Ronald Bloom <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Would the group of kids doing a post-hoc experiment be
> biased inasmuch as the nature of the problem at hand may
> have become common-knowledge by now; even among kids; and
> so one would be forewarned of the error-mode in question,
> and be much less likely to fall into that mode of error?
Quite likely.
> At any rate, what inference am I being prompted to draw here?
> That the people who claimed to have been confused were
> either (a) ignoramuses or (b) changing their tune after
> the fact?
> Is there some more generous interpretation, (c), say?
I suspect the average visual acuity of the fourth-graders was better than
that of the Palm Beach voters.
There are certain cognitive tasks that children do better on than
adults; could this be one of them? Or could it be one of those tasks that
younger adults do better on than older ones? Valid research questions
here, and if the latter turns out to be true, it would certainly have
legal implications for future ballots.
Did the exercise actually involve punching a hole using the apparatus
found in an actual voting booth, or did it involve filling in a
circle? If, as I suspect, it was the latter, than I doubt the results are
transferrable. There are plenty of user interfaces that seem to work in
mockups, but fail in production because of seemingly minor differences
(one of my pet examples is that a simulated thumbwheel control as often
seen on MP3 player software or other programs with a "skin" interface
requires an entirely different set of motor movements (and skills) than a
real-life thumbwheel; to me at least, the motor movements involved in
operating a simulated thumbwheel rather close resemble those involved in
removing a child-resistant cap from a medicine bottle ("press and turn
simultaneously")).
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