Business events and friendship: Leveraging the sociable legacies

© 2014 Cognizant Comm. Corp. Business events are celebrated for their contributions to community and industry. They are understood to be shared social contexts in which people meet to advance knowledge, sell products, and network. Less celebrated and, arguably, less understood is that business events provide a context for the development of friendships. In 2011 an online survey was conducted with the delegates of five international business events held in Sydney, Australia in the period 2009-2011. The survey was designed to investigate business legacies of the events (such as investment opportunities, research collaborations) rather than sociable legacies. However, a surprising number of references to friendship were made in the "additional comments" sections of the questionnaire. Reflecting on this finding, this article argues that friendships forged at business events contribute to, respectively: the well-being of delegates, association membership levels, conference attendance, retention of personnel in the profession, successful research and professional collaborations, and creativity and innovation in the sector. Business event planners can maximize opportunities for sociable outcomes among delegates by designing warm and inviting event spaces that facilitate interaction, and by providing social space for the development of relationships, optimal conditions for sociability, and opportunities for play to stimulate creativity and build community

Maximizing the Area of a Sector With Fixed Perimeter

Historically, many maxima and minima were found long before Newton and Leibniz developed calculus. Ivan Niven's (1981) classic Maxima and Minima Without Calculus provides a systematic and thorough account of solving extreme-value problems using elementary algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. Niven devotes a chapter to isoperimetric problems: problems that ask "for the region of largest area in a given class of regions ... of a specified perimeter" (p. 77). We use technology as a tool to solve the isoperimetric problem for the sector of a circle—an investigation inspired by a project in Farrell and Boyd (2007)

Shape Affects the Sound of a Drum: Modeling Area and Perimeter

The sound of a drum is based on the wave equation from physics. The surface area of the drumhead and its fixed perimeter are key parameters. This paper uses area and perimeter to model and answer the question, Can a rectangular and a circular drum make the same sound

On the Interpretation of Supernova Light Echo Profiles and Spectra

The light echo systems of historical supernovae in the Milky Way and local group galaxies provide an unprecedented opportunity to reveal the effects of asymmetry on observables, particularly optical spectra. Scattering dust at different locations on the light echo ellipsoid witnesses the supernova from different perspectives and the light consequently scattered towards Earth preserves the shape of line profile variations introduced by asymmetries in the supernova photosphere. However, the interpretation of supernova light echo spectra to date has not involved a detailed consideration of the effects of outburst duration and geometrical scattering modifications due to finite scattering dust filament dimension, inclination, and image point-spread function and spectrograph slit width. In this paper, we explore the implications of these factors and present a framework for future resolved supernova light echo spectra interpretation, and test it against Cas A and SN 1987A light echo spectra. We conclude that the full modeling of the dimensions and orientation of the scattering dust using the observed light echoes at two or more epochs is critical for the correct interpretation of light echo spectra. Indeed, without doing so one might falsely conclude that differences exist when none are actually present.Comment: 18 pages, 22 figures, accepted for publication in Ap