Moves: An Year's Worth of Data

In closing my Moves review last year, I noted the following:

“The main drawbacks of the phone is that there are no accounts created while using the app so there is no way to transfer the data. This data is all stored on your phone’s device and there is no option for getting it in a simplified manner.”
— http://chiiramaina.com/blog/moves-review

Please note that this was in reference to the Android version of the app. It had just come off from the beta stage (they came off from beta on 19th September 2013 and the review was written on 7th October 2013).

Now the app is part of the Facebook conglomerate and they have cleaned up pretty well. Accounts were introduced and with that came the opportunity to download any data that you might have on the service. The only thing missing on the Android app that the iPhone app has? Calorie counter.

I decided to have a review of data worth 365 days. I had joined the service on 8th July 2013 so 8th July 2013 would have been a perfect cutoff date for the data. But there was a trip coming up so that threw me off-balance.

Earlier this year is when I managed to download the data and have been going through it since then.

This is not an exhaustive analysis of this data but it offers a few insights.

The data comes in a format of your own choosing between csv, geojson, georss, gpx, ical, kml and kml_ge. They are normally in a zip file and is inclusive of a .pdf file titled About Moves Data Export Formats.

I grabbed the csv file and in it you get five folders; daily, monthly, weekly, yearly and full. Each of those files are further files as follows:

  1. Activities - Groups the four activities (walking, running, cycling and transport) as they happened
  2. Places - Looks at all the places that you have visited as tracked by Moves
  3. Storyline - A storyline of the particular period of time that you are looking at
  4. Summary - An overall summary of the time period you chose

Let us then dive into it.

First up is the general overview of everything that has been tracked.

Activity Duration (Minutes) Duration (Hours) Distance (km) Steps
Walking 24,177 403 1,595.52 2,314,200
Transport 39,154 653 10,869.57 0
Cycling 704 12 182.11 0
Running 202 3 33.92 30,960

The interesting part to those that don't know is that I did cycle and run at some point in time. I had ballooned by a few kilograms and felt that it would be good if I took up some physical exercises to keep the body in check. I bought a bike a few weeks after I went biking with friends at The Hell's Gate  and started cycling.

The running was not hard to start off on. Maintaining it was tough as seen by the below graphs.

The graphs are grouped into three based on Duration, Distance and Steps.

With air travel, you can really see the time taken while travelling in July was lower than even in some months that I was on the ground (crude joke. I know). The flight was four hours long of which I spent about three of them asleep. The distance is however something else.

My running steps are way lower than my walking steps. When I would run, it was at most a 35-minute run. I wish I had access to the Nike+ data then I could try and visualize the same though initial tests through looking at the two apps confirm that the data is (almost?) the same. I would put a 98% confidence interval on it when compared against the two.

Below is the average distribution of steps taken by the day.

Average is 358.36 steps a day.

Average is 358.36 steps a day.

Below is an average distance in kilometres covered in a day.

Average is 1.88 km per day.

Average is 1.88 km per day.

9th and 19th of the month are pushed higher because in the month of July I went to South Africa for training. I went on 9th July 2014 and got back on the 19th of July 2014. The distance between Nairobi and Johannesburg by air is 1,818.71 miles (2,926 km). This is what skews the data that much. Something that I also noticed is that I travelled to Ruiru quite a lot around the 9th of most months.

Excluding the dates of 9th and 19th July 2014, puts things in a bit more normal perspective.

Average drops to 1.14 km per day.

Average drops to 1.14 km per day.

And below is the average walking distance by day.

Always thought I would walk about three to four kilometres per day. The average is a measly 0.32 km per day.

Always thought I would walk about three to four kilometres per day. The average is a measly 0.32 km per day.

As I said earlier on, the data is not conclusive. There is still more that I can look into it since I have only looked at the activities summary in this example. If I get anything more interesting, I will add onto it here.

There was an earthquake in Napa Valley in America. It was a 6.0 on the Richter Scale. The surprising news (at least surprising to me) came in after Jawbone, the wearable devices maker, released a graphic showing the effect of the earthquake on the sleep patterns of the residents.

As more and more data is "released" into our devices and the hands of non-medical personal, it is important that we know what it is used for. If Jawbone had told the users of their devices that the data can be used in a particular manner, then that is fine. If they had not been informed, then it creates a moral (and possibly legal) issue.  And there was outcry when Moves changed their Privacy Policy after acquisition by Facebook to say that they can share data with other parties. Luckily, I haven't seen any change in the way the data is being used.

I believe that one's data should always be their own and no one can use it in any other way. It is a disappointment that Nike+ does not allow one to download their data.

A Double Review

Walking into a duty-free shop is either an act of last-minute shopping or spending the last of your vacation money. But I had neither on my mind when I walked into one of O.R. Tambo's duty free shops. I was looking for chocolates for my colleagues back at the office. And then I bumped into the bookshelves clearly labelled "South African Authors" & "Others." Surprising that they had Chimamanda Ngozi-Adichie under the South African Authors. Taking the glory where they have not sown any?

The bookshelves changed my mission. It now read as get-two-books. I ended up picking three books; Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns (it is actually And The Mountains Echoed), Zakes Mda's Black Diamond and Zukiswa Wanner's London Cape Town Jo'Burg. I had read Khaled Hosseini before in The Kite Runner.

I would summarise A Thousand Splendid Suns (see above) with the tweet below.

It would be my first time that I would revel in the works of Zakes Mda and Zukiswa Wanner.

BLACK DIAMOND

Only Jeffrey Archer is allowed to start a book with a courtroom scene. Or that is what I thought. Black Diamond starts with the sentencing of the Visagie brothers on charges of pimping/prostitution and running a brothel. They are set to appear before Magistrate Kristin Uys. The prosecutor bungles the case which means that Kristin has to let Shortie and Stevo Visagie go scot-free, a decision which pains her a great deal. She has made it her life mission to crack down on prostitution as she sits at the Roodepoort Magistrate's Court. Stevo, with his characteristic quick tongue, blurts out something which angers Magistrate Kristin who sends him to jail for six months.

Opposite the court, is VIP Protection Services where Don Mateza is in the office wondering whether he will be promoted to CEO once his boss retires. Don, AKA Comrade AK Bazooka, happens to be a former freedom fighter. He faced life in the bush but on coming back to South Africa, the Rainbow Nation, he has nothing to fall back on. His girlfriend, Tumi, is a former model who is currently running her own modelling agency. She is full of ambition for two, herself and Don. She believes that Don is not supposed to be living the life that he leads but he should be up there with the rest of the new businessmen and politicians. Her main aim is to transform her boyfriend in to a Black Diamond.

Stevo, in the meantime, has threatened Kristin and is co-ordinating "attacks" on her from behind the bars at Diepskloof Prison. The Chief Magistrate at Roodespoort hires the services of VIP Protection Services to protect Magistrate Uys. They have no option but to send Don to protect her. The only catch is that he must sleep at Kristin's house.

LONDON CAPE TOWN JO'BURG

In this book that is named after three cities, the opening scene is a suicide. A sad scene because it is the death of a 13 year old boy. Or rather it is the death of what would have been a 13-year old boy. His family, dad Martin O'Malley and mom Germaine Spencer, are trying to come to terms with the death.

The book follows the paths of Martin O'Malley, a South African born in London and raised by an Irish stepfather, and Germaine Spencer, a British lady, through their marriage and subsequent settling in Martin's country of 'origin' (Origin here being the nationality that Martin chooses to identify with). Martin bears the unusual surname since he does not know who his biological father is and he has been raised by an Irish gentleman who married his mother. He has a stepbrother (bra as he likes to call him) from his step-father's & mother's marriage, Liam Comrade Swart Mokoena.

The first part of the book is about how Martin and Germaine meet up together with their marriage. It also offers us a glimpse of life for Martin being a black man in London yet there is tension back at home before apartheid is abolished. A shot gun wedding is what happens when he falls in love with Germaine Spencer, the feminist. Germaine had said that she would never get married but after she met Martin, it all changes.

Martin comes back a married man and a son, Zuko Spencer-O'Malley, yet he has a degree from the London School of Economics. Coming in after the Rainbow Nation has been birthed, he is sure to head places. He starts off as a junior investment manager at an investment firm in Cape Town. Germaine, a ceramist, takes her craft to the women in Cape Town's townships and her craft helps them a lot.

With time, Martin becomes bored of his job in Cape Town and the family decides to move to Jo'burg. Martin has been tamped by Comrade Swart to be the CEO of Mokoena Holdings, a BEE company that is owned by Liam. This makes sure that Liam is closer to his nephew, Zuko, with whom they have a really tight bond. A bond that leads to the final climax of the book.

Both books look at the South Africa that not many people will identify with. They look at a South Africa that is just coming from one of the worst periods of human history and leading into a future that is supposed to glorious. While Zakes Mda looks at the society through the eyes of Don and Tumi, Zukiswa Wanner looks at the society through the eyes of all of her characters. In Black Diamond, Tumi wants her man to be the man who is on the rise because it is part of whom he is. After all, he is a former freedom fighter and all the former freedom fighters are now in politics and business. Tumi will even introduce him to these barons so that he can also strike it rich. Don, on the other hand, wants for it to come to him naturally. He knows that he has to work hard for it to happen and that is why he is VIP Protection Services' most treasured employee. He is usually tasked with guarding the high and mighty.

In London Cape Town Joburg, Martin O'Malley is a man who has been on the rise because of his degree. But is that just enough to see him succeed in this country where he is recognised as an O'Malley and not a Mokoena? His brother, Liam "Comrade Swart" assures him that he can but it is because the whites at the investment firm, "...want what you can bring to the table by being a black man." In the two books, it is assumed that the black man is only in business if he can be able to help the white man access power and economic privileges.

BEE (Black Economic Empowerment), South Africa's version of affirmative action, plays a huge role in this. Tumi and her friends try to start one of the consortium that is bidding for the rights for a private television station, only to see it snatched from under their noses. Mokoena Holdings is primarily where it is because of BEE. While hailed as an answer to the economic disparity between the blacks and the whites, BEE has been overtaken by the politicians and their cronies as a way to self-enrich. This is the underpinning of the two books.

As in any society that has come out of minority rule, there are always racial tensions that are simmering. Martin on getting back to South Africa is roughed up by the Immigration officer who does not understand why an O'Malley would claim to be Xhosa. This is despite the fact that he speaks Zulu and isiXhosa as fluently as possible. When Germaine mentions it to Liam, he retorts, "That is what those people do." "And who are those people?", Germaine asks. "The whites," Liam answers back. Never mind the fact that the Immigration officer was a black man.

Kristin Uys, still lives in the days of Afrikaner pride and does not believe why she should be sharing a house with a black man. She sees that the only good she can do is by walking to the park every Saturday and serving the homeless people food. She will not mingle with them but only watch from a distance. In this same group of people is an Afrikaans man who is now homeless but will rather blame the black people for his misfortunes by saying that they stole jobs. The black people are also asking the same question to him instead of all of them figuring out how they can move away from the situation that they are in.

Unlike Zakes Mda, Zukiswa tackles politics in South Africa by looking at the whole range of presidents after Mandela. Thabo Mbeki remains to be seen as aloof yet the intellectual while Kgalema Motlanthe is the placeholder before mshololozi Jacob Zuma takes over. Liam is a politician who is completely dyed in the ANC wool and is always trying to get Martin and Germaine to change including the very last day of elections at the queue into the polling station. The surprise comes where only Zuko and his other classmate are the only people who can pronounce Kgalema Motlanthe's name (spellcheck saved my spelling of his name).

Both books are a lovely read with Black Diamond coming across as the more comic of the two. Zakes Mda travels between the townships, especially Alexandra, and Johannesburg's suburbs as our characters navigate these two worlds. In each of the places, there is a fair share of laughter and tears. It tends to come off a bit predictable especially after Don is no longer with Tumi. In London Cape Town Joburg, we are mainly in the suburbs but one can recognise the struggles that they all face. Opening with a suicide lends the book a really dark outlook but all this is thrown away when we are transported to London and we meet Martin. The ending is a shocker and one has to be able to endure it all. But you already know how it ends.

Zakes Mda, legally Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda, is a South African novelist, poet and playwright. He has won major South African and British literary awards for his novels and plays. He is also an artist. He can be followed on Twitter as @zakesmda.

Zukiswa Wanner was born in Zambia to a South African father and a Zimbabwean mother. Her debut novel, The Madams, published in November 2006, dealt with racial role reversals in post-apartheid South Africa. In addition to writing fiction, Zukiswa has also contributed essays to Oprah, Elle and Juice magazines, and literary reviews and essays to Afropolitan and Sunday Independent, as well as the international online journal, African Writing. She blogs at zukiswawanner.wordpress.com.

Untitl3d

It was an age of restricted love. When men could hold hands together in public and the no one batted an eyelid when women kissed. It was a brilliant time to be a young adult.

Free of any cares and eager to take on the world. Or so, you thought. But underneath you, the sands of stability were shifting. One grain at a time. One tiny speck dislodged only to be replaced by air. You could smell the revolution from the way everything was absorbed by the shifting sand.

Your phones beeped with the stupid jokes. The newspapers were colourful with language. The land was green and lush. The only thing that was missing was the humanity. And without the humanity, the sands started shifting faster.

You could tell that some had lost the humanity in them by looking at their eyes while some hid it behind huge sunglasses. Of course, they looked fashionable while they did it but you could not tell their motives.

You came to learn of how they hid it because you are the only surviving member of the species after they had massacred each other. You also did your fair share of killing at which point you had generalised it as "Survival for The Fittest." Now the land is all shades of grey and brown. Nary a soul to be seen. Unless those from outer space are waiting for when you will sleep and they can land.