampers embedded in their frames, why not just simplify things and use spokes which are inherently springy? Most conventional thinking about spokes says that they should be as rigid as possible; stiffening the wheel to ensure effective ‘feedback’ from the road surface (and limiting fatigue damage).

But what if you want to be transported on a featherbed and don’t much care about performance? As long as the spokes are stiff in the wheel axle direction, they can stand to be pretty flexible radially. This would probably mean that the hub of the wheel remains slightly eccentric when in motion, but to anyone who has tried to ride over cobbles, springy spokes have got some obvious advantages.

I’d suggest making the spokes C-shaped in the plane of the wheel (allowing alternating tension and compression) and with an oval section with its long axis parallel to the wheel axle (to ensure the rim stays coplanar with the hub).