The Investor Talk | Episode #35 | Robin Ravi Crow

The Investor Talk | Episode #35 | Robin Ravi Crow

Here's what you get when you mix Learning Creativity Donughuts Hair Maths ...

    After a horrendous (relatively, given cost) journey (mostly the UK parts) I find myself in Frankfurt. Thus far I've seen some of the stadium and the business district.
    Then I went to some sort of park, with palm gardens and other such things. -Not a bad place to work and listen to music, it's by Zeppelin alley. There's also a Bieber district, but no one should have to listen to that.
   
    I also started to write about hairy balls and doughnuts ...
        At a teachers conference (first Association of Teachers and Lecturers' Further Education Conference) I went to a workshop on creativity in teaching run by Lisa Vernon. One of the group tasks was to make educational activities using a few props -a tennis ball, duct tape etc. That reminded me of the following, and now it's ready:

Hairy Ball Theorem -Luitzeu Egbertus Jan Brouwer (1881-1966) proved this in 1912

Brouwer showed the following:
    Imagine a sphere covered in hair (something like a tennis ball)
    try to smoothly brush those hairs to make them all flat
    there will always be at least one hair standing up straight or a hole (for example, a bald spot).
    This does not apply to the surface of a torus (e.g a doughnut), but nobody wants to eat a hairy doughnut.


An application*
    In 2007, materials scientist Francesco Stellacci of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used hairy ball theorem to force nanoparticles to stick together to form long chain structures.
    Stellacci's team covered gold nanoparticles with sulphurous molecular hairs.
    Hairs were likely to stick out in several points.
    These points became unstable defects on the particle surfaces, making it easy to substitute them with chemicals that act as handles so that the particles could link to each other forming a chain.
    Eventually this might be used to make nanowires for electronics devices.

Mathematically:
    Any continuous tangent vector field on the sphere must have at least one point where the vector field is zero.
    Consider a continuous function f that assigns a vector in 3-D space to every point p on a sphere such that f(p) is always tangent to the sphere at p.
    This means that at least one p exists such that f(p) ~ O.

An example in nature:
    wind can be modelled as vectors with magnitudes and directions
    so at least somewhere on the Earth's surface, the horizontal wind speed must be zero
    (Like the swirled hairs on the tennis ball, the wind will spiral around this zero-wind point - under our assumptions it cannot flow into or out of the point.)
    Then the Hairy Ball Theorem implies there must at all times be a cyclone somewhere.
    The eye can be arbitrarily large or small and the magnitude of the wind surrounding it is irrelevant.
    This is not strictly true as the air above the earth has multiple layers, but for each layer there must be a point with zero horizontal windspeed

   
    here's a doughnut story
        http://www.newser.com/story/192197/fugitives-mistake-he-wins-police-doughnut-contest.html
   
    FREE DOUGHNUT or Free HALF DOZEN if you get 5 friends to sign up also
http://assets.fbmta.com/clt/krspykrmuk/lp/join/6/join.asp?RID=4304663042

Brouwer is also known for his work on Fixed-Point Theorem (1909)

"Hairy ball" by Original uploader was The Evil Midnight Uploader what Uploads at Midnight at en.wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hairy_ball.png#mediaviewer/File:Hairy_ball.png
   

New Year, New Career, New thinking ? (part 2)

part 2

January is the month of job applications, at least by volume, unfortunately not by quality.
generally this proliferation is put down to people making it their resolution to make positive career changes (great) and send out lots of applications (not so great) to 'anything' (clenching my teeth)





 One of my favourite (as in I hate it so much I have clenched my teeth to the point of almost losing them) careers myths is to put in (waste) lots of effort in sending out masses of applications to as many job adverts as one can find.
  Sadly many people have been made redundant in 'the current economic climate', and so the number of applications accelerates as number of  'jobs' decrease rapidly. -at least we are told the amount of jobs available decrease.
 On my courses we dispel myths about careers and help students achieve their ideal careers as they develop throughout their life. Many of these are spread by scaremongers and unsystematic approaches to learning, so are quite ingrained in our society.

My next course tour date is 7th February, at the University of Southampton,on Finding your 'Ideal' Career
 I welcome tour bookings by email

thanks
Robin

side note
hmm interesting:
Fewer than one in five children aged 10-11 aspire to a career in science, according to new research.

New Year, New Career, New thinking ? (part 1)

part 1
 Welcome, and Happy New Year. One of my New Year's resolutions is to blog- occasionally, as it is not my intention to spam my readers -hopefully I have a few.

I would like to know your views on careers :
How did you chose your career (or how do you intend to, if you have not yet) ?
How did you or will you go about making it happen ?

 I have delayed my response, as I want to know your opinions first, and will combine them with my previous research

thank you
Robin