Hi Laurent,

Thanks for your considered response. As I've said before, this visualization was put together before the Canadian government had announced additional funding. I suspect the same may be the case for other countries on the list. I imagine the data set that I used will be updated with new figured shortly - when that happens, I'll update my figures.

I'm starting to sound like a broken record here, but the point wasn't really to suggest that some countries weren't 'pulling their own weight'. Instead I wanted to put the numbers into some kind of real framework that I could understand.

Let's ignore the $5.5 million dollar figure for Canada and choose some hugely larger figure for the sake of discussion. Let's estimate high and say the figure ends up being $140M. I am only going to talk about government aid, not individual donations. What does $140M mean? As you've said - and I'll use your effective capitalization for emphasis - this is a FORTUNE.

It's several thousand times more than I make in a year.

It's 16,470,588 tickets to Avatar.

It's about 4% of Canada's annual foreign aid budget.

It's 8% of what Vancouver is spending on 2 weeks of Olympic games.

As you can see, the definition of a FORTUNE can change when we put it into different frameworks.

You know, while I'm here pissing off rampant Canadian nationalists, let's take a closer look at that foreign aid statistic. 3.45B is about 0.24% of Canada's GDP. Compare that to the Danes, who spend 0.83% of their GDP on aid (up this year from 0.82%, despite a record forecast deficit), or to the Swedes who spend about 0.92%.

Canadians like to believe that we are a shining example of global citizenry, but largely this is an artifact of the pre-Mulroney governments of the 1970s and 1980s. The Center for Glocal Development ranked Canada 11th in their Commitment to Development Index from 2009, behind countries like Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Ireland, Spain, and Australia (http://www.cgdev.org/section/initiatives/_active/...

This index includes factors like aid, trade, investment, and migration. As the report notes, our migration levels of unskilled immigrants from developing countries has changed very little since the 1980s (we rank 11th on the list for migration).

Like many other Canadians I grew up feeling proud about my country and about our role in the world. Unfortunately, the more I look into the actual figures, I realize that we have in many ways failed to maintain these ideals in the last 30 years.

Yes. This visualization is only looking at government aid. I think that's clear when I say 'Canada' and not 'Canadians'.

Thanks for the exhaustive copy/paste.

Like I've said before, the point wasn't to bolster any given country for donating more or to chastise any country for donating less. I simply wanted to put the numbers into some kind of perspective.

As I've also said before, I'll update the figures as the Guardian dataset is changed.

Hi - Avatar is 162 minutes long. The average ticket price in the US for the movie is $8.50. So, an 'avatar minute' is worth about 5.25 cents.

I take the country's total aid amount and divide it by population to get a per-capita amount. Then I divide that by 5.25 to get the number of 'avatar minutes'.

I hope that makes sense.

Hi Antoine,

I am using these figures:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AjuKrzV2y... />

Per capita aid amounts are listed in that table. One of the nice things about the Guardian data sets is that they are typically updated as information becomes available. I will definitely be updating the figures in my post where it seems important.

Hi Chris,

I haven't gained the ability to look into the future yet (though I'm working on it) so this visualization was built from currently available data. I will happily update the project as new numbers become available.

Details on sources for the numbers can be found in the original Guardian data set linked to in the post.

-Jer

Yes - my point here was not to bolster one country over another but instead to put the numbers into perspective. Governments can sometimes benefit from the fact that the average citizen still things a million dollars is a lot of money.

All of the countries includes on the Guardian list add up to about 200 Avatar minutes when their per-capita values are summed. So, yes - about one and a quarter full films.

France wasn't included in the original data set, but has been added since.

Per capita aid by France is about $0.23, which puts it in line with New Zealand at about 4 minutes of Avatar.

In your comments the baseURL is coming in strange.

It should read:

String baseURL = "http://api.nytimes.com/svc/search/v1/article";

If that is all still working, I'd start from the beginning and see which of the lines (there aren't very many) are causing the problem.

ie. start with this:

import org.json.*;

Test it. If that works, then:

import org.json.*;
String baseURL = "http://api.nytimes.com/svc/search/v1/article";

If that works...:

import org.json.*;
String baseURL = "http://api.nytimes.com/svc/search/v1/article";

String apiKey = “820151880ac5d2227033d9d1a48451cf:13:34125204”;

Then add the void() and setup() enclosures.

-Jer