10,000 Brilliant Ideas

Researchers never share. They want everyone else to share with them, but they never share. Well, they do want to share eventually (weee publish!), they just really don't want to be scooped. How do you fix this perverse situation of smart people? (full disclosure: I think I really don't like the whole archaic publishing process of current day academia. Maybe I'll find something down the road, but I feel like it's been long enough and I still don't really like it. (a)) - Create some incentive to reveal early what you're up to. Some kind of notoriety. Or, more excitingly - Create a news site that hunts down things investigative journalism style. As soon as someone starts a trial or anything scientific they're posted in the papers. Of course researchers could 'turn themselves in', which is what they'd start doing if the journalists were good at sniffing them out anyway. (a) Reasons I don't like the process. - It's gatekept by establishe...

I have no plans to save you money. I don't think that's what you really want. In fact I have plans to take the exact amount of money that you want to spend. What I do want to do is give you the maximum output for that money. That way you look good to donors. You implement (spend) all you plan, and you have great results to show for it. Expect to see me make my pitch around October/November of each year.

Bail bonds is a system that more or less works. You got bail to pay, they loan you the money and then use every tactic possible to make sure you show up for court. Could the same thing go for Visa applicants? You want to go to the US. The US doesn't believe you'll return when you say you will. You pay me a bit and I guarantee the US government to a certain amount of money that you'll be back on that plane.

Perhaps this could be seen as just a modification of a suicide hotline, but more from the user's perspective. She can't take it anymore. She goes onto the bridge. Before she steps over the fence she sees a sign that says "Considering suicide? Commit virtual suicide instead. Call 800 - come get me. Location 3453" She calls the number, gives her name and location and is asked to stay on the line for ten minutes while waiting for an unmarked van to arrive. The van arrives, she climbs inside and sits down in the black interior with a trained facilitator. The facilitator begins whatever the best therapy is and obtains a contact name and number. She relays this information to dispatch who informs the family that their loved one has committed virtual suicide. This means that the person nearly committed suicide and has chosen an alternate escape route. While this route is reversible it is still serious. The family is informed of how information will be provided to them and ...

Hurricane's have huge amounts of energy. More than the world uses in a year. But of course when they blow through you better get your wind turbine turned off or it will snap in half. But what if you designed a wind turbine to handle that speed of wind? 99% of the time it wouldn't do anything, but if a hurricane did come through it would power the world for a day.

Mobile phone theft must be huge. Well at least in our family it is. And it seems to be hard to insure from theft since it's difficult to prove one was stolen and not just misplaced or sold. Samsung has samsung dive which I'm currently trying to get to work. It can lock your screen, wipe your data, track your phone and a few other tricks. I would like to add one - melt your phone. If you can remotely melt a phone this would be good for a few reasons. You can really make sure your data are secure You can prove that the phone is no longer useable It will make theft less desireable Insurance then can be practical I assume that the actual manufacturing cost of a phone is much less than what those wires are worth. Let's say a phone "really costs" 20 bucks. The rest is intellectual property and the technology. If you can show samsung that you melted your old phone, then they would handily sell you a new one at cost. Unless they are trying to capitalize on the...

Assuming that mosquitoes have plenty of legs around to bite and the only thing really that's stopping them from multiplying quicker is the lack of suitable places to lay eggs; and also assuming that no Malarial vaccine exists (or dengue); then if you were to construct a mosquito feeder that would give the mosquitoes the blood meal they need, while at the same time preventing the spread of the virus, couldn't you effectively "immunize" the biteable population enough that malaria would die out? UPDATE Smart people had essentially this same idea (albeit much more thought out and informed) back in 2011. Cool to see my main assumption somewhat vetted as well. I like this kind of validation.  http://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/EP10602610.pdf

Your a business. You want to know how secure your stuff is. So you pony up 1000 dollars, make a duplicate of whatever you want to test and throw it into the hacker's arena. (Oh and you have to sign something that says you won't press charges for what people try to do to access your stuff.) In the hacker's arena, people sign up as in that one web site with the predictability thing individually or in teams. Once it's open season on a new one, any team who wants to goes at it until they find the code you've nested behind your stuff. Once the code is entered, that team gets the 1000 dollars and you get a certified hackability score, which is the time it took to hack. Then you can brag about it.