The Inventions in Everything team celebrates the spirit of innovation, even when they fail to live up to the promises their inventors laid out in their patent applications. Usually, the IIE team focuses on the stories of inventions that were novel enough to be awarded patents, but today's feature is a truly failed invention that never made it past the patent application stage.
U.S. Patent Application 2008/0299533 A1 was filed on 4 June 2007. The application describes inventor Frank C. Orsini's vision of a "Naughty or Nice Meter", which would let children discover exactly how they stand in the eyes of Santa Claus.
That's right, the Santa Claus. Who, as we all know, determines whether or not any of the items listed on a child's Christmas wish list will ever show up among any gifts they open. Provided they don't forget to leave some cookies and milk out to snack on when he might visit.
All children have to do is submit their honest self-assessment of how well they've performed on twelve behavioral metrics, scoring each on a scale of 0-to-5, with the Naughty or Nice Meter tallying their total score to determine whether they qualify as naughty, nice, or something in between. Because apparently, Santa Claus believes these kinds of metrics are extremely valuable for assessing child performance and has chosen helpers who all aspire to work in the human resources department of a large, impersonal corporation to help him compile the records he needs to quantify their moral development.
To be fair, it could be worse. If the alternative is Santa Claus operating the most sophisticated personal surveillance system ever devised to actively and continuously monitor every person on the planet to find out who's really naughty and who's really nice, we should all be grateful of Orsini's proposed innovation. Here's a figure from the patent application we've colorized to give a sense of how the behavioral self-assessment might be presented to the child resource who needs their naughtiness/niceness score quantified:
Here are Orsini's suggested twelve metrics on which the child resource's morality might be assessed:
- Listens to parents.
- Tells the truth.
- Says "Please" and "Thank You".
- Eats all meals.
- Has a Clean Room.
- Helps around the house.
- Completes homework on time.
- Does well in school.
- Follows Directions.
- Plays nice with other children.
- Respects others.
- Goes to bed on time.
The Naughty and Nice Meter allows the user to input the scores into a calculator, which determines the child resource's final ranking. Orsini proposes the following scale, which closely resembles the kind of grading system you might have encountered in elementary school:
In any case, we can see why Orsini's Naughty or Nice Meter never became a patented invention. For an invention submitted in the 2000s, there's nothing truly patent-worthy about its physical manifestation, while its functionality relies on the previously patented technology of a calculator. The only thing really unique about it is the algorithm Orsini concocted for determining a Naughty/Nice score, but alas, algorithms are not patentable.
We can go on with our analytical critique, but we're afraid we'll have to leave shortly to meet with IIE's human resources department auditor. It seems we need to complete some kind of evaluation that will determine what our next year bonuses will be before the upcoming holiday break.
Labels: technology
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