Category: professional

  • Prof. Mark Davies’ ouster at BYU

    Mark Davies was a professor of linguistics at BYU who created tools for analyzing large collections of text, a method known as corpus analysis. He ran a website, corpus.byu.edu, where these text collections were available for anyone to use. The site, now at english-corpora.org, and Dr. Davies’ website, describe a process of administrator mismanagement that…

  • ‘they’ is not a drop-in replacement for ‘he’ and ‘she’, but we could use one

    Singular usage of ‘they’ is well-established in English, going back centuries. Depending on your exposure to it, you may yourself use it regularly, as I happily do. It’s great having a single word that can refer to individuals whose gender is unclear or unspecified. However, gender-neutral ‘they’ and its friends ‘them’, ‘their’, and ‘theirs’, do…

  • Decentralizing the Web… Again

    …cloud computing represents centralization of information and computing resources, which can be easily controlled by corporations and governments. [Jaeger, et al. Link] In the wake of Prismgate or the Snowden Affair or whatever we’re going to call this kerfuffle, I’ve been struck by how the current centralized nature of the World Wide Web has facilitated…