Being Creative…..

Migration rates are increasing year by year. Millions of people are migrating from less developed countries to more developed countries. People cross oceans, mountains, deserts, and what not to full fill their dream. A dream of having a decent job with a decent salary to support their family and their future. Most of the people who migrate have very little or no money in the pocket. Many of them either take a loan or use their family savings to go to developed countries either for higher education or for a job.

They have just one simple dream and that it to earn money for their family and send it back to them in times of economic/ financial crisis, to support education of their loved ones. They send money for healthcare, weddings, unexpected funerals which they can’t attend, or any sort of investment with a solid advice. Money send from developed nations to developing nations in this form is known as remittances.

Approximately 232 millions of international migrants are there in the world. These are people living in nations other than that of their birth. Population wise this figure is bigger than the population of Brazil. In economy wise it’s bigger or just near to economy of France. Out of 232 million people 180 million people are from poor or developing countries like India and Mexico.

According to a survey 413 billion dollar remittances were sent from developed countries to developing countries which are approximately three times of the development aid provided by the authorized government agencies to people. Remittances are often seen as a life saving drug for poor people in developing nations especially during an economic crisis or some natural disasters like tsunami, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions etc which disrupts the normal lifestyle of people.

One of the best example of it can be seen in Bangladesh where there is 45% of the population below poverty line but during the financial crisis of 2005 poverty level went down to 31%. It’s quite strange especially during a crisis. It was found that 50% of remittances were received by the country from neighbouring country India. So in such situations remittances acts like lifeblood to such nations.

Same situation can be traced down in countries like Somalia, Mexico, Egypt, Tajikistan etc. Remittances not only help in crisis but also increase the consumption demand of people in developing countries. Such nations get a huge cash flow in their economies, which lead to more imports to satisfy the consumer demands.

However at some places it’s not easy to send remittance to the native country because of strict money transfer laws and protocols. Internationally 8% of the money sent is charged as fees for money transactions. Many countries like Africa have put exorbitant cost of sending money because of the fear of money laundering. Such regulations curb remittances and governments have to understand that these are lifelines to some of the very poor country like Somalia.

 However do remittances really help in getting economic stability? Can a country just survive only on remittances?

The answer to such questions is a big NO. Let’s take a case from gulf countries, In June 2014 when the oil prices fell globally, gulf countries didn’t made a profit which directly affected the workers and so the remittances sent from these countries fell.  It was a blow not only to oil producing countries but also to families across south-east Asia and elsewhere those have breadwinners working in the Gulf. It proved to be a structural shock for Lebanon, a small economy in which families and the banking system are heavily dependent on inflows from the remittances.

Remittances have other side effects too such as by helping to subsidise low incomes at home they provide a cushion against the impact of slow growth, which eases pressure on governments to reform their policies. And, by channelling capital into consumer spending, remittances boost imports – which, some economists say, holds back the development of domestic manufacturing. So with just support of remittances no country in the world can rise from its poverty level.

In fact government of developing countries should make such policies and plans so that they can be less dependent on remittances. Because if at some point of time the host country gets hit hard economically then this will directly affect to migrants family in the form of lower remittances This can export the slowdown to the recipient country, fuelling economic instability on a global scale as we have seen above the case of gulf country.

So in general I think remittances should be given to developing nations however it’s the job of government and policy makers there to make their country economically stable without the help of remittances. And in extremely poor countries like Somalia there should be an open partnership to lower the cost of money transfer as they did in telecommunication sector. From 8% it should be reduced upto 2% which would help to save millions of dollar and some more help can be provided to such nations.    

Technology is the practical application of knowledge in a particular area. 21^st century had seen much technological advancement in every part of life. We are quickly moving towards automation and robotics which includes artificial intelligence, machine learning, internet of things etc. Technology has changed everything from communication to the way we think.

Today most people do not invent, they do business to solve people’s problems. They can sell anything and every human being is targeted customers.  They are collecting data, what you search, where you click, what you buy, how you react to certain copywriter’s text. This is impacting our life because they are creating products based on our search results and technologies habits. 

We as humans are losing our thinking capabilities because we are addicted to use more of digital tools than to think. If we require any information regarding to anything we can just use internet (one of the digital tool). This situation will even get worse with artificial intelligence. Main role of AI is to calculate the result of ‘n’ number of probabilities which can happen in a particular experiment or a situation. This will completely eliminate the need for experimenting because you have a powerful super-computer to that for you.

However technology has also helped in a lot many ways like in education system, nowadays we don’t just rely on books we have a lot of material available anytime at our fingertips. Communication is now not a barrier at all, we can talk, chat, video call whatever we want at a very low rate or just free of cost. We can order anything from electronics gadget to food to cars, taxi almost anything.

Technology is making us more and more dependent on our smartphones and internet. It’s impossible to be truly self-reliant, but it is possible to learn more about the technologies we use, to learn basic skills of repairing and fixing them, to find people who know more about particular topics.

Individually, we depend more on our technologies than ever before – but we can do more than ever before. Collectively, technology has made us smarter, more capable and more productive. What technology has not done is make us wiser.

Imagine a person sleeps in the year 1970 and wakes up after 50 years that is in 2020. He will find the world has changed a lot, however he will find himself more organised and energetic as compared with current generation. But if we compare the productivity of people at that time with current century, we people are generating more products with a smaller land with high profits; I am directly aiming the manufacturing industry. Technology is a boom for this industry. As and when people will generate more products in a less space and time with more quality, living standards of people will tend to rise, consumption is going to rise and so the use of more resources for meeting the demands.

So does technology makes up more productive? Does it help us to get more organised and achieve our dreams at a faster rate? Or does it make us lazy and busy doing nothing?

I don’t have a clear answer to these problems but yes one thing is for sure technology belongs to those who know how to use it to its fullest and bring out the best outcome. It has become such a powerful tool that it can destroy an individual or its can help you in a lot more ways. Technology will be getting more advanced and it has not break circuits that means upto the time human civilization is present, technology won’t have limits.

China is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. China accounts for 1/6^th of the global economy having GDP growth of 6.9% annually. Not only just GDP, China is biggest market for manufacturing cars, semiconductors, PCs, Iphone etc and Chinese spend great on international tourism, and is the biggest exporter of clothing and textile. Not just manufacturing China has a role to play in global supply chain, distribution and production of goods.

Wuhan is the largest city in Hubei and the most populous city in Central China, with a population of over 11 million, the ninth most populous Chinese city, and one of the nine National Central Cities of China. Wuhan today is considered the political, economic, financial, commercial, cultural and educational. During the New Years Eve Corona Virus first case was recorded in Wuhan capital of Hubei province. The Virus has taken 636 lives as of now and around 9000 people are expected to be infected by it and this number is increasing on a daily basis.

Since New Year eve factories have been shut, people were advised to stay at home, that means very less people are working and contributing towards economy. Cash flow has been hit the most. Demands for commodities have reduced, due to which travel and purchasing has been reduced and economy of china is on a standstill and so it’s affecting the global economy as well.

The virus is not the driving factor behind those losses, however. Instead, it’s the way consumers, businesses and governments respond to an outbreak that matters most. People are more likely to stay home during an outbreak to avoid getting sick, preventing them from travelling, shopping and working. Doing so limits demand for consumer goods and energy. Decisions by companies and governments to close shops and idle factories, meanwhile, curtail production.

If it continues it will automatically result in a severe pandemic that would resemble a global war in its sudden, profound, and widespread impact. However Chinese government has started taking measures to lower down these possibilities such as The People’s Bank of China cut a key interest rate this week and injected huge amounts of cash into markets in order to help take the pressure off banks and borrowers. Officials have also announced new tax breaks and subsidies designed to help consumers. It has much higher debt, trade tensions with a major trading partner and its growth has been steadily slowing down for a number of years, which gives a weak starting point to face such a crisis.

If the situation continues economies of countries like Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Germany, USA, UK will be affected. Possibly Japan and Germany would have a loss of 0.2% of GDP whereas for USA and UK it would be 0.1% which won’t have a major effect.

The situation has not just hit manufacturing and automobile industry but other industries like entertainment has been affected equally like for more than a week, Disney’s theme parks in Shanghai and Hong Kong have been shut. The closures are expected to reduce the company’s operating income by $175 million. In technology Apple has a large sales presence in China and assembles most of its products there. Mr. Cook said that some Apple suppliers would remain closed and that traffic into its stores in the country had fallen off. Hyundai, the world’s fifth-largest automaker, said it would temporarily stop production lines at its factories in South Korea because of shortages of Chinese parts.

Many corporate have advised their employees not to visit china and so travelling industry has also been hit the most and a series of airlines have cancelled their flights to china not just because of the virus but because they don’t have enough passengers to visit china. One thing is sure that the situation is going to affect the first quarter of economy of china as well as of the world as a whole.

Facebook is one of the biggest social networking giant which currently has 2.37 billion monthly active users. This mega company is founded by Mark Zuckerberg  with his college roommates and fellow Harvard       University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes in 2004. However facebook wasn’t his first and only company. Back into Harvard University at the age 17 he launched a website named Facemash in 2003. This website was set up for Harvard students as hot or not. The website allowed visitors to compare two female student pictures side by side and let them decide who was more attractive. We can say this was a huge success for him at that point of time because facemash attracted 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online.

However Harvard administration forced to shut it down and Zuckerberg was charged with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy. Ultimately, the charges were dropped. Issues of privacy can be traced down to Zuckerberg’s history right from the college. His idea behind a social networking site was having a complete transparency of information, people, and their social activities basically asking people to have the access of their privacy for showing them better results. With results I mean if someone has to find a person nearby or if someone wants to view some events or clubs in their neighbourhood then it’s by default that they have to share their location and other details with the company.

Transparency was one of the key elements which facebook had to grow its member. With this transparency idea users were forbidden from adopting false identities. The company’s management argued that transparency is necessary for forming personal relationships, sharing ideas and information, and building up society as a whole. It also noted that the bottom-up, peer-to-peer connectivity among Facebook users makes it easier for businesses to connect their products with consumers.

The company’s success was dependent on the number of users because facebook earned from advertising content to its users so if more number of users are there then more the companies would love to advertise on facebook in short facebook created a platform for users to find and meet new people globally or locally and for business people it provided a platform to advertise about 2.3 billion people at the same time.

Facebook began growing by introducing some of the key features like wall, timeline, idea of tagging people and using ‘#’, giving a like to a comment or a picture and then by developing other platforms like instagram and snapchat. As these things were letting people know the world and helping them to connect globally, advertisers were able to create new and effective customer relationships and so many companies began using the social network for marketing and advertising. In terms of business this was a perfect business model because according to a survey an adult in USA spends 38 minutes daily on such platforms.

Now comes another big privacy issue from facebook that was Cambridge Analytica: A timeline of the data hijacking scandal. I think because the issue was directly linked to USA presidential elections of 2016 Zuckerberg had paid a hefty fine. The charges on facebook was that it sold out millions of its users personal data to Cambridge Analytica which had effected the 2016 elections and brexit vote.

In April 2010, Facebook announced the launch of a platform called Open Graph to third-party apps. This update allowed external developers to reach out to Facebook users and request permission to access a large chunk of their personal data — and, crucially, to access their Facebook friends’ personal data too. If accepted, these apps would then have access to a user’s name, gender, location, birthday, education, political preferences, relationship status, religious views, online chat status and more. In fact, with additional permissions, external sites could also gain access to a person’s private messages.

We can’t say whether this was a mistake made by Zuckerberg or it was a part of business to increase the worth of facebook. Because in this data scandal more than 50 million user personal data was with Cambridge Analytica in order to profile and target users for political advertisements.

Anyways nowadays these big tech giants are using data of millions of users to provide a highly customized web search, products, advertisements, etc. We can’t blame only Facebook even Google uses its user’s data. Like most of people say 20^th century was a golden period for fuel industry similarly I believe 21^st century is a golden period for those who has a large customer/consumer based database and for whole technological era privacy will always be a concern and maybe after AI we won’t have any control on our privacy!

3D printing industry had a boom in year 2014. It’s still going great as of now, but is it really a future technology for a better and sustainable tomorrow? Is our future safe in 3D printing technology? Can we really develop everything i mean every single item which we use daily?

So first of all for those who doesn’t know what 3D printing actually is, it’s a technology through which we can 3D print CAD (Computer Aided Designs) models in real life by using many types of filament. A filament meant here is a roll of a thermoplastic basically a material which can be heated easily and gets hardened on cooling instantly and provides strength. So if I talk about types of filament then we have 16 different types of it such as:

1. ABS Filament
2. PLA Filament
3. PET Filament
4. PETT Filament
5. Nylon Filament
6. PVA Filament
7. Sandstone Filament
8. Wood Filament
9. Metal Filament
10. HIPS Filament
11. Magnetic Iron Filament
12. Conductive Filament
13. Carbon Fibre Filament
14. TPE Filament
15. Glow in the Dark Filament
16. Amphora Filament

So I won’t be going into much detail about these filaments and let’s stick to the point whether 3D printing is really going to be a technology for tomorrow or not?

Just like the two sides of a coin 3D printers also have some advantages as well as some disadvantages. First of all 3D printing is not everyone’s job, 3D printing up to this date requires professionally trained people. It’s not as simple as conventional 2D printers where we give a command and within a few seconds we get a print on a paper. In 3D printing we need to take care a lot of things such as the support points of bed should be levelled, to check nozzle temperature according to the material used, paying attention to printer adjustment and maintenance, properties and nature of filament used, using support over hangings and many more. Then while printing one can face problems like the layer of material is not diffusing properly with each other, quality of parts printed and then cost of pre and post processing.

Well apart from these issues I personally love 3D printing and there are many reasons for it. 3D printing offers you rapid prototyping. There is no limit to 3D print objects that means it requires you to have imagination to print objects i.e. imagination is your limit! 3D printing also provides you faster production of your components than conventional manufacturing including injection moulds and subtractive production.  From a prototype to a final product, 3D printing tests ideas and designs quickly. Faster design and prototype production means more time to iterate the prototype and find product market fit before competitors. 3D printing production takes just hours. Conversely, testing ideas and designs with conventional manufacturing methods can take up days, if not several weeks.

3D printing provides better quality products as traditional manufacturing methods can easily result in poor designs, and therefore poor quality prototypes. 3D printing allows the step-by-step assembly of the object, which guarantees enhanced designs and eventually better quality objects. Apart from this it also enables you to customize your product according to your needs and taste; you can even create your own signature products!

However for common people it’s still out of reach. From designing to 3D printing one requires a skilled labour to do that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. First issue comes out to be is the designing part. Trust me it’s not so easy to design even a smallest object in CAD software. If somehow we have a design still we can’t 3D print objects as we do in our 2D printers. Selection of filament is also a very important task and not much variety of filaments are available with us.

Moreover if we talk about its cost then whole 3D printing machine is very costly and above that filament also costs a lot and then it requires a lot of effort to prepare design and 3D print them. Overall it’s very costly and requires a lot of skills. However apart from this 3D printing can contribute towards sustainable and ecofriendly future because some of the filaments used here are completely bio-degradable and are made from solid wastes. Moreover its material is completely re-usable.

So i believe that yes 3D printing a technology for the future but still many more advancements have to be done in this field. Many big players are already there advancing technology and stretching its limit still there is a lot more journey and challenges which we need to tackle. We can even think of living in a 3D printed house somewhere in future!