Disclaimer Many of my essays are quite old. They were, in effect, written by a person who no longer exists in that my views, beliefs, and overall philosophy have grown and evolved over the years. Consequently, if I were to write on the same topics again, the resulting essays might differ significantly from their current versions. Rather than edit my essays to remain contemporary with my views, I have chosen to preserve them as a record of my past inclinations and writing style. Thank you for understanding.

June 2012

Oatmeal Indiegogo Charity Drive Pledge Analysis

The following tables and plots exhibit a cursory analysis of the distribution of pledges made to the Oatmeal's Indiegogo BearLove Good. Cancer Bad. charity drive. In June 2012, Matthew Inman, creator and sick-minded imaginer of all things Oatmeal, raised $220,024 to be evenly divided between the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society. The sordid story underlying this event is best left to Matthew's own words, so I defer on that subject (but it's excellent reading and I highly recommend it). As soon as I realized how huge this pledge drive was going to be, I knew I wanted to get my hands on the data (big data, as it's called these days, is kinda my thing). I scraped as much data as I possibly could from Indiegogo's website and processed it as soon as the pledge drive ended. The results are shown below.

Note that since Indiegogo never anticipated that data-nuts such as myself would want to download data in such unmitigated hoards, their webserver was not able to fully process my requests and I could not retrieve the entire dataset. I implored with them for assistance, but their staff is quite small and they could not spare the man-hours to amend the problem. No hard feelings guys, thanks for trying. Consequently, the analysis shown below is performed on a subset of the total data, namely, the chronological last 5840 pledges out of 14,407 total (about 40% of the total pledges).



















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