When I was a child, the Radiometer was probably the first device that I was aware of which the adults in my family couldn’t explain convincingly. I’m still short of a how-it-works theory which satisfies me, but it forms the basis of today’s invention.

I noticed that the vanes of the radiometer which I was given 30 years ago had recently stopped moving. Wiping a small area of dust from the top caused them suddenly to restart. It occurred to me that here we have a system capable of measuring more than household dust. It is a potential, low cost monitor of airborne pollution.

This is a matter of concern for me because I regularly spend time working by the window of a city centre office which is visibly speckled with sooty particles. Using a suitably calibrated radiometer, I can now be aware quantitatively of the ambient level of atmospheric particulates inside the building -when the vanes become immobile, it’s time to evacuate or activate the expelair.

This simple system incorporates a small fan, to accelerate the deposition of specks on the glass, and a selection of smoked glass filters to boost the sensitivity to their density. This could be supplied to urban schools, for example, in order to protect children from pollution.

I’m always interested in the idea of symmetry. Actually, the real interest is in asymmetry -especially whenever that arises apparently spontaneously.

In today’s world, everyone in the comfy developed countries is exhorted to ‘downsize their carbon footprint’, even if those doing the exhortation have no concept of what that means (suddenly Carbon is a bad thing?).

My proposal is to concentrate on waste and specifically wasting electricity. Today’s invention, without any official hectoring, is simply to create switches for everything electrical which are quite difficult to switch on and very, very easy to flip off. This would cause users to pause and think ‘do I really need to switch the X on?

The difficulty might involve a multi-step ‘on’ process, rather than one involving great amounts of finger strength (think about trying to log off from Windows, where you get asked that infuriating ‘are you sure?’ and imagine applying that to energy-absorbing systems). It might take the form of greater frictional resistance to the movement of a switch, or a sound effect which is a slightly annoying whine in the ‘on’ direction and applause when you switch off. Now that fingerprint readers are available at a few dollars on thumb drives, switches might only activate for certain individuals. (A symmetrical version might even record how many times that person switched on and didn’t switch off).

The asymmetry which any such threshold creates, can perhaps make people think before they act. If this user-unfriendly development had the effect of making people never switch anything off, then each electrical apparatus could be made to automatically deactivate after a certain length of time. This period would have to be set by the user, before the on switch could be activated.

When one’s tyre treads wear down towards the legal limit, it’s not always obvious (until you end up parked in a hedge perhaps).

Today’s invention is a way to become aware of this problem in advance of a terminal loss of traction.

A band of hard plastic would be inserted, during manufacture, in one of the circumferential tread gaps. This would eventually be exposed to the road surface as the surrounding rubber wears away. When this occurs, serrations in the surface of the plastic make a characteristic buzzing noise as the wheels rub on the road.

This would be annoying enough for people to find it necessary to visit a garage quickly to buy new tyres. The noise might even be made to increase and decrease in frequency, in a siren-like way as the wheel in question rotates.

Freedom of speech. It’s a great idea; until you are forced to spend one minute listening to some nazi or nerd or sycophant or fundamentalist or egomaniac sounding off. Freedom of speech is fine, as long as people don’t drown each other out and can walk away from the soapbox.

Which leads me to online communications. At the moment, I can search the web with various ‘safety’ filters in place. Often however, when I read some comments string or some newsgroup, people are just so intolerant and rude. There is a tendency to resort immediately to some unnecessarily hyped language. Two posts later, it becomes obviously inappropriate.

Today’s invention is a software based filter which web readers can use to substitute-in less emotive words when they are perusing user-generated content…”idiot” would become “person with limited understanding” etc. (We might resort to the automatic substitution of derogatory terms by friendlier emoticons instead and there would also have to be some slightly intelligent handling, in English, of the use of ‘a’ and ‘an’).

This would lessen the emotional tone of a lot of comms and make it easier to see the strength of people’s arguments, independent of their intensity. I’d be interested in a scheme which blocked postings from individuals whose comments had been very frequently edited in this way. I claim the inalienable freedom to ignore their rantings.

In olden, ie pre-Edison, times we had streets lit by flickering gas lamps (if we were lucky). Now that electricity is a more usual power source, why do we still have static, uniform levels of light output?

It always seems crazy to me that city streets, already lit by shop windows and signs, are doubly lit by such civic lights.

Today’s invention aims to save a lot of money by enabling such lamps to sense the local ambient light level and adapt the intensity of their output to achieve a constant level of illumination. This would allow many lamps to run at reduced power and provide a more consistent, and therefore safe, visual environment.

I was attending an EU conference receently which benefitted from some pretty fancy comms and multimedia technology. As each speaker addressed the meeting from the floor, their moving image appeared on two giant screens at the front (with sometimes hilarious consequences, because eg the speaker was sitting directly behind someone who was much taller….leading to frequent mismatches between the voice and apparent face of the individual concerned).

Today’s invention is twofold…

a) simply equip each seat in an auditorium with its own webcam, rather than a central, tv-quality system (which needs a fancy system to point it in the right direction).

b) provide the chairman with a touchscreen showing all of the audience. This avoids having to spend a lot of time saying ‘ yes, lady in the red dress…’ etc which is embarrassing and slow.

Whoever is in the chair could select people whose ‘request to talk’ button was lit, by touching their face on the screen at the front and thus automatically switching their mic and webcam on.