Patent mashups

So many patents are simply combinations of previous ideas, I wonder if you could build a tool that generates new patents, or new ideas at least, by intelligently selecting claims to combine together. Of course, glomming claims together willy-nilly won't provide much value, so the tool would need to learn combinations that are rational.

Compounding knowledge?

This fascinating piece on animal intelligence adds to the growing body of work suggesting that human intelligence is different from animals only by a matter of "degree, not kind." If we admit that, though, we must also admit that, at least at this point in history, overall human production is different from animals in kind. One way to reconcile these two conclusions is the theory that human intelligence is different precisely in that it facilitates knowledge compounding over time. Just like a small initial difference in an investment can turn into a large difference after many years of compounding interest, so too can an incremental difference in intelligence eventually lead to a vast difference in achievement (for the moment, I'm setting aside the issue of whether this achievement is good or bad).

This line of reasoning, though, could lead one to something like the Singularity: if human abilities are growing exponentially then eventually they reach a near-infinite level. I think this conclusion is largely a fallacy of metaphor. Closer to the truth is that humans compound knowledge at different rates in different domains. The phones in our pockets run as fast as supercomputers did only decades ago, but we've still not put anyone on Mars (or even returned to the Moon, for that matter). Or to use a more mundane example: besides the ubiquity of mobile devices the interiors of homes are largely unchanged over the last 60 years.

Perhaps it is best to say that human ability is an irregular field whose area is monotonically increasing.

Solid data on firearms

This one is short, sweet, completely obvious, not novel, yet somehow incredibly difficult.

Regardless of what side of the debate you're on, we've got to have more data on gun use in the US.

Education is reputation

The term disruption is hackneyed in Silicon Valley, yet there are a few massive bureaucracies that do seem dearly in need of it but that are stubbornly resistant to change. The medical-insurance complex is one, but the sheer amount of money involved coupled with massive legal hurdles at least makes its resilience understandable.

Academia less so. While any bureaucracy has significant political power as well as legal and fiscal interests, they would seem less pronounced in academia than in e.g. medicine. I don't quite understand the glue that keeps it together. These experiences of a university math lecturer are a typical refrain of a system creaking under a terrible weight of bureaucracy, with its in-fighting, internal power struggles, and political gambits taking a front seat to intellectualism.

Probably most of the glue is in reputation networks. This implies that new educational ventures should cooperatively leverage established systems.

Better tools for everyday capture and sharing

With the near ubiquity of GoPro cameras, this feels like a solved problem. But I don't think we are quite there yet. I think that what people most want is a way to record and share their own experiences without having to think about technology at all. This would require not only capture devices and software capable of taking high quality shots, but also automated filtering and rendering algorithms (either pre- or post-capture). The tool should also focus on photos, quick videos, and animated PNGs.

20th century critiques of photography often centered on its unnaturalness. As Sontag and others wrote, it has a way of freezing something in time so that the photographer can gain control of the moment. There may be some truth in this, but we now know that these type of critiques are largely beside the point, which is that the network is at least as important, if not more so, than the photograph itself. This is because the value of a photograph is more about providing others with some context about your situation than it is documenting moments for one's own sake. It is for this reason that longer video is not as useful: it is harder for others to consume (and, again, harder on the network). This also implies that volume can quickly make photographs useless because, again, a recipient can't be expected to sift through a massive archive.

If the main focus is on sharing, then this also implies that quality is somewhat less important. At least, it implies that the bar might be low enough for automated techniques to have a chance.

One key problem is the capture device itself. Drones are problematic for many reasons, not the last of which is that they are likely to be illegal in many outdoor (and indoor) settings. GoPros are close, but are probably too cumbersome for most activities. We need something like a panoramic camera that can be attached flexibly to equipment or clothing that will take photos at an extremely high resolution, and coupled with an automated editing process that will create a personalized and relatively terse archive of photos and animations selected from portions of the panorama at key moments.

Finally, many automated techniques focus on creating a narrative of an event, I doubt this is necessary. I think people just want to feel like they've captured and communicated the gist of an event (in a way that makes them look good, if possible ;)

Smartwatch app for meteor logging

Marking down the path and intensity of meteors during showers can provide useful data for astronomers. It can also simply be a nice way of logging what can be a spectacular event. But I always found it difficult to mark down a meteor's path on a paper sheet. It would be much easier to directly retrace the path through the sky with a gesture. Intensity would be slightly harder to log, but it is usually done with reference to another star or planet of similar magnitude. Perhaps the app could have four stages: 1) gesture path; 2) feedback that path has been accepted with option to manually correct it on an associated phone; 3) point to a reference star; 4) feedback that magnitude has been set.

A similar approach might be useful for other logging tasks as well, for example wilderness tracking, perhaps with speech-to-text to tag the species, etc.

Everyday microloans with microinterest

ING Direct, now Capital One 360, has a nice feature where if your checking account goes below zero you get a loan for the negative amount from the bank at a competitive rate. In most cases this happens only rarely and only for small sums, so that the actual amount that customers pay for the loan is on the order of pocket change. Still, this benefits the bank since they profit from the scale of the loans.

Perhaps it would be useful for people to do the same with each other. Of course you'll loan a friend money with no strings attached, but attaching a small amount of interest might make everyday microloans more likely among people who don't necessarily have strong social ties. I am not sure about to mitigate the risk of defaults, though. Perhaps if the transactions were publicly inspectible (similar to Bitcoin)?