The New York Times has an article up about how bloggers are affecting reporting of the tsunami disaster events and relief efforts. It raises some very interesting points, including:

Bloggers at the scene are more deeply affected by events than the journalists who roam from one disaster to another, said Xeni Jardin, one of the four co-editors of the site BoingBoing.net, which pointed visitors to many of the disaster blogs.

"They are helping us understand the impact of this event in a way that other media just can't," with an intimate voice and an unvarnished perspective, with the richness of local context, Ms. Jardin said.

To continue along the same lines as the recent post about blog censorship, according to a Washington Times story it appears that "Homeland Security" is mulling over ideas that include censoring the entire internet:

Access to networks like the World Wide Web might need to be limited to those who can show they take security seriously, [Former CIA Director George J. Tenet] said.

"I know that these actions will be controversial in this age when we still think the Internet is a free and open society with no control or accountability," he told an information-technology security conference in Washington, "but ultimately the Wild West must give way to governance and control."

Hi all. This is my first post here at Kairosnews. I've been keeping a personal blog for about 4-5 years now, and I'm excited to expand my blogverse, as it were, to include this community.

I just came across a piece in the New York Times about computers writing fiction (registration required):

'Dave Striver loved the university - its ivy-covered clocktowers, its ancient and sturdy brick, and its sun-splashed verdant greens and eager youth. The university, contrary to popular opinion, is far from free of the stark unforgiving trials of the business world: academia has its own tests, and some are as merciless as any in the marketplace. A prime example is the dissertation defense: to earn the Ph.D., to become a doctor, one must pass an oral examination on one's dissertation. This was a test Professor Edward Hart enjoyed giving.'

That pregnant opening paragraph was written by a computer program known as Brutus.1 that was developed by Selmer Bringsjord, a computer scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and David A. Ferrucci, a researcher at I.B.M.