Where
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Things Work Right
** New ideas added 05/15/05 starting at number 214.
214. The Darth Vader Baby Crib -
A simple combination of 2 existing products.
While watching the scene in a TV show called 'Lost' last night where one
character's deep voice stopped a cranky
baby from crying it occurred to me that I've seen the same thing happen
in real life more than once. There's something
about a deep voice that soothes some babies. The idea here is just to enhance
cribs so they come with built in CD
players and a collection of stories told by an assortment of deep-voiced
narrators. Think Darth Vader, James Earl
Jones, etc... There could also be a collection of sing-songy voices like
Mary Poppins. (And if you were really mad at
the kid you could play a story told by that nasal-voiced New Yorker who
used to be on 'Nanny', Fran Drescher.)
215. I Wouldn't Sit There If I Were You -
The Nasty Toilet Recognition System
Ever wonder how a blind person knows if the smell coming from a public
toilet stall is just left over from a previous
tenant or continuing to be emitted by a dirty seat? They could always wipe
the seat of course but that still wouldn't tell
them if the toilet was clogged (or about to be). That's where the Toilet
Recognition System comes in. If we can create
a software program that's capable of matching one face in a million then
we should be able to write one that will be
able to recognize a dirty toilet from a clean one when a blind person points
their camera phone at it. If the toilet
looked hazardous the computerized voice would just say 'I wouldn't sit
there if I were you.' I'm sure there are a lot of
other situations where it would be helpful to have a computer program do
the checking for a blind person too.
216. Blind Carpets -
While we're on the subject of helping the blind.
A blind parent who has to take care of sloppy kids might find it useful
to have a carpet pad that could emit
ultrasound waves at the touch of a button to alert them that the kids had
left something on the floor (and tell them
where it is in relation to where they were standing). A baseline test with
the floor picked up would establish which
items to ignore (chairs, coffee tables, etc..). Something similar
could be done with cabinets and drawers. When a
magnetic seal was broken (like home alarm systems on windows) the hearing
aid or communicator would let a blind
user know about it at the touch of a button.
If an ultrasonic emitting carpet pad proved too expensive, a system built
using the three-way lasers that some levels
use now could be adapted to suit our purpose. With one put in each
corner of the room it could triangulate
obstructions and note where it found any that didn't belong where they
were.
217. Best Practice -
Success through anecdotes.
This would be a simple web site broken into sections based on business
areas. It would contain anecdotes about
problems people have run into and the solutions they came up with to make
people's jobs easier.
Example: A plant supervisor was taking me through the plant while an inventory
was being taken. We stopped at a
group of pallets that had single-sheet, preprinted forms on them stacked
about 4 feet high. The person doing the
inventory was walking a 12 inch piece of pvc pipe up the stack to find
out how high the stack was in inches so she
could then multiply the number of inches x sheets per inch and get a somewhat
accurate count of how many sheets
were on the pallet. I suggested she could significantly cut down the amount
of time she spent counting this inventory
simply by getting a bigger piece of pvc pipe and marking it off in 12 inch
increments. If it was at least as tall as the
highest stack she'd get her inches in one step. (Ignore the fact that a
tape measure would do the same thing much
more accurately.) Kind of like Dilbert with a clue for the clueless.
It might be interesting to skim through a web site
like this to see if there were any easy answers to problems you hadn't
thought of yet.
218. Recycled Windshield Washer Fluid -
I hate refilling the damn thing.
It seems like we should be able to devise some way of capturing the fluid
that's sprayed on the windshield so it can
be reused instead of just letting drip to the ground. I'm thinking of a
collection channel running along the bottom of
the windshield that would funnel the water into a cylinder. The cylinder
would spin while the wipers were on, forcing
the water through filters to get all of the gunk out and then feeding it
back into the reservoir. Whenever it was raining
and the system determined you weren't using the cleaning fluid it would
spin the collected rainwater back and forth to
clean the filters and then open a hatch so it could just fall to the ground
beneath the car. This would give us a
self-cleaning system that rarely had to be refilled (a plus on the ecological
side).
219. Evaluation By Dagger -
Make sure your boss gets the point.
I don't know about anyone else, but climate surveys, 360 degree evaluations
and the like don't really let me evaluate
some of my bosses the way I'd like to. If upper management really wants
to know which managers are contributing
to low morale and which ones aren't, then they should create a couple of
long, narrow evaluation rooms that the
employees could use any time they feel like it. The rooms would have a
set of 20 daggers at one end and a blank
board at the other. Employees would enter, key in a manager's name (or
fellow employee for that matter), and a
picture of the person would be projected onto the blank board at the other
end of the room. Then they'd start
throwing the knives at it. You could be pretty sure that whichever managers
had the most knives thrown at them
during any 3-month period were not helping morale very much.
In order for this to work there would have to be a couple of conditions.
Employees would only get one set of knives
per trip to the evaluation room. Those who used the room would be guaranteed
anonymity. And no manager could
select the picture of one of his peers (to keep them from trying to offset
their own negative evaluation). In addition to
giving upper management a better assessment of how their employees feel,
it would give the employees a very
refreshing way to vent.
220. Pelican Road Trips -
Let the kids be backseat flyers.
Now that rear-vision cameras have become fully baked it's about time we
take the next technological leap and fully
integrate front, rear and side view cameras into a helmet for kids that
can keep track of its own orientation and
smoothly change the view as you turn this way and that. Done well, it will
give the kids the illusion that they are the
car. A set of buttons on the side of the helmet could make the view even
more interesting. One button would let them
zoom in for a closer look at whatever they're passing. Another would let
them replay the scene (tapping it to rewind
the TiVo-based logic in 15-20 second increments). Another would make the
question - "Did you see that!" -
completely rhetorical as it could send the recorded scene to whichever
sibling they were talking to. And another
button would play whatever DVD you slid into a slot on the back of their
helmet. If nothing else, these helmets would
cut back on the number of head injuries kids get in accidents.
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