Barclays Media Report

BM Index with R

Some Big Mac plots from R:

Sovereign Debt Southern Africa

Big Mac Interactive

Big Mac Index for Southern African countries-STATIC

DATA ART

There is a trend to make data journalism more easy. No spreadsheets or difficult statistics or coding, but immediately producing impressive visualizations. Read more: https://d3-media.blogspot.com/2018/07/new-steps-in-data-journalism.html  .
I believe we have arrived at the logical end of this development: turn your data in work of art. Give it a try at: https://morph.graphics/. Difficult? No of course not but  the intro by Alberto Cairo is very nice. Here is an example of my art work, using data about life expectancy and GDP per capita from Sub-Sahara countries. Impressive. Nice start for a powerpoint ppt, but don't  ask what it means.

Google Data: Traveling back in Time

Discussing how to control the Internet and the big data companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook is import. https://d3-media.blogspot.com/2018/07/take-back-control-over-internet.html However finding out what these companies know about you is an other question. This is about YOUR data and thus on a personal level. I found out that it is pretty scary how much Google for examples knows about the details of my whereabouts.

First I downloaded my Google data using Take Out: https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout. Unzipped the file was 363 GB. To show the amount of detail and to produce an interesting visualization I took out the location history file, 273 MB. The file is in JSON. There is in interesting site that visualize your location history in a heat map - https://locationhistoryvisualizer.com/heatmap/ , and by zooming in you get much details.
Here is the result of an investigation of the NYTimes about apps using location info:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/location-data-privacy-apps.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage 

Last year I worked for a month at Cape Town, the three pictures below zoom in step by step, and in the end I can find the restaurant at Bree Straat where I had lunch last year. This time traveling.

NOW it is time to scrutinize all my data at Google and Facebook!