Vote from Any Country for ME/FM Charity to Win $20,000!

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by Sasha


Image by www.facebook.com/MEAwarenessPics


The first thing to say about this: you don’t need Facebook!

The second thing: you don’t have to be in Canada to vote!

The third thing... well, time to give you the details...

Nature’s Bounty, a long-established manufacturer of vitamins and food supplements, is running an online voting contest for Canadian charities. The National ME/FM Action Network has entered.

The Action Network is probably best-known internationally for spearheading the development of the Canadian Consensus Criteria.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of rigorous diagnostic criteria in this disease: we all owe the Action Network a debt for this contribution to diagnosis and research. The Network also hosted the 2011 IACFS/ME Conference in Ottawa. But as well as these international achievements, for the past twenty years the Action Network has supported patients through advocacy, education, information, and promoting research. It’s the main charity for the 750,000 people in Canada with ME or FM.

So it’s well worth supporting the Action Network in the contest. The top three winners will get $20,000, $10,000 and $5,000 respectively. Of the remaining charities, three will be chosen at random to each win $5,000. US dollars and Canadian dollars are worth the same: $20,000 is about £13,000 or 15,000 Euros. That would be a considerable boost to any national ME/FM charity.

Voting opens on Tuesday, 26 February, and continues with one vote allowed per day until Friday, 29 March.

At the time of writing, voting instructions have not appeared but if you go to the Nature's Bounty contest webpage, all should become clear on the day.

There’s a big push behind the Action Network for this contest: a team of supporters has already been posting widely on the net to drum up support. Let’s help them win.

Got any questions? We’ve got a thread for that! The competition looks straightforward but the first post in this thread will be updated with instructions and help if any problems emerge.

Have you heard about other contests? Many, many small prize contests are announced in local papers, on the radio, and so on. If you notice any, please message helen41 so that she and the fundraising team can look into them. Every dollar helps!

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I just voted and it counted it, so, yes, keep voting.

Sushi

 

Not sure when this actually ends, I think it is 3/30 and i just voted, or at least I think I did?! So lets keep voting!!

The Charities page says “Vote for your favourite charity between February 26th and March 29th, 2013”, yet it let me vote today (March 30th).

 

• REACH FOR THE RAINBOW ONTARIO 71801
• Alberta Animal Rescue Crew Society 67913
• MOUNTAINAIRE AVIAN RESCUE SOCIETY 29908
• NATIONAL ME/FM ACTION NETWORK 28427
• SALTHAVEN WILDLIFE REHABILITATION AND EDUCATION CENTRE INC.14935

Voted! Maybe they extended it a bit due to the site being down a bit yesterday.

 

Weird - I just voted too. It's 9am in the UK and 2am in Vancouver - I wonder if their tech person is in bed and hasn't switched it off!

• REACH FOR THE RAINBOW ONTARIO71804
• Alberta Animal Rescue Crew Society67958
• MOUNTAINAIRE AVIAN RESCUE SOCIETY29921
• NATIONAL ME/FM ACTION NETWORK28446
• SALTHAVEN WILDLIFE REHABILITATION AND EDUCATION CENTRE INC.14935

 

Still taking votes - hope they're not rejected!

 

The contest is now closed, results will be posted on April 24th.

 

the message says that now VOTES ARE BEING REVIEWED. So thats good, as it sounds like there will be a correction of the votes. lets hope we gain a place.

 

Huh, 1/3 = 33%, so if you drop more groups out, shouldn't the percentage increase and not decrease?

GG

Removing the votes of the winners on the first two rounds does increase the percentage chance very slightly, as I've mentioned a couple of times, but I think the effect would be very small and I still haven't figured out how you would calculate that.

But the 1/3 is based on a common error in probability: simply adding 1/9 + 1/9 + 1/9 is wrong. Instead you have to combine the probability of losing on the first draw with winning on the second, and losing on the first and second with winning on the third.

So, overall probability of winning is:

p(Win on 1st Round)
OR
p(Lose on 1st Round) AND p(Win on 2nd Round)
OR
p(Lose on 1st Round) AND p(Lose on 2nd Round) AND p(Win on 3rd Round).

Which equals:

1/9
+
8/9 * 1/9
+
8/9 * 8/9 * 1/9

As mentioned, the three fractions on the right of the above need to adjust very slightly (in our favour) based on the expectation of the number of votes removed from the hat when the 1st and 2nd rounds are won. But I think that will be a very small effect, adding 0.1 or so to the overall probability.

A couple of ways to help understand/persuade people of the fallacy of calculating this as 1/9 + 1/9 + 1/9.

1. What if there were 9 draws? If this method worked, then you would have a probability of 1, i.e. certain success. So clearly it doesn't work that way.

2. Calculate the probability of not winning any of the draws: disregarding the votes removed for the winners of the first two rounds, that would be 8/9 * 8/9 * 8/9 = 70.23%. So the probability of winning one of the draws is 1 - 0.723 = 29.77%.

As I said above, you can add a little to that 29.77% for the expected size of the votes removed from the first two winners, but I don't think that would take it much above 30%. I haven't yet worked out the best way to include that effect in the calculation, but I think it must be based on the known probability distribution of the votes for the remaining charities.

 

I think you just gave ma a headache!

GG