Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?
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@Luhmann even the most basic calculator can help you with that kind of stuff. Those weren't banned if not by the pedant traditionalists. You're missing the point. I really can't envision the kind of exercise you do in high school that requires you to have more than square and maybe cubic roots and trigonometric functions, and those can be found even in the cheapest Chinese bootleg calculators.
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@admiral_p said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
Where's the need for a calculator when most exercises are designed not to need one
Strangely you're not forced to use one, so for the exercises where a calculator isn't the right solution, you just don't use it.
It's almost like "should I use a calculator or not" is just another element of working out what the correct method of solving the problem is.
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@loopback0 I actually would prefer, if I were in high school, to have only the kind of exercises that basically signal your mistakes when you can't factorise or simplify or whatever. It doesn't take a genius to know when a calculator is useful anyway. By the way, why should public schools impose a further cost over families for little gain? I can buy a calculator that is overkill for even physics or bookkeeping classes, where "elegance" is not a factor, for maybe €15 at the most.
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@boomzilla said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@LaoC said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Vixen said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Vixen said in In other news today...:
I'm not sure why you have a hard time understanding this..... They bought a monopoly and enforced it through scholastic curriculum requirements. It was shady, unethical, but legal so exactly what you would expect capitalism to do.
Yes, that most capitalist institution of public schools.they being TI, not the schools.
TI bought the monopoly by paying the schools to adopt the curriculum requirements.
Ah, OK, fair enough. Under non-capitalism they would have just made the monopoly the law.
What do you think characterizes a monopoly outside a capitalist context?
What do you think characterizes a monopoly inside a capitalist context?
That definition seems to have been uncontroversial here so far, and I suppose we can all read Wikipedia. As you brought up monopolies "under non-capitalism", where the usual effects like monopoly profits simply don't apply, I thought you might want to explain what you think that does.
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We were only required to have one like this:
I had one of those and then had one of these when I lost it (or broke it or something):
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@loopback0 yeah, that's the kind you'd see in Italian schools. And we usually only used, like, maybe a third of their functions anyway.
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@LaoC said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@boomzilla said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@LaoC said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Vixen said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Vixen said in In other news today...:
I'm not sure why you have a hard time understanding this..... They bought a monopoly and enforced it through scholastic curriculum requirements. It was shady, unethical, but legal so exactly what you would expect capitalism to do.
Yes, that most capitalist institution of public schools.they being TI, not the schools.
TI bought the monopoly by paying the schools to adopt the curriculum requirements.
Ah, OK, fair enough. Under non-capitalism they would have just made the monopoly the law.
What do you think characterizes a monopoly outside a capitalist context?
What do you think characterizes a monopoly inside a capitalist context?
That definition seems to have been uncontroversial here so far, and I suppose we can all read Wikipedia. As you brought up monopolies "under non-capitalism", where the usual effects like monopoly profits simply don't apply, I thought you might want to explain what you think that does.
And I might think you'd like you explain why you think no one profits anything under "non-capitalism."
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@admiral_p said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
for maybe €15 at the most.
See the start of this thread, this is exactly what those $100 calculators are, if you strip out the monopoly.
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@Luhmann said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
Even in the 90ties this was mostly done by pc. But there we were learning the basics of bookkeeping on paper like schmucks. Why wouldn't you use a calculator so at least you didn't flunk because you made stupid calculation error while adding VAT.
Even in intro to economics in college they made us do calculation of interest (basically just exponentiation) with tables for interest rate/number of years. What the fuck, just use the calculator like a sane person.
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@remi but then why should schools really discourage students from buying other calculators? So in some cheaper calculators there are no parentheses which means that you must use memory functions. So what? It's tedious but it works. I mean what's the pretence behind encouraging TI and only TI?
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@admiral_p said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
So what? It's tedious but it works. I mean what's the pretence behind encouraging TI and only TI?
Read the thread.
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@admiral_p said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@remi but then why should schools really discourage students from buying other calculators? So in some cheaper calculators there are no parentheses which means that you must use memory functions. So what? It's tedious but it works. I mean what's the pretence behind encouraging TI and only TI?
TI paid for that.
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@topspin and endure the pointless bickering and (hyperbolic) tangents? No thanks.
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@Carnage teachers are bleeding heart commies. Why would they submit to what is clearly a cryptofascist diktat?
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@admiral_p said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@Carnage teachers are bleeding heart commies. Why would they submit to what is clearly a cryptofascist diktat?
I'm afraid a reply to that from me would be deep into
territory so I'll refrain.
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@admiral_p said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
teachers are bleeding heart commies.
teachers are also very much
and 
give them a solution and they will happily use it for the next 20 years
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@boomzilla said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@LaoC said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@boomzilla said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@LaoC said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Vixen said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Vixen said in In other news today...:
I'm not sure why you have a hard time understanding this..... They bought a monopoly and enforced it through scholastic curriculum requirements. It was shady, unethical, but legal so exactly what you would expect capitalism to do.
Yes, that most capitalist institution of public schools.they being TI, not the schools.
TI bought the monopoly by paying the schools to adopt the curriculum requirements.
Ah, OK, fair enough. Under non-capitalism they would have just made the monopoly the law.
What do you think characterizes a monopoly outside a capitalist context?
What do you think characterizes a monopoly inside a capitalist context?
That definition seems to have been uncontroversial here so far, and I suppose we can all read Wikipedia. As you brought up monopolies "under non-capitalism", where the usual effects like monopoly profits simply don't apply, I thought you might want to explain what you think that does.
And I might think you'd like you explain why you think no one profits anything under "non-capitalism."
What a long-winded way of saying No.
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@Bulb said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@remi said in In other news today...:
@Tsaukpaetra Again, same here, and yet the market is clearly working better...
Because it probably is. I understood the article so that the American curriculum is so tailored to the exact features of the TI devices that having any other is between highly impractical and not acceptable.
Mind you, this isn't just competing products, but also other TI graphing calculators.
If you have something that works on a TI-82/83/84, it might not work on a TI-85/86 or TI-89.
(The ones with slashes are just upgraded versions of the same model)
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@remi said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@TimeBandit When I was in high-school (long ago...
) in France, TI was second to Casio in market shares (and HP was a distant third, maybe 1-2 per classroom at the very maximum)Much the same in the Netherlands, I’d guess, and probably around the same time. My school required, from a certain year on, a calculator with the capabilities of a Casio FX-82. You did see the occasional other brand, but most people just got an FX-82 for that reason. (I still have mine lying by my computer and usually reach for it if I need to calculate some stuff, despite Spotlight being quicker and handier … but I don’t remember to use that much of the time.)
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@topspin said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
Even in intro to economics in college they made us do calculation of interest (basically just exponentiation) with tables for interest rate/number of years. What the fuck, just use the calculator like a sane person.
That’s because schools are often somewhat behind the times of the real world, and yours apparently hadn’t caught up with the use of calculators yet.
Just like: WTF do Dutch customs round all values of imported goods down to the nearest whole euro? The only reason I can think of is because this saved a lot of effort before they got electronic calculators, let alone computers, but somehow it’s still done that way.
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@Gurth It's not just customs, it's all taxes. And it's not just down. You can round up to the next whole euro if that works better for you.
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I can't comment on this thread due to NDA, but if I could, I may or may not have a lot to say about it.
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@error said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
a lot to say about it.
But only offline and in German?
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@HardwareGeek He knows what kind of stuff John Texas Instruments gets up to in his spare time
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@HardwareGeek said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@error said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
a lot to say about it.
But only offline and in German?
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@error said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
I can't comment on this thread due to NDA, but if I could, I may or may not have a lot to say about it.
Are you one of TI's entourage?
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@hungrier said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@HardwareGeek He knows what kind of stuff John Texas' Instrument
sgets up to in his spare timeGenit
alived That For You
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@powerlord said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@Bulb said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@remi said in In other news today...:
@Tsaukpaetra Again, same here, and yet the market is clearly working better...
Because it probably is. I understood the article so that the American curriculum is so tailored to the exact features of the TI devices that having any other is between highly impractical and not acceptable.
Mind you, this isn't just competing products, but also other TI graphing calculators.
If you have something that works on a TI-82/83/84, it might not work on a TI-85/86 or TI-89.
(The ones with slashes are just upgraded versions of the same model)
Yeah. That was incredifucking unbelievabletastic.
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@LaoC said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@boomzilla said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@LaoC said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@boomzilla said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@LaoC said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Vixen said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Vixen said in In other news today...:
I'm not sure why you have a hard time understanding this..... They bought a monopoly and enforced it through scholastic curriculum requirements. It was shady, unethical, but legal so exactly what you would expect capitalism to do.
Yes, that most capitalist institution of public schools.they being TI, not the schools.
TI bought the monopoly by paying the schools to adopt the curriculum requirements.
Ah, OK, fair enough. Under non-capitalism they would have just made the monopoly the law.
What do you think characterizes a monopoly outside a capitalist context?
What do you think characterizes a monopoly inside a capitalist context?
That definition seems to have been uncontroversial here so far, and I suppose we can all read Wikipedia. As you brought up monopolies "under non-capitalism", where the usual effects like monopoly profits simply don't apply, I thought you might want to explain what you think that does.
And I might think you'd like you explain why you think no one profits anything under "non-capitalism."
What a long-winded way of saying No.
Indeed. Wasn't interested in that particular irrelevant tangent, especially if you don't want to discuss it more.
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A few thoughts (avoiding the squabbles):
- If you're thinking of teachers making these decisions...they're nowhere in the decision loop. These decisions (at the public-school level) are made at the state Board of Education level.
- The individual market for graphing calculators is tiny. Just like how Microsoft made very little of its Office-related revenue from retail license sales, the big money in calculators is in class sets. A district (under state mandate) will buy 30+ identical calculators per math/science classroom. And even though the lifetime of a good calculator is long, the classroom ones get lost/broken/stolen/vandalized/etc and have to be replaced. And since the district won't pony up money for a new set, they have to get replaced by identical models. Which means lock-in. Plus it means that the companies can't really innovate.
- School purchasing is...broken. Just like military procurement, and for many of the same reasons. As I understand it (I may be wrong), they make a deal to purchase X (in large lots) devices at Y% off the list price, where Y is set by fiat. If they set the list price to the point where individual sales make sense ($15-$25), they'd lose money on the big purchase contracts. TI has chosen to go with the big contracts (including by universities and the College Board Inc) and jack up the list price until they make hefty products. Mainly because they can, and because as with most products bought by corporate/central levels, who you know is much more important than what you can do. And those procurement offices are incestuously staffed with industry people (and vice versa).
Textbooks work the same way. And it totally sucks for everyone else.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
The individual market for graphing calculators is tiny.
I'm not sure I'd totally agree with that, although I'm sure it is significantly smaller than the school/set market
@Benjamin-Hall said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
School purchasing is...broken. Just like military procurement, and for many of the same reasons. As I understand it (I may be wrong), they make a deal to purchase X (in large lots) devices at Y% off the list price, where Y is set by fiat. If they set the list price to the point where individual sales make sense ($15-$25), they'd lose money on the big purchase contracts. TI has chosen to go with the big contracts (including by universities and the College Board Inc) and jack up the list price until they make hefty products. Mainly because they can, and because as with most products bought by corporate/central levels, who you know is much more important than what you can do. And those procurement offices are incestuously staffed with industry people (and vice versa).
That I can believe
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Having did my Honors in Physics, I remember forgetting to bring my calculator to exams, then leaving some of my answers in their unevaluated forms. They never really penalized me for doing that. For the trigonometric and power evaluations, I sometimes used the Maclaurin's expansion series to approximate my answers.
My peers gave me the stare of disbelief when I shared with them what I did during exams.I guess that's why I will never make it in Academia.
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@sloosecannon said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
The individual market for graphing calculators is tiny.
I'm not sure I'd totally agree with that, although I'm sure it is significantly smaller than the school/set market
Who is the market for them? The main use since the End of School that I've had for my (now dead and gone...screen died) TI-85 was doing calculations while playing Advanced Civilization. I rarely use a calculator. If I need to do some math I typically open up a spreadsheet, and I haven't needed any of the fancy stuff.
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@boomzilla said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
If I need to do some math I typically open up a spreadsheet, and I haven't needed any of the fancy stuff.
Spreadsheet can do more than even quite fancy calculator anyway.
At this time it would make most sense, for things where calculators are desired, to switch to applications running on Android tablets. There are plenty of cheapo tablets for those who can't afford any better that can still run a calculator app or a spreadsheet and the app could be upgraded any time as desired.
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@Bulb I use my Ti-85 quite a lot for doing simple calculations (ie finding the right answer for class questions and making keys) because it's way simpler to use than firing up a full spreadsheet. I also use it for unit conversions (which are built in to the 85) and for polynomial root finding (because that's built in).
The 85 (which isn't made anymore) is pretty close to the best calculator TI ever made. My Precious (said gollum-wise) is my baby and I will be very sad/angry when it finally bites the bucket.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@Bulb I use my Ti-85 quite a lot for doing simple calculations (ie finding the right answer for class questions and making keys) because it's way simpler to use than firing up a full spreadsheet. I also use it for unit conversions (which are built in to the 85) and for polynomial root finding (because that's built in).
Yes, but you're...still in a school.
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@boomzilla said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@Bulb I use my Ti-85 quite a lot for doing simple calculations (ie finding the right answer for class questions and making keys) because it's way simpler to use than firing up a full spreadsheet. I also use it for unit conversions (which are built in to the 85) and for polynomial root finding (because that's built in).
Yes, but you're...still in a school.
I do a surprising amount of unit conversions and polynomial solving outside of school as well. But yes. I don't use it as much as I did when I was an active student, and the main market for graphing calculators is students/schools.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@boomzilla said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@Bulb I use my Ti-85 quite a lot for doing simple calculations (ie finding the right answer for class questions and making keys) because it's way simpler to use than firing up a full spreadsheet. I also use it for unit conversions (which are built in to the 85) and for polynomial root finding (because that's built in).
Yes, but you're...still in a school.
I do a surprising amount of unit conversions and polynomial solving outside of school as well. But yes. I don't use it as much as I did when I was an active student, and the main market for graphing calculators is students/schools.
Unit conversions I could believe. I typically use google when I need to do that. Why are you solving polynomials?
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@boomzilla said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@boomzilla said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@Bulb I use my Ti-85 quite a lot for doing simple calculations (ie finding the right answer for class questions and making keys) because it's way simpler to use than firing up a full spreadsheet. I also use it for unit conversions (which are built in to the 85) and for polynomial root finding (because that's built in).
Yes, but you're...still in a school.
I do a surprising amount of unit conversions and polynomial solving outside of school as well. But yes. I don't use it as much as I did when I was an active student, and the main market for graphing calculators is students/schools.
Unit conversions I could believe. I typically use google when I need to do that. Why are you solving polynomials?
Worldbuilding. Trying to figure out how far things will (reasonably) go when launched (ie "how far can the goblin get punted" and other such things). And a few other esoteric things. Sure, there are other ways of doing it, but physicists prefer to reduce everything to a quadratic if possible.
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@boomzilla said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
Who is the market for them? The main use since the End of School that I've had for my (now dead and gone...screen died) TI-85 was doing calculations while playing Advanced Civilization. I rarely use a calculator. If I need to do some math I typically open up a spreadsheet, and I haven't needed any of the fancy stuff.
I still use mine (TI-85 as well!), mostly because it allows me to have a physically separate device from whatever I'm working with (i.e. I can keep my main application on the full screen and type whatever maths I need on the calculator). But any app on my phone could serve equally well on that regard. Except maybe that the calculator having physical buttons means I can type without watching. It's also a bit more convenient when I'm scribbling on a piece of paper as I can keep my eyes on my desk without having to switch back and forth with the computer screen, but I usually give up as soon as the maths become a bit too tedious to type on a calculator. So yeah, that's a very limited use, and it definitely doesn't require the full power of a TI-85. And if mine died, I definitely wouldn't buy another one.
I tried a couple of times to use more advanced features that I needed while working, such as plotting or simple matrix manipulations (for the same reason as above, because it's physically a different device than my computer), but the UI is so awful that the friction of switching apps on my computer is much smaller than that of using the calculator. And the calculator quickly becomes too limited (plotting is soooooo slow...) compared to e.g. Wolfram Alpha or Octave if you're trying to do more than trivial problems.
One of the articles mentioned up-thread (either the OP or one of the French ones I found?) was saying that what "saved" calculators is that phones can do too many things and make it too easy to cheat, so calculators are basically devices that purposefully do less than a phone in order to be usable in the restricted school environment. In that sense, they naturally become totally useless as soon as the restriction of the school environment disappear and my understanding is that there is no market for them outside schools.
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@remi said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
One of the articles mentioned up-thread (either the OP or one of the French ones I found?) was saying that what "saved" calculators is that phones can do too many things and make it too easy to cheat, so calculators are basically devices that purposefully do less than a phone in order to be usable in the restricted school environment. In that sense, they naturally become totally useless as soon as the restriction of the school environment disappear and my understanding is that there is no market for them outside schools.
Yeah. That's why we enforce a "must have a calculator for exams" policy--phones are too easy to cheat with. Although we don't require any particular type, as long as it can do the needed operations (which for Chemistry is just basic stuff + scientific notation + roots/exponents).
Although the phone calculators just generally suck for anything involving serious numbers or operations (roots, fractions, scientific notation, etc). And the iphone calculator app had a serious bug--if you typed too fast, the animation would play but the button presses wouldn't get registered. So you'd do
2+3+4and it would read2+4or whatever. Had a bunch of kids run into trouble with that.
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@Bulb said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
At this time it would make most sense, for things where calculators are desired, to switch to applications running on Android tablets. There are plenty of cheapo tablets for those who can't afford any better that can still run a calculator app or a spreadsheet and the app could be upgraded any time as desired.
The problem is that tablets allow easy cheating if not properly locked down. And no teacher wants to be responsible for properly locking it down (mostly because they have no idea how).
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@Gąska said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
@Bulb said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
At this time it would make most sense, for things where calculators are desired, to switch to applications running on Android tablets. There are plenty of cheapo tablets for those who can't afford any better that can still run a calculator app or a spreadsheet and the app could be upgraded any time as desired.
The problem is that tablets allow easy cheating if not properly locked down. And no teacher wants to be responsible for properly locking it down (mostly because they have no idea how).
And because such locking down is easily circumventable. We deal with this every day. Basically, test security requires that there be no available electronic devices that can wirelessly communicate. On-topic, this is why the "fancy" graphing calculators (TI-92, etc) never took off--they were banned from the standardized tests because of their communication capabilities + the ability to easily type stuff in (using the qwerty keyboard). Even the TI-89 (with its symbolic algebra capabilities) was disfavored.
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@boomzilla said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
Unit conversions I could believe.
On Linux I use the venerable qalculate, but it's true that when I looked for something on Android some time ago, the choice was pretty bad.
@Gąska said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
The problem is that tablets allow easy cheating if not properly locked down.
And do they need to be? I still think it's a weird case—either you have no tools at all, and the questions are written so they don't need any calculations that would be hard without a calculator, or you have tools, and the task needs to be designed so that you can't find ready made solution anywhere and have to show some skill and understanding whatever you use. But I guess that's too hard for most schools.
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@Bulb said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
and the task needs to be designed so that you can't find ready made solution anywhere and have to show some skill and understanding whatever you use
Step 1: block WolframAlpha.
Step 2: block all proxies that allow access to WolframAlpha.
Step 3: block all WolframAlpha ripoffs.
Step 4: block everything that allows non-HTTP connection that would make it possible to bypass your block on WolframAlpha.
Step 5: block all methods of removing the 4 blocks mentioned above.
Because if you don't block WolframAlpha, you might as well not bother with the test and give A+ to everyone.
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@Gąska I have to admit that I only use WolframAlpha to look up values from ISA for me and don't know what it's actual power is.
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@Bulb it can solve any integral, polynomial, and differential equation you want, and it's very permissive in how you write the query. It even prints out all the steps required.
