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Published online 28 October 2009 | Nature 461, 1189-1192 (2009) | doi:10.1038/4611189a
News Feature
Decision-making: Risk school
Can the general public learn to evaluate risks accurately, or do authorities need to steer it towards correct decisions? Michael Bond talks to the two opposing camps.
A group of eight-year-olds sits around a classroom table, playing with coloured, plastic boxes called tinker-cubes and linking them into chains. It could be playtime at almost any primary school in the world.
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Tinker Cubes for encoding feature values were actually introduced by Martignon, who also experimented with children in 6 classes near Stuttgart, as part of a program with several blocks, some of them based on ideas promoted by Gigerenzer. The work by Kurz-Milcke was designed for the use of Tinker Cubes and trees for elementary Bayesian Reasoning.
A reference on experiments with Tinker-Cubes in the classromm with young children (8 years old, and 9 yeasr old) is the article by Martignon & Krauss in
International Electronic Journal of Mathematics Education, 4, October 09.
http://www.iejme.com/
Apart from this missing reference, this is a beautiful article.
If making the right decission would be a matter of statistical literacy, how then all the people working at the banks and university deparments with the most complete and sofisticated data bases and programs could not predict the financial disaster that was looming?.