Cairns Blog

Visualization Tools for Selecting a Candidate

Participation rates in the recent primaries and caucuses are way up.  Ten times the number turned out in Nevada yesterday than in the previous presidential election!  A number of new tools that help people visualize and therefore make sense of the issues may be helping to spark Interest in the candidates and their positions.

Here are a few examples of the kinds of visual tools we see emerging to use the computer interface more effectively to help us understand who the candidates are.  In another post, I'll talk about visual tools that help us see ourselves as part of a community of supporters and inquire as to whether this makes us give more, join sooner and be active in ways we wouldn't have done before the ability to imagine ourselves as part of the collective.

Minnesota Public Radio developed a quiz to help people identify which candidate is most closely aligned with their views.  Other media outlets have copied the quiz to disseminate the tool to local viewers.

Connect2Elect has users select and order keywords or tags that represent the most important views they want their ideal candidate to have.  The website provides a "visualizer" that shows the user's views at the center and the candidates arrayed around her (like pins on a map).  The site will also provide a rank-ordered list of candidates based on preferences entered.

Smartvote asks a series of questions about issues and priorities and then also displays a Kiviat diagram or visual map of the candidates in upcoming Swiss races.  The site operates in the four Swiss national languages: German, French, Italian and Rumantsch.

ChoiceRanker is designed to be a polling tool to enable "collaborative expression of converging and diverging opinion."  The site presents candidates in random order and asks users to cast their ballot for first, second, third etc choice.  Using these ranked preferences, the interactive ballot demonstrates instant run-off voting.  This is not an issue-ranking tool like the others but enables users to understand something about the depth of popularity and likely viability of a candidate.

Tidbit of the Week: Apropos of Nothing in Particular - Satsumas

My aunt is an award-winning German translator, whose translations include Hitler’s Bunker: The Final Days of the Third Reich and Europa, Europa.  While we were together, she was working on a book called Lexicon des Unwissens, not unlike a German version of Schott's miscellanies, those perennial bathroom-reading favorites.  Why in this day and age of Wikipedia, I queried, would anyone want or need such a book?  Well, she answered, it's precisely because you don't know what you don't know and until you know to look it up, well......

This is why I thought that someone might find it as useful as I did to know the difference between a Clementine and a Satsuma (also sometimes spelled Tsatsuma).  Mandarins are now in season and they are deliciously sweet, seedless and easy to peel.  I also like the challenge of having to consume the entire wooden crate-full as they are generally sold in bulk.  I've included the links to Wikipedia but there's lots more on the web about both.

The short answer is: Clementines are the variety of mandarins from North Africa.  The varietal is about 100 years old.  Satsumas are the variety of mandarins from Asia and Asia Minor/Turkey and are more than 700 years old.  The largest producer of mandarins in the world is China.

So what's a mandarin?  Well, according to Wikipedia:

The Mandarin orange or mandarin is a small citrus tree (Citrus reticulata) with fruit resembling the orange. The fruit is oblate, rather than spherical, and roughly resembles a pumpkin in shape. Mandarin oranges are usually eaten plain, or in fruit salads. Specifically reddish orange mandarin cultivars can be marketed as tangerines, but this is not a botanical classification. The mandarin has many names, some of which actually refer to crosses between the mandarin and another citrus fruit. Most canned mandarins are of the satsuma variety, of which there are over 200 cultivars. Satsumas are known as mikan in Japan. One of the more well-known satsuma cultivars is the "Owari", which ripens during the late fall season in the Northern Hemisphere. Clementines, however, have displaced satsumas in many markets, and are becoming the most important commercial mandarin variety. The tangor, which is also called the temple orange, is a cross between the mandarin and the common orange. Its thin rind is easy to peel; and its pale orange pulp is spicy, full-flavored, and tart. The rangpur is a cross between the mandarin and the lemon

You don't know you don't know until you know.

Wow!

""Hope is the bedrock of this nation.  The belief that our destiny will not be written for us but by us....by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be...Together ordinary people can do extraordinary things."  (Barack Obama, Iowa victory speech, January 3, 2008).

New Hampshire, here we come!