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For the revision to our ACT book, Preparing for the ACT: Mathematics and Science Reasoning, we purchased a cheap scientific calculator from Casio, the fx-115 ES, and I was amazed at the power of this pocket calculator. The calculator sells for about $20 (or less depending on where you purchase it), and can:

• work with percents, fractions, and mixed numbers


• simplify radical expressions


• express answers in terms of pi


• do operations with complex numbers


• find permutations and combinations


• perform one-variable statistics (including frequency tables)


• solve one variable equations


• do operations with matrices


• calculate integrals


• do all the usual things that a scientific calculator can do (like radicals, powers, trig functions, etc.)

To top it off, the darn thing runs on solar power! The geek in me can’t help but say, “Wow!” It’s proof that technology can be cheap and powerful (I’m talking to you, Apple.) I called the ACT twice just to confirm that this calculator is allowed on the test.

ACT Tip: If you are planning on taking the ACT test and can’t afford (or don’t want to bother with) a graphing calculator, you can’t go wrong with the fx-115 ES. You are not going to find a TI model with similar capabilities for the same price.

Note/Warning: The ACT is a timed test – you have an average of 1 minute per question. This means two things: (1) Buying a calculator that you are not accustomed to using right before the test is a big mistake. (2) While using an advanced calculator can be helpful in the classroom, you probably won’t have time to use the advanced features on the ACT test. The Casio fx-115 ES’s features that will be useful on the ACT are fractions, mixed numbers, simplifying radical expressions, expressing answers in terms of pi, and operations with complex numbers.

To conclude today’s post, here is the promised potpourri of links:

• Engineers beat math PH.D’s in math contest. The contest: The Netflix Prize. Make Netflix’s movie recommendation system more accurate by 10%. The math: statistics.


• We’re all probably going to speak Chinese one day. A group of computer science students from China created one of the most awesome pieces of software I’ve seen in a long time: PhotoSketch (see the video below). It takes a hand-drawn sketch tagged with the name of the object and turns it into a real-world photo. It works in one of those “Why didn’t I think of that?” ways – the software does a web search based on the tags and chooses pictures that match the sketch. The best matches are then combined together and the user chooses the best looking image. The results are pretty amazing – check out the video below.


• The Making of a Mathlete. PBS is going to air a documentary about the International Math Olympiad. Need I say more? No, really, it actually looks pretty exciting.
  
  

PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage from tao chen on Vimeo.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at reconciliation. See his previous OUPblogs here.

There is a lot of hushed talk about using the Reconciliation procedure to pass health-care reform in the Congress these days, so Americans need to know something about this obscure parliamentary procedure, and what is at stake.

Reconciliation is an optional, deficit-reducing procedure that was created in the 1974 Congressional Budget Act. The Reconciliation process is a two-stage process. First, Reconciliation directives must be included in the annual Budget Resolution (as they were in the 2010 Budget Resolution passed on April 29). These directives instruct the relevant Congressional committees to develop (in this case, health-care) legislation by a specific date (in this case, October 15) to meet certain spending or revenue targets. The instructed committees then send their legislative recommendations to their respective Budget Committees, who then package all recommendations into one omnibus Reconciliation bill. Enter Stage 2, when this bill is then considered on the floor of both chambers of Congress under expedited procedures; of greatest political note is the 20-hour limit on debate on any Reconciliation measure, which effectively strips the minority party of the filibustering option in the Senate. That means the Democrats can pass health-care reform with a simple majority.

But there is an attendant cost to the majority party for using Reconciliation. The Byrd rule, passed in 1985, sets out the rules for what Reconciliation can and cannot be used for. In particular, it specifies that Senators will be allowed to raise a point of order against “extraneous” provisions in a Reconciliation bill which, among other things, “would increase the deficit for a fiscal year beyond those covered by the reconciliation measure.” Critically, cloture must be invoked to overcome a point of order. So the filibuster power is back.

Here’s the bottom line. Since the Budget Act states that the Reconciliation measure covers the next ten years, the Byrd Rule had the effect of allowing a point of order to be raised against any spending increase (or tax cut) that does not contain a ten-year sunset provision. That’s why the Bush tax cuts, passed via the Reconciliation route in 2001, 2003, and 2005, had sunset provisions written into them. If Democrats use Reconciliation, they will get a health-care bill, but it will expire.

Now let’s talk politics. There’s a debate within the debate that only seasoned politicos know about. Since the actual benefits of Reconciliation are mixed - a health-care bill can be passed with a simple majority in the Senate but it must have a sunset provision - the real power of Reconciliation is not in its actual usage, but in the mere threat of its usage.

The benefits of issuing the threat of going the Reconciliation route are akin to the threat of a presidential veto. The threat of a presidential veto sets the boundaries of permissible legislative action; it lets Congress know what is out-of-the-question and therefore powerfully guides legislative outcomes in the direction of the president’s preferences. By letting it be known that they will resort to Reconciliation if they had to, Democrats in Congress are incentivizing Republicans to be part of the making of a bi-partisan bill rather than be shut out of a purely partisan one. In making the threat, Democrats are specifying the costs of Republican non-compliance to the tune of: “if we let you stay in the kitchen, at least you can determine some of the ingredients in the cake. Make us shut you out and you won’t have even the slightest say.”

Like the presidential veto, the power of Reconciliation is maximal at the level of a threat. For between the time a threat is issued and the time when a bill is passed (via Reconciliation or not), there is a powerful incentive for Republican Senators to come back to the bargaining table because there is the distinct possibility that they could be shut out. Reconciliation is the Democratic antidote to the Republican Party becoming the “Party of ‘No’” For if Republicans keep saying “No,” then they box themselves into the plea of Nolo Contendere.

That is why different spokespersons for the Democratic Party are keeping the Republicans guessing and making sporadic and cryptic references to the Reconciliation possibility. And Republicans are trying to minimize the power of the threat by characterizing it as a no-go “nuclear option.” Unfortunately for Republicans, theirs is an empty threat because there is no Mutually Assured Destruction in this asymmetric power situation, and it is both a legal and political fact that, as the White House says, the Reconciliation option “is out there.” It is a win-win situation for Democrats to issue the threat, for if Republicans are unmoved by the threat, Democrats could materialize the threat and get what they wanted having known that an effort at bipartisanship had failed anyway.

What is missed in the debate out there now is that the effect of Reconciliation is already underway, for its power lies in its threat.

And this will be my trick or treat doodles for this Halloween!