I am publishing my emails to Rosemary Jones at Greater Good, regarding the disputed contest results. I spent over two hours on the phone with her on Dec. 29 explaining why we believe the contest results are incorrect. I thought I had made some progress and that she would review the results as they were posted day by day. Her email reply to me (not printed because I do not have her permission) made it clear that she would continue to parrot the "party line" that BART got more votes than we did -- with no explanation as to HOW that might have so miraculously occurred.
We did FINALLY just receive their $1000 check for being a weekly "high vote" getter. I have included my emails to her and Liz at Petfinder regarding the elusive check.
Unless Greater Good can supply some actual figures to support their contention, I will always believe that it was statistically impossible for Basenji Rescue to get 2.42% in a single day!
I also do not anticipate that we will ever have an adequate response or explanation from Greater Good or Petfinder. I think this entire episode was a disgrace.
Should any of you have any final words for them, their email addresses are: rosemary@greatergood.com, liz@petfinderfoundation.com, and lisa@petfinderfoundation.com. I don't plan to waste any more of my time on this useless endeavor, now that we finally have the $1000 check for weekly winner.
my email sent today to Rosemary Jones....
We finally received your erstwhile check. It was postmarked JAN 6! That is 3 DAYS after my last email to you (below), 8 DAYS after my phone conversation with you and Liz at Petfinder in which she said she would be sending it right out that very day. It is 15 DAYS after you told us the check was mailed on Dec. 22. And it is 24 DAYS after you told one of our friends that the check was mailed Dec. 13.
I think this speaks volumes about why so many of us have troulble believing you and trusting your word!
Your response to my presentation of the actual numbers during the contest (also below) is insultingly vague. The issue is not "inclusiveness". It is that WE WON first place in Texas but the prize was given to someone else.
You have yet to offer any cogent explanation other than "BART had more votes" and that we should simply take you at your word. You completely ignore the central point. As of Sunday morning, your own numbers showed us ahead by 2.42%
During the entire contest, the most movement in a single day was only .23%.
You would ask us to suspend intelligent thinking and just accept on blind faith that BART received 2.42% in a single day! That is 10 TIMES MORE than the best single day either of us posted during the contest!
I don't believe it. Our friends don't believe it. Anyone with a functioning brain will not believe it.
When a miscreant leaves DNA at the scene of a crime, the statistical likelihood that it belongs to the perp is calculated. Let's say it is 1 in 1,000,000 that he left the DNA. In empirical reality, it is possible that there was the 1,000,001st guy who left the DNA and not the perp. But it is not statistically likely. He goes to jail.
It is NOT STATISTICALLY LIKELY that any other group rounded up IN A SINGLE DAY 2.42% of the total votes cast! That is 10 TIMES more than the BEST day of the entire contest. That is 27 TIMES more than the average daily gain throughout the life of the contest.
Unless you can show on paper how the votes came in day-by-day, matching the numbers you were reporting on your website, and how many votes are alleged to have been gained by BART on the last day of the contest, there will always be the conviction that the results are wrong.
And the stories about when the check was mailed simply reinforce this conviction.
jay hellerich
In a message dated 1/3/2011 11:54:22 P.M. Central Standard Time, HELLERICH@aol.com writes:
For what it is worth, we have NEITHER check at this point.
We returned to Wharton last night, late. Went to P.O. Box this afternoon and no check -- not the old one, not the new one...
Checked mail box here at the farm, in case it was mailed to the physical address. No checks there either.
If a check was mailed on Dec 22, it most certainly should be here by now.
If a check was mailed to us on Dec. 29, I would think that four business days would be sufficient time for it to arrive, as well (subtracting Sat, a holiday, and Sunday).
The mailing address that appears in our website is P.O. Box 743, Wharton, TX 77488. I cannot imagine what other mailing address you would be using.
On 12/29/10 2:59 PM, HELLERICH@aol.com wrote:
we are out of town and will not return until monday, Jan 3... we can check the po box then... the confusion over the check was based on one of our supporters being told that the check had been mailed on Monday, Dec 13... since it was not actually mailed until Dec 22, it did not surprise me that it was not there before Christmas...
i do want to recap my conversation with you, rosemary, about the contest results so you will understand the outrage that Smiling Dog Farms supporters feel...
it is NOT that we "lost"... it is the belief that we did not lose, that we had the votes to remain on top in Texas and that statistically it was not possible for us to lose...
we all checked the contest results daily, as they were posted on the Greater Good website... by all, i mean not just ricky and me but countless supporters... the one thing i could count on every day was that i would have several emails telling me the day's statistics by the time i looked at the computer every day!
i wish that you had a way to pull back up every day's bar graphs, nationally and for Texas... i have incomplete results, but i think they will help you understand what we were all seeing daily: (from at least October 25 right up to December 19 we were never out of First Place in Texas... that is what should be noted... while they had days when they closed the gap, they NEVER took over 1st place... and since we cannot see raw votes, but only percentages, we can only speculate as to how many votes each had... what you can see is that even though one day they might do better and the next we might do better, their aggregate votes were NEVER more than us... EVER from Oct 25 forward...)
Date Smiling Dog Basenji Our Pct. Lead Daily Gain/(Loss)
10/25 2.28
10/26 2.43 .15
10/27 2.37 (.06)
10/28 2.29 (.08)
10/29 2.23 (.06)
10/31 2.22 (.01)
11/1 15.52 13.37 2.15 (.07)
11/4 15.47 13.29 2.18 .03
15.30 13.26 2.04 (.14)
15.34 13.23 2.11 .07
15.40 13.20 2.20 .09
15.05 13.08 1.97 (.23)
14.93 13.04 1.89 (.08)
14.87 13.06 1.81 (.08)
14.61 12.97 1.64 (.17)
14.58 12.94 1.64 -----
14.61 12.90 1.71 .07
14.67 12.85 1.82 .11
14.82 12.86 1.96 .14
12/15 14.98 12.80 2.18 .22
12/16 15.09 12.76 2.33 .15
12/17 15.14 12.73 2.41 .08
12/18 15.13 12.71 2.42 .01
12/19 15.12 12.70 2.42 -----
Obviously, I do not have every day in here... on my yellow legal pad, these are my notes... if i go back through my blogs, it will have more data... but here is what is important...
1) At no time... on no day... between Oct 25 and Dec 19 did Basenji Rescue go ahead of us into first place... even if you said, "well you dont have all the days on your chart -- maybe they went ahead on one of the days you dont have tracked", the answer would be that i would have heard it before i ever opened the website that day from at least one of our supporters...
Furthermore, the numbers do not support that... you can see that we stayed between 15.52% of the Texas vote and 14.58%... Basenji stayed between 13.37% and 12.70%...
Their highest number is not greater than our lowest number...
So it is fair to say that from Oct 25 to Dec 19, Smiling Dog was No 1 in Texas and never relinquished that position to Basenji...
2) The single BIGGEST day for either Basenji or us was .23%.. not .50%, not .75% and certainly not as great as 1.00%... check the statistics above... .06 or .14 was the norm...
that is the statistics that were true for the entire contest... no one in Texas ever got 1.00% on a single day, much less 2.42%... that is why we find it impossible to believe that Basenji suddenly got over TEN TIMES the number of votes in a single day than had been reported in the entire contest up to that point!
it is statistically impossible...
here is what i mean... when they test DNA on an accused murdered, and the DNA test comes back with a certainty to within 1,000,000,000... it means that only one guy out of 1,000,000,000 could match this DNA...
now in all of reality, it is possible that it was another guy with that identical DNA... the 1,000,001st guy on the planet...
but the statistical model says that it is just not likely it was anyone else but the accused...
and for us, the numbers show that things moved by .01 or .14 or .23on the biggest single day of movement... to suggest that one group -- even on the last day when everyone is pulling out all the stops -- could garner 10 TIMES MORE votes than all the previous history just does not make sense to a reasonable person...
EITHER... someone in your computing department DOES have a relationship with Basenji and "created" a lot of votes to make them first....
OR... the votes were NEVER accurately reported on the Greater Good website from the start...
those are the only two possibilities in logic and probability... it is just simple math...
we did not drop 2.42% of the TOTAL VOTES in a single day...
think about that a minute... we are not even talking about Basenji betting 2.42% more votes on any given day... we are talking about them getting 2.42% of ALL THE VOTES CAST in the entire contest, from Sept to December 19! all the cumulative votes we had received up to Dec 19 left us 2.42% ahead... so they had to make up 2.42% of the cumulative vote from the entire contest!! Given the typical movement of .01 to .23 per day, it is just ridiculous to suggest that they managed to gain over 10 TIMES the typical vote registered on all the other days of the contest (and that 10 TIMES is based on the only one single day that got .23...
if you average the daily difference from my notes, that number drops to .09 and we are looking at Basenji getting 27 TIMES the average daily vote in a single day!
that is just not believeable...
that is the source of our outrage... i wish you could bring up the daily charts and graphs that we all used to arrive at these numbers... our team was watching them daily, using them as our guide to what was happening...
when your technical people say there was jockeying back and forth between Basenji and us, that may mean that on some days they did better and on some days we did better... that is reflected in my chart...
but the NEVER did enough better to take back first place.. we rode out the last month of the contest in 9th place nationally, and the last TWO MONTHS of the contest in 1st place in Texas...
their TOTAL vote never surpassed our from Oct 25 forward... and if it did, then your graphs and numbers that you presented were in error...
jay hellerich
979-559-1062
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