To mark the United Nations' first-ever International Day of Democracy, the U.S. State Department launched a YouTube-based video contest on Monday.
Called the Democracy Video Challenge, the contest encourages the submission of three-minute videos that define the concept of democracy.
"The Democracy Video Challenge asks budding filmmakers, democracy advocates, and the general public to create video shorts that complete the phrase, 'Democracy is...'," the contest's official Web site explains. While they don't require entrants to be professional filmmakers, it's pretty clear that they're looking for something more high-end than sitting in front of your Webcam and waxing philosophical about Barack Obama.
Submissions will be accepted through January 31, and a jury will select semifinalists and then finalists. Seven winners, each one from a different global region, will be chosen by a public vote sometime in June. The winners will receive trips to New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles for screenings and meetings with film industry representatives and "democracy advocates."
There are very few rules: entrants must be 18 or older; the videos must be under three minutes long, "suitable for a general audience," comply with YouTube's terms of use, and either be in English or subtitled in English.
Partners in the contest include NBC Universal, the film schools at New York University and the University of Southern California, and the Directors Guild of America.
While knowing how to string together words puts food on my table, FreeRice.com is trying to let you use such powers for the good of others with their vocabulary-testing site. FreeRice will service up a quick little vocab quiz with a word and four answers. If you answer correctly, the service donates 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program to give away to impoverished or hunger stricken people. If you're wrong, it'll let you know what the correct answer was and give you a chance at a new word while ramping down the difficulty. As you continue to progress the site will keep track of your "level" by changing the difficulty of the words for every three you answer correctly, which ends up getting pretty tough once you get above level 40 or so. The site caps off at 50, although you can continue to play as much as you'd like.
The site manages to work through sponsorships, whose tiny ads you'll see below the testing area. Since launching in early October, the site has donated more than 1.5 billion grains of rice, which it keeps a daily tally of here.
As your progress, the rice bowl gets filled with your smartness. And eventually goes into other people's bellies.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
- prev
- 1
- next
