Education
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Background: The term ”helicopter parenting” refers to an intrusive style of overprotective parenting where a parent is constantly micromanaging their child’s every activity. (Metaphorically, the parent is “hovering” like a helicopter around their child.) Proposal: Until recently, this was just a metaphor: it was simply not technically feasible for a parent to supervise and express…
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Background: Textbook publishers will often issue a new edition of a textbook every few years. Sometimes, this is necessary to reflects new developments in the field, but for many topics, the field has been static for hundreds (or possibly even thousands) of years. For example, it is unlikely that the 15th edition of an “Introduction…
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Proposal: Illustrated children’s books usually consist of two main things: Unfortunately, books written before the advent of computer-generated images are stuck with “stale” illustrations: each page contains a single fixed image that will never change. But thanks to machine learning, we can fix this! Observe the new style of children’s book, where instead of an…
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Background: Ever since the invention of writing, the amount of recorded history has more-or-less steadily increased. The Issue: Over time, events accumulate that were once noteworthy, but are now just kind of a random historical footnote (Figure 1). This problem just gets worse and worse over time! How do we prevent history books from getting…
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Background: In addition to educating their students in traditional “academic” fields, many universities also dabble in the entertainment industry. Sometimes, this can be big business: in fact, the head coach of a particularly well-funded sports team might be the highest paid individual at the entire institution! The Issue: There has been a severe lack of…
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Background: From the perspective of a person on the Earth’s surface, the Moon is a more-or-less featureless white circle in the sky. Even with a telescope, what information can a layman glean? Perhaps “here are some craters, and some gray splotches, I guess?” The Issue: The Moon (Fig. 1) might as well be a blank…
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Background: In ages past, certain vocations had a high technical barrier to entry. For example, to be published writer, a person would have needed a publishing deal (or to buy their own printing press). Similarly, when computers were extremely expensive, a person would need a $5000 computer and a $500 compiler just to write a…
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Background: Many teachers find that the most stressful part of their job is, surprisingly, dealing with the parents of their students. Proposal: There are a few ways to address this issue, but one possible way would be to make it impossible for parents and teachers to ever interact. Although this initially seems impossible (Figure 1),…
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Background: When reading the news, people should ideally form opinions of the events in question based on the actual merits being reported. However, a frequent approach is: “Is this something that my nation or my political party did? Then I’m sure it’s good.” The Issue: Although this is undeniably often a successful heuristic (e.g. “cannibal…
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Background: One popular animal-training technique is to give the animal (such as the killer whale in Fig. 1) a small reward immediately after it accomplishes a task. Proposal: Strangely, this approach—frequently-dispensed minor rewards—has rarely been attempted for humans. But with the increasing rate of remote work and the implementation of the dystopian surveillance state from…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 