10,000 Brilliant Ideas

Donate your living body to research! That's what the banner ad will say on your facebook page. What it means simply is that you are willing to give access to your full facebook and other social site history to researchers who can use it under certain conditions (guarantee of anonymity for example). I'm not talking about research of social media which is already plentiful. I'm talking about traditional research that needs to have you remember something about your past. For example, a study trying to determine if yo-yo dieting leads to diabetes. The researcher could contact you, pay you the nominal fee as is done in research studies, test you for diabetes, and then look in your facebook history to see how many times you mentioned being on a diet. Currently these studies suffer from recall bias because it's hard to remember what you did 5 years ago, much less what you ate. But if you're one of those facebook people who posts every time you eat a hamburger, well the...

My kids when very little, loved Baby Einstein. If you missed the release in theaters and it isn't yet out on Blu-ray in your area, I'll describe it to you.  A camera is locked down (ie doesn't move) looking at infinity space (that white space where you can't tell where walls or floor are). And into this space come or are put, toys and sciencey gadgets that are colorful and repeat. Each thingy is displayed for like a minute at a time (although it seems like 10 minutes), while Mozart plays in the background. The kids love it. (And I'll admit that I have literally watched the whole show with them several times. It's mesmerizing.) Some parents, such as myself, are totally sold on the idea that injecting the high-culture art of Mozart in the kids brains must have some benefit. But perhaps there lurks in the back of some parent's minds, that watching toys is stupid. Or at least can't have the same long-term benefit as Mozart. What are we new-age paren...

What do you do when you've finished your coffee in your personal cup which remains at your desk with a residue of drying coffee in the bottom? If you have a kitchenette in the break room there might be soap and a sponge for washing. If not, do you rinse it in the bathroom sink? Do you pour water into it, slosh it around and then dump it in a plant? Do you take it home and wash it? Or do you, eh, just pour some more java in the next morning crossing your fingers that nothing anthraxy got in there overnight? I propose a handy packet of coffee mug wipes. They clean and disinfect as well as with dish soap and water and don't leave any residual nasty taste.

I know. Creative teaching environment, blahdy blah, frrrt. The fact is while education has become more creative, it still is lacking. And even if the teaching has achieved something on the creative scale, testing is still very much not. A few truisms that made me stumble on this. - One of the reasons I tank on tests is because there's something inside of me that always wants to find a clever, innovative something. I never get rewarded for clever new ideas on tests and I sometimes get penalized. The rigid test structure is set out beforehand (that's the point) and thinking outside the box isn't encouraged. - This even happens in creative subjects. I made a film shot in reverse (people walking backwards, etc.) that my teacher barely acknowledged. True, it wasn't a very good film, but I think he was instantly turned off by my 'gimmick'. (Which of course has been done before, if it was 'creative' from his well-informed perspective he would have been al...

Okay I'm imagining a public debate platform based on twitter. You set up a time, a topic and a hashtag. Then people can log in with their twitter accounts and say something about the topic. When a thing is tweeted it shows up as a bubble floating at random around the screen. When you hover on the bubble it stops so you can read it. Then you have the option to retweet it . If you retweet it it the bubble get's bigger for you and everyone else viewing. You can tweet a new point, or you can just read and retweet what you agree with. The effect of this is a mass public discourse where thousands of people are 'heard' at the same time in real time.

mHealth stands for mobile health and basically means using mobile phone technology to improve health systems. While visiting the MDR-TB clinic yesterday I looked into how they keep their records and how they report them. Basically each patient has a paper file, some data of which is transcribed into a register book, which is then typed into a computer. So basically data is entered 3 times at least. Health workers sometimes don't consider it a priority (surprise!) to enter their numbers in the computer and sometimes let things get backed up. In discussion with the people there, it again seemed clear to me that data should be entered once, electronically. (You may be tempted to think that triple entry improves accuracy, but actually it only reflects the accuracy of the transcribing since data is only taken from the source once.) But there's another problem. Computers aren't so abundant. And even if they were, internet connections and power connections aren't so abundant...

This may not be a good idea, but it is an idea and I had it, so here goes. I visited a treatment center for multi-drug resistant tuberculosis yesterday. The treatment is huge. It lasts two years and requires patients to come in every day and take gut-wrenching drugs. It's often very tough for patients to continue treatment (in fact that's why most have drug resistant TB because they didn't adhere to their original treatment.) While I was there, patients were hanging around for awhile. I asked why and was told that they each have their own style of taking the drugs to make it easiest on the stomach. So here's my idea. Create an intense telenovela series of 700 twenty-minute episodes. Play one episode a day over and over again for the patients who come in. Each episode will end with such a cliff-hanger that everyone will have to come back for the next installment. Thus adding another motivation to get to the clinic to get your daily treatment.