Opinion poll

An opinion poll, sometimes simply referred to as a poll, is a survey of public opinion from a particular sample. Opinion polls are usually designed to represent the opinions of a population by conducting a series of questions and then extrapolating generalities in ratio or within confidence intervals.

History

The first known example of an opinion poll was a local straw poll conducted by The Aru Pennsylvanian in 1824, showing Andrew Jackson leading John Quincy Adams by 335 votes to 169 in the contest for the United States Presidency. Since Jackson won the popular vote in that state and the whole country, such straw votes gradually became more popular, but they remained local, usually city-wide phenomena. In 1916, the Literary Digest embarked on a national survey (partly as a circulation-raising exercise) and correctly predicted Woodrow Wilson's election as president. Mailing out millions of postcards and simply counting the returns, the Digest correctly predicted the victories of Warren Harding in 1920, Calvin Coolidge in 1924, Herbert Hoover in 1928, and Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

India Today

India Today is an Indian English-language weekly magazine and news television channel. It was established in 1975 by Vidya Vilas Purie (owner of Thompson Press), with his daughter Madhu Trehan as its editor and his son Aroon Purie as its publisher. At present, India Today is also published in Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam and Telugu. The India Today news channel was launched on 22 May 2015.

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Uttar Pradesh

Uttar Pradesh (/ˈʊtər prəˈdɛʃ/, Hindi : उत्तर प्रदेश literally "Northern Province"), abbreviated as UP, is a state located in Northern India. It was created on 1 April 1937 as the United Provinces, and was renamed Uttar Pradesh in 1950. Lucknow is the capital city of Uttar Pradesh. Ghaziabad, Kanpur, Allahabad, Moradabad, Bareilly, Aligarh, Sonbhadra and Varanasi are known for their industrial importance in the state. On 9 November 2000, a new state, Uttarakhand, was carved out from the Himalayan hill region of Uttar Pradesh.

The state is bordered by Rajasthan to the west, Haryana and Delhi to the northwest, Uttarakhand and the country of Nepal to the north, Bihar to the east, Madhya Pradesh to the south and touches small areas of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh to the south eastern corner. It covers 243,290 square kilometres (93,933 sq mi), equal to 6.88% of the total area of India, and is the fourth largest Indian state by area. With over 200 million inhabitants in 2011, it is the most populous state in the country as well as the most populous country subdivision in the world. Hindi is the official and most widely spoken language in its 75 districts. Uttar Pradesh is the third largest Indian state by economy, with a GDP of ₹9763 billion (US$140 billion). Agriculture and service industries are the largest parts of the state's economy. The service sector comprises travel and tourism, hotel industry, real estate, insurance and financial consultancies.

Opinion

In general, an opinion is a judgment, viewpoint, or statement about matters commonly considered to be subjective.

What distinguishes fact from opinion is that facts are verifiable, i.e. can be objectively proven to have occurred. An example is: "United States of America was involved in the Vietnam War" versus "United States of America was right to get involved in the Vietnam War". An opinion may be supported by facts, in which case it becomes an argument, although people may draw opposing opinions from the same set of facts. Opinions rarely change without new arguments being presented. It can be reasoned that one opinion is better supported by the facts than another by analyzing the supporting arguments. In casual use, the term opinion may be the result of a person's perspective, understanding, particular feelings, beliefs, and desires. It may refer to unsubstantiated information, in contrast to knowledge and fact.

Collective or professional opinions are defined as meeting a higher standard to substantiate the opinion. (see below)

Robert Jaffe

Robert L. Jaffe (born May 23, 1946) is an American physicist and the Jane and Otto Morningstar Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was formerly director of the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics.

Biography

Jaffe was born in Bath, Maine, USA, in 1946 and educated in public schools in Stamford, Connecticut. He received his A.B. degree in physics, summa cum laude, from Princeton University, where he was valedictorian of the Class of 1968. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University in 1971 and 1972, respectively. At Stanford he founded the Stanford Workshops on Political and Social Issues.

In 1972, Jaffe moved to MIT as a postdoctoral research associate in the Center for Theoretical Physics; he joined the faculty in 1974. From 1975 until 1979, he was an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow. Jaffe has spent sabbatical years at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (1976), Oxford University and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) (1978–79), Boston University (1986–87), and at Harvard University (1996–97). He has served on the program advisory committees of several national laboratories including the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and Brookhaven National Laboratory. For a decade he chaired the advisory council of the physics department of Princeton University. Since 1996, Jaffe has been an advisor to and Visiting Scientist at the RIKEN-Brookhaven Research Center. He spent the fall term of 1997 on leave from MIT at the RIKEN-Brookhaven Center.