All ideas
Why do juries emit binary verdicts, i.e. guilty or not guilty? Why not allow each juror to emit a "Bayesian vote" reflecting his/her subjective degree of belief in the probability of the defendant’s guilt? Under this alternative method of Bayesian... continue reading
Antibiotics indicating a link between migraines and gut bacteria
Recent research has found links between the composition of gut bacteria and whether a person suffers from migraines. Since [antibiotics influence gut... continue reading
In India, post-harvest losses amount to 16 million metric tons of food grains each year (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5296677/). Improper storage and transport is the main problem to be addressed since it contributes to more than... continue reading
Phylogenetic tree representation in n-dimensional space
Traditional phylogenetic trees are represented as bifurcating trees, where the leaf nodes represent taxa and the internal nodes represent common ancestors. Bifurcating trees offer advantages of interpreting common ancestors as well as being widely... continue reading
Use of waste plastic as a reducing agent for iron ore
China's recent announcement that they will cease to accept large quantities of waste plastic has brought a growing crisis into sharp focus; global capacity for waste plastic handling is being rapidly outstripped by production. The clear solution... continue reading
Orthogonal versus redundant data in education
Our university was recently hit by malware. It took weeks to restore most data, some lost completely. All backups were affected making a simple restore ineffectual. Why take this redundant approach in data safety? Consider flight data recorders:... continue reading
METRICS: a pattern language for education scholarship
Scholarly activities in health professions education have been growing but despite the interest, what is considered as scholarship in (medical) education has remained vague. Boyer’s classes of scholarly activity (Boyer 1990) and Glassick’s... continue reading
“Venus” cult and “Old Man” mythological motif have already existed since 50.000 BP
If human language and genes spread “in tandem” as postulated by Michael Witzel, the split up time of the major phylogenetic lineages may provide a minimum age for the origin of Palaeolithic myths.
If this hypothesis is true, the distribution... continue reading
1: Placebo effect sometimes plausibly has powerful effects.
2: Buddhism philosophy holds that every living animal is sentient, and has a consciousness and killing them is bad for the killer and freeing them is good somehow. Consciousness may... continue reading
Reverse nudge theory - when the many nudge the few.
Nudge Theory, popularised by Thaler & Sunstein, proposes that our decisions can be biased by relatively small changes in choice architecture. While we... continue reading
Welcome
This is the Journal of Brief Ideas - citable ideas in fewer than 200 words.
Before you can create a new idea, you'll need to log in using the link above. You also can't vote on existing ideas without signing in too.
Voting
Click on the icon to vote on an idea. You can't vote on your own ideas.
·