In between ...

In between the pauses during my fast spoken words, in between my long monologues with my inner self, in between those time taking queues for earthly stuffs, in between my wandering thoughts about our discovered universe, in between my mixed feelings of calmness and the undefined, and in between everything else that's there for me to do, I keep on painting a beautiful world, for us.

A short history of nearly everything - my review

Even with all the cumulative learning from the past, humans are still insecure about the same old problems. Billions of years ago, probably this earth was not the kind of place it is now. Some wonderful thinking minds have already outlived a large part of their lives to understand about it and it's a proud thing to say that still there lies a great amount of uncertainty in everything that we know or say. Theories and postulates which tend to unite many of our experiences, may or may not hold good even in some of the simplest of exceptions. No wonder that we have evolved, in many sense, in a great way, but it's the kind of importance we give to inconsequential things in our prime which then eludes us from all the truly significant ones. Only because of the few relentless ones, science could fathom (or at least we think that it can) a small amount of curious outcomes, but imagine what can happen if, irrespective of all our differences and struggles, we come together to do numerous thought-experiments about every little thing and be worthy of our existence. After all, we owe a lot.

Thank you, A short history of nearly everything!

किस लम्हें में...

किस लम्हें में, खो गया फिर से मैंजाने कहाँ, फिर मैं खो गया | 
यून तो mood अच्छा था अब तक,
जाने क्यूँ अचानक philosophical सा हो गया |

ढूनडता रहा जो सब मैं,
मिल गया मानो सब कुछ मुझे,
तुम्हारी इन आँखों में |

सरसराती हुई नज़रों के इस भीड़ में,
कई खिलखिलाते हुए चेहरों पे उदास आँखें देखीं हैं मैंने,
मगर अब चाहूँगा की तुम्हें कभी मेरी इन आँखों को पढ़ना नसीब ना हो |

Bus Conductors in Kolkata !

In Kolkata, usually, a typical bus conductor performs the following things, like a boss and it makes me wonder if I am living my life up to its true potential wink emoticon

• He is The boss. It's his bus. His rules and his calculations of the fare.
• He is The marketeer. Sales will follow only if he screens through his target passengers and resolves their queries (bus stops) promptly. It's a thankless job, really.
• He is The live Google directions/ maps. The route, the bus stops, the pit stops, the abrubt stops, the not so popular stops. All. He just needs a breath's time to name them !
• He is The negotiator. Be it the traffic police, or his thakurdada, 100 means 100. He just can't get enough out of this hero.
• He is The singer. All the idiotic songs which got the coveted chance to feature in the playlists, at some time in the distant past, for the stereo in the bus, are known to him. And his voice is earthy, rusty, mystic and hysterical grin emoticon
• He is The funny guy. Astey ladies, kole bachcha, chepe bosun, dhore thakun !
• He is The fin guy. All accounts receivable and accounts payable, time value of money (his understanding of 50p coins) - he collects and he dispenses. All day. Also, fair deals, without bills - side income after all smile emoticon

He might not be the one who drives the bus, but surely the bus rides drive me crazy grin emoticon

Aastey Aastey. Nambar ache wink emoticon

কলকাতায় আমার ফিরে আসা ...

কুয়াশাই ভীজে ছিলো চোখ দুটো,

ক্লান্তো হয়ে পড়েছিলো চোখের পাতা,

তবু চেয়েছিলাম, খুঁজেছিলাম সেই,

চেনা মানুষের চেহারাগুলো |

রোদে বৃষ্টিতে একই রকম কাটাচ্ছিলাম যখন দিনগুলো,

বাংলা ভাষার মধুরতর স্বরের ওই টান ভুলে,

নির্বাক শ্রোতা হয়ে ঠিক পড়ছিলাম যখন,

খুঁজে পেলাম শহর কলকাতাই আলোক দর্ষন |

दिन ढल जाए - lyrics :)

दिन ढल जाए, हाय रात ना जाए
तू तो ना आये, तेरी याद सताए

प्यार में जिनके सब जग छोड़ा और हुए बदनाम
उनके ही हाथो हाल हुआ ये, बैठे हैं दिल को थाम
अपने कभी थे, अब हैं पराये

ऐसी ही रिमझीम, ऐसी पुहारे, ऐसी ही थी बरसात
खुद से जुदा और जग से पराये, हम दोनों थे साथ
फिर से वो सावन अब क्यों ना आये?

दिल के मेरे पास हो इतनी, फिर भी हो कितनी दूर
तुम मुझसे, मैं दिल से परेशान, दोनों हैं मजबूर
ऐसे में किस को कौन मनाये?

Shine ablaze

Keep sailing in the waters,
Keep walking in the rain.

Sit quietly under a banyan,

Sing out loud, with an overly joyous grin.
Lie down under the stars,

Walk bare feet, do not stop.

Do not stop, till it hurts,

and then like sunshine, shine ablaze, shine ablaze.

Facebook Network Analysis (for a facebook page) using Gephi - A students' guide

Students who are pursuing their course on Social Network Analysis in some form or the other, can use Gephi, a free software which can be used to visualize and manipulate graphs. Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of social / other networks and complex systems.It can also process dynamic and hierarchical graphs. It runs on various platforms which include Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. LinkedIn maps is also based on Gephi tool with some modifications.

Some of the applications of Gephi are:

• Exploratory Data Analysis
• Link Analysis
• Social Network Analysis
• Biological Network analysis
• Poster creation

Some of the technological aspects of Gephi are:

• Ergonomic interface: It is based on NetBeans UI
• High-performance: It has a built-in 3D rendering engine
• Native file formats: GDF (GUESS), GraphML (NodeXL), GML, NET (Pajek), GEXF, etc are some of the file formats which are supported by Gephi
• Customizable by plugins: layouts, metrics, data sources, manipulation tools, rendering presets, etc.

Now, it is very easy to use Gephi to do data analysis of facebook data for bipartite network. The following steps may be used to do the above mentioned analysis:

1. Login to Facebook through an user account & ‘like’ the facebook page for which analysis needs to be done.
2. Using the Netvizz app (http://apps.facebook.com/netvizz/) on Facebook extract a dataset for a bipartite network containing users and posts
3. Download 1 gdf format file and 2 tsv format files (total 3 files)
4. Open the gdf format file using Gephi and analyze
5. Open the tsv format file using Microsoft Excel

Using Gephi's layout tool, statistics tool and filter tool, various analysis on degree, betweenness and closeness centrality, network density, path length, diameter, HITS, modularity, clustering coefficient, etc can be obtained.

Some Modularity analysis on Gephi can be shown as below:

Using Big Data in Telecom - how it can change the game play

Increasing ARPU (Average Revenue Per User), reducing customer churn (subscriber base) and reducing OPEX (Operational Expenses) are three very important priorities for any CSPs (Communication Service Providers) or Telecom Service Providers in general. With the rise in the usage of telecommunication devices in our day-to-day lives, the amount of digital content is increasing tremendously in the data networks. 

Having good insights from the big data, utilizing the insights to ramp up the revenue streams, catering to the customer complaints more effectively, taking feedback for the new service offerings and improving upon them, etc can really create differentiation among the competitors in the telecom industry. Big telecom companies, around the world have realized this opportunity and are taking good amount of initiatives to harness their big data analysis to their help.

As per a study done by IBM, successfully harnessing big data can help the telecom companies to mainly achieve the following three critical objectives:

1. Deliver smarter services that generate new sources of revenue and content across the network
2. Transform internal and external operations to achieve business and service excellence across the different SBUs
3. Build smarter CDN and data networks to drive consistent, high-quality customer experience

There are many service sector companies which are now offering the following service packages to the the telecom operators (The list is not exhaustive):

• Proactive call centers
• Smarter and effective marketing campaigns
• Network Analytics
• Location based services

Some examples of big data analytics in work for the telecom companies and their success stories are:

• A Tier-1 Mobile Service Provider, based out of the US, transforms call centers operation with real time access to Product and services data (customer/users)
• Globe Telecom, based in the Philippines, used big data analytics to improve the effectiveness of their promotions by 600%
• Ufone, based out of Pakistan is deploying big data analytics to improve marketing "offer acceptance rate" by 25%
• XO Communications, based out of US, used big data analytics to improve customer experience and an annual OPEX reduction of USD 15 million per year
• T-Mobile AG, Deutsche Telekom (Germany) uses big data to optimize network performance & reduce OPEX costs
• Sprint, based out of the US, leverages big data analytics to put real-time intelligence into the network driving a 90% increase in network capacity

So it is quite evident that companies across the world are increasing depending on the big data analytics for their improvement and this trend is opening up different avenues for data scientists and big data analysts.

Image source: Internet

Towards Big data in a big way - an introduction

In the modern times, people all over the world are increasingly creating digital information through their usage of cellphones, digital cameras, social media websites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook,etc. The digital data deluge is on the rise at a very fast pace. Online streaming of data is a very common thing to do over the internet, which primarily needs huge data transfers across networks. It has been estimated that almost 90% of the digital data residing in the world of ours was created in the past two years itself. Also most of this data (85%) is of the unstructured kind of data.

Few things which might not be known to few, regarding digital data are:

1) Internet has a huge memory and it literally forgets nothing, absolutely nothing - anything and everything that gets created digitally, gets stored in the internet, either through different storage mediums or in raw form as a unstructured stream of ones and zeroes (which can be retrieved as meaningful information when needed) in the network/ memory of the network elements.

2) Privacy issues are increasing with the addition of different internet applications - Marketers and security agencies are extremely interested to monitor practically everyone for their ulterior motives. NSA has been allegedly reported to be following secretive practices to keep record of all the online activities of world citizens over the internet. E-commerce websites use the information content of the web browser cache to understand the consumer behavior and consumer buying pattern.

3) All the big data are getting analysed and collected by different companies at various geographies and capacities - with the increasing demand for analytics among the corporate and industry trend analysts, different companies are increasingly looking for different ways to understand their customers better. While social media websites are a rich source of such information, other Web 2.0 based websites are also important.

With the growing reach of internet and related technology, more and more data will be generated in future and analyzing such data can help the companies to reap tremendous amounts of profits. Data scientists are in huge demand now-a-days and in a way they hold the key to success for many businesses.

Big data have three unique properties of Volume, Variety and Velocity. Along with this time-stamp and location information adds meaning to the data. Analysis of big data is gaining importance primarily because of the fact that unlike analysis of sample based data, analysis on big data takes into effect the entire set of data (as is) and hence all sampling errors can be avoided.

Photo courtesy: intellihq