Joanna Maselli's List: English Resources

• Over the past two decades, the use of they  as a singular generic pronoun has been defended often and eloquently by linguists in various venues
• I want to address the teachers who have read all of these various justifications yet still find themselves reluctant to let students use singular generic they
• As English teachers, one of our responsibilities is to ensure that students master the conventions of standard edited English, so that they will not be judged in negative ways based on their formal writing. Whether it is fair or not, others (including other teachers and future employers) may judge a construction like singular they as “wrong”
• I tell students that they are welcome to use singular they  in writing for my class, but they should footnote it the first time they use it and in the footnote explain their rationale for using singular they.
• grammar is a description of the rules of language; it is not prescriptive; it does not say what is correct and what is not, it simply explains the workings of a language

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• Amazon's Mechanical Turk,
• This crowdsourcing platform is described as artificial artificial intelligence. In other words, it aims to use human intelligence to do the work that one day a computer might do. Mechanical Turk assigns HITs, or Human Intelligence Tasks, out to the world, often priced at a penny. A task might involve labeling a photograph. Amazingly, there are thousands of people who "turk," and these micro-laborers tend to turk for many hours.
• "digital sweatshop"
• a crowdsourcing tool that can solve problems big and small. Motivated by simple rewards, collective intelligence can be harnessed to create huge stores of accurate, useful data (as opposed to computer-generated nonsense).
• beyond Amazon's marketplace, the same crowd-sourcing technique could easily be used by say, the Iranian government to identify political dissidents.
• people will also do this work for free.
• Internet security tools that ask humans to decipher warped text that computers cannot read. One of the added benefits of this challenge-response test is that one can engineer human labor to digitize books.
• If you make this task into a game, people will play it, earning "points." While this is a completely worthless currency, Zittrain points out that it is really positive feedback that people are craving, and that is what motivates them to participate.
• crowdsourcing may be used in either constructive ways, or alternatively, it may be used as a tool that exploits human labor and utilizes it for pernicious purposes.

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