Alibaba’s World (Book Review)

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The reason why I was soo keen to read this book was  Jack Ma.The founder and CEO of Alibaba, one of the world’s leading e-commerce web portals, is one of the world’s richest man.Jack Ma is a classic rags-to-riches story, but even more impressive than his fabulous wealth is his uncanny level of persistence. His achievements are practically unbelievable considering his meager, humble beginnings.

alibaba

Book Review

Epic !!!!

Porter Erisman has crafted an insider’s loving portrayal of the world’s largest e-commerce site, from its humble beginnings in Hong Kong and rural China to its present-day dominance of the online China trade.

Erisman came to Alibaba in its infancy as a Chinese-speaking, American-trained PR guy. His first stint with the company ended during one of its many cash crunches. He returned, and was at Jack Ma’s side as Ma coolly and calmly conquered the world.

The best part of the book for me is “The David and Goliath story between Alibaba and eBay”. Aren’t you interested in how David defeated Goliath?

Some famous quotes from the book and by Alibaba

Today is tough, tomorrow is tougher. But the day after is beautiful. Most people die before they see the sunrise the day after

If you don’t give up, you still have a chance

On the path to success, you will notice that the successful ones are not whiners, nor do they complain to often

You need the right people with you, not the best people.

Erisman has taken into account the journey of Jack Ma from his childhood. His deep desire to learn and change, his accounts of failure, and finally success. While there was nothing easy about Alibaba’s rise, the book is certainly replete with lessons on how to get a big company off the ground with few resources and enormous challenges.

A very inspiring read, go ahead and read Alibaba’s World.

Thanks

My reads

books

Hello friends, in this series of blogs  I would be writing book reviews of some of the best books I came across(all non-fiction), although  I started reading Chetan Bhagat(soft porn writer ) but sooner realized that this is not my cup of tea (no offense).

Startup journey, business management, memoirs, biographies, you name it — if it’s nonfiction, I’m interested.Reading nonfiction is more than just reading. It’s learning, exploring, and understanding something real.What better than books to learn and get inspired.

Do follow the upcoming blogs in this series. The first one will be on Alibaba’s World(How a chinse company is changing the face of Global Business).

Thanks

 

Transperency in Political Funding

With its move to demonetise high-value currency notes, the government claims to be fighting the problem of black or untaxed money that has become a menace to the economy, I wont be discusssing the pros and cons of the move being no economist but one question seems to be taking a lot of eyebrows about political funding.

What’s the issue?

If the Government is serious about his fight against black money and moving India towards a cashless society, if you, I and everybody else, are being encouraged to go cashless, why are political parties still allowed to take donations in cash and not declare the source of funds?

What the rule says

Political Parties are only legally required to publicly disclose political contributions in excess of Rs. 20,000. This rule allows unlimited political contributions just below this threshold value completely free of disclosure and this is where the problem lies.

Source of Information

I have created bar charts in order to visualise the source of funding of the two National Parties, BJP(Bhartiya Janta Party) and INC(Indian National Congress) from the report published by ADR(Association for Democratic Reform) between 2004-2005 and 2011-2012. You can visit the ADR website for further information ADR report. I have added new features to the data for better understanding.

Dataset

National Party
Donations from unknown sources(in crores)
% unknown sources
Total Donations
Donations from known sources(in crores)
% known sources
BJP
952.58
73
1304.904
352.3241
27
INC
1951.07
82.5
2364.933
413.8633
17.5
Total
2903.65
79.12
3669.837
766.1874
20.88

Analysis and Visualization

Just look at the  bar chart  below for a few seconds

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Needless to say, these “unknown sources” are the top sources of income for political parties.

Doesn’t the green bar seems to be black?

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Congress received the largest amount (Rs 1,951.07 crore or 82.5%) in anonymous donations.About 73% of BJP’s donors were unknown which accounted for 952 crores RS.

Percentage of Anonymous Donation

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The total funds received by the two national political parties (Bhartiya Janta Party and Congress) between 2004-2005 and 2011-2012 was Rs 3,669 crores of which only 20.88% was from known donors. Around Rs 2903 crores or 79.12% were anonymous contributions.

Congress received 82.5 % funds from unknown sources, BJP on the other hand received 73% funds from unknown sources.


Shouldn’t there be less infiltration of black money in political parties?

Political parties have been opposing the Right To Information Act saying it was impossible to keep track of all donations. “Why should political parties be the only exception?

I’ll leave you with these questions because questions need to be asked in a democracy.

Thanks

Comparing Gender Gap Across Degree Categories

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In this project, we’ll explore how we can communicate the nuanced narrative of gender gap using effective data visualization. We’ll try to compare the gender gap of men and women in different categories.Randal Olson, a data scientist at University of Pennsylvania, has cleaned the data set and made it available on his personal website dataset.

Analysis

The data set contains the percentage of bachelor’s degrees granted to women from 1970 to 2012 in various fields.The data set is broken up into 17 categories of degrees, with each column as a separate category.

You can visit my Github repo for the complete code.

Let us have a glimpse of few rows and columns, the values represent percentage of women in various categories.

Year Agriculture Architecture Art and Performance Biology Business
1970 4.229798 11.92101 59.7 29.08836 9.064439
1971 5.452797 12.00311 59.9 29.3944 9.503187
1972 7.42071 13.21459 60.4 29.81022 10.55896
1973 9.653602 14.79161 60.2 31.14791 12.8046

Data  Visualisation

Let’s generate line charts for four-degree categories on a grid to encourage comparison between men and women.

The first two degree categories are dominated by men while the latter degree categories are much more balanced.

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By spending just a few seconds reading the chart, we can conclude that the gender gap in Computer Science and Engineering is quite large, on the other hand, there seems a significance rise of women in the fields like Agriculture and Architecture.

A more balanced gender gap 

Be it Business or Math, the gender gap is becoming less and getting more balanced.

studt_gender_gap

Go ahead and compare other categories, follow the Github link for the code Github.


Now, let’s look at a different perspective, let’s find what changes have come from 1970 till 2012?

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The change is evident, from a percentage share of nearly 5 % in Agriculture(which had the least share ) in 1970 to 50% in 2012.Women are certainly marching ahead then Men. You will see the similar trend in Business as well.

Let us see what changes have come in STEM fields over the year

Many scholars and policymakers have noted that women have historically been underrepresented in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM fields).

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Biology with its upward trend shows a significant improvement and a lot more presence of women, Engineering and Computer Science, on the other hand, is still dominated by men.

Conclusion

By spending just a few seconds reading the chart, we can easily compare the gender gap in various categories and analyze the trend over the year.That’s the power of Data Visualisation.

Thanks

Analysing Pixar Movies

pixar-movies

Pixar Animation is one of the most well-known animation studios in the world, with hits like Toy Story 3, Finding Nemo, Monster’s Inc, and A Bug’s Life, Pixar’s movies are adored by kids for their charming characters and by adults for their wit

In this project, I’ll explore the ups and downs of Pixar over the years primarily using data visualization. Data visualization is especially useful in this case since our sample size, only 15, is low and we can glean more general insights from exploring the data visually.

Analysis

You can visit my Github repo for the complete code and the dataset.

import pandas as pd
import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
%matplotlib inline
# reading the dataset
pixar=pd.read_csv("C:/Users/hp/Downloads/PixarMovies.csv")
pixar

The DataSet

Here are some of the columns in this dataset, PixarMovies.csv:

Year Released — the year the movie was released.
Movie — the name of the movie.
RT Score — the Rotten Tomatoes rating for the movie.
IMDB Score — the IMDB rating for the movie.
Metacritic Score — the Metacritic rating for the movie.
Opening Weekend — the amount of revenue the movie made on opening weekend (in millions of dollars).
Worldwide Gross — the total amount of revenue the movie has made to date.
Production Budget — the amount of money spent to produce the film (in millions of dollars).
Oscars Won — the number of Oscar awards the movie won.

Cleaning the data

#cleaning data removing % from domestic % columns and converting it to float
#making score out of 100 for imdb instead of 10
pixar['Domestic %']=pixar['Domestic %'].str.rstrip('%').astype('float')
pixar['International %']=pixar['International %'].str.rstrip('%').astype('float')
pixar['IMDB Score']=pixar['IMDB Score']*10

Adding new features to the dataset

# Adding new features
pixar['Profit']=pixar['Worldwide Gross']-pixar['Production Budget'] 
pixar['Domestic Profit']=pixar['Domestic Gross']-pixar['Production Budget']
pixar['International Profit']=pixar['Profit']-pixar['Domestic Profit']

Data Visualisation

How do the major review site rate Pixar movies?

# now analysisng critics score
critics_review=pixar[['RT Score','IMDB Score','Metacritic Score']]
critics_review.plot(figsize=(10,6),grid=False,linewidth=2)
plt.title("Critics Review")
plt.show()

pixar2

From the previous plot, it seems like the review site Rotten Tomatoes gives Pixar consistently higher ratings. Let’s generate a box plot to explore the question:

How are the average ratings from each review site across all the movies distributed?

#analysing through boxplot
critics_review.boxplot(figsize=(10,6),grid=False)
plt.title("Critics Review")
plt.show()

pixar3

From the above plot, it becomes clear that Rotten Tomatoes have consistently given higher scores.The most spread out scores are given by Metacritic ranging from right under 60 to right under 100.IMDB gives an average rating of 80.

The Profit Scenario

#The Profit Senario
pixar.sort_values('Profit')[['Profit','International Profit','Domestic Profit']]
.plot(kind='bar',figsize=(15,6),grid=False)
plt.title("The Profit Senario")
plt.show()

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Pixar studios have a terrific reputation when it comes to business, every single movie released has made profits, this is incredible.Toy Story 3 being the most successful movie in terms of business, followed by Finding Nemo. Movies which did not do well in the domestic market were still profitable due to its international presence worldwide. Cars 2 failed to impress in the Domestic market but did well overseas.

The International market

# how pixar took up the international market 
pixar_year=pixar.set_index("Year Released")
pixar_year[['Domestic %','International %']]
.plot(kind='bar',figsize=(15,6),grid=False)
plt.title("Comparing Domestic market vs International market year on year")
plt.show()

Does Pixar have a worldwide reach?

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Pixar always had a wider reach, from 2001 Pixar made more Profits from the overseas market than their domestic market. Their overseas popularity has always increased year on year. This says a lot about their worldwide popularity.

Let’s draw a stacked bar chart for better understanding:

# comparing domestic vs international collection
pixar[['Domestic %','International %']].plot(kind='bar',figsize=(15,6),stacked=True,grid=False)
plt.title("Domestic collection vs International collection in %")
plt.show()

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Spend sometimes visually exploring it. You’ll notice that there’s been a general decrease in the proportion of revenue that was made domestically. 

Opening Weekend Collection

#Comparing Production Budget vs Opening Weekend Collection
op=pixar[['Opening Weekend','Production Budget']]
op.sort_values('Opening Weekend').plot(kind='bar',figsize=(15,6),grid=False)
plt.title("Comparing Production Budget vs Opening Weekend Collection")
plt.show()

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The plot shows a very interesting result. Almost all movies collect more than 50 % of their cost in the opening weekend. 

The big stage: Oscars

#The big stage: Oscars
pixar[['Oscars Nominated','Oscars Won']]
.plot(kind='bar',figsize=(15,6),grid=False)
plt.title("The big stage: Oscars")
plt.show()

download8

9 out 16 movies produced by Pixar have one at least one oscar award. Isn’t that great feet.The movie WALL-E has received a maximum of 6 oscar nominations followed by Toy Story 3, Up, Ratatouille with each 5 nominations.

Toy Story 3, Up along with The Incredibles have won 2 Oscars.

Cars 2 and Monster University are the only movies which did not receive any oscar nominations.

Conclusion

The study brings into light the strong presence of Pixar in the international market. It’s growing popularity. The profit machine for its shareholders and receiving accolades at the Oscars.

Thank you

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