Is Sharp even in the running.

[Matt Agajanian]

Even from my collection and from what I’ve noticed, Casio & TI seem to dominate and be the first names in the educational and the SAT/math placement exams. On the other hand, it seems Sharp is few & far between.

Maybe I missed the memo. Does Sharp have any position in the educational/testing market?

[Maximilian Hohmann]

Hello!

(08-12-2023 01:49 AM)Matt Agajanian Wrote:  Does Sharp have any position in the educational/testing market?

That's difficult to say without any "official" sales and production figures. Some large retailers do publish sales ranks though. On Amazon Germany, when searching for "scientific school calculator", the first one from Sharp is shown on position 14, namely the "Sharp EL-W531 XH-GR" (what a crazy denomination!).

There are plenty of wrong search results in the list, e.g. the Ti Little Professor which is not a scientific calculator, or a Ti Spire which is in a different category and some packages consisting of a calculator and a book or a case. Correcting for these, the fist Sharp ends in position six. Without any absolute sales figures this does not tell uns much, does it? But obviously that's profitable enough to stay in this business sector.

Regards
Max

NB: Personally, without being able to specify exactly why, I prefer the scientific school Sharps over their competition. Maybe becuase of the display.

[vaklaff]

They are pretty common here in Czechia. There are no lists of "recommended" or "approved" lists of calculators for education, exams, tests or whatever. I guess it's what makes the difference you observe in the US.

Trivia: Moravia (of the HP 15c Collector's Edition fame) is a long-time distributor of not only HP but Sharp as well.

Hmm, imagine collector's editions of EL-5150 or PC-1475 ;-)

[EdS2]

I checked four UK suppliers, and Casio absolutely dominates, followed by own-brand and off-brand. (Helix, Aurora, Q-Connect). No sign of TI at all. Just one SHARP model: EL-531THB-WH (273 functions)

Edit: just to note, Sharp used to be very available in the UK, a near-equal to Casio, or a close second runner. I think TI was always a bit expensive.

[Matt Agajanian]

(08-12-2023 11:12 AM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  Hello!

(08-12-2023 01:49 AM)Matt Agajanian Wrote:  Does Sharp have any position in the educational/testing market?

That's difficult to say without any "official" sales and production figures. Some large retailers do publish sales ranks though. On Amazon Germany, when searching for "scientific school calculator", the first one from Sharp is shown on position 14, namely the "Sharp EL-W531 XH-GR" (what a crazy denomination!).

There are plenty of wrong search results in the list, e.g. the Ti Little Professor which is not a scientific calculator, or a Ti Spire which is in a different category and some packages consisting of a calculator and a book or a case. Correcting for these, the fist Sharp ends in position six. Without any absolute sales figures this does not tell uns much, does it? But obviously that's profitable enough to stay in this business sector.

Regards
Max

NB: Personally, without being able to specify exactly why, I prefer the scientific school Sharps over their competition. Maybe becuase of the display.

Perhaps the Sharp EL-W531 XH-GR (definitely a funky name) has the right amount and catalog of functions for classroom/SAT testing levels, budget price with 335 functions.

[thenozone]

Science studio do a SharpEL-W506T which has 640 functions for £9.25 +vat and quite a nice calculator, a smaller number but significantly more functions, it has a comman problem with all the non graphical sharp calculators i have had for over 20 years , in that it get the integral of e^(x^3) between the limits of 0 and 6 wrong; but they have the graphical El-9950G good value as well. not as good as a casio fxcg 10,20,50 but a lot cheaper over here. and surely worth a punt as a collector.

[Matt Agajanian]

(08-14-2023 10:26 PM)thenozone Wrote:  Science studio do a SharpEL-W506T which has 640 functions for £9.25 +vat and quite a nice calculator, a smaller number but significantly more functions, it has a comman problem with all the non graphical sharp calculators i have had for over 20 years , in that it get the integral of e^(x^3) between the limits of 0 and 6 wrong; but they have the graphical El-9950G good value as well. not as good as a casio fxcg 10,20,50 but a lot cheaper over here. and surely worth a punt as a collector.

Hi. I have the both the 516TBSL and the 516X. It looks like I’m up to speed there.

UPDATE:

I entered that integral on both and got quite an incorrect result. The TIs and Casios get the answer right. I wonder what's causing the integration glitch on the Sharp models.

[EdS2]

(08-14-2023 10:26 PM)thenozone Wrote:  Science studio do a SharpEL-W506T ... they have the graphical El-9950G good value as well.

Interesting supplier! They have Sharp, Casio, TI, and Aurora, and for some models they sell Class Kits - sets of 30 calculators. And they have an engraving service, for security-by-labelling.

They also have checkmarks for approval of various models by UK examination boards.

I notice, I think, that their Casio Class Kits are marked for sales to educational establishments only.

It's a different approach to the question of calculators in exams: provide a standard calculator, which the class is already familiar with, and which can be provided in a factory-reset state.

[Dave Britten]

Having just acquired an EL-9950 a couple months ago, I can say that no, they are not. The keyboard is overly stiff, it frequently misses keystrokes (seems like maybe a software thing, I don't think the key contacts themselves are the issue), it's not terribly fast, programming is very limited, and in terms of capabilities, it's maybe only about on par with the original TI-83 (not Plus).

[pier4r]

For the little that I know the sharp advanced scientific calculators (from 2000 on, I have a 2004 model still using it today, el-506w) are pretty good. Without picking more beefy calculators (I mean a larger package), I couldn't find any competitor that is strictly better.

The new models should be on par with the top casio 991 series.

[klesl]

It is interesting the smath studio get the integral of e^(x^3) between the limits of 0 and 6 wrong also and same as the Sharp calcs - 7.4662×10^91

[Matt Agajanian]

(08-15-2023 07:20 AM)EdS2 Wrote:  

(08-14-2023 10:26 PM)thenozone Wrote:  Science studio do a SharpEL-W506T ... they have the graphical El-9950G good value as well.

Interesting supplier! They have Sharp, Casio, TI, and Aurora, and for some models they sell Class Kits - sets of 30 calculators. And they have an engraving service, for security-by-labelling.

They also have checkmarks for approval of various models by UK examination boards.

I notice, I think, that their Casio Class Kits are marked for sales to educational establishments only.

It's a different approach to the question of calculators in exams: provide a standard calculator, which the class is already familiar with, and which can be provided in a factory-reset state.

Here’s an interesting, if not critical question.

With the example that both the EL-W516X and 516T are way off target with the integral of e^(x^3) with the limits of 0 & 6, what happens if a student/engineer/scientist uses a calc that’s error prone without realizing it? Next thing you know, the student gets a wrong answer on a test or worse, an engineer/scientist gets a goofy answer for a schematic, structural, fuel, etc. project?

Question is: How does one pick a calculator that doesn’t have a minefield of miscalculations?

[EdS2]

That is an especially challenging numerical integration, and numerical integration is always going to be an imperfect art, because one can always find functions which misbehave with respect to any given tactic.

So a very good education will provide the student with some tactics to check their results.

The HP-15C manual contains a whole appendix on how to be careful with integration.

[Steve Simpkin]

(08-16-2023 06:52 AM)EdS2 Wrote:  That is an especially challenging numerical integration, and numerical integration is always going to be an imperfect art, because one can always find functions which misbehave with respect to any given tactic.

So a very good education will provide the student with some tactics to check their results.

The HP-15C manual contains a whole appendix on how to be careful with integration.

William Kahan was directly responsible for the integration function used in the HP-34C/HP-15C and most importantly, the section in the manual that dealt with the complexities of using it. HP originally did not want to include this section in it manuals.

KAHAN: That’s how the HP-34C was born. They agreed to do it, and then like a thunderclap, they were appalled when I said, “You know, we’re going to have to put some guidance into the manual because people who use these keys, especially the integrate key, they can fool themselves. These things cannot be foolproof. There will be situations where people will get misleading answers, and they need a little bit of guidance about that.” “Kahan, you just told us to do this stuff, and now you tell us that you’re going to get wrong answers! I mean, all this time, we’ve been listening to you tell us how to get the right answer, invariably, every time!” Well, the difficulty was then that I’d have to go to the manual writers. But there was a Hewlett-Packard policy which said, “We are professionals, and we sell to professionals. We tell them what the device does, and they figure out how to use it. We’re not writing tutorial material in our manuals.” And I tried to explain, “Look—this time you’ve got to put some tutorial material in the manuals. You really must. Otherwise, folks are going to fool themselves.”

Well, the managers wouldn’t do it, but I had persuaded Barkin, and I can’t remember the name of the other guy. It’s probably in there somewhere. There were two guys who were writing the manuals, and I persuaded them. I think persuasion is the wrong word. This was a case of subversion. I subverted them and got them to do something that their managers had told them not to do. The manual writers listened to my arguments and decided that I was right, and their managers were wrong. And that’s a dangerous decision, you know. You can get fired for that. They wrote the two extra chapters into the manual, which said something about the solve key and something about the integrate key, and a little bit to warn you. And I had written up some more stuff, which ultimately got into the Hewlett-Packard Journal. And the managers were outraged. They had said explicitly, “Don’t do that.” And now their guys had done it. And they said, “Take it out.” And they were told, remember, “If we take it out, it’ll delay the appearance to market.” You’ve heard that story before. That was it. The managers had just been blackmailed by time-to market, so they left it in. Then afterwards, they did a survey, and they discovered that the customers loved this stuff. In fact, the customers would often say they had bought the calculator because they’d been told that there was advice in the manual about these problems, which was advice they actually needed not only for the calculator but also when they solved similar problems on the big machines. And so when I came up with these articles, they were perfectly happy to print them in the Hewlett Packard Journal. I was told by the editors some years later that they had had more requests for reprints of these articles than for all their others put together.

Okay, so they put this, you might call it tutorial material, into the manual. I believe some of the manuals are now available online, and so you can look at it yourself. Well, of course, the particular writing staff manager was pissed, and the marketing people were, of course, annoyed about a violation of policy; when they interviewed customers, though, they had these little questionnaires—you buy something; they’ve got a questionnaire, you send it back. They would see that people actually liked that material and, in some cases, had bought the calculator because the material was there, so they felt confident as purchasers that they could use it. I think ultimately there was some award from the Willamette Valley Chapter of the Technical Writers’ Association that went to Barkin and company for writing what was considered an exceptionally good manual. That was the first of two occasions when I heard about an award for an HP manual. So there were guys who looked at me sidelong at HP, but there wasn’t any hostility. They figured I had done the right thing. The calculator was extremely successful, as such calculators go."

Dr. Kahan's full oral history PDF document can be found at:
William Kahan Oral History Aug 2005

The Aug 1980 edition of HP Journal that discuses the HP-34C and its Integration function (written by Dr. Kahan) is available at: https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/pdfs/Is...980-08.pdf

[Maximilian Hohmann]

Hello!

(08-15-2023 11:39 PM)Matt Agajanian Wrote:  ...what happens if a student/engineer/scientist uses a calc that’s error prone without realizing it? Next thing you know, the student gets a wrong answer on a test or worse, an engineer/scientist gets a goofy answer for a schematic, structural, fuel, etc. project?

1. Students should not be rated for solutions that can be obtained by entering numbers in a pocket calculator, thereby using it's built-in functions. Well trained chimpanzees can do that. Students must be able to demonstrate how they find the answer to a problem. The (nmerical) answer itself is irrelevant.

2. Engineers/scientists who use a pocket calculator to solve problems resulting in values like the one here (7.4662×10^91) should be sent back to school.

Regards
Max

[Albert Chan]

We could estimate ∫(e^x^3, x = 0 .. 6) without calculator.

Let y = e^x^3 , dy = e^x^3 * (3*x^2) dx

∫(e^x^3, x = 0 .. 6) = 1/3 * ∫(ln(y)^(-2/3), y = 1 .. e^6^3)

Integrand f(y) = ln(y)^(-2/3) is decreasing, *very flat* on the right, shaped like └------
We can easily see this with f'(y) negative sign, and last term (1/y)

f'(y) = (-2/3) * ln(y)^(-5/3) * (1/y)

f(y) > f(e^6^3) = (6^3)^(-2/3) = 1/36

∫(e^x^3, x = 0 .. 6) > (e^6^3-1) / (3*36) ≈ e^216/108 ≈ 5.94544458536e+091

With sharp calculator, see https://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-89...#pid149128

---

We could do integrating by part, repeatedly.

∫(ln(y)^(-2/3) dy)
= y*ln(y)^(-2/3) + 2/3 * ∫(ln(y)^(-5/3) dy)
= y*ln(y)^(-2/3) + 2/3 * (y*ln(y)^(-5/3) + 5/3 * ∫(ln(y)^(-8/3) dy))
= y*ln(y)^(-2/3) * (1 + 2/3/ln(y) * (1 + 5/3/ln(y) * (1 + 8/3/ln(y) * (1 + ...

d = 3*ln(e^6^3) = 3*6^3 = 648

mean(f(y)) = 1/36 * (1 + 2/648 * (1 + 5/648 * (1 + 8/648 * (1 + ... ≈ 1/35.888368017

∫(e^x^3, x = 0 .. 6) ≈ (e^6^3-1) / (3*35.888368017) ≈ e^216/107.665104051 ≈ 5.96393809190e+91

Generatlize above, with same d = p*b^p

∫(e^x^p, x = 0 .. b) = (e^b^p-1) * b/d * (1 + (p-1)/d * (1 + (2p-1)/d * (1 + (3p-1)/d * ...

[Matt Agajanian]

(08-16-2023 09:32 AM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  Hello!

(08-15-2023 11:39 PM)Matt Agajanian Wrote:  ...what happens if a student/engineer/scientist uses a calc that’s error prone without realizing it? Next thing you know, the student gets a wrong answer on a test or worse, an engineer/scientist gets a goofy answer for a schematic, structural, fuel, etc. project?

1. Students should not be rated for solutions that can be obtained by entering numbers in a pocket calculator, thereby using it's built-in functions. Well trained chimpanzees can do that. Students must be able to demonstrate how they find the answer to a problem. The (nmerical) answer itself is irrelevant.

2. Engineers/scientists who use a pocket calculator to solve problems resulting in values like the one here (7.4662×10^91) should be sent back to school.

Regards
Max

I agree. My question is more about the calculator’s creation, alpha & beta testing (if calculators go through those steps. Then, if at the end bugs and errors show up, repeat the process again until the end product is foolproof. I know, making the calc foolproof sounds like an impossible requirement.

[rprosperi]

(08-18-2023 09:05 PM)Matt Agajanian Wrote:  I agree. My question is more about the calculator’s creation, alpha & beta testing (if calculators go through those steps. Then, if at the end bugs and errors show up, repeat the process again until the end product is foolproof. I know, making the calc foolproof sounds like an impossible requirement.

That's because fools can be so damned clever...

[klesl]

Nothing in the real world is foolproof. As rprosperi wrote, some people are in some situations very inventive

[Matt Agajanian]

(08-19-2023 07:51 AM)klesl Wrote:  Nothing in the real world is foolproof. As rprosperi wrote, some people are in some situations very inventive

Well, in that case, we’ll see if Casio or TI or Sharp makes a better mousetrap than the 991CW. Or one can only hope Casio makes good on the idea to create a superb sequel to the 991EX Classwiz. I think that after the CW backstep, Casio owes us a better option.