International Herald Tribute:

On a talk show last autumn, a prominent political analyst named Mikhail Delyagin offered some tart words about Vladimir Putin. When the program was televised, Delyagin was not.

His remarks were cut and he was digitally erased from the show, like a disgraced comrade airbrushed from an old Soviet photo. (The technicians may have worked a bit hastily; they left his disembodied legs in one shot.)

Delyagin, it turned out, has for some time resided on the so-called stop list, a roster of political opponents and other critics of the government who have been barred from television news and political talk shows by the Kremlin.

The stop list is, as Delyagin put it, “an excellent way to stifle dissent.”

More:

And it is not just politicians. Televizor, a rock group whose name means television set, had its booking on a St. Petersburg television station canceled in April, after its members took part in an Other Russia demonstration.

When some actors cracked a few mild jokes about Putin and Medvedev at Russia’s equivalent of the Academy Awards in March, they were expunged from the telecast.

Political humor in general has been exiled from television here. One of the nation’s most popular satirists, Viktor Shenderovich, once had a show that featured puppet caricatures of various politicians, including Putin. It was canceled in Putin’s first term and Shenderovich has been all but barred from television.

Senior government officials deny the existence of a stop list, saying that people hostile to the Kremlin do not appear on television simply because their views are not newsworthy.

In Utah, there’s a move afoot to make it a crime for a teacher to answer unapproved questions in sex ed.

There are still tribes in the Amazon with no contact with the outside world.

They’re suing Chicago little leagues for using team names in common with MLB teams. Not logos; just the names; MLB is insisting they own the idea of a baseball team named, for example, the Giants, or Tigers, and that in order to use those names the little leagues must buy their uniforms from MLB’s much more expensive provider. Gee, thanks.

Fortunately, Techdirt and Stephen Colbert are on the case.

Apparently, the oldest mamallian cell line is a transmissable canine tumor spread sexually. Yup: this means it’s an immortal, cancerous STD. Yikes.

Unlike most other contagious cancers such as cervical cancer in humans, CTVT isn’t spread by a virus but (as recently proved) by cancerous cells themselves. Genetic analysis suggests the tumor originated in an individual wolf or domesticated dog, probably in east Asia, between 200 and 2,500 years ago. This long-dead canid’s much-mutated cells are still alive and being passed along during coitus (or sometimes through casual contact) centuries later, making it the longest-lived mammalian cell line known.

The Japanese police hid a bunch of dope in some random traveler’s bags and then turned loose the dogs to train them — and then lost the hash. Score!

They announced today that they would begin charging $15 for the first checked bag from any passenger.

There’s a new educational notion floating around called “Minimum 50 grading,” the gist of which is that any numerical grade lower than a 50 is “rounded up” to 50. This is so stupid it makes my head hurt; John Gruber has more. From the story:

“It’s a classic mathematical dilemma: that the students have a six times greater chance of getting an F,” says Douglas Reeves, founder of The Leadership and Learning Center, a Colorado-based educational think tank who has written on the topic. “The statistical tweak of saying the F is now 50 instead of zero is a tiny part of how we can have better grading practices to encourage student performance.”

But opponents say the larger gap between D and F exists because passing requires a minimum competency of understanding at least 60% of the material. Handing out more credit than a student has earned is grade inflation, says Ed Fields, founder of HotChalk.com, a site for teachers and parents: “I certainly don’t want to teach my children that no effort is going to get them half the way there.”

Reeves, as Gruber points out, is either incredibly stupid or incredibly craven here, especially with his line about students having a “six times greater chance of getting an F.” Um, no. Grades aren’t random; they reflect classroom work, pedagogy, and effort. Students are not six times more likely to get an F than some other grade (obviously! in a class with 10 students passing, do 60 students fail, on average?).

I’m not insane. I understand that, with sufficiently low grades, a student may be doomed to failure by mid-semester. But a grade is supposed to show, roughly speaking, percentage mastery of the subject. What sort of lesson are we teaching if showing up, literally, guarantees half credit? The only reason for policies like this seems to be improving passing rates — but, like the post title says, it’s not real. It’s juking the stats — a methodological hip-check to the pinball machine of education that results in shiny numbers with no corresponding increase in actual education.