After last week's debate I looked for an app where I could get objective, near-real time analysis pertaining to the accuracy of a candidate's claim, since Wolf Blitzer obviously wasn't interested in doing his job. To my surprise, I couldn't find an app that did what I wanted. I considered writing one, but it's been almost a week and I haven't done anything yet, so I'll share the idea and maybe someone else will build it.
The basic idea would be that you press a button whenever a candidate says something you think is controversial. This will bring up a list of recent controversial statements made by the candidates, and you have the option to select one. Meanwhile, someone on the server side is using his best google-fu to immediately find primary sources that are relevant to each controversial statement. When a primary source is found, it is immediately pushed out to the user.
A lot of debate points really aren't "true" or "false" but only "true from a certain point of view". There's exceptions in both directions, certainly, but I don't think this is amenable to real-time analysis by anyone; you're mostly going to get fed the biases of the person on the other end of the wire, not "truth".
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After last week's debate I looked for an app where I could get objective, near-real time analysis pertaining to the accuracy of a candidate's claim, since Wolf Blitzer obviously wasn't interested in doing his job. To my surprise, I couldn't find an app that did what I wanted. I considered writing one, but it's been almost a week and I haven't done anything yet, so I'll share the idea and maybe someone else will build it.
The basic idea would be that you press a button whenever a candidate says something you think is controversial. This will bring up a list of recent controversial statements made by the candidates, and you have the option to select one. Meanwhile, someone on the server side is using his best google-fu to immediately find primary sources that are relevant to each controversial statement. When a primary source is found, it is immediately pushed out to the user.
A lot of debate points really aren't "true" or "false" but only "true from a certain point of view". There's exceptions in both directions, certainly, but I don't think this is amenable to real-time analysis by anyone; you're mostly going to get fed the biases of the person on the other end of the wire, not "truth".