Better Website Censorship

I am going to start off and say I do not entirely agree with the ethics behind this idea. Or rather, in general I disagree with censorship intended to limit free speech, and this idea would make censoring people who disagree with your viewpoint easier. However, in the same vein of free speech and following the intentions of my website, I am making this post.

There are many sites that censor aggressively. They have admins and automated bots scowering forums and comment sections on their site. They remove any comments that do not agree with their stated viewpoints. They remove anything that questions their logic or the validity of their arguments. Some sites will report blatantly false information as accurate and prevent anyone from saying otherwise on their site.

Inevitably, if the site is remotely popular, this will spawn a backlash. Perhaps people will discuss the censorship on another website's forum. In some cases entire sites are devoted to the suppression of free speech on just website.

Ultimately, the reason this happens is because people are aware that their freedom of speech has been impinged upon. The best way to do this is simply not to let them know they have been censored.

On many sites, when an admin removes a comment it can be a teaching moment. A person can learn 'ok, foul language is not accepted on this site,' or some similar lesson. However, if a site is removing comments because they criticize the site, they are not going to change the posters mind by doing so. Instead the poster will see that his comments have been removed and become incensed.

The way to deal with this is rather than removing 'undesired' posts, simply hide them. The only user who can see a hidden post would be the user who made the comment. There would be no indication to this user that the post has been hidden. He or she has no immediate reason to assume that they have been censored.

Likewise rather than banning someone, he is silenced. Only the admins would be aware of this, and to the silenced user his account would seem to work like normal. However, all of his posts would automatically be hidden. Any personal messages he sent to other users would never reach their recipients. A user who has banned but never realizes it may not be so quick to create a new account to 'troll.'

Now a user who has been 'censored' may eventually grow wise. If he or she has multiple accounts they will catch on quickly. However, the reason many people create multiple accounts is to work around bans or previous censorship. If they are blissfully unaware that no one is reading their comments, they may never bother creating a dummy account.

The other way in which they may grow wise is if they notice that people never seem to respond to their comments. However, it is not uncommon to make a comment on a website and have no one respond to it, even if they can read it. People often skim longer posts and threads and miss some comments. Depending on the situation, I could see a large period of time passing before someone finally caught on. They could, for some time, simply think the other users are bad at reading or paying attention.

If the site wanted to be really tricky, they would have bots that would create automated replies to any threads that a 'banned' user would create. He or she would be the only user who could see these replies. Effectively it creates a labyrinth of a subform to trap 'trolls.' They may eventually learn of the deception and escape, but until they do, they have been neutralized.

To throw people of the trail the occasional thread could be deleted traditionally and the occasional user could be straight up banned. For example if someone used fowl language, they may even expect to see their post removed, and doing so could keep them from being suspicious. The deception, hiding their posts from everyone but them, could be reserved for only the posts that dissent from the viewpoint your site promotes.

Now there could be even larger backlash if users discovered that this technique was used. However, sites that are already censoring opposing viewpoints are already facing disparaging remarks on other sites and this could let them avoid that. Yes, it is deceptive, but many sites do not mind deceptive. Would I ever use such a system on this blog? No. Of course it may be hard to figure out.

On a lighter note, the method of 'silencing' users rather than banning them could be effectively used even on sites that do not try to limit people's expression. Yes, it is still deceptive, but all sites have to deal with trolls. And sometimes a troll isn't someone who disagrees with you but is a legitimate jerk who is disrupting a site and needs to go.

Extended Museum Exhibits

As time goes on more and more people have 'smartphones,' or at least phones with abilities traditionally attributed to smart phones.

While some organizations have begun to take advantage of this fact, many more have not. I will be discussing some ways in which the capabilities of modern phones can enhance old entertainments such as a museum.

There are several ways in which this idea could work. On its most simplest level an art museum, for example, could release a phone app for their museum. While wandering through the museum the phone could figure out what exhibits you are looking at. This could be done in any number of ways including RFIDs, WiFi, bar code scanning, or even image recognition of the exhibit itself.

The app would then pull up additional information about the exhibit, or information related to it. I know I have been in situations at museums where I wish I had had more knowledge at my fingertips beyond what was provided by the signs and placards in the museum. In our theoretical art museum the app could allow you to bring up a bio of the artist, find the location of 'related' paintings, or perhaps see pictures of other paintings by the artist not on display.

Depending on how the exhibit identified itself, this information could either be transmitted from the exhibit itself, or more likely from central server that the app would reference.

Other 'museum like' locations could take advantage of this. A zoo for instance is a prime candidate. The app could pull up all sorts of additional information on the animals on display. It could even mention the 'personal' histories of these animals for those who were interested: when they were acquired by the zoo or born for example. If the zoo had cameras in the animal's pen, perhaps people could then watch the video feed on their phone.

Now, much of this could be accomplished with signs. But it seems to me, the more signs and more text at any given exhibit the less of it will be read on average. This would provide additional information to those who desired it. It is very similar to renting a set of headphones to listen to an audio tour at a museum. In fact, I see this idea as a natural evolution of those audio cassette tours. It would not even be unreasonable for a museum to charge for this app. 

In addition to providing additional information the system could be interactive. The app, in its settings, could perhaps allow for an 'age' preference. This could allow for content to be better targeted to demographics. It would make it easier to create an exhibit that would be both 'kid friendly' while interesting to adults. 

I mentioned earlier that there were several ways that this could be implemented. Now, each museum could make their own custom apps, but this would be inefficient. A great opening for a new product would be for a single company to make such an app (and hardware to be installed at exhibits) and market it to museums. The product could be called something like "Museum Plus."

A unified system used by multiple museums would reduce deployment costs. It would also be better for the end user, as they would only ever need to obtain and learn how to use one app rather than a different one for every museum they attend. I feel the potential profit in marketing such a system worldwide could be quite impressive.

While this idea will not revolutionize anyone's life, it is these incremental steps forward that marks mankind's progress towards  fully integrating technology into out daily existence.

Dream Recording Clock

The best way to remember your dreams is to get in the habit of writing them down when you do remember them. Doing this regularly will cause you to remember more of your dreams. But this can be difficult early in the morning, especially if you are groggy.

My idea is for an alarm clock, that after waking you up, automatically starts an audio recording. So instead of having to grab a pen and paper, you can simply dictate your dream. The system will save the recording to an mp3 file that can then be transfered to a computer.

This little push may be all that some people who want to have better dream recall need.

As an added feature the clock could allow a person to record a message on it before going to bed. The message would be a reminder to do something in the morning. Then, when they are done recording their dream, the message will play. This could be a useful feature just by itself for people that tend to be forgetful while still waking up.

Ultimately something like this would be a niche product. However, I think its a niche that a large enough number of people would appreciate.

Electronic Tupperware

Tupperware has not changed much over the years, but it could be a lot better.

For me Tupperware has two problems. One, at times it can be difficult to know/remember what is inside the Tupperware (especially if you were not the one to 'pack' it), and two, it's easy to loose track of how old the contents are.

My idea is to have Tupperware lids with a slot to 'clip on' cheap LCD displays. The displays themselves do not need to be anything fancy. Really they just need to be capable of showing a single line of text.

A consumer would purchase a 'keyboard' when they first invest in the Tupperware. The keyboard/keypad would be magnetic and could stick onto a fridge. There would be a slot where the displays could plug in. When a display is plugged in, the consumer simply needs to enter in the label they would like to be displayed. To make things more convenient the keypad would automatically append the date to the label.

Simply by looking into the fridge a hungry person could know what was in each container and how old the stuff was.

The displays, when not in use, would dock with the keyboard and would likely be magnetic themselves. The keypad would then charge the batteries that power the displays. As for how the keypad gets this power itself? Perhaps it could be charged off of batteries as well, or integrated into high-end fridges and just draw power from the mains.

The amount of engineering to create such a product would be minimal. Ultimately the key would be in marketing it. But to me at least, this product is useful enough that all you would need to do is let people know it exists.

Restaurant Wait App

After thinking about my last idea for a bit I came to a conclusion. While it would be useful and some places would be honest, there needs to be accountability or else many places will simply fudge the wait times as they do now.

There is a fairly straightforward solution, an iphone or google droid app.

When a restaurant quotes a wait time, the user boots the app and enters in the quoted time. The user then presses another button when they are finally seated. Based on GPS coordinates the phone will try to identify the restaurant and suggest the location, but if it is wrong the user can enter it in manually.

This information would be uploaded to a website and restaurants would be ranked by not only their actual wait time, but also their honesty.

There is also sorts of ways the information could be displayed for users. It could show break downs based on time and day. It could also rank the restaurant with the times normalized by different metrics.

If a particular restaurant is all ready in the database, the average wait and honesty score of a restaurant would come up when the user starts the app.

While it would still be possible for restaurants to manipulate the data, it would be much more difficult and they could not simply 'lie.'

The app could even support comments and reviews of places along with average price per person in order to be a complete solution.

If people used this app, less than honest restaurants might begin to see customers turning away from their door. This method of accountability could encourage honesty with wait times and allow the method I outlined the other day to work to its full potential.

Online Restaurant Wait Time Report

It's annoying to drive up to a restaurant and see a huge number of people and just know there is going to be a long wait. The restaurant probably loves the business, but there is a down side for them. After this happens a couple time at the same restaurant I become less inclined to going back even in the off-hours. They just lost a customer. However, if I knew for a fact there wouldn't be a wait, I might still be inclined to go early. Or if I knew that the wait usually died down past a certain hour, then I might consider pushing back my dinner.

Many restaurants are already digitalizes table assignments and food orders. They punch in when people are at a table, and enter in when they leave. Its not hard to imagine that this information could be entered into an algorithm and converted into a 'wait time.' This information could then be dynamically updated on the restaurant's website.When trying to decide where to go to dinner, you could just load up the websites of your favorite websites and see who has the shortest wait.

If they wanted to be really helpful they could provide past averages based on hour and day. So perhaps at 4 pm on a Thursday night, you see that they have a 45 minute wait at the moment, but usually by 6 pm its only 10 minutes. So you decide to do a later dinner.

I could even imagine people creating a website that would spider crawl the restaurants in the area and reports all the wait times at places to eat within a 25 mile radius of your address.

Now restaurants could just lie. It seems to me that they already do this when you ask how long the wait is. Its obvious why. They don't want you to leave, and if you hang around for a bit, even if the wait is twice as long as they said, you will probably end up staying until they seat you. But if they were honest on the site they might ward customers off before they even arrive. However, I am of the opinion, that they are sacrificing long term business for short term business when they lie about the wait.

A system like this would reward places that can keep the wait time down and are honest about it. The wait will become a point in their favor. If they honestly report when their busy hours are, some people who might just walk away when seeing the wait may instead show up at a less busy time. Meanwhile if a restaurant is always reporting fake wait times, well people will hopefully catch onto that fairly quickly.

Some restaurants would need to upgrade their computer systems (or install them completely) to be able to get something like this to work easily. A system that could not be automated would likely be too much work for a restaurant to be worth it.

I think this could be a great feature. It could help make the decision of where to eat, and I could imagine choosing a restaurant that reports its wait time over one that does not. Ultimately there is very little preventing many restaurants from setting up a an Online Wait Time Report system right now.

Scam Review Site

There are various sites where people can report scams, but thats not what this idea is about.

If you are familiar with Snopes I envision a site in a similar vein. If you are not familiar with it, basically it is a site that investigates and either debunks or confirms urban legends.

The Scam Review Site basically would do the same thing but with scams.

They would look at as seen on TV products, email Scams, and basically anything that seems to good to be true. They could classify things either as Dangerous Rip Offs (for scams that will steal your identity), Total Rip Offs (for scams that charge you for nothing, or contain hidden fees or hard to cancel subscription), Partial Rip Offs (for scams that sell things that sort of work, but not nearly as advertises), and finally Real Deal (for things that seem like scams but aren't).

The site would rely on a combination of independent investigation and user feedback. Ultimately there are likely too many scams out there to deal with them all, but the site would focus on the 'popular' ones of the day.

A good tag line for the site could be "When it seems too good to be true." And that is basically how you would want to market it. The idea you would want to market is that if someone is online and sees something that seems absolutely amazing, and they ask themselves How can they offer such a great deal!, they will then go to the Scam Review Site to find out what the real deal really is.

As I mentioned earlier I have seen websites that talk about scams, but nothing that seems to be comprehensive. And definitely nothing as recognized as Snopes is in its field of urban legends.

It might take a while for the site to gain momentum, but if made accessible and properly marketed, I could envision it being a big hit.