Pirelli Relativity Challenge 2005

The challenge

We have been contacted by the assistant to the Manager of Pirelli INTERNETional Award.

The Pirelli INTERNETional Award call for contributions to the diffusion of scientific and technological culture, with an overall budget prize of 135,000 Euros (about US$ 170,000). The deadline for submissions is midnight, December 31.

This year there is an extra 25,000 Euro award : the Pirelli Relativity Challenge, a special challenge honoring the centenary of the publication of the Special Relativity Theory.

Relativity Challenge

Overview

Submissions for this challenge should be multimedia presentations of up to 5 minutes in length. The deadline for PRC submissions is March 31, 2005. http://www.pirelliaward.com/einstein.html

Rules and Ideas

Rules

1. Submissions must be interactive multimedia presentations -in about five minutes- of Einstein’ Special Relativity Theory (hereinafter referred to as the “Works”), for example, a .swf animation by means of Macromedia tools. The Pirelli Internetional Award Technical Committee is available for any clarification and advise.

I suggest that we submit the two articles plus a multimedia presentation of Wikipedia. We must discuss this with them beforehand. Anthere

2. Submissions must be sent by FTP or by an e-mail attachment before March 31, 2005 to the adresses the respective links.

3. The Jury will be formed by a reknown physicist, a famous scientific journalist, an unknown young student, a representative of industry, and a representative of the net economy.

4. The only award consists in a 25,000 Euro check (more than US $ 30,000), given to the winner in occasion of the Pirelli Internetional Award Ceremony, which will be held in Rome at mid 2005.

5. Pirelli & C. S.p.A. agrees that exclusive copyright of the Works shall remain the sole property of the authors (hereinafter referred to as “Authors”) at all times.

I guess this should not be a problem... Anthere

6. Subject to provision under item “5” above, the Authors grant to Pirelli International Award, through Pirelli & C. S.p.A, the unconditional right to publish, reproduce and distribute, in whole or part, for non commercial purposes, the Works through any media which Pirelli & C. S.p.A. deems fit. Such media may include newspaper, magazines, audio cassette, CD ROMs, DVDs, the world wide web (or other electronic forms of distributions).

Angela mentions that "unconditional" goes against the gfdl. We need to check whether the Pirelli people will agree with just the GNU FDL license.

7. In case of any inconsistency between provisions of these “Rules” and general provisions of “Pirelli International Award Rules”, provisions of these Rules shall prevail. It is further understood the provisions of “Pirelli International Award Rules” shall apply with reference to any matter which is not expressly governed by these Rules.

INTERNETional Award

Overview

There are 6 categories of awards; the only one which applies to us seems to be b) "for educational institutions", which comes with a 15,000 Euro prize. The best of the six winners gets an "overall best" award, which comes with an additional 10,000 Euros.

Applications should be done online http://www.pirelliaward.com/ch5_intro.html and work submited via FTP by December 31st, 2004.

The assistant indicated: If you decide to participate please let me know by mail who is in charge of admissibility of entries -- and we will answer any specific questions you might have, so as to maximize your chances of winning.

http://www.pirelliaward.com/ch5_faq.html

Rules and ideas

Submissions to the Pirelli INTERNETional Award must be:

a multimedia work
for the spread of scientific and technological culture
of maximum 150 Megabytes in size
in the English (and Italian) language

(The full text/image content of the current En/It 'pedias might be acceptable; better yet a specially made science & technology portal page, along with all articles in the span of the links from that page, pruned back to include only articles that exist in both En and It, with related content in other languages as well -- they appreciate multilinguality and a wide audience.)

Working on the Challenge

Articles concerned

I think it would be a mistake to include only the main article on SR and miss the subtopics and related topics. I've put a provisional list of articles from the English Wikipedia below.

On reflection, I've expanded the list to include some of the less-mathematical topics from GR. This is mainly for context, any discussion on SR will contain references to GR. -- Tim Starling 06:28, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Theoretical physics, non-mathematical (and italian equivalent):

Theoretical physics, mathematical (and italian equivalent):

Experimental physics (and italian equivalent):

w:Michelson-Morley experiment - w:it:Esperimento di Michelson-Morley
w:Kennedy-Thorndike experiment
A general article on experimental confirmation of relativity would be useful. This article could contain popular everyday effects of relativity, such as GPS correction and the fact that gold is yellow.

People (and italian equivalent):

Wikiquote:

q:en:Albert Einstein - q:it:Albert Einstein

plus an article with quotes on relativity

Wikisource:

Wikibooks:

b:en:General relativity
b:en:Wikiversity:Special Relativity (no longer just a copy of the Wikipedia article)
b:Modern Physics:Special Relativity:Contents (mostly copied from another free source)

Editors involved

References : http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ABar#Pirelli

w:it:Utente:Berto (merge of italian and english articles, final validation management)
user:Danny (freezing of final article displayed on meta, submission, and translation coordination of final article)
User:Snowdog (help in translation from en-it it-en)
Tim Starling (writing and reviewing articles)
Sj (translation coordination, it-en translation, merging it and en articles)

Working on the INTERNETional Award

We have a good chance of at least getting a certificate out of the contest by packaging and submitting a subset of existing en/it/fr/de/ja content. And we might get funds in the bargain.

If we want to forego flashy multimedia, and just stick to images and text, we could make a new sci/tech portal (which would be a useful test caes; we need portal pages for various subjects), pick out a subset of ~5,000 relevant articles, and pack them up into a download with their own search-enabled reader.

If we want to win for sure, we could create a downloadable wikireader and editor that lets you download a subset of WP content, view/search/edit it locally, but still request updates or submit edits to WP. There is already a fledgling OS project to get something like this working... +sj+ 00:04, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Does you folk know that zee deadline is less than a month away ? ? ?

first (and yet uncomplete) draft of the main article in italian