A feature on TV's that detects and mutes the sound when they are soliciting for respondents for polls and giving the results on local news shows. Perhaps the screen could blank with a textual notification, as well.

The technology would use optical character recognition (OCR) to look for phone numbers on the screen paired with "Yes"/"No" or "Agree"/"Disagree," etc. To detect results, it would look for percentages instead of phone numbers.

This would affect the display of results of legitimate random-sample polls, too, but this is probably no great loss. (For those who are unaware, polls that are self-selected are extremely unlikely to be [i.e. never are]representative of the real opinions of a population.)
-- Dewey, Jul 10 2001

[jutta], it might be a bit ranty in the last paragraph, but that's more to explain why it might be desirable to someone who doesn't know/care about such things.

[waugsqueke], the idea is not a "shield" any more than any kind of auto-mute for commercials, or anything else people find annoying. It would certainly be an optional feature able to be turned on/off.

Maybe I should move this to the "TV Filter" category since that's what it is... thought False Claims was more amusing, though.
-- Dewey, Jul 11 2001


I disagree, I still think it's a rant. It's a huge technical effort to suppress a very specific practice you don't like. Unlike the commercials, this specific practice isn't vital to television's business model. I think that if this weren't the halfbakery, you wouldn't word this as an invention but as criticism of the practice and leave it at that.

But if it's important to you, I've moved it to TV Filters and will let it stick around.
-- jutta, Jul 14 2001



random, halfbakery