Tuesday, May 26, 2009

BF Gets it Done Photo Contest

It seem that some organizers of photo contests looks so lowly of photographers and perhaps looks at them as if they're a bunch of kids wanting some attention - only to win an unidentified gadget package and some limited edition pink urinal pen holders! Read the mechanics below and you be the judge..

Team Bayani Fernando invites all professional and amateur photographers to join the BF GETS IT DONE Photo Contest!

Simply capture a photo from anywhere in the Philippines where Chairman Bayani Fernando was able to improve the situation of that area to join.

Contest Mechanics:

1. Participants must log on & register at www.bayanifernando.com.ph to join.

2. Photos MUST be taken from any area of the Philippines where a Bayani Fernando/MMDA project has been or is being implemented.

3. Duration of contest is from May 12, 2009 – May June 12, 2009.

4. Deadline for submission of entries is June 12, 2009.

5. All entries must be submitted with a title and an explanation on how the photo embodies “BF Gets it Done!”

6. A participant may submit multiple entries.

7. All entries submitted shall be considered property of www.bayanifernando.com.ph and may be used for future Bayani Fernando projects/campaigns.

8. By joining the contest, the photograph, in its entirety, must be a single work of original material taken by the participants. The entrant acknowledges, and warrants that the submitted photograph is an original work created solely by the entrant, that the photograph does not infringe on the copyrights, trademarks, moral rights and/or rights of privacy/publicity or intellectual property rights of any person or entity, and that no other party has any right to claim or interest in the photograph.

9. Entry Specifications:
a. Photo entry must have the following characteristics:
i. 800x600 pixels, 72 Dpi, JPEG format.
b. The text must have the following characteristics:
i. Title: Max. 50 characters.
ii. Narrative: Max. 500 characters.
c. Filenames of entries for submission must be in the following format:
i. Filename format: last name.first name.date of submission in MMDDYY format (Ex. DelaCruz.Juan.050109)

10. Criteria for Judging:
25% - Relevance to theme
25% - Composition / Impact
25% - Technical Excellence
25% - Creativity
100% - TOTAL

Participants are granted:
1. The opportunity to compete for the gadget package grand prize donated by the friends of the Chairman!
2. To receive a limited edition MMDA Urinal penholder. (For Top 10 Entries.)
3. The right to have their name appear next to the photo, in the case of publication.
4. The chance to take part in any exhibition and have the photos published in a final photo book.

Tagalog and English are the official languages of the initiative in terms of rules and regulations.

Note: You need to register in order to read/download the contest mechanics.

Saturday, May 2, 2009

Copyright? What Copyright?

Gloved and hunched over scanners, librarians from some of the biggest libraries in the world have spent the last five years digitising each and every page of millions of books — five million of them still under copyright.

They did it to democratise information, they said, to preserve the corpus of human knowledge for generations to come. They did it without permission from the copyright holders.

They did it for Google. Or, more specifically, for the Google Books Library Project, a virtual database containing the scanned pages of millions of the world's books.

Originally, back in 2004, the partnership between Google and America's great libraries was conceived to digitise the 15 per cent of library books that were in the public domain — golden oldies like Wuthering Heights and David Copperfield. In America (and Australia, thanks to the Fair Trade Agreement), a book enters the public domain 70 years after the author's death (in Australia it used to be 50), or if it was published prior to 1 January 1923.

That left 85 per cent of library books unscanned — 10 per cent of which are still in print and on bookstore shelves, and the remainder of which are "orphans" (books out of print but still in copyright). But because Google are uppity little nerds who consider the world as theirs to metatag, they decided to scan them all, regardless of legal status.

Arm-in-arm with librarians, Google declared they would have 15 million books digitised in under a decade. In other words, almost half of the 32 million books that humans have published.

Using the Elphel 323 — a digital camera that can scan 1000 pages per hour — librarians and Google began to scan the full texts of every book in five major university and public libraries: Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library. Google archived the entire text of each book, indexing it to be responsive to search requests. Users got a few lines of text as their search result — a "snippet" — which Google claimed was "fair use", the same way a review might quote a few lines of a film or book.

Continue reading at newmatilda.com

Relevant links:
A Photo Editor

AddThis