Saturday, December 23, 2023

A Wedding Bride


A bride so new,

Actually, spectacularly beautiful,

Walked down the aisle.

The groom shed a tear, a tear of joy.


Hundreds and thousands of guests

Scattered the flowers with grace,

Yet it was the father

Whose eyes were wet.


He might have recalled

The night the bride was born,

And today he sees

She is walking down the aisle.


He refused to accept it at once

And looked at his wife,

She signaled to him to pull his shit together

And put on a fake smile of joy.


Being a man, a husband, and a dad,

He remembers a saint and his words:

"Daughters and sons are there as a part of life,

Yet they have their own stories to make for their lives."


Attachment is a source of suffering,

And yet it makes us wonder,

What if there was none?

Would life be the same, full of fights?


This is all that life makes,

So for a bride,

It's in the groom's eye

Where they see both their lives.

Smell of wind


The beast rang its bell,

Clouds are forming,

And I stared

At the blank canvas.


Mortified I was,

Yet calm in my mind,

Felt as thunder looming in,

Slowly, I felt fear.


Fear of the dark

With no hope of lights,

Yet there is a fragrance,

Wait, a smell, a smell of fragrance.


You and I,

Not so different,

Yet as old as one old wine,

Wait, it's definitely a smell, a smell of wind.

Stupid Brain


A wise man once said,
"There is no difference between
A loaf of bread and a brain."
Startled, I thought, "What did he say?"

Just leave them both:
Musk they will become, and mold they will get.
They lose touch with reality,
Making them unbearably rot.

I fear to use them both,
As they become pungent.
What if both were not real,
And it was something that my stupid brain made!

Saturday, May 30, 2020

Logical Framework : A Brief Introduction

The logical framework approach is a way to think of plans and act in a more integrated fashion.

What does that mean? 

Well let's take a tool like Project management. Project management is great once you're clear about:

a. what the objectives are?
b. what the risks are?, and
you simply need to execute a timeline. But it's not very good at helping you come up with what the goals are? and neither they do have an integrated approach.

So, this is where logical framework steps in!

The logical framework combines really three types of thinking which are the best principles from strategic planning. It is scientific in nature and method. It does it in a fairly elegant way. It may sound like a big bunch of jargon words but it's actually quite simple.

To begin with, the basic three types of thinking in question form are:
1. What are we trying to accomplish and why ?
2. How will we measure success?
3. What other conditions must exist?
and even there is fourth question which is
4. How we are going to get there?

So first thing first lets observe the logical framework table:



Step 1: The objective column


For this:

a. We will write down our goal in the box given
b. We will then write the purpose/objective we expect to achieve
c. We will then write the outcomes
d. Finally in the Inputs box we will write down all the resources required.

Once you have written all those, the thought process should be from bottom to top. That means you need to check the inputs and ask yourself whether those inputs will give you the outcomes you have jotted. If outcomes are sure to achieve ask if that gives you required purpose and then if that leads to goals.

Step 2: Success measures and verification
Once Step 1 is done. Lets do Step 2. The question that rings after Step 1 is:

a. How will we measure success at each of these levels?
b. How will we know in advance that we've achieved these objectives?


In step 2, we will come up with measures, quantity, quality, time, cost, customer, as well as verification. The means of determining the success measure.

Step 3: Assumptions/Risk

In Step 3 we're going to ask two questions: 
a. What other conditions must exist? 
b. What assumptions do we have to make for this?

Step 4: Inputs

The fourth question is how do we get there now? 
Usually, while doing LFA, most people jump prematurely to the fourth question. I would say that's like trying to paint the house before you've built it. 


Well, If you are reading this, then Congratulations! You have almost quite figured out basic logical framework approach. You though will need lot of practice. So let me suggest! Go to google and type for LFA example. Take 1-2 of those and try to navigate along this write-up. I bet you wont get lost! 

Thank you reader for bearing with me ! Good day! 



Saturday, May 9, 2020

Mathmatics- An overview

(Transcripted from the youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmJ-4B-mS-Y&t=3s. I do not own this article. The Channel: Domain of Science is the rightful owner of the text here-within. If you want to go through the video you can click on the link above)

The mathematics we learn in school doesn’t quite do the field of mathematics justice. We only get a glimpse at one corner of it, but mathematics as a whole is a huge and wonderfully diverse subject.

My aim with this write-up is to show you all that amazing stuff. We’ll start back at the very beginning.

The origin of mathematics lies in counting. In fact, counting is not just a human trait, other animals are able to count as well and evidence for human counting goes back to prehistoric times with checkmarks made in bones.

There were several innovations over the years with the Egyptians having the first equation, the ancient Greeks made strides in many areas like geometry and numerology, and negative numbers were invented in China. And zero as a number was first used in India.

Then in the Golden Age of Islam Persian mathematicians made further strides and the first book on algebra was written. Then mathematics boomed in the renaissance along with the sciences.

Now there is a lot more to the history of mathematics then what I have just said, but I’m going jump to the modern age and mathematics as we know it now. Modern mathematics can broadly be broken down into two areas,
1. Pure maths: the study of mathematics for its own sake, and 
2. Applied maths: when you develop mathematics to help solve some real-world problems.

But there is a lot of crossovers.

In fact, many times in history someone’s gone off into the mathematical wilderness motivated purely by curiosity and kind of guided by a sense of aesthetics. And then they have created a whole bunch of new mathematics which was nice and interesting but doesn’t really do anything useful.

But then, say a hundred years later, someone will be working on some problem at the cutting edge of physics or computer science and they’ll discover that this old theory in pure maths is exactly what they need to solve their real-world problems! Which is amazing, I think!

And this kind of thing has happened so many times over the last few centuries. It is interesting how often something so abstract ends up being really useful. But I should also mention, pure mathematics on its own is still a very valuable thing to do because it can be fascinating and on its own can have real beauty and elegance that almost becomes like art.

Okay enough of this highfalutin, let's get into it.

Pure Maths
Pure maths is made of several sections. The study of numbers starts with the natural numbers and what you can do with them with arithmetic operations. And then it looks at other kinds of numbers like integers, which contain negative numbers, rational numbers like fractions, real numbers which include numbers like pi which go off to infinite decimal points, and then complex numbers and a whole bunch of others.

Some numbers have interesting properties like Prime Numbers, or pi or the exponential. There are also properties of these number systems, for example, even though there is an infinite amount of both integers and real numbers, there are more real numbers than integers. So some infinities are bigger than others.

The study of structures is where you start taking numbers and putting them into equations in the form of variables. Algebra contains the rules of how you then manipulate these equations. Here you will also find vectors and matrices which are multi-dimensional numbers, and the rules of how they relate to each other are captured in linear algebra. Number theory studies the features of everything in the last section on numbers like the properties of prime numbers.

Combinatorics looks at the properties of certain structures like trees, graphs, and other things that are made of discrete chunks that you can count. Group theory looks at objects that are related to each other in, well, groups. A familiar example is a Rubik’s cube which is an example of a permutation group.

And order theory investigates how to arrange objects following certain rules like, how something is a larger quantity than something else. The natural numbers are an example of an ordered set of objects, but anything with any two-way relationship can be ordered.

Another part of pure mathematics looks at shapes and how they behave in spaces. The origin is in geometry which includes Pythagoras and is close to trigonometry, which we are all familiar with from school.

Also, there are fun things like fractal geometry which are mathematical patterns that are scale-invariant, which means you can zoom into them forever and they always look kind of the same.

Topology looks at different properties of spaces where you are allowed to continuously deform them but not tear or glue them. For example, a Möbius strip has only one surface and one edge whatever you do to it. And coffee cups and donuts are the same things - topologically speaking.

Measure theory is a way to assign values to spaces or sets tying together numbers and spaces. And finally, differential geometry looks at the properties of shapes on curved surfaces, for example, triangles have got different angles on a curved surface, and brings us to the next section, which is changes.

The study of changes contains calculus which involves integrals and differentials which look at areas spanned out by functions or the behavior of gradients of functions.

And vector calculus looks at the same things for vectors. Here we also find a bunch of other areas like dynamical systems that look at systems that evolve in time from one state to another, like fluid flows or things with feedback loops like ecosystems.

And chaos theory which studies dynamical systems that are very sensitive to initial conditions. Finally, the complex analysis looks at the properties of functions with complex numbers.

This brings us to applied mathematics.

Applied Maths
At this point, it is worth mentioning that everything here is a lot more interrelated than I have drawn.

In reality, this map should look like more of a web tying together all the different subjects but you can only do so much on a two-dimensional plane so I have laid them out as best I can.

Okay, we’ll start with physics, which uses just about everything on the left-hand side(refer to the map below) to some degree. Mathematical and theoretical physics has a very close relationship with pure maths. Mathematics is also used in the other natural sciences with mathematical chemistry and biomathematics which look at loads of stuff from modeling molecules to evolutionary biology.

Mathematics is also used extensively in engineering, building things has taken a lot of maths since Egyptian and Babylonian times.

Very complex electrical systems like airplanes or the power grid use methods in dynamical systems called control theory. Numerical analysis is a mathematical tool commonly used in places where the mathematics becomes too complex to solve completely.

So instead you use lots of simple approximations and combine them all together to get good approximate answers. For example, if you put a circle inside a square, throw darts at it, and then compare the number of darts in the circle and square portions, you can approximate the value of pi.

But in the real world numerical analysis is done on huge computers. The game theory looks at what the best choices are given a set of rules and rational players and it’s used in economics when the players can be intelligent, but not always, and other areas like psychology, and biology.

Probability is the study of random events like coin tosses or dice or humans, and statistics is the study of large collections of random processes or the organization and analysis of data.

This is obviously related to mathematical finance, where you want to model financial systems and get an edge to win all those fat stacks.

Related to this is optimization, where you are trying to calculate the best choice amongst a set of many different options or constraints, which you can normally visualize as trying to find the highest or lowest point of a function.

Optimization problems are second nature to us humans, we do them all the time: trying to get the best value for money, or trying to maximize our happiness in some way. Another area that is very deeply related to pure mathematics in computer science and the rules of computer science were actually derived in pure maths and is another example of something that was worked out way before programmable computers were built.

Machine learning: the creation of intelligent computer systems uses many areas in mathematics like linear algebra, optimization, dynamical systems, and probability.

And finally, the theory of cryptography is very important to computation and uses a lot of pure maths like combinatorics and number theory.

So that covers the main sections of pure and applied mathematics, but I can’t end without looking at the foundations of mathematics.

Foundations of Mathematics:
This area tries to work out at the properties of mathematics itself and asks what the basis of all the rules of mathematics is.

Is there a complete set of fundamental rules, called axioms, which all of the mathematics comes from?

And can we prove that it is all consistent with itself? Mathematical logic, set theory, and category theory try to answer this and a famous result in mathematical logic are Gödel’s incompleteness theorems which, for most people, means that Mathematics does not have a complete and consistent set of axioms, which mean that it is all kinda made up by us humans. Which is weird seeing as mathematics explains so much stuff in the Universe so well.

Why would a thing made up by humans be able to do that? That is a deep mystery right there. Also, we have the theory of computation which looks at different models of computing and how efficiently they can solve problems and contains complexity theory which looks at what is and isn’t computable and how much memory and time you would need, which, for most interesting problems, is an insane amount.

Ending So that is the map of mathematics. Now the thing I have loved most about learning maths is that feeling you get where something that seemed so confusing finally clicks in your brain and everything makes sense: like an epiphany moment, kind of like seeing through the matrix.

In fact, some of my most satisfying intellectual moments have been understanding some parts of mathematics and then feeling like I had a glimpse at the fundamental nature of the Universe in all of its symmetrical wonder.

Thursday, July 11, 2019

What are some ways you can break free from Product Life Cycle?


The Product life cycle is an inevitable situation. We can assure ourselves that almost every company has experienced it. One may be at the start, mid, or end of the Product life cycle. But interestingly we have to keep in mind that these inevitable situations do have way out. The time horizon can be manipulated if we have absolutely correct approaches to leverage. It's quite daunting for lots of firms in a competitive market where the competition to stay at the top is very high. Here in this article review, I will try to give you steps to follow to realize if you are under threat of the Product life cycle. Also, I will mention the steps to follow to overpass those and how to be on track.

STEP 1: REALIZATION OF PRODUCT LIFE CYCLE:

The bell curve which depicts the product life cycle is the first thing we need to ponder and understand very well. For our easiness, let us consider marketable product toothpaste, and let’s name it: Denti-fresh. The usual bell curve that defines this product will be somewhat as below figure depicts.
Product Life Cycle Model

                   As you can see the product sales with respect to time have a exponential growth till a point and eventually starts to decline. Well, this is something very inevitable. The graph is something we as an entrepreneur should have information. This is very critical in realizing the behavior of the market and planning accordingly.

STEP 2: POSITIONING IN START, MID OR TOP

After the realization of the product life cycle we need to focus on the position we fall under. Usually for an ease we will consider three positioning in the PLC that eventually manifest the outcome.

STEP 3: CASE_IF WE ARE AT THE TOP (REVERSE POSITIONING)

The first being the case what if the product we launched, Denti-fresh is at the top of bell curve. We know we have to face inevitable fall or decline. Also we have fierce competition. Is there a way back from this? Can we stale our PLC curve at here? These are the question we have to ask ourselves. The right question will direct us to right answers. Here in this case scenario we have to use something called Reverse Positioning. This positioning will help us somehow skip the fall until we hit another being to the top scenario. Consider we have the maximum sales for a year and we have started declining as time runs forward. At this moment, if we have innovate new formula for our Denti-fresh product line and get it tested from doctors. The brilliant review revives the production scale as it is marketed as customer is expecting it toothpaste to perform. Here, we have initiated another product life cycle and growth. The competitors are slow to respond. We eventually increase the share of our market and the sales and profit maximized until the falls looms us. This approach of positioning is Reverse Positioning.

STEP 4: CASE_IF WE ARE AT THE MID (BREAKAWAY POSITONING)

The second being the case what if the product we launched, Denti-fresh is at the mid of bell curve. We know we have to face inevitable uncertainty. Is there a way to prepare ourselves in a growing competition, when we have to win in marginal amount? These are the question we have to ask ourselves. As we mentioned the right question will direct us to right answers. Here in this case scenario we have to use something called Breakaway Positioning. This positioning will help us somehow alter the journey we were anticipating and get in track into new journey. Consider we have the tight one on one competition with our rival. Now in this situation we bring an idea to distinguish our product as per age group, the packaging for kid is different compare to adult. The child packaging comes with small toys of dolls and cars. This will eventually lead to marketing strategy being correctly used for maximum outflow of the toothpaste in market. Well the sales of Denti-fresh will sky rocketed when we are uncertain about the market behavior. This approach of positioning is Breakaway Positioning

STEP 5: CASE_IF WE ARE AT THE START (STEALTH POSITIONING)

The last but not the least being the case what if the product we launched, Denti-fresh is at the start of bell curve. We know we have to face inevitable question ‘what’s next?’ Well answer is in the positioning approach which is known as Reverse Positioning. This positioning will help us to maneuver ourselves in tenure of start. The education to the consumer about the product will help us focus in inclusion of new category. And this is the first thing we need to do when we are at the start. Suppose in our case of Denti-fresh we can firstly educate consumers about the organic way of keeping teeth healthy. Next slowly implying on how our toothpaste is most organic thing in the market. This realization on the market can be most effective way to overcome the latent market segmentation. This will eventually direct the sales in expected number. This approach of positioning is Stealth positioning

Hope the above steps will be handy in-case we are stuck in a paradigm of Product Life Cycle. As mentioned first is realization of PLC, then optimization of the position we are situated in PLC model and finally opting one out of three positioning method.


Sunday, June 30, 2019

Big Data



BIG DATA

Authors: Niwesh Koirala and Shashank Shreshta

Introduction

The 6th edition of “Data Never Sleeps” by Domo (Domo, 2017) states that "Over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every single day, and it’s only going to grow from there. By 2020, it’s estimated that 1.7MB of data will be created every second for every person on earth." It is also surmised that 90% of the world’s data was only created in the last 2 years. We are literally generating gigabytes of data every data without realizing it, and massive internet companies exist to leverage these raw bits into usable information. Now is the next evolution of information age; it is the time of Big Data.
In 2005, Roger Mougalas from O’Reilly Media coined the term Big Data for the first time, only a year after they created the term Web 2.0 (Rijmenam, 2016). Big Data refers to a large set of data that is almost impossible to manage and process using traditional business intelligence tools. SAS software (SAS , 2019) defines Big Data as a collective term that describes the large volume of data – both structured and unstructured – that inundates a business on a day-to-day basis. Rather than just the collection of Big Data, it is its applications that make it a cornerstone for modern businesses.
The key characteristics of Big Data have been the three ‘V’s: Volocity, Volume and Variety, Those characteristics were first identified by Gartner analyst Doug Laney (Laney, 2001). Big Data usually deals with a large amount of data (volume), differing in formats (variety) i.e. data is not limited to just text and numbers but can also draws from images, videos and as such, and finally, the speed at which the data is collected and processed (velocity). Three more characteristics have been added to the set lately (Blacksell, 2017): Veracity, Value and Variability. Veracity deal with how much ‘noise’ i.e. irrelevant information is in the data collected, Value attributes to the overall potential of the data collected and finally Variability deals with the various ways the data can be used.
The information derived from these massive pools of data allows us to make accurate market predictions, user segmentation and customization of services. This vast application of Big Data across a number of fields has made it immensely appealing as well as raised valid questions on its usage. This paper will try to understand the business impacts, ethical questions and applicability of Big Data in the Nepali context and present cases that shows the development of Big Data.

Brief history and development

An immense volume of Data is created every single day. Although data has been created since the beginning of time, we are just realizing the quantum of data that was available from long back. To begin with, we can decode the history of the Big Data in three eras:
i. 16th – 19th Century
iii. 20th Century
iv.  21st Century
16th – 19th Century
In 1663, John Graunt was considered a pioneer when he quested for raising the awareness on the effect of bubonic plague. He recorded and analyzed information on the rate of mortality in London. He is also considered one of the first statisticians who used data to conclude his findings. His book, “Natural and Political observations made upon the bills of Mortality” does statistical analysis of data. We can technically observe this event as initial footprints of Big Data. Eventually in 1889, computing system invented by Herman Hollerith attempted to organize census data making a huge impact in computational technology history. Unbeknownst to Graunt and Hollerith, they would be laying the foundations to Big Data – categorization and analysis of vast volumes of unstructured data.
20th Century:
The era of world war started and ended which pushed civilization and whole world into information age. IBM was contracted by then President of United States of America Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration for creating track of millions of Americans in 1937. IBM in response develops a punch card reading system which helped in the accumulation of data. Later during world war in 1943 British engineer built a Colossus, a very first data processing machine in order to decipher Nazi codes. Subsequently, in 1952, National Security Agency (NSA) developed a machine which independently and automatically collect and process information. The rising popularity of data and seeing its potential American in 1965 established the first data center. The purpose of this data center was for storing millions of tax returns and fingerprints sets. This can be marked as the starting point of electronic big storage. The revolution in data consumption and availability was humungous when in 1989 Bernes lee invented World Wide Web. Entering at the end decade of 20th century, the creation of data grew at an extremely high rate as more devices gained capacity to access the internet.
21st Century:
The era of evolution to rapid informational age was a boon to Big Data concept. There is analogy of data being created it says that since the beginning of time up-to year 2003 we have 5 exabytes of data stored. But to the surprise, we are creating that volume of data every 2 days since 2016. In 2005, Roger Mougalas coined the term ‘Big Data’ to signify the massive amounts of data that we had began generating. The sheer volume of raw data also posited the question, “How do we turn Big Data into information?” The solution lied in the same year - 2005, with a discovery which is considered a turning point for a field of Big Data. This is the year when Yahoo launched the open source platform Hadoop. Initially created by Yahoo to index the entire web, Hadoop became the solution for processing the vast ocean of data we had now begun generating. Today, Hadoop is used by millions of business around the world to go through the colossal amounts of data. The data analytics since then have seen the remarkable changes around the world. Till this day, we are witnessing the march towards yet un-scaled horizon of Big Data and its Analytics.

Workflow, Benefits and Challenges

A Big Data Ecosystem needs a robust workflow to properly function. Creating a workflow that suits the business and its goals is essential in actually reaping the benefits of becoming Data-driven. According to Harvard Business Review (Randy Bean, 2019), 40.3% identify lack of organization alignment and 24% cite cultural resistance as the leading factors contributing to the failure to adopt data-driven workflows. Alon Lebenthal identifies a functional Big-data workflow having the following 4 steps (Lebenthal, 2018):
·     Ingesting data
·     Storing the data
·     Processing it
·     Making data available for analytics
The ingesting of the data i.e. data acquisition can be done from a number of sources. In the current social media age, our cellphones have become hubs for data acquisition for online companies. Once acquired, the data is then stored and processed for analysis. Traditionally, large storage units may have been required for this and hence, been too costly for most companies.

However, hardware and software costs are reducing and becoming more powerful, companies can even take advantage of cloud computing services so to do all the data crunching. Data centers can distribute batches of data for processing over multiple servers, and the number of servers can be scaled up or down quickly as needed. This scalable distributed computing is accomplished using innovative tools like Apache Hadoop, MapReduce and Massively Parallel Processing (MPP). Similarly, NoSQL databases have been developed as more easily scalable alternatives to traditional SQL-based database systems.
The data hence processed can be analyzed as per the user’s parameters and visualized to detect trends, find patterns and most importantly, for strategic impact. The most common use of Big Data has been target ads and customized products and service but it extends to a much larger dimension. Information can be analyzed to find better business routes, monitor traffic congestions and create better road management models, marketing agencies can use it to create customer profiles and at its most sensitive, Big Data analytics can even be used to spy on others. Once such breach of privacy occurred with Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, where it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica had acquired large amount of data from nearly 86 million Facebook users and used them to create voting profiles for said users – sending them targeted ad to influence them into voting for or against a certain political candidate, the candidate that Cambridge Analytica was hired to help, is Now the President of the United States, Donald Trump (BBC, 2018).
The challenges of using Big Data can be identified in two groups – Data Complexity and Computational Complexity. These topics are briefly discussed as follows:
Data complexity:
·    The emergence of Big Data has provided us with unprecedented large-scale samples which lead us to face far more complex data objects.
·     The typical characteristics of Big Data are diversified types and patterns, complicated inter-relationships, and greatly varied data quality. The inherent complexity of Big Data (including complex types, complex structures, and complex patterns) makes its perception, representation, understanding and computation far more challenging and results in sharp increases in the computational complexity when compared to traditional computing models based on total data.
·    Traditional data analysis and mining tasks, such as retrieval, topic discovery, semantic analysis, and sentiment analysis, become extremely difficult when using Big Data.
·     We lack knowledge regarding the laws of distribution and association relationship of Big Data.
·  We lack deep understanding on the inherent’s relationship between data complexity and computational complexity of Big Data, as well as domain-oriented Big Data processing methods.
·  A fundamental problem is how to formulate or quantitatively describe the essential characteristics of the complexity of Big Data.
Computational Complexity:
·        New approaches will need to break away from assumptions made in traditional computations
·    When solving problems involving Big Data, we will need to re-examine and investigate its computability, computational complexity, and algorithms.
·    New approaches for Big Data computing will need to address Big Data-oriented, novel and highly efficient computing paradigms, provide innovative methods for processing and analyzing Big Data, and support value-driven applications in specific domains.
·   New features in Big Data processing, such as insufficient samples, open and uncertain data relationships, and unbalanced distribution of value density, not only provide great opportunities, but also pose grand challenges, to studying the computability of Big Data and the development of new computing paradigms.
·      There is a massive hurdle in terms of ROI and unless the Big Data initiative is tied to company onjectives and goals, the information obtained will only be scientific data that is not actionable. The Data driven initiative must be made with the company and its objectives in mind.

Business Impact

The literature review was carried out for the Big Data and Big Data analytics. For our report we have included research from some of the top journals, conferences, and white papers by industry around the world. Though enough information was found on Big Data, we found it little difficult to retrieve data about Big Data Analytics. We found the most of the research was carried out in academia. Here we present the benefits in business due to Big Data with relevant literature supporting it. The Big Data has been changing and transforming the way we live, work and think (V. Mayer-Schonberger, 2013). The business impact Big Data has been able to bring in the world are as follows:
Impact in National development:
Depth analysis and utilization of Big Data plays an important role in promoting sustained economic growth of countries and enhance the competitiveness of companies. In the future, Big Data will eventually become a new point of economic growth. With Big Data, companies will be able to upgrade and transform to the mode of Analysis as a Service (AaaS), thereby changing the ecology of the IT and other industries.
At the national level, the capacity of accumulating, processing, and utilizing vast amounts of data will become a new landmark of a country’s strength. The data sovereignty of a country in cyberspace will be another great power-game space besides land, sea, air, and outer spaces. The Western countries, represented by the United States, are moving under their national agenda towards a modernization of their national strength through Big Data research and applications. It is anticipated that future economic and political competitions among countries will be based on exploiting the potential of Big Data, among other traditional aspects.
Impact in Industrial upgrades:
Big Data is currently a common problem faced by many industries. Everyone in the industry hopes to mine from Big Data extracting the information, knowledge and even intelligence and ultimately taking full advantage of the big value of Big Data. It has become actually a key product for getting relevant decision making tools and strategies rather than being a byproduct. Big Data and its analytics is a new engine to sustain the high growth of the information industry, but also the new tool for industries to improve their competitiveness. For example cloud computing provides the IT infrastructure to Big Data and Big Data is an application of cloud computing. So the industry based on active decision based on off grid situation can get benefit from Big Data and its analytics.
Impact to scientific research:
Big Data has caused the scientific community to re-examine its methodology of scientific research (J. Hey, 2009) and has triggered a revolution in scientific thinking and methods. It is well-known that the earliest scientific research in human history was based on experiments. Later on, theoretical science emerged, which was characterized by the study of various laws and theorems.
However, because theoretical analysis is too complex and not feasible for solving practical problems, people began to seek simulation-based methods, which led to computational science. The emergence of Big Data has spawned a new research paradigm; that is, with Big Data, researchers may only need to find or mine from it the required information, knowledge and intelligence. Turing Award winner, Jim Gray, believed that the fourth paradigm may be the only systematic way for solving some of the toughest global challenges we face today. In essence, the fourth paradigm is not only a change in the way of scientific research, but also a change in the way that people think (V. Mayer-Schonberger, 2013).
Impact to multidisciplinary researches:
Big Data technologies and the corresponding fundamental research have become a research focus in academia. An emerging interdisciplinary discipline called data science (Data Science, 2014) has been gradually coming into place. This takes Big Data as its research object and aims at generalizing the extraction of knowledge from data. It spans across many disciplines, including information science, mathematics, social science, network science, system science, psychology, and economics (Loukides, 2011) (C. O'Neil).. It employs various techniques and theories from many fields, including signal processing, probability theory, machine learning, statistical learning, computer programming, data engineering, pattern recognition, visualization, uncertainty modeling, data warehousing, and high performance computing.
Many research centers/institutes on Big Data have been established in recent years in different universities throughout the world (such as the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia University, New York University, Tsinghua University, Eindhoven University of Technology, and Chinese University of Hong Kong). Lots of universities and research institutes have even set up under-graduate and/or postgraduate courses on data analytics for cultivating talents, including data scientists and data engineers

Implementations

Big Data analytics has permeated into multiple sectors and applications. As our discussion surmised, the key strength of Big Data is using the massive data collected into creating analytical information that can drive business and strategic decisions. According to strategic advisors NewVantage Partners (Osborne, 2019), the “fear of disruption” by rivals using data and AI to their advantage will be fueling investments in Big Data by competitive firms as 2019 moves forward. The study further states that the survey showed the reason for investment as: 75% fear disruption from new entrants, and 88% feel greater urgency to invest in Big Data and AI. 92% are driven by positive objectives—transformation, agility, or competition—and only 5% are driven by cost reduction.

According to a Forrester TechRadar Study of Big Data based technology (Press, 2016), MPP data warehouse, Predictive Analysis, Data Visualization and Distributed File storage are some the most significantly successful technologies with most them reaching the next phase of development in the next 3 to 5 years.
In light of these developments in the technical side of thing, it bears importance to see how practical applications of Big Data are being implemented in the business sector and how successful they have been.
Dr. Pepper Snapple Group (DPSG)  has utilized machine learning and predictive analysis tools in its Big Data Plaform MyDPS, boosting its productivity and revenue. In a testimonial for the platform (Symphony Retail, 2018), John Williams, Director of Category management, DPSG said, By using aisle optimization technology, we have increased our margin dollars by $1.4 million.”
The challenges DPSG was facing was two-fold, their information flow to their sales route was voluminous - large binders filled with customer data, sales notes and promotions, and secondly, with the consumer preferences changing, they needed to keep up with the market and identify category growth categories. Utilizing MyDPS and SR Assortment and Space solution, they were able to consolidate these problems and use the massive amount of data they had into strategic business insights.
MyDPS was initially tested in isolated DPSG branches. According to a NetworksAsia case study (Boulton, 2017), the sales staff that used the platform reported a 50 present increase in sales. This motivated Tom Farrah, CIO of DPSG, to implement the platform company-wide, “Our Sales Route staffs were glorified order takers. Now, they are becoming intelligent sales people equipped with information to achieve their goals,” He remarked. The platform is equipped with machine learning and analytic tools that funnels recommendations and a daily scorecard to workers showing expected projections, their sakes track and insights of correcting course if needed.
Rolls-Royce Holdings is another prominent name that is using Big Data to their competitive advantage. In a Forbes Report (Marr, 2015)), Paul Stein, the company’s chief scientific officer, said: “We have huge clusters of high-power computing which are used in the design process.We generate tens of terabytes of data on each simulation of one of our jet engines.” The chief areas Rolls-Royce is using Big Data in their operations are: design, manufacture and after-sales support.
The terrabytes of design data is processed into design visualization and evaluations. This allows them to simulate the design perfomance in extreme conditions, taking the need to practically test these out of the equation bring both performance and reduced testing costs. The company’s manufacturing systems are also networked and communicated with each other in an Internet of Things environment.
An example of this can be seen in what Rolls Royce refers to as its Ship Intelligence initiative (Marr, 2015). Developed with the VVT Technical Research Center of Finland, the initiative automates security processes and gives the commanding crew of the ships with a digital dashboard. It also enables the craft with sophisticated Big Data-driven automatic piloting and operating systems. Hazards detected by sensors can be highlighted to the crew right in front of their eyes by augmented reality (AR) displays, and the ship can automatically plot a safe path.
So efficient has Rolls-Royce been in their data driven initiatives that it has started becoming a product in itself. In 2015, Rolls-Royce inked a 5-year deal with Singapore Airlines to provide the airline with its TotalCare civil aerospace software (Murphy, 2015). The software provides fuel consuption, on-board system monitoring, flighting planning, operations control and engineering systems and is projected to significantly cut fuel consumption in aircrafts.
However, not all have been successful in their big-data initiatives. One of the biggest failures in Big Data initiatives remains with one of the frontrunners - Google. In 2008, Google launched Google Flu Trends (GFT) with the aim to predict future disease outbreaks and trends at a margin of the price such models take. In 2015, the service closed down amidst massive criticisms regarding its accuracy and privacy issues stemming from its data aggregation. According to Lazer, Kennedy, King and Vespigini (David Lazer R. K., 2014), GFT was predicting more than double the proportion of doctor visits for influenza-like illness (ILI) than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which bases its estimates on surveillance reports from laboratories across the United States. This happened despite the fact that GFT was built to predict CDC reports. According to a Harvard research paper, even after Google Flu Trends was updated in 2009, the comparative value of the algorithm as a stand-alone flu monitor was questionable. A study in 2010 demonstrated that GFT accuracy was not much better than a fairly simple projection forward using already available (typically on a 2-week lag) CDC data (4).
Google Flu Trends symbolizes the biggest problem researcher have stated about Big Data, most Big Data trends that have received popular attention are not the output of instruments designed to produce valid and reliable data amenable for scientific analysis. Google Flu Trends also did not share its data with others, as reported by Wired (David Lazer R. K., 2015), “while Google’s efforts in projecting the flu were well meaning, they were remarkably opaque in terms of method and data—making it dangerous to rely on Google Flu Trends for any decision-making.”
Google Flu Trends closing makes it a cautionary tale (David Lazer R. K., 2014), sparking the term “Big Data Hubris.” The value of the data held by entities like Google is almost limitless, which also means those holding these data have a responsibility to use it in the public’s best interest. Being both opaque and not being able to forecast the data accurately spelled the end for Google flu trends turning it, as Wired stated, “from the poster child of Big Data into the poster child of the foibles of Big Data.”

Practicalities and Potential in Nepal

The use of Big Data in Nepal is still in its nascent stage. According to “Nepal’s emerging data revolution” by Development Initiatives (Rana, 2017), Nepal’s 27 ministries have digitised their day-to-day operations, and about half of Nepal’s 7,000 government offices are now reported to be computerised, paper based systems of data collection and management are still common. “The problem with Big Data in Nepal, as with many technologies, is that it is still in the hype phase,” said Prabin Joshi, CTO of Rooster Logic, a Kathmandu-based data research firm, “The next problem is data collection, there is not enough collected and what is there, is not in proper structured format. It will still take a while to properly digitize and structure the data to make anything of it.”
In 2014 a research project coordinated by the Open Data in Developing Countries programme set out to explore the emerging impacts of open data in Nepal.  The general lack of open data was quickly discovered (Rana, 2017). The project also stated that data that meets the needs of decision-makers and accountability actors is not available: data is not disaggregated, there are significant data gaps, it is not timely and different datasets lack interoperability due to lack of standards (Rana, 2017).
Despite the lack of proper applications, the potential sectors for use remain promising. United Nations has recently stressed on the use of Data for development and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals:
“Big Data analysis techniques could be adopted to gain real-time insights into people’s wellbeing and to target aid interventions to vulnerable groups. New sources of data, new technologies, and new analytical approaches, if applied responsibly, can enable more agile, efficient and evidence-based decision-making and can better measure progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in a way that is both inclusive and fair.” (United Nations, 2017)
Ajay Ohri of the IBM Big Data Initiative & Analysis Hub (Ohri, 2015) recognized financial services, Agriculture, Education, Healthcare, Corruption reduction and Carbon consumption optimization as major areas where Big Data technologies can have a significant impact. Similarly, Pratima Pradhan and Subarna Shakya discuss the possiblity of using Big Data in e-governance akin to India:
“In India the “Adhaar" card [3, 5, 10] was introduced as a unique identifier for transparent citizen bene ts. This card could hold the key to verification for multiple purposes. Nepal could benefit for passport, taxation, and license and citizen benefit distribution” (Pratima Pradhan, 2018)
The paper additionally identifies disaster relief as a key area that Big Data technologies can help. Taking the 2015 earthquake as an example, the use of identification cards akin to the Indian “Adhaar” card can help consolidate relief clusters, rescue strategies and rolling out of support materials and capital. In fact, Kathmandu Open Labs was rcognized internationally (Sinha, 2015) for aiding in the initial days of disaster relief during the 2015 Earthquake through its open source mapping services.
The outsourcing market has seen immense potential in Nepal however. Dovan Rai (Rai, 2017) recognizes the following companies in her report on Big Data:
        YoungInnovations creates automated data tools and data platforms
        CraftData Labs works with business data along with open-data for governance a
        GrowByData specializes on Big Data for e-commerce.
        Grepsr provides data scraping solutions.
        Fusemachines creates automated sales platform using Big Data.
        Deerwalk provides Big Data solutions to healthcare industry.
        LeapFrog Technology offers healthcare data solutions as one of their technology services.
        Javra Software works with Big Data to create business intelligence tools.
This is, by no means, an exhaustive list of all the companies working on outsourced Big Data solutions. It does stand to notice that Nepali Companies has stepped up to the plate of being trained in and learning the architecture of Big Data technologies. “There is, of course,  potential in Nepal, but so much of the collected data is in offline format and that is the hurdle,” said Aakar Anil, member of CloudFactory. A data processing company with a focus on Natural Language Processing, CloudFactory has converted the Big Data process workflow by creating a workforce that can analyse tons of information they receive from their clients. “Our workers work online and they analyse the data provided as per the client specifications. Some information requires Human observation and our platform uses our cloudworkers (online workers) to process the data.” CloudFactory currently employs more than 8,000 workers to process the data needs of more than 150 A.I., NLP and automation projects for global companies like Microsoft, Drive.ai, Ibotta and nuTonomy (CloudFactory, 2016).
Currently, the cellphone/telecommunication penetration of Nepal is high; with Nepal Telecommunications estimating about 60% of the population has access to a cellphone (Nepal Telecom, 2019). OnlineKhabar states that the actual ownership data of cellphones actually states that the number of Cellphone users in Nepal is 34% more than the actual population (OnlineKhabar, 2018) obviously caused due to a single user owning multiple cellphones. Leveraging off of the penetration of telecommunications, the opportunities for Big Data driven initiatives are plentiful. “The biggest platforms I see are Health, Education and Agriculture,” said Pravin Joshi of Rooster Logic, “Nepal needs infrastructure and educational reforms and data driven analytics can elevate both development and commercial organizations in the sector.” The potential is there, but the what must happen is a long-term vision on how to access the potential and not merely jump aboard the hype train.

Conclusions

As mentioned above, it was found that Big Data analytics can provide vast horizons of opportunities in various applications and areas, such as customer intelligence, fraud detection, and supply chain management. Additionally, its benefits can serve different sectors and industries, such as healthcare, retail, telecom, manufacturing, etc. However, Big Data is also very difficult to deal with. It requires proper storage, management, integration, federation, cleansing, processing, and analyzing. All the problems we face with traditional data management, Big Data exponentially increases these difficulties due to additional volumes, velocities, and varieties of data and sources which have to be dealt with.
We saw that Big Data analytics is of great significance in this era of data surplus, and can provide unforeseen insights and benefits to decision makers in various areas. If properly harnessed and applied, Big Data analytics has the potential to provide a basis for advancements, on the scientific, technological, and humanitarian levels. Industries are already applying the Big Data for its advantages in huge degree. According to the figure Alibaba disclosed in March 2014, their data center has, so far, stored more than 100 PB of processed data, which amounts to 100 million high-resolution movies. During the just past “Singles’ Day” (also known as “Double 11 Day”), Alibaba pulled in around 278 million orders. For this annual shopping event, Alibaba developed a real-time data processing platform called Galaxy, which could handle 5 million transactions per second. The total amount of data that Galaxy can process every day is about 2 PB. Industry is more successful in this respect because it has two essential driving forces: they really need to possess Big Data in real time and they have the requirements on making better use of the data collected.
However, Big Data requires more clarity of one’s own business and also some ethics driving its use. As seen from Cambridge Analytica’s case, Big Data makes it easy to manipulate one’s perspectives and such unethical profiling is not marketing or business strategy but fraud of the highest order. Data driven approach to business or even development can yeild massive benefits but it must be focused, tailored to one’s objective and used in an ethical manner.

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