China Tightens Censorship of Electronic Communications

My blog is on a March 21st New York Times article about China disrupting Gmail services. The only intrinsic evidence was as follows;

"Google began receiving complaints from Gmail users and its own employees in China about a month ago, around the time anonymous Internet posts urged people unhappy with the government to gather every Sunday. Some Gmail users found their service disconnected when they tried to send or save messages."

The article then uses intrinsic evidence and examples of previous censorship to show that China's government likes to control its people. One of the more interesting facts in this article is that one of the spokespersons from China was quoted in saying that Google, Facebook and Twitter were instruments of the U.S government to cause disorder and chaos. To me, this seems outlandish. After all, American's are more exposed to those sites than other countries. It's comforting that China still respects the U.S enough to think of us as capable of such a diabolical plan.

Shrek, Dora Make Cereal Taste Better, Kids Say

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellness/shrek-dora-make-cereal-taste-kids/story?id=13083805&page=2

Yep. You heard the kiddies; popular characters on their cereal boxes make the cereal taste better. An article from ABC news posted March 8th discussed results from a study where children were given identical types of cereal either named "sugar bits" or "healthy bits" and either featured a well known cartoon character or no character at all. Although the kids seemed to prefer the cereal if Shrek was on the box, they did prefer the cereal named healthy bits over cereal bits. The author notes that although kids understand that eating something "healthy" is better than eating something "sugary", their line of reasoning is completely suspended when SpongeBob is telling them to eat it. This article uses mostly logical proof by showing the results of the study. Intrinsic proof is used when the author analyzes some of the possible causes for why the study went the way it went. This article confirms what we already know; advertising is more subversive than we care to admit.