Illinois Science Olympiad is in Running for Pepsi Grant!

[4science]

Illinois Science Olympiad is in the running for a $50,000 Pepsi Refresh grant!

Vote twice a day--every day--in December.

Vote by texting the message 104513 to 73774

Vote on the website http://www.refresheverything.com/iso

EVERYONE 13 and older can vote! Please share with everyone you know!!

[zyzzyva980]

Isn't this the same thing andrewwski's school is running for?

[4science]

Not sure. Do you have a link? there are 10 winners at each $ level--except only 2 at $250,000.

[andrewwski]

We gave up on Pepsi Refresh. You pretty much can't win without cheating.

[brobo]

We gave up on Pepsi Refresh. You pretty much can't win without cheating.

I'm sorry andrewwski... I'm sure that you'll find another grant program

[4science]

I'm still going to vote. It would be totally awesome to see SO get something like this. I've got it set up on my phone as a text and then click through on FB. Still a bit of work to vote on the site. All of that takes less than a minute. It's worth a shot.

[edisoncomets]

YEAHHHH i live in illinois.

[lllazar]

I don't understand why it's so important to get laptops in an elementary school in an already rich sub division of chicago, when something like this could benefit the entire state. Or why there are about 9 things in the top 10 about animal shelters. I love puppies as much as the next person, but really?

And Andrew (i hope thats ur name), i understand ur feelings, i suppose it is easier for a whole state of schools vs just one, although most of them do cheat (i mean most of the programs vying for the grant).

[andrewwski]

I wouldn't say it's easier for a group of schools necessarily. We have about 30,000 students plus thousands of faculty and staff on our campus, plus a large network of professional contacts and alumni. The biggest challenge was reaching out to as many people as possible, but I feel we made a good effort.

I talked to numerous people that were also competing, and the general feeling seems to be that you can't win fairly. Even if you can get into the top 40 or 50, the difference between the top 10 and top 40 seems huge. There's no way to compete with someone running batch scripts that submit votes 20 times per minute, from multiple machines.

Pepsi claims that they log IP addresses and eliminate suspicious votes, but from everything I can find, it seems to be very inconsistent. I've seen someone climb from 25th to 4th overnight, and someone drop from 3rd to 13th.

One of my professors won during the first month, when there was no captcha and proxy voting was allowed. It would have been easy then.

There are some weird ideas in there, and the winners are not those with the best ideas, rather those who can manipulate the system the best. Don't underestimate the power of alliances. Especially when people are batch voting.