Pollite Lens Opinion Database "How To" Confused? See the Introduction . Create and Manage Your Account How do you create an account ? How do you change your password or email address ? How do you delete your account entirely ? Login and Logout How do you log in ? What is a session ? How do you log out ? Publish or revise a claim What is a claim ? What types of claims are there ? How do you publish a claim ? Typing a claim interactively Uploading a claim HTML file How do you propose that a claim be revised ? Take a position on a claim How do you create a position ? How do you change your position ? How do you delete your position ? Find and navigate claims How do you search for claims ? How do you look at claim summaries ? How do you get from one claim to a related claim ? How do you bookmark a claim in your browser ? Analyze claim responses What are coalitions ? How do you see all the votes and reasons ? How do you see all the conclusions drawn from a claim ? How do you see other users' positions and platforms ? Implicit Drill-Down Techniques Other Views Available Manage your platform How do you see all your positions ? How do you see all claims you have published ? Access Expert Features How do you customize the system behavior ? Create and Manage your account How do you create an account ? You need to read and agree to the Account Agreement. Then you need to choose a "Login Name", and submit this login name using the Create Account page. You will receive your initial password by email, and then you can login . How do you change your password or email address ? There is no way yet to change your email address, but you can change your password . How do you delete your account entirely ? There is no way to do this yet. Login and Logout How do you log in ? To login you must first create an account , then you can enter your login name and password on the login page. What is a session ? This section of the "about" page explains: About Login Sessions How do you log out ? When you are done working with the Lens, you should click on "Logout" in the menu box in the top left. This will end your session. To be absolutely safe, you should then exit your browser and wipe your cache. If you do not do this, and someone else has physical access to your computer, it is possible that they could steal your password and impersonate you (this is true of many things that people commonly do on the Web). This is a problem we will work to correct. Publish a claim What is a claim ? Here is the answer: About claims What types of claims are there ? Here is the answer: About "Proposals" and "Surveys" How do you publish a claim ? How to enter new a new claim, from a file or by typing it. A claim is a document that you put into the lens because you think it is important, interesting, or provocative, and you want to give people a chance to respond to the idea in the document. A claim should be a simple statement. The best claims are the shortest ones. It is also better if claims are in your own words, although they may contain links to any unauthenticated website, as defined here. By putting a document in the Lens, you are not necessarily saying that you agree with this idea. It is just a draft, or maybe a quote. A claim has a title and a body. You can enter a claim in one of two ways: Typing the claim interactively Sending a file from your hard disk Once you enter a claim, it is stored in the Lens. However, it cannot be seen by other users until someone takes a position on the claim. The most natural person to take the first position is you, the publisher, until there are so few responses that the Lens cannothas any votes on it (What are votes ? How do you respond ? See Respond to a claim ). Before proceeding, please see the complete list of rules regarding submission of claims. Type a Claim Interactively If you choose this option, you will be presented with a form where you can separately enter a title and a body for your claim. You can, of course, copy and paste into this window from some other window on your computer, if you so choose. When someone reads your claim, they will see exactly what you have typed, but you may not use any HTML formatting. This is the best method to use if you just want to type in a short claim without using HTML formatting, and without the benefit of advanced editing features offered by a word processor, such as spell-checking. Upload a Claim File If you choose this option, you will be presented with a form allowing you to select an HTML file on your computer. Your browser must support HTML file upload to use this method. The file will be sent to the lens and, if it obeys the rules, will be stored just as if you had typed it in. The title of the HTML document (the area between the "TITLE" tags) will be used as the title of the claim (the filename on your computer is irrelevant). The body of the HTML document (the area between the "BODY" tags) is used as the body of the claim. The file you submit must be ASCII text (it may not contain unicode or ISO-Latin characters, unless they are encoded using HTML entities). The document may not be longer than 2 kilobytes. The document may contain tables and certain kinds of links, as well as most of the character and paragraph formatting tags common in HTML, however there are important exceptions. You may not include images, forms, scripts (such as JavaScript), applets, or other active content in your claim; although you may include links to pages on your own server that contain these elements. Before submitting a file to the lens, you should verify that it renders properly in your web browser. Remember that you cannot change a claim once you submit it ! How do you propose that a claim be revised ? Q: What do you do when you no longer agree with a claim you published ? 1) Publish a new claim, or find an existing claim of another user, expressing your refined opinion. 2) Vote to "REVISE" the old claim, and cite your new claim as the reason for your vote. Take a position on a claim A response to a claim is called a position, because it represents your position on the claim at issue. A position is made up of citations of reasons for voting in a particular way. Note that the previous sentence is plural. You can have many citations, that is: many reasons, and many votes. The reasons you choose are single claims. In this way, a citation links together two claims. These links are used to navigate between related claims. How do you create a position ? You can express your response to a claim as a short vote, such as "AGREE", "DISAGREE", "CONFUSED", "WASHINGTON". In addition to your vote, you must add a reason. The reason must be another claim that already exists. (Note that you are free to write a claim called "I don't need a stinkin reason" and then use it for every position you take). You can combine the selection of vote and reason when you choose to join in supporting a reason some other people are already citing for a particular vote. In this case you can click on the "no" link in the "You Support" column of that reason's row (on the coalition detail or All Votes and Reasons page), to bring up a form that confirms whether you want to add this vote/reason to your position. If you confirm the "no" will change into a "yes". How do you change your position ? You can always add votes/reasons using "Cite Vote and reason" or the other "toggle" method described above, and you can remove votes/reasons by clicking on the "yes" links, and confirming that you want to change them to "no". How do you delete your position ? You can click on the "Delete Position" link in the "Actions" box of a claim page. This will bring up a form showing your position and confirming that you want to delete it. Find and navigate claims How do you search for claims ? The P.L.O.D. ("Pollite Lens" Opinion Database) provides several ways for you to look up claims that are interesting to you. The most basic of these is the "search by keyword" feature, which is familiar to anyone who has used the popular web search engines like Yahoo, Hotbot, DejaNews, etc. When you search this way, you get a list of up to 100 claims that have some or all of the keywords you specify. These claims are sorted by their "Word Search Score", which is computed using a combination of factors, including how often the words you specified appear in the documents, and whether your query words appear in the title. Currently, we do not provide any advanced searching features, but there are a variety of other ways to find claims that may be related to your interests. You can look at a list of all the claims in the system, ordered in several different ways. The list of "most recently published" claims shows you the claims that have been entered recently into the system. The "most argued" claims shows you the claims that the largest number of people have taken positions on. This is a good way to quickly see what the "hot topics" are in the PLOD. Alternatively, you can see what claims are "most cited", which are the ones that have been most used as reasons for votes on other claims. This tells you which claims are viewed as "persuasive" by a large number of users. How do you look at claim summaries ? Once you click on a claim that sounds interesting, you will see the contents of the claim, followed by a table full of links and numbers. These links and numbers show the different votes people have entered in response to the claim. Here you can see the general reaction of people to this claim so far. Each vote is a link to a coalition screen, showing the details of reasons that people have cited for supporting that vote. How do you get from one claim to a related claim ? Different ways to get from one claim to a related claim: In addition to these different searching facilities, you can find claims by navigating through the links that are created by the reason citation process. As mentioned in the section on votes, reasons and citations, you can proceed either inductively or deductively along the chains of reasoning that connect related claims together. When doing this, we refer to the claim you are starting from as "the context claim". When you proceed inductively, and look at the claims cited as reasons for voting on an issue, you will generally find more and more specific kinds of opinions. For example, a broad claim about "the problem with kids today" will probably have a bunch of responses that contain reasons linking to evidence about specific problems, or the lack thereof. You can find these claims by looking at the "All Votes and Reasons" page for the context claim. On the other hand, if you proceed deductively, and look at the "All Citations" page for the context claim, you will see the conclusions that have been drawn based on the assumption that the context claim is correct. In our example, you might find broader assertions about "the problems with society today", which people have taken positions on by citing the "problem with kids" claim as evidence. How do you bookmark a claim in your browser ? How can you store a link to a particular claim in your web browser's bookmarks, for easy reference. You can find claims by searching for words you are interested in ( details on text searching ). At the top of your search results are the claims which are judged to be more interesting, according to the profile you have set up. You can look at the summary page for any claim by clicking on it's link. Analyze claim responses Viewing claim response details _______ How to get more information about the support for different kinds of response to a claim _______ What are coalitions ? A coalition screen shows what reasons people have given for a particular vote. These reasons are just claims. You can see their titles in the table on the coalition screen. You can click on these titles to see the summary of these claims. This How do you see all the votes and reasons ? How do you see all the conclusions drawn from a claim ? How do you see other users' positions and platforms ? Once you are interested in a particular claim, there are a variety of pages that you can use to investigate the positions that different people have taken in response. You navigate to these different pages by using the set of links in the "Views" box at the top of the page. When you first look at a claim, you are automatically sent to the "Claim Text and Voting Summary" page, which contains the text of the page, and the list of voting coalitions. Implicit Drill-Down Techniques As mentioned in the section on votes, coalitions, and reasons, a coalition is the set of all people who have included a particular vote in their position. For example, all the people who vote "AGREE" on some proposal are automatically assigned to the "AGREE" coalition. Each coalition is listed with a link to a "Coalition Detail" page, which shows all the reasons people have cited for the vote, as well as statistics on the number of people supporting each reason. Each reason is listed with the title of the claim cited, as well as a link to the cited claim. If you follow this link, you will jump onto the "Claim Text and Voting Summary" for that claim, and then all the statistics you see will be for that claim, which is now the "context claim". Keep in mind that you can always use the "back" button of your browser to get back to the pages you were on previously. There are several other links in each line of the "Coalition Detail" table of reasons. Under the column "You Cite" is a link that reads either "yes" or "no". This indicates whether or not you currently cite that reason for this vote (the vote implied by the coalition you are looking at). In either case, if you click on this link, you are saying that you want to change your position regarding this citation -- i.e. if you currently support it you want to stop doing so, or if you don't support it you want to start doing so. Don't worry, in either case you will be asked to confirm this "toggling" of your support. Under the column "Reason Detail" is a link to detailed information on the support for each reason. The "Reason Detail" page includes a list of all the positions (identified by the login name of the user) supporting the citation of that reason for the vote. This list includes links to a "Position Detail" screen which shows you all the votes/reasons in one user's position. Other Views Available The last few paragraphs describes the most straightfoward way to proceed inductively in examining the different responses people have made to the context claim. However, there are a number of other views available, through the links in the "View" box at the top of each page. ALL POSITIONS - A list of all the positions on the context claim. Each contains a link to the "Position Detail" page for that position ALL VOTES / REASONS - A list of each vote/reason combination cited in response to the context claim. This is kind of like a combination of the "Voting Summary" table with all the "Coalition Detail" tables. This is the fastest way to see ALL the reasons that people have cited in response to the context claim, and is a good way to get a quick overview of the state of opinion. ALL CITATIONS - A list of all uses of the context claim as a reason. This is probably the most confusing part of the P.L.O.D., since in this table all the statistics have a meaning that is inverted with respect to the other pages described here. This is because this page shows what deduction (conclusions) have been made using the context claim, while all other pages are used to show how people have responded to the context claim itself. When you understand this difference, you understand the P.L.O.D. AUTHOR'S PLATFORM - This is the platform of this claim's author (the person who published the claim). This platform includes all other claims she has authored, as well as all positions she has taken, and all claims she has used as reasons. AUTHOR'S POSITION - This is the position the author of the claim has taken. YOUR POSITION - This is the position YOU have taken on this claim, if any. Manage your platform See all your positions How can you remember which claims you have responded to ? See all the claims you have published How can you remember all the claims you have published ? Use Advanced Features Manage your profile This stuff doesn't exist yet.

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