pridkett

Almost four years ago I asked a question on StackExchange English "What's the plural of ostrich?". Finally this is my chance to ask an expert.

Is the plural of "ostrich" most properly "ostrich" or "ostriches"?

You're big on using human computation for various things that are hard for computers to accomplish (image tagging in the ESP game, object recognition in Peekaboom, and digitizing books in Recaptcha). However, these are all things that, conceivably, computers could one day get really good at. We all know that computers are gonna be really smart some day in the future. And when they do they're gonna be pissed because you've been saying they're bad at stuff.

So, here's my question, given that you're likely one of the first people to be targeted in a machine uprising, what's your strategy for staying alive in the coming war between humans and machines?

What's Bob Parsons' current role in the company? Back in the day I swore off Go Daddy and transferred my domains because, honestly, Parsons was a walking gaffe machine, and if you make that many gaffes at least some of them must be reflections of man's true character. He supported torture (since dropped in the memory hole), defended elephant hunting, and probably greenlighted those horribly sexist ads that GoDaddy is still known for today. He still is Executive Chairman of the company, which means he's still there.

Why should I take my business back there?

Duolingo has managed to capture most of the major languages with Latin character sets. There seems to be an increasing desire for duolingoers to learn languages with alternative character sets that don't easily map to the Latin characters (i.e. Arabic, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, and Thai).

To what extent has the implementation of these languages inside of Duoling been hindered by the lack of common knowledge about the best way to teach someone to understand languages in a different character set?

What do you see as the major research questions that could help Duolingo and folks around the world bridge the gap between languages with different character sets?

Please say that you're going to do a TI-99/4a version after that. The speech synthesizer has got to be useful for something...