Conspiracy Theory Voter

This essay is about a suggested student project in Java programming. This essay gives a rough overview of how it might work. It does not describe an actual complete program. I have no source, object, specifications, file layouts or anything else useful to implementing this project. Everything I have to say to help you with this project is written below. I am not prepared to help you implement it; I have too many other projects of my own.

I do contract work for a living, which could include writing a program such as this. However, I don’t do people’s homework for them. That just robs them of an education.

You have my full permission to implement this project any way you please.

This offbeat student project requires access to a webserver, or a computer with a 24/7 access to the Internet that can run a servlet womb.

Perhaps you have heard that there are unexplained cattle mutilations in Argentina. Sexual organs, tongues etc were removed and the corpses arranged in a circle. No footprints or tire tracks were found. No one heard any noise. This has happened 200 times as of 2002-06-22.

What is your favourite explanation of the phenomenon?

Aliens from another planet.
CIA trying to scare people.
Government trying to distract people from the financial scandals.
Satanists with helicopters.
Military guys on a lark with a new quiet levitation vehicle.
Teens enjoying freaking their elders.
Some foreign competitor trying to sour the Argentine beef market.
Rabid vegetarians trying to discourage beef consumption.
Hit by lightning.
Jack the Kipper.
Swamp gas.

It would be fun to put up a website with an Applet/servlet that let people vote for their favourite conspiracy theory. The site would display a pie chart showing the proportions of popularity of each explanation. The voter would track IP, to let people change their vote as many times as they want, but not vote twice. This is not perfect. Dial up users usually get a new IP each session, and could vote more than once, or change somebody else’s vote who earlier had that IP.

For a fancier version, visitors might rate each theory from 0 to 9 for plausibility. you could use a spinner or let them key a digit to register their ratings into an Applet.

If you used an SQL database to record the responses, the project would scale up. If you used a simple serialised HashMap to track responses, you could only handle a RAM’s full.

The Applet would be controlled by parameters so that you could use it for a variety of conspiracies.

You could encourage visitors to come up with new wilder explanations to add to the list and email them to you. People could then change their votes if the new theories were more appealing.

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