blprnt's Comments

blprnt.blg : Finding Perspective: Haiti Earthquake Aid in Avatar Minutes

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:49:26 +0000

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.

blprnt.blg : Finding Perspective: Haiti Earthquake Aid in Avatar Minutes

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 22:56:05 +0000

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

blprnt.blg : Finding Perspective: Haiti Earthquake Aid in Avatar Minutes

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:17:57 +0000

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.

blprnt.blg : Finding Perspective: Haiti Earthquake Aid in Avatar Minutes

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:15:12 +0000

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.

blprnt.blg : Finding Perspective: Haiti Earthquake Aid in Avatar Minutes

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:00:06 +0000

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.

blprnt.blg : Finding Perspective: Haiti Earthquake Aid in Avatar Minutes

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:51:03 +0000

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

blprnt.blg : Finding Perspective: Haiti Earthquake Aid in Avatar Minutes

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:49:04 +0000

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.

blprnt.blg : Finding Perspective: Haiti Earthquake Aid in Avatar Minutes

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:48:03 +0000

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.

blprnt.blg : Finding Perspective: Haiti Earthquake Aid in Avatar Minutes

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:46:03 +0000

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.

blprnt.blg : Processing, JSON & The New York Times

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 03:43:05 +0000

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

blprnt.blg : Processing, JSON & The New York Times

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 03:30:04 +0000

Hi,

The second }; at the bottom of the sketch is a typo - I've removed it from the post. Try it without that?

-Jer

blprnt.blg : Quick Tutorial: Twitter & Processing

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 03:14:10 +0000

Sorry for the late response. This is strange - have yo had any luck finding a fix?

blprnt.blg : GoodMorning!

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 03:12:54 +0000

Good idea! I should have done this - I suppose now I'll have to wait until 2011!

blprnt.blg : 7 Days of Source Day #1: GoodMorning!

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 03:12:26 +0000

Hi Jörn - rate limiting is always going to be a problem. At any given time, you can retrieve the 1500 latest results - but you can only make that request once an hour. That's why, in this case, I had to build a harvesting application that runs for 24 hours and gathers data. Once we have that data, we can use some pretty hacky HTML scraping to get the locations from users' twitter home pages and then use MetaCarta to get the lat/lon data.

blprnt.blg : 7 Days of Source Day #4 - BC Budget Visualization Tool

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 02:58:05 +0000

Hi,

This is the standard Processing video library - you should be able to import it from the menu bar: Sketch > Import Library ... > Video

Cheers,

-Jer

blprnt.blg : Processing, JSON & The New York Times

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 02:57:04 +0000

Hi Jilly,

At which step in the tutorial does your code stop working?

If you have just this:

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

String apiKey = �1af81d#######################:##:########�;

void setup() {

};

void draw() {

};

Does the your sketch run?

Let me know - then we can take it from there!!

-Jer

blprnt.blg : Tokyo | Cairo: Comparing Obama's Foreign Policy Speeches

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 23:56:07 +0000

Hi Andrew,

The horizontal positions are calculated by averaging the weights of the words in each article. So, yes, there is some adjustment for the size of the article.

The vertical positions are an average of all of the location of the word in the articles - I calculate the average location for each word in each text then average the two to get the overall position.

When a word is focused, you see the 'cords' showing theoccurrenceof the words in each text. These cords show up lighter when no individual word is focused. My intent with these 'bundles' was to give some general idea of where each word occurs in the texts - this information can easily be lost when all of the averaging is done.

Does that make sense?

-Jer

blprnt.blg : Tokyo | Cairo: Comparing Obama's Foreign Policy Speeches

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:27:24 +0000

Hi John, I hadn't considered the legal world when I built his but of course I can see how it might be useful! If there are any specific features that you think would be useful, let me know.

blprnt.blg : Tokyo | Cairo: Comparing Obama's Foreign Policy Speeches

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:25:40 +0000

Hi John, Yes, it will be released soon with an open source license. Typically my only request is that if the code gets used there is an attribution when the work is published.

blprnt.blg : 7 Days of Source Day #4 - BC Budget Visualization Tool

Mon, 2 Nov 2009 18:53:05 +0000

Hi Akash,

You can remove the import line:

//FIRST, IMPORT SOME LIBRARIES ----------------------------
import processing.video.*;

//import toxi.util.datatypes.*; << remove or comment out this line
import toxi.math.noise.*;
import toxi.math.waves.*;
import toxi.geom.*;
import toxi.math.*;
import toxi.math.conversion.*;
import toxi.geom.util.*;

It's actually not used in the sketch. I'll post up a revised version later today.

Cheers,

-Jer