The Ore­gon pri­mary bal­lots are due soon.  “Soon?”  Yes, for those unfa­mil­iar with our sys­tem up here, every­thing is done by mail or by drop-off.  There’s no polling place and polling date, just a mail-in dead­line.  I think the gov­ern­ment might think that the Novem­ber weather might be too cold, wet, and dreary for peo­ple to tra­verse it to go vote–so we vote by mail, even in the pri­maries.  We’re also not trusted to pump our own gaso­line.  Any­way, I have a gut feel­ing about who I’m vot­ing for, but I’d really like to have a bit more ratio­nal­ity behind it.

And now a bit of a sidebar…

In my line of work, the sales and mar­ket­ing folks use a par­tic­u­lar style of com­par­i­son called a “fea­ture matrix.”  You might have seen these kinds of things before, as they’re not just rel­e­gated to the tech sec­tor.  You start with a grid or table with labels across the top and sides.  One axis is a list of the com­pet­ing prod­ucts or ser­vices being compared–say a Tech­Mas­ter Super­Wid­get 3000, a Bam­ble­weeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain, and a Yoy­o­dyne oscil­la­tion over­thruster.  The other axis is the set of fea­tures being compared–power source, num­ber of ser­ial ports, top spa­cial speed, top tem­po­ral speed, etc.  The main con­tent of the grid con­sists of check­mark boxes to say yes, this prod­uct has this fea­ture or num­bers to con­vey sim­i­lar infor­ma­tion (the wid­get has 2 ser­ial ports, but the over­thruster has 3.)

When fea­ture matri­ces are used cor­rectly, they present an impar­tial and objec­tive com­par­i­son between prod­ucts.  When they’ve been giv­ing a mar­ket­ing depart­ment spin, eh… not so much with the fair-and-balanced.  Categories–quite often entirely use­less ones–might get cho­sen to make one prod­uct appear bet­ter and more feature-rich than the oth­ers.  Oh, look, the over­thruster is the only prod­uct with polar­ized fil­ters over the dis­play so that you can read it cleanly out­doors, even under direct sun­light.  Wait, what?  Who’s going to use any of these prod­ucts out­doors?  But it does give you a fea­ture check­mark for one prod­uct that none of the oth­ers have.  You get enough of those, and at first glance, it looks like one prod­uct is much bet­ter than others.

…and that’s then end of my sidebar.

So, dear inker­net, I ask you: where can I find a rea­son­ably unbi­ased fea­ture matrix of the can­di­dates?  Ide­ally, it would have Hillary and Obama (and per­haps oth­ers?) along one axis and issues (war, taxes, spend­ing, abor­tion, death penalty, etc.) across the other.  The main con­tent of the table would then be brief descrip­tions of each candidate’s stance on each issue.  Extra spe­cial super bonus if ref­er­ences are cited so that inquis­i­tive read­ers can con­sult the pri­mary sources of the sum­ma­rized data.

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Tagged as: candidates, feature, featurematrix, matrix, politics