Anonimo in Venezuela says,

In this video, you can see the strange and sad way that the news program on RCTV shut down this past Friday, after Venezuela's president arbitrarily decided to close it.

Each worker at the TV station, hundreds of people whose jobs depend on this network which has been critical of Chavez, will be unemployed tomorrow.

The station closes Monday May 28th thanks to a political decision through which Chavez seeks to gain total control of the basic freedoms of the country's citizens.

The world needs to know. Only you guys abroad can help us spread the word. Chavez spends hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying around the world with goverments and earning many international support at the expense of our taxes, natural resources, and freedoms.

Many of us are scared, but we are willing to do something about it.

Video link.

And here are videos of demonstrations against chavez closing down this channel, the most popular tv station in Venezuela, one that has been on the airwaves for 53 years: Link 1, Link 2.

Here's a Reuters item about the TV shutdown by Chavez. It will be replaced by a state-run channel "promoting President Hugo Chavez's self-proclaimed socialist revolution in a move widely criticized as a threat to democracy."

(posted from Central America / Xeni)

See also on BB: Venezuelan media crackdown -- the other POV.

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit attended, and blogs:

I haven't been to an International Space Development Conference in years. Things have changed a bit, and that was probably more apparent to me than to people who have been going every year. But lots of people were remarking on some changes.

Most notably, the character of the attendees has changed. There's less of a science-fiction-convention feel, as more of the people attending are actually making their living in the space biz, and particularly the commercial space biz. One of the people I was talking to last night was noting that there were a lot more attractive women than in the past, a change she put down to the presence of a lot more "good-looking men with money."

There's something to that, and Alan Boyle has a post on the entrepreneurial activity at the conference. I have to say that it's the first time I've seen Brioni suits at an ISDC -- as happened a few years ago with the nanotech conferences I attend, suddenly there's a sizable contingent of venture capitalists, investment bankers, big-firm lawyers, and the like. There's not a space bubble yet, but a guy I spoke with who knows a lot said that "the bubble's scheduled for two years from now," and that seems about right.

Link. Here's a related first-person account at Space.com: Link. (posted from Central America / Xeni)

Bonnie Burton says: "Since I shot some footage of the one thing most fanboys want to see at Star Wars Celebration IV, I thought you might like it: Slave Leias at Star Wars Celebration IV." Link to photos | Video

Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish 2006 book "The Case Against Homework" is a fine and frightening explosion of the homework myth: that giving kids homework improves their educational outcome. The authors start by tracing the explosion in homework since the eighties, and especially since the advent of the ill-starred No Child Left Behind regime, which has teachers drilling, drilling, drilling their kids on math and reading to the exclusion of all else.

Kindergarten kids are assigned homework. Kids get homework over the weekend. Over vacations. When they're away sick for a day.

What's more, all the credible research on homework suggests that for younger kids, homework has no connection with positive learning outcomes, and for older kids, the benefits of homework level off sharply after the first couple assignments.

Not that most teachers would know this -- homework theory and design isn't on the curriculum at most teachers' colleges, and most teachers surveyed report that they have never received any training on designing and assessing homework.

The book is composed of equal measures of interviews with kids, parents and teachers; hard research numbers from respected institutions; and strategies for convincing your kids' teachers to ease back on homework.

One thing the authors keep coming back to is the way that excessive homework eats into kids' playtime and family time, stressing them out, contributing to sedentary obesity, and depriving them of a childhood's measure of doing nothing, daydreaming and thinking. They quote ten-year-olds like Sophia from Brooklyn, saying things like "I have to rush, rush, rush, rush, rush, rush through my day, actually through my seven days, and that's seven days wasted in my life."

No Child Left Behind has to shoulder some of the blame here. No Child Left Behind and standardized testing not only turns your child into a slave to her test-scores, but they can even affect your property values: a school with low test-scores brings down the neighborhood property values. That means that whatever your approach to your kids, the chances are that the other parents in your neighborhood are busting their asses to get their kids great test scores, drilling them, sending them to tutors, helping them with assignments that they were meant to complete themselves. If you don't do the same, your kids will suffer by comparison.

The authors report on an elementary school in North Carolina where at least twenty standardized test books have to be replaced after their use because the stressed out elementary school kids working to them have vomited on them.

The stories go on and on, and just when you're ready to throw in the towel and send your kids into the woods to be raised by wolves, the authors supply several long chapters of strategies and sample dialogs for convincing your kids' teachers to ease off on homework, for changing the homework policies in your school district and for rallying other parents to their cause.

They're not whistling Dixie, either: the authors have gone through this themselves, challenging and changing the homework policies in their kids' school districts. The last section of the book is an activist guide and a postmortem of the strategies they employed. One of the authors, Sara Bennett, is a celebrated civil rights lawyer; the other, Nancy Kalish, is a famous editor and writer of material for parents, especially mothers. One imagines that their school board didn't know what hit them.

I was lucky enough to attend excellent, publicly funded alternative schools through my educational career. We had homework, but we were also given a lot of time for free play, and a lot of free rein to choose our subjects and design our curriculum -- I remember spending half of the fourth grade working my way through two or three math textbooks and the other half designing and writing a parody of MAD Magazine, to the exclusion of all other work. The next grade I followed the class for most of the semester, except when I didn't. In high-school, I took a year off, moved to a little house in Mexico, and wrote stories. All of this stuff contributed more to my learning than any amount of worksheets and homework ever could have. Link

Update: Sara Bennett, co-author of the book, writes in with StopHomework.com, her site to continue the movement.

This lavishly illustrated account of a meal at L'Enclume in England's Lake District is jaw-dropping. The author ordered the "Underground Menu," a "No holds barred, no deviations" molecular gastronomy tasting menu with as many as 26 courses. The chef is pretty inventive, and the food sure sounds good.

This was "Whim 03", and I think was one of the dishes that came semi-unplanned, off the cuff, as our menu evolved. It was the first dish that absolutely knocked me into a cocked hat for technical brilliance. The white block was an impossibly light, and yet completely sturdy marscapone foam, topped with salmon roe, on a bed of parsley puree. The pink powder was grated frozen tuna, which reminded me of freeze dried astronaut food. The white puree was grapefruit foam, with passion fruit seeds. This was a riot of contrasting textures, with absolutely surprising complementary flavours.

Link (via Neatorama)

WikiHow has a great HOWTO for vacating an apartment without surrendering your security deposit -- not just how to clean it, but how to clean it in such a way that your landlord can't claim that you still owe. Wish I'd known about this before: I once had a crooked landlord keep back some of my deposit for failing to clean an oven that I had never, ever used during my tenancy (and this was after the landlord inspected my apartment and told me it was all OK). Link (via Consumerist)

Warren Ellis has just posted an essay on "Burst Culture" about the way that we have come to read and write the web. He tackles the notion of a "web magazine" and looks at what has and hasn't worked -- and decries the notion that the web is shortening our attention spans. Good, thought-provoking reading.

* Comics Foundry retreated from its position as a web “magazine” (though it was aping print magazine elements, rather than adopting the medium of the web fully, as I recall) to try and become a print magazine. And was summarily rejected for distribution by Diamond. They’re out time and money on a project that would have seen them, if successful, available in fewer venues and read by fewer people than if they’d stayed accessible by anyone with an internet-ready device.

* I love print. I love magazines that commit and pay for long articles and long fiction. The web rewards neither approach. It’s a packeted medium, a surf medium. Short bursts are the way to go. The web isn’t a replacement medium — it’s *another” medium. That said, if your concept of a magazine is something designed in one-page bursts, or three pages that only carry 500 words due to the mass of images, then, really, you’re not doing anything the web can’t do better, are you?

* Every day, millions of people download single lumps of data that take them three minutes to consume. They’re called mp3s. It’s a burst culture. Embrace the idea for a while.

* Bursts aren’t contentless, nor do they denote the end of Attention Span. If attention span was dead, JK Rowling wouldn’t be selling paperbacks thick enough to choke a pig, and Neal Stephenson wouldn’t be making a living off books the size of the first bedsit I lived in

Link

The Hungarian exhibition in East German manufacturing called "DDR, Life and Style" features innumerable terribly made, miserably designed objects that seem to actually have been engineered to make their owners miserable. Link (via Beyond the Beyond)

Following on the heels of yesterday's post about Sony charging $82 for a simple replacement screw, the blog Screw Asylum does nothing but document weird, proprietary machine screws that cost a fortune and badly mangled screws. Link (Thanks, Reevo!)