Invention Of The Day

#76: Brainstorm tool

I spend a fair amount of time brainstorming, both ‘on-fees’ and in the back of my mind -it’s my default mode of thinking. There is something special, ie emergent, about the combination of brain processes that occurs when people are encouraged to shout out ideas whilst reading and listening to other people’s suggestions.

I’m always looking for ways to help enhance ideas generation. Today’s invention is a combination of tools which already exist. This is aimed at allowing people, who may be geographically remote from each other, to contribute to a brainstorming session. This way you don’t have to rely solely on the five or six people who happen to available in Company X on the afternoon in question: they are almost never the best equipped.

Each person would wear a headset into which they bawl their single-phrase contributions in the usual way and which allows them to hear the inputs of others. These words are converted by speech-to-text software and displayed as a ‘cloud’ on the screens of contributors, deliberately delayed by a second or two.

In addition, word association software could be used to spot links between elements in the existing cloud and distantly related ideas…and to display these as if they were the input of some extra, supersmart participant.

#75: Camera return details

As digital cameras get smaller, so the chances of them being left behind in restaurants or in taxis tend to increase. Although the hardware will soon be almost disposable, the images on board can still be very valuable.

I’m optimistic enough to still think that, in the event of me forgetting some possession, someone might actually try to return it to me. I discovered recently, however, that there is no easy way to store my contact details in my new camera -short of carving my email address into the rather attractive steel casing.

Today’s invention is therefore to equip new digital cameras (those without keypads, anyway) with the ability to store one, read-only image. This could be of eg a business card or other contact information stored on the day of purchase and remaining as startup image forever. You might even choose to include details about a reward for the safe return of your stuff.

#74: Alternative 3-D display

When you look at some image (whether an old master or some pastoral scene on your desktop) it usually looks flat and obviously unreal. That is partly because of that fact that when viewing with both eyes, the brain can easily detect that some picture of a 3-D scene is just 2-D.

One way to get more from such images is to view them, using one eye, through a stationary frame. Often an artist or photographer will have cleverly composed their image so as to contain many ‘monocular depth cues‘ -elements like texture which blurs as it ‘recedes’ into the image. When the image is seen using only one eye, these cues get a chance to be interpreted strongly by the brain and everything can seem much more realistic and 3-D.

Today’s invention is therefore an ultra-cheap and crude alternative to 3-D displays. It consists of a simple mechanical ‘headset’ that allows someone to sit with their head very still relative to a screen whilst they view images through a frame which is closer to the user than to the screen itself. One eye would be blanked off, although this could perhaps be allowed to alternate every few hours to minimise fatigue.

Certain games, works of art and tv shows might even be designed to incorporate lots more depth cues to enhance this effect and reduce the need for customer purchases of electronic display hardware.

#73: Second Life mindswap

Maybe Second Life can contribute something to oldfashioned reality -other than a place to hide from it? (My personal view is that normal reality is no more real than the model versions in virtual worlds like SL -they are all simplified simulations).

Certain interesting things are, however, uniquely possible in computer-based simulations. One such may be that it’s (technically) possible to swap Avatars and therefore viewpoints.

Today’s invention is to exploit that possibility to help resolve realworld disputes. Such a mindswap mediation service could even form a high-value export for SL back to gritty, high-resolution reality.

#72: Sleeping bag with active thermal management

If you have a fever, current medical advice is simply to attempt to adjust your temperature by varying the amount of clothing or bedclothes surrounding you and thus achieve as great a level of comfort as possible. For those who are unconscious, or infants that may not be possible.

Today’s invention is an attempt to promote heat transfer from hot regions of the body to cold regions and thus minimise the danger of thermal organ damage.

A close fitting body-shaped sleeping bag lined with a network of copper tapes is envisaged. This alone would be enough to promote a more nearly uniform body temperature, but in addition, I’d suggest the following extra measure: a kind of thermal ‘nervous system’.

In its crudest form, there could be a tape running from each of say 20 recognised thermal centres each to a peripheral part of the body (requiring about 200 tapes in total). Each tape would contain a small switch capable of turning ‘on’, to allow heat flow along its tape, only if the temperature difference between that tape’s ends was sufficient. This would have the effect of allowing a fever to progress to the level required to overcome eg a viral infection but not to the point where fitting sets in.

#71: Prehab product

Today’s invention is a new product for the many sources of highly-priced therapy in connection with addictive behaviours.

Prehab is a tool which reads news feeds for the first appearance of each new name on the celebrity circuit. It allows exclusive rehab clinics to get in touch with these people before they develop an addiction and to provide them with a personalised risk assessment and information about the possible dangers of fame and fortune.

This may not be enough to avert the problem entirely but it does allow each clinic to get their foot in the door as the first choice source of support if addiction rears its head later in an individual’s career. It also provides wannabees with a valuable indicator of having ‘made it’.

#70: Slam shield

Some people just don’t have much ‘mechanical sympathy,’ ie a sense of how hard to push or twist or bend a device to achieve some result. Especially when closing car doors, it’s common practice to use the ‘stand back and slam’ approach. This is bad because:

It encourages people to make a bloody nuisance of themselves in the early hours: “HOWDY NEIGHBOURS, WE’VE BEEN TO A PARTY”
The door takes a terrible mechanical beating over the course of its lifetime.
Most important of all, It’s still too easy to catch some poor child’s fingers in the gap

I’m not advocating an MIB II complex electronic door closure system -which is guaranteed to break (replacement cost £2,299 + VAT, per door, thanks).

Instead, todays’s invention take the form of a hose fitted around the internal periphery of a car door, to form a loop (you could use a hollow version of the common foam door seal).

One end of the loop has compressed air passed in when the door starts shutting (it could be compressed by the previous door closure action). The other end of the hose has a microphone embedded in it. The microphone ‘knows’ the sound of a correctly closing door. Children’s fingers depressing the hose, by being in the gap, and other phenomena, such as hurling the door closed, make a discernibly different noise within the hose and cause the door’s internal rubber stops rapidly to protrude -or not to withdraw. (This whistling hosepipe technique might also underpin the contact monitoring pads of this idea).

If you wanted a greater margin of safety, the hose might have pinholes inserted along its length which would issue compressed air streams. These would interact with objects in the gap but not actually in contact with the hose, changing slightly the noise picked up by the microphone and stopping the door from closing somewhat earlier.

#69: Stomach acidity indicator

A relative of mine routinely feels a sudden burst of nausea several minutes after taking an omega-3 oil capsule. We believe that it’s the result of the soft wall of the pill suddenly breaking down (in HCL with a pH of around 1) and releasing a burst of harmless, but sickening, oil (we hope it’s harmless and at least the effects disappear within a few minutes).

Today’s invention is to use the time-to-nausea as a non-invasive measure of stomach acidity. It turns out, surprisingly, that this isn’t a predictor of that many diseases, but it may help to highlight when someone is undergoing heightened stress.

If we could only find a way to encourage eg suspected criminals to ingest such pills, there might be a way to use the effect as a back-up to lie detection techniques.

#68: Toilet turbulator

I’ve had to undertake a lot of practical research into the phenomenon of blocked drains, lately…we are talking toilets here actually, I’m afraid. I’ve been astonished by how poorly a sink plunger performed, even when combined with gallons of chemical unblocker. There is no way to form the required seal, so I resorted to a different tactic.

Ideally, I’d use a high-pressure hose, but if the drain isn’t clear within about 10 seconds, the entire house fills with effluent: -nasty. Turbulent vortices, created by a flapping motion under the water surface, are the answer, I’ve discovered. These can be made energetic enough to erode and dislodge the most stubborn of blockages.

Today’s invention is an attempt to achieve the intense flapping required without having to use your hand. Instead, a variant on this trash picker device is suggested, with a flipper in place of the ‘beak’ and the whole thing encased in some kind of ezy-clene rubber sleeve. I still haven’t thought up a way to make this flexible enough to go around a U bend, but fortunately, water is sufficiently incompressible for pressure waves to be transmitted over longish distances -making this usually unnecessary.

#67: Subjective interface tool

When I was in my early 20s, I suddenly discovered that most people didn’t have the same internal models as I had.

Here is a page from a computer-based diary (written in HyperTalk) which I designed to mirror how I think about the year… how I actually see time in my head.

Each week is envisaged as an upwards-slanting ellipse which moves from Monday (lower left) to Friday (upper right).

Successive weeks form a vertical helix with New Year at the top. This helix of the year then loops over and flows downwards towards Summer.

My 3-D view of time does make using a conventional, rectilinear calendar a major challenge, but it occurs to me that it provides a much more direct, ‘zoomable’ model of time than the conventional grid layout (which never works for me, since I can’t stand that need to look over the page to see what’s happening next month -come to think of it, surely it would be better, on computer-based calendars, to scroll time so that eg on the 2nd of the month you get a window displaying the 15th of last month to the 16th of this month…how many meetings get missed because people didn’t see them coming?)

It turns out that I have several of these visual models: the kinds of thing that NLP and ‘timeline therapy’ rely on. Today’s invention is therefore to equip people with a simple, personal design tool which allows them to create computer based interfaces, reflecting their subjective mental models, to the processes of eg

travelling in the city where they live -see this example
all the activities within their company
their relationships to other people (could produce a few surprises).

It would probably be something like a version of FrontPage (that actually worked) but with lots of javascript widgets available as standard to accommodate the necessary interactivity and personalisation. (I’ve just come across this interesting development).