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Seriously, if you were being attacked by zombies, you might yell out the word f- - -. But no one does on The Walking Dead. When it comes to language in this golden age of basic cable dramas, the rules are idiosyncratic and unclear.

"It's so arbitrary, hon," says Kurt Sutter. "It's just basically people in suits making up the rules."

Sutter created the biker-gang drama Sons of Anarchy on F/X, and if you've ever looked at his Twitter feed, his language might put you in mind of another program: the famously profane Deadwood on HBO, where for three seasons pretty much anything went, cursewise.

Sutter says he's not allowed to use the f-word. Or the word "retard." He also can't use his very favorite epithet — probably the first one that comes to mind when I say "slang for female anatomy."

"But we can use the word 'gash,' which I think is far worse," he observes.

“ They want to be able to say 'bulls- - -,' which is a really hard word to substitute for. It's hard to find anything else that feels as good.

China will jail anyone caught using social media to spread "slanderous rumors" or "false information" for up to 10 years, according to a new legal interpretation of Internet restrictions, the official Xinhua news agency reports.

A court's interpretation says the spread of such rumors could automatically incur a three-year prison term, but if the post is read by 5,000 or more people and/or shared more than 500 times, the penalty could jump to 10 years in jail.

"People have been hurt and reaction in society has been strong, demanding with one voice serious punishment by the law for criminal activities like using the internet to spread rumors and defame people," court spokesman Sun Jungong said speaking at a news conference quoted by the People's Daily website.

"No country would consider the slander of other people as 'freedom of speech,'" he said.

The Telegraph quoted Mo Shaoping, a leading human rights lawyers, as saying he "hoped the measures would help prevent 'absurd' cases such as one where a micro-blogger was arrested for tweeting that nine people had died in an accident when, in fact, the true number was only seven."

"[But] if not handled properly, this might have negative effect on freedom of speech and the online fight against corruption," he added. "I believe that in the near future online free speech and the exposure of corruption will be suppressed."

Yuan Yulai, another rights lawyer who has over 1.3 million followers on China's Twitter-like microblog Weibo, complained that the interpretation had been published "too hastily" and without public consultation.

It's still officially wintertime in Buenos Aires, but the city is in a record heat wave. Tuesday's high was 34.4 degrees Celsius (94 degrees Fahrenheit), the hottest temperature recorded in September since 1940, La Nacion reports.

"The unusually high temperatures are expected until tomorrow and may reach the maximum of 40 degrees," the Buenos Aires Herald reports.

That's 40 degrees, again, in Celsius — so, around 104 degrees Fahrenheit. And it looks like the area could be in for a roller-coaster ride: Forecasters say that on Thursday, things could cool down to a high of 15 degrees — or 59 degrees Fahrenheit.

As we looked into this story, we noticed that Argentina set another record today, in the financial sector.

The country's MERVAL index, based on 13 companies in core industries such as banking, metals, and utilities, rose to a new high of 4,477.81 points Tuesday — equal to "an increase of 53 percent so far this year," The Herald says.

For more of our reporting on this story, please see our recent column in the New York Times Magazine, and the latest episode of This American Life.

This morning, we reported on a charity called GiveDirectly that's trying to help poor people in the developing world in an unusual way: It gives them money with no strings attached. This is a somewhat radical idea in the charity world.

Most charities, of course, get money from donors and spend it on things they think will help people. They build schools, provide medicine or give people cows.

When we were in Kenya recently, we visited a village where people had been given cows by a group called Heifer International. And, we can report, these were very impressive cows. They looked strong and healthy.

And, like lots of charities, Heifer also spends money to provide training. Working with another group called Send a Cow, Heifer teaches people to make sure their cows get the right nutrition and to keep detailed logs tracking milk production. People visited the village to make sure everything was going well. And all this really helped. One woman told us her cow produces 15 times as much milk as local cows — and she sells most of the milk.

That's a traditional charity. GiveDirectly, on the other hand, takes money from donors and just gives it to poor people. (For more on how GiveDirectly works, see our story from this morning.) This is something of a challenge to other charities. Paul Niehaus, one of the group's founders, is pretty blunt about it.

"We would like to see organizations make the case that they can do more good for the poor with a dollar than the poor can do for themselves," he says. "And I think some may be able to make a convincing case. But if you go to the websites, today I don't think you're going to be seeing that argument being made. Nobody even bothers."

Neihaus says charities should be clear about how much they're spending and how much it's helping. And to figure this out, he says, charities should do actual experiments. In GiveDirectly's case, independent researchers are conducting a randomized, controlled trial. Basically, there are two groups of villagers. One group gets money, the other doesn't. The researchers do a detailed survey to compare the two groups and see what difference getting money makes. The results from the study are due out later this year. And they'll be made public.

If you were trying to compare giving cows and training with giving cash, you could take the same approach. Give people in one village cows and training; in the next village over, take the money you would have spent on cows and training and just give it to people.

Not surprisingly, Niehaus loved this idea. We called up Heifer International to see what it thought, and we talked to Elizabeth Bintliff, vice president of Heifer's Africa programs.

"As an African woman, that sounds to me like a terrible idea," she said. "It sounds like an experiment, and we're not about experiments. These are lives of real people." The world is "just not that linear," she said. "It's not an equation. It's an ecosystem."

Still, she said, Heifer has worked with independent researchers to measure its programs. "The University of Western Michigan evaluates Heifer's projects and has found that there's very positive return to families in terms of income, nutrition and other indicators," she told us.

Bintliff said she could send us those evaluations. After the interview, though, we got an email from a Heifer official. After thanking us for our interest she wrote: "As the sources cited are unpublished, we're not able to provide further information publicly at this time."

Until pretty recently, the charity world has been about doing stuff that helps, without really asking: How much does it help exactly, and how much does it cost? But there does seem to be this shift that's starting to happen. Philanthropy is getting nerdier; people are paying more attention to data.

Last year, the GiveDirectly guys gave a presentation at Google's corporate charity office. They didn't show any pictures of people. But they showed charts and studies and numbers. The people at Google were impressed. They gave $2.4 million to GiveDirectly and told them to figure out how to give money to lots more people.