| About Accounts | |
Each person who enters information into The PLOD must have
an account. An account has a "Login Name", which you choose when you
create the account, and cannot change thereafter.The account also has an
associated email address, which is used only for adminsitrative purposes, and
is not shared with users of the system. Finally, the account has an
associated password, which you need to know when you login. You can change your password
at any time.
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An account has associated with it a "Platform", which is defined in
the section
About Platforms and Positions
.
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If you have multiple email addresses, it is technically possible for
you to have more than one account on the PLOD, andthereby appear to
have more than the fair amount of weight associatedwith your opinions.
However, if you do this you are acting in contradiction to our
policies
and thereby in violation of our
account agreement
.
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| About Passwords and Security | |
You should never share your password with anyone. In particular,
you should not communicate it to anyone over the internet. You
should not use the same password that you use for any other system, especially any
system storing sensitive or valuable information.
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The PLOD is not currently operated as a secure system. There is
no use of encryption used to protect transmission
of your account information. Therefore it is quite possible that
your password could be stolen by an unscrupulous
denizen of the internet. If you suspect that this has happened,
you should change your password, and report whatever
information you have to our administrators.
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In the future, we will probably add the ability to access the PLOD using
SSL encrypted communication. However, at the moment, providing this mode
of access would entail a technical and administrative burden
for our organization that seems unwarranted, given the novelty of the
idea we are advancing.
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| About Privacy | |
Preserving your privacy is a cooperative endeavour, and requires
that you understand the impact of your actions. Please read our
privacy statement
.
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| About Login Sessions | | Are you logged in ? | |
When you correctly enter your username and password on the
login screen, you become "logged in". We also say that you have a "session" on the PLOD.
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You need to log in if you want to enter any information, like claims
or votes, into the Lens. This is because we need to know who is entering information !
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You also need to be logged in for certain links to work properly, such
as the link to "your platform" or "your position". This is because we
need to know whose platform or position to look up !
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You can tell whether or not you are logged in by looking at the "status"
box (sorry, not yet implemented !).
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The PLOD does not (yet) use cookies to manage session information, because
it is a goal of the system's designers to avoid dependence on any facilities
that are tainted by even a hint of contreversy. The session information
is carried in the URL links produced by the PLOD.
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| About Claims | |
The "Claim" is the central concept in the PLOD.
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A claim is essentially a document, with a title and a body.
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Any user with an account may publish a claim. She also may respond to any
claim by creating a position (see the section on
claim responses
).
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There are two kinds of claims, and there are two different ways to publish
a claim on a system.
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This section contains the following parts:
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| The Two Kinds of Claims | |
Claims come in two flavors: Proposals
and Surveys. You must choose one of these
flavors when you publish your claim. You cannot change the flavor later.
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| What are Proposals ? | |
Proposals are simply statements that others may agree or disagree with
for various reasons. Respondents are only allowed to vote AGREE, DISAGREE, REVISE, or COMMENT.
They can cite any claims as reasons for these votes. Proposals can be revised
(details on revising proposals).
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| What are Surveys ? | |
Surveys are questions that may have a variety of answers. A survey
is like a conventional poll, except that respondents can enter any vote,
as well as enter any claim as a reason for their vote.
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Note on semantics: It is a bit of a stretch to call a survey a
"claim", but note that when a number of responses have been gathered,
a survey can be seen as a "claim" to the effect that "many people think a certain way."
This is the sense in which a survey may be used as a reason supporting a vote on another
claim.
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| Claim Contents | |
Every claim must contain both a title and a
body. The title is a short phrase.
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There are also a few rules governing what you are allowed to say in
a claim.
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Please review the detailed rules concerning claim format and content.
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Note that once a claim is entered, it cannot be changed or deleted,
although it can be revised if it is a proposal (this feature
is only partially implemented).
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| Different Ways to Publish a Claim | |
You can create a claim in two ways: by typing it interactively,
or by uploading an html file. Finding a claim you authored, or have visited before...
NEED TO COMPLETE TOPIC!
|
| About Claim Responses | |
Claims themselves are simply documents. The complexity
of the P.L.O.D. lies in the way that people are allowed to respond to claims.
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Understanding all aspects of this topic will probably require that you
read this section a few times, and spend some time practicing using the the system.
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This section is divided into the following parts:
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| About Votes and Coalitions | |
When someone responds to a claim, they need to choose one or
more votes and reasons. You cannot supply a vote without a reason. Each person can choose
to support all the votes and reasons they think are relevant.
However, each person gets the same amount of "weight" to use
up on each issue (see the section on weighted and absolute support).
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When you are responding to a "proposal" claim, you must choose one of
the 4 predefined votes, which are "AGREE", "DISAGREE", "REVISE" and
"COMMENT". But when you are responding to a "survey" claim, you can
enter any vote you want, as long as it is a single word, name or short
phrase. So proposals are more used for structured debate, while
surveys are used for polling.
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Each vote implies a "coalition" of users who support that vote.
They may each have different reasons for supporting that vote,
which is why we use the word coalition, which traditionally means "a group
of people who come together in agreement on a particular issue for
varying reasons." Not everyone in a coalition is in complete agreement
with other people in that coalition, but they at least agree enough
to support the same vote. They express their differences by choosing
different reasons for that vote.
|
| About Reasons and Citations | |
In our system, a "reason" is a claim (the "cited" claim) that
is used to support a position on another claim (the "issue" claim).
For example, suppose you are responding to an issue claim that
says "Monsters are bad". You might vote that you "AGREE", and then
cite a reason that says "Monsters scare people". Here "Monsters
are bad" is the issue claim, "AGREE" is the vote, and "Monsters scare
people" is the reason claim. We say that the reason claim has been "cited",
and we also say there has been a "citation of" the reason claim.
This might seem technical and confusing, but you should reread this
example until you understand this terminology. Once you do, you will
understand the most important features of our system !
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Continuing the example, you might separately respond to the "Monsters
scare people" claim, and vote "AGREE" while citing a reason that says
"Freddy was badly scared by a purple monster". In this context, the
"Monsters scare people" is the issue claim, and the reason is the
anecdotal claim about Freddy's experience. So in effect you are
establishing a chain of reasoning that leads from the very broad claim
"Monsters are bad" to the very specific claim "Freddy was badly scared
by a purple monster", which is provided as a kind of evidence
for the more general claim.
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The very useful facility that our system provides is that readers can
follow and respond to your logic in EITHER direction, from the general
to the specific (called "inductive reasoning"), or from the specific to
the general (called "deductive reasoning"). The latter kind of analysis is one of
the most interesting aspects of the Pollite Lens system.
Specifically, you can look at all the uses of a particular claim as
a reason. For example, suppose you searched on "purple" and saw the claim
"Freddy was badly scared by a purple monster". Now suppose that you wanted
to know what conclusions people had drawn based on this information.
You can click on the "All citations" link, and see the list of all "citations"
(uses as a reason) of the Freddy claim. One of these citations would be the
above mentioned use to justify a vote of AGREE on the claim "Monsters
scare people". However, you might also see some very different conclusions
drawn, such as "People named Freddy are easily scared", or
"Purple monsters are easily misunderstood". When you see this kind of divergence,
you can learn a lot about the different points of view that people bring to a
discussion, and how these differences lead them to different conclusions
based on the same evidence.
|
| About Complex Positions | |
The other major source of complexity in the "Pollite Lens"
system is that each person can potentially enter multiple
votes and reasons in response to each claim. We have included
this feature so that people can express complex opinions which may
be "hedged" or even ambivalent. For example, on a question such as
"Who should be the next president", you might feel that Brenda Badger
has a better understanding of foreign affairs, while Johnnie
Jackrabbit has views on domestic policy that more closely match yours.
In response to a "survey" claim asking "Who should be the next president",
you might vote "BRENDA BADGER" and cite a reason like "Ms. Badger is
most qualified in matters of foreign policy", AND also vote "JOHNNIE
JACKRABBIT", citing a reason like "J.J. understands our nation's economy
and our problems with crime." So in this example, your position would
support two different votes and cite two different reasons.
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| Key Facts about Claim Responses |
The important things for you to remember from this section are:
-
Any claim can be used as a reason for any vote on any other claim.
-
You can "drill-down" into the reasons supporting any particular vote, to
see the responses to the cited claim.
-
You can examine the all the citations (i.e. "uses of") a particular claim,
to see what the consequences of agreement with that claim might be.
-
Proposals have a fixed set of allowed votes, while Surveys permit you to
respond with any vote.
-
Each user can have a Position on each claim.
-
Each user has a Platform, which contains all the claims she has authored
or responded to.
|
| About Voting Statistics | |
One of the main functions of the PLOD system is to display
statistics indicating the amount of support for each response to a claim.
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The following sections explain the way these statistics are calculated
and presented:
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| Measuring support: "Weighted" vs. "Absolute" | |
In the lingo of the Lens, "Absolute" support means the number
of people who support a vote or reason. However, since each person can
support more than one vote or reason in response to a particular claim,
this number can be somewhat misleading. To try to correct this
situation, we use the concept of "weighted" support. The idea is that
each person gets a total "weight" of 1.0 votes. If she cites only one vote and one
reason, then all of her weight (1.0) is given to that particular vote/reason.
However, if she cites 3 different votes and reasons, then each citation
gets a weight of one-third (0.333). So in a sense, each vote/reason in
your position dilutes the "weight" of the other votes/reasons.
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So if there are 50 people responding to a claim (i.e. there are 50 "positions"),
the total weighted support for all the votes will add up to 50.0, regardless
of how many votes/reasons there are in each position. However, the total absolute
support can vary dramatically, and in fact can be dramatically skewed based
on the activity of a single user. For example, one user could
enter 10 different votes, and enter 3 different reasons for each vote
(30 citations total). In the voting summary table, he would have a total impact of
1.0 for each coalition, for a total of 10.0 in absolute coalition support.
Then in the detail for each coalition, he would have an impact of 1.0 for
each reason, or 3.0 for each coalition, or 30.0 if you add up the impact on
all 10 coalitions.
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However his "weight" for each citation would drop to 0.033, and his
impact on the weighted support would still add up to just 1.0. This is why
we emphasize weighted support in our presentation of statistics - it is a more
accurate aggregate measure of support. But the absolute support
numbers are included because they are also significant - they show the number
of people having who at least partially support a particular response.
|
| Support Ratios | |
Some of the tables which display support statistics display
both a number and a ratio (percentage) for each type
of support. The ratios are always computed relative to
the toal number of positions (i.e. the number of people
responding) to the issue. For the reasons described above, the
weighted ratios will always add up to 100 %.
However, the absolute support will often add up to more than 100%,
because some positions are supporting
more than one coalition or reason.
|
| Interpreting Support Statistics | |
A final thing to keep in mind when looking at statistics is
that it is presently possible for an unscrupulous person
to create multiple accounts on our system, and thus to "speak with
more than one voice." Also, there is no methodology ensuring that the
opinions people enter into the system are a "representative sample" in
statistical terms of the opinions held by the general population of
people in any region or other group. Furthermore, since the "polls remain open"
forever on each issue in the system, it is possible for the statistics
to change quite dramatically over time. For all these reasons,
any particular snapshot of the support statistics on a particular claim should
not be interpreted as measuring, even approximately, the state of public opinion in
any national or regional population. However, in the future, we may try to implement
measures that lead to a greater confidence that the support statistics in the
"Pollite Lens" opinion database are meaningful in some way.
You are invited to submit ideas on how this might best be done, by
making relevant claims in the P.L.O.D. !
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| About Searching and Finding Claims | |
The Pollite Lens does not provide any segregation of claims
into topics, so the question of finding claims of interest is of great
importance in determining the usefulness of the service.
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| Different Ways to Search | |
NO ANSWER IN HERE YET!
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| About Bookmarks and Claim ID's | |
NO ANSWER IN HERE YET!
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