Group items tagged

A new web tool is being used to help foster sensible debate about the conflict in Gaza. Debategraph is a browser-based web application that gives a visual representation of the intricate arguments and issues in a heated debate - more recently being used to create order from the chaos surrounding the crisis in Gaza.

Our goal is to make the best arguments on all sides of any public debate freely available to all and continuously open to challenge and improvement by all.

Essays and research supporting the idea that global warming poses a clear threat to humanity, that it is largely caused by human activity, and that solutions to the problems of climate change lie within human reach.

ScienceBloggers discuss the advantages of open science and debate the necessity of the current peer-review system.

ESSENCE: E-Science/Sensemaking/Climate Change is an immersive internet experiment, culminating in a face-face conference. We want to build a collective intelligence resource on the climate change debate. This is analogous to Wikipedia, but decidely not enforcing a "neutral point of view". We are going to put through their paces tools tuned for mapping the key issues, options, arguments and evidence on the different dillemmas - and reflect on how effective the current tools are.

ESSENCE is an immersive internet experiment, and a face-face conference. It invites human-centred technologists, climate scientists, policymakers, and any other stakeholder with a view on some part of the climate change debate, to experience and reflect on a new generation of software tools. Build, structure, summarise and navigate the science and policy arguments underpinning climate challenge. Think of it as a visual Wikipedia, a collective intelligence, to organise the key issues, options and arguments.

# What is Cruxlux about? # Shining a light on the crux of things. If something's true, it should withstand scrutiny, and if something's wrong, we should be able to help uncover that. With our novel and powerful technology, we allow interactive back-and-forth between different views, making it easy to see counterpoints to a given argument and to identify the root causes of disagreement on an question. Besides participating on this site, the Cruxlux platform can be embedded on other sites, to enable their visitors to participate in inter-blog debates and chats.

There's a huge debate going on at Digg right now about limiting the influence of the top users. I support that effort 100%. Many sensible suggestions were offered, such as limiting number of diggs per day, taking away the shout system, or completely discount votes from close friends.

Mapping Great Debates: Can Computers Think?

"The debate within the Web community over the optimal means by which to organize information often pits formalized classications against distributed collaborative tagging systems. A number of questions remain unanswered, however, regarding the nature of collaborative tagging systems including whether coherent categorization schemes can emerge from unsupervised tagging by users. This paper uses data from the social bookmarking site del.icio.us to examine the dynamics of collaborative tagging systems. In particular, we examine whether the distribution of the frequency of use of tags for “popular” sites with a long history (many tags and many users) can be described by a power law distribution, often characteristic of what are considered complex systems. We produce a generative model of collaborative tagging in order to understand the basic dynamics behind tagging, including how a power law distribution of tags could arise. We empirically examine the tagging history of sites in order to determine how this distribution arises over time and to determine the patterns prior to a stable distribution. Lastly, by focusing on the high-frequency tags of a site where the distribution of tags is a stabilized power law, we show how tag co-occurrence networks for a sample domain of tags can be used to analyze the meaning of particular tags given their relationship to other tags."

The paper shows that the tags users choose are not chaotic, but rather quickly converge to a common descriptive set of tags that is almost unchanging over time. Perhaps once the tags have stabilized, coherent URI-based identification schemes could emerge?

Nice paper, thanks. Categories / tags / subjects / topics / issues ... that's what I'm working with right now. p.s. sure would be nice if the email notification included the source URL. I'm far more likely to download the PDF when I see something like www2007.org/paper635.pdf

There's a long-time debate between those who advocate for semantic markup, and those who believe that machine learning will eventually get us to the holy grail of a Semantic Web, one in which computer programs actually understand the meaning of what they see and read.

Argunet is an open platform for creating, sharing and presenting argument maps.

Our mission: "Promoting critical thinking, education, and informed citizenship by presenting controversial issues in a straightforward, nonpartisan primarily pro-con format."