Culture
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Background: In the early 2020s, the appeal of short (< 1 minute) videos became widespread, with TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and other services vying for market share. (Surprisingly, the earliest major entrant into this genre, Vine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service)), completely failed and was shut down in 2017). The Issue: Unfortunately, the popularity of “bite-sized” videos has…
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Background: People who do not live in a jungle frequently associate the “sounds of the jungle” (e.g. the noises of birds and other miscellaneous creatures) with a sort of exotic and faraway mystique. Proposal: This idea is already used in theme parks, but there’s no reason we can’t apply it everywhere: any business that has…
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Background: According to the American Dental Association, the “general” recommendation is for people to brush their teeth for two-ish minutes, twice a day. The Issue: Two minutes is a long time! Maybe there’s some way to motivate people to brush their teeth for this long. Proposal: The incentive is simple: two-minute videos that are only…
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Background: Security cameras have become extremely cheap, and it’s economically quite feasible for a homeowner to have a really excessive-seeming number covering the entire exterior of their home or apartment. The Issue: As more cameras are added, more tiny security camera windows are shown. It can become overwhelming to even try to make sense of…
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Background: One of the various promises of “augmented reality” (or “AR”) is the ability for a user to wear a virtual reality headset that edits reality in some vaguely useful fashion. For example, a maintenance worker might be able to overlay a diagram of the wiring inside walls, giving them a sort of “x-ray vision.”…
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Background: In the mid-2010s and 2020s, the service “Twitter” was a popular method for celebrities to share short messages with their followers. It had the unusual property of requiring short posts (originally only 140 characters). This was originally due to ancient historical limitations on sending messages (called “SMS”es) over phones, but a slightly-increased limit was…
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Background: Every year, tens of millions of coloring books are sold to children and adults alike. The Issue: Filling in a coloring book can be quite a time-consuming process. Even with frantic scribbling and thick markers, it’s a slow process to fully color even a single page in a coloring book (Figure 1). Proposal: Thanks…
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Background: Supposedly, changing a phone’s display to only show a drab grayscale tends to reduce the amount of time that the phone’s owner spends fiddling around on the Internet. Proposal: Here’s a simple software-only hack that would make people more aware of the amount of time they’re spending on their phones, and might give them…
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