Category: News

You probably don’t need to know how a calculator makes two plus two equal four, or how your favorite smartphone app works, but the way the background software is implemented can make a big difference to the output. Slight rounding errors or slow load times in these cases might be annoying, but when you scale up to big data modeling, for instance, you might want to take a closer look at the software running your calculations before you click go.

Blind trust in black box, or click-and-run, software is a growing problem in science, according to a commentary published Thursday in the journal Science, and the concern extends beyond formal research to other domains that use high performance computing.

The researchers who addressed the “troubling trend in scientific software use” were motivated by a growing unease that the abundance of powerful software is letting scientists derive answers without a thorough understanding of what the software is doing. Software snafus have been responsible for some high-profile data misinterpretations and retractions.

This wouldn’t normally cause a blip on the average citizen’s radar, but now a lot of these scientific conclusions have real-world implications, from climate modeling and weather forecasting to high volume financial trading. In any domain using big data, misplaced trust in the power of software can be problematic, particularly when the decision makers don’t know what the software they are using is doing, said lead author Lucas Joppa of Microsoft Research.

So what does ecology have to do with any of this? Joppa is an ecologist by training, and works on computational techniques in that field that may also have applications for big data more broadly. He and his colleagues surveyed scientists in a sub-field of ecology — species distribution modeling (SDM) — to find out how they choose software and how well they understand its inner workings.

“Lots of SDM techniques are only available as computational methods, but there is a lot of discourse going on in the literature about whether the methods themselves are correct,” said Joppa. Scientists use SDM to forecast where plants and animals will be in the future given current numbers, known habitats, and climate change. It’s a niche area of research, but the disquieting survey results should be noted in any domain where forecasting is done by plugging data into software.

Only 8 percent of the more than 400 scientists who responded had validated their modeling software against other methods. “The number speaks for itself,” said Joppa. “The real crux of the problem is the results from software being published in a peer-reviewed journal, versus the software itself having been peer-reviewed,” which is rare. Software packages, whether proprietary or not, are often black box systems that can’t be opened and inspected. Even if you can get under the proverbial hood, like with open source software, said Joppa, most people will still have no idea what they are looking at, or how to judge its quality.

To top it all off, having confidence in what your software is doing results in a massive computational catch-22: how do you know the software is giving you the right answer, if you can’t get the answer without running the software? The level of confusion over what algorithms are doing in the SDM field is illustrated by a debate over which of two statistical techniques is superior. It turns out, Joppa explained, that the two techniques were mathematically equivalent, but the ways they were implemented in software resulted in big predictive differences.

This sort of mix-up isn’t surprising given the messy nature of software development (if you can even call it that) in research environments. Joppa lauded efforts like Software Carpentry that teach scientists basic software fundamentals for better programming, and said the days of getting a doctorate by merely pushing a button are over.

“Scientists themselves can learn a bare minimum of software engineering,” said Joppa. On the flip side, he said computer science students should have more exposure to scientific methods. “People with traditional software engineering training become uncomfortable with the way scientists want to work with software, where the design and specs are constantly changing. The way that scientific software is built is fundamentally different from consumer apps.”

Developers of scientific software, like MathWorks or SAS, may want to watch this space. If Joppa’s suggestions are implemented, journals may start requiring that even proprietary software be opened up for inspection and peer-review. Nearly half of the surveyed ecologists report using free statistical language R as their primary software, so maybe there is hope yet, both for open, inspectable code, and for computational science becoming more accessible while yielding trustworthy, high impact results.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. – IER President Thomas Pyle penned an op-ed in RealClearEnergy today on the Obama administration’s failed energy policies. In the article, Pyle explains how states like North Dakota benefit from the shale boom and hydraulic fracturing, while the …

With yesterday’s announcement about the new Google Play games service, Google also started the process of shutting down Google+ Games. Visiting the Google+ Games page yields visitors a new banner announcing Google+ Games will not be available after June 30th. Some developers are already working on replacements or alternatives for players who want to continue to play a particular title. 

If a user had made some payments in the game, Google indicates there are a couple options available. If the developer has an alternative site for the game, the unused balance of payments can be used at the new site. If an alternative is not available, it appears players have until June 30th to use up whatever balance they may still have in their account.

Google’s help page explaining this change also includes a short description of Google’s new game services available through Google Play which provides a framework for cross-platform gaming on Android, iOS, or the web. Since Google wants to see the new game services succeed, it makes sense they would wanted to eliminate competition, even if it is their own platform.

source: Google

Come comment on this article: Game over June 30th for Google+ Games

I’m pleased to share an update from the Arrowhead Electric Coop Facebook page – with a reminder that while this is good news, it doesn’t mean service will be available next week…

Big Broadband News!!  Progress on backhaul (the all important connection to Duluth) is being made.  Monday, make ready work will begin on power poles in Lake County.  Once completed the much needed fiber optic cable will be installed and eventually spliced into Arrowhead’s cable.  It’s a huge step in the right direction for Arrowhead and everyone in Cook County.  No dates to provide at this time…stay tuned….!!

If interested in construction crew locations in Cook County: Fiber Splicers working in Schroeder, Aerial drop crews working in Grand Marais and pulling cable into conduit installed last year along Bethany Dr.

Meeting with contractor today to begin discussing the much anticipated construction crew ramp up…

Sometimes with cars and motorcycles getting back to basics is the best thing you can do. Take Triumphs new Scrambler 900 for example. A no frills motorcycle that gives the rider everything they need, and nothing they don’t. With 58 hp and 50 lb-ft of torque, the 900 has plenty of power to get you up and rolling, while at the same time, providing one with a bike that’s one of the nicest nostalgia rides we’ve come across in quite some time. Host Jamie Robinson gives us a little insight into just what makes this new Scrambler so special.

Source: MotoGeo

Jay Silver demonstrates how a cat’s water bowl can be rigged to take photos. Photo: Ryan Lash

MaKey MaKey — the kit that encourages you to rig a banana piano or control a video game with pencil-etchings — was one of the most successful projects on Kickstarter in 2012. The project raised 2, 272% of its goal in 30 days, bringing in a cool half million from excited makers.

Jay Silver: Hack a banana, make a keyboard!Today’s TED Talk comes from the co-creator of the MaKey MaKey, Jay Silver. In this madcap romp, he reveals his first invention — a pasta spinner rigged from a fork and drill — and how it led him to a fascination with the way that things are made. Throughout the talk, given during our in-office salon TED@250, he shows some incredible projects, both his own and those of others, like a paint brush that makes anything it touches play electronic music and a cat’s water bowl that lets the feline snap photos of itself as it drinks.

“Sometimes what we know gets in the way of what could be, especially when it comes to the human-made world. We think we already know how something works, so we can’t imagine how it could work,” says Silver. “I don’t care that pencils are supposed to be used for writing. I’m going to use them a different way.”

In the talk, Silver also introduces us to the MaKey MaKey, using it in a demo at 7:50 to turn two slices of pizza into a slide clicker. But to him, of course, the fun part isn’t just his own creating his own projects – it’s releasing the kit out into the wild and seeing what people came up with on their own.

Here, a collection of really cool things made with MaKey MaKey.

First, a video from Silver’s JoyLabz, that shows you how to make a banana space bar, a Play-doh video game controller, piano stairs, a synthesizer out of friends (it plays “Eye of the Tiger”), the aforementioned banana piano and cat photo booth, plus an alphabet soup keyboard.

Christian Genco of SMU, an incredibly clever maker, plays the “Star Spangled Banner” by eating his lunch and capping it off with pie.

Here, the people at We Are Genuine turn Star Wars bobble heads into an instrument.

Garrett Heath of Rackspace Hosting creates a cloud server using the MaKey MaKey … and a bacon sandwich.

How to turn dog into a piano, from YouTube user Captain Eagle.

Here is an amazing mashup of MaKey MaKey and another notable Kickstart project, Roy the Animatronic Robot’s Hand.

Brooklyn musician j.viewz takes you to the grocery to buy the fruits and vegetables needed to play Massive Attack’s classic song, “Teardrop.”

Musical paintings from Eric Rosenbaum, who is the co-creator of this incredible kit.

J. Nathan Matias uses his guitar to control an online video game.

A next-generation banana piano, called the Bananamophone, from Beau Silver.

Bonus: DJ Nu-Mark of Jurassic 5 played his necklace onstage at Coachella this year using the MaKey MaKey. See a photo »

And a note: We in the TED office debated the number in this headline extensively. Here is our list of 21 items, in order: bananas, pencils, a drill, forks, paint brushes, a cat’s water bowl, pizza, Play-doh, stairs, your friends, alphabet soup, lunch, pie, bobble head dolls, a bacon sandwich, dogs, Roy the Animatronic Robot’s Hand, fruits and vegetables, paintings, a guitar, and a necklace.

And finally, TED’s own Alex Dean shares his MaKey MaKey project:

At Google I/O, Google announced today that it has rebuilt its AdMob mobile ad network technology. It incorporates tech from other Google platforms like AdSense, and adds some additional features.

The new AdMob includes smarter app promotion features. “Conversion Optimizer helps many AdWords advertisers increase conversions while decreasing cost per acquisition,” explains AdMob product manager Vishay Nihalani. “We’re now bringing Conversion Optimizer to app developers using AdMob to promote their apps, so they can get the best possible number of installs for their budget. Choose a target cost per acquisition for each download, and Conversion Optimizer will show ads when they are most likely to lead to an install.”

“Ensuring that your app is showing quality, relevant ads is important for app developers,” says Nihalani. “Now, developers will have more control over which ads appear in their apps, by blocking sensitive categories, so they can increase relevancy and protect their brand.”

Additionally, AdMob Mediation has a new simplified setup, and there’s new local currency payments.

Finally, there’s a new reporting interface that lets developers slice data in a variety of ways, and has multi-dimensional reports, which can be broken down over time by app, ad unit, platform, country, bid type, etc.

The new AdMob is rolling out to developers starting today. It will be available to all developers globally within the coming months.

If data journalism means the analysis of and reporting on data sets that already exist, sensor journalism goes a step further: Organizations and journalists using sensor technology to create their own real-time data and then report on it. But is sensor journalism feasible or sustainable?

Columbia University plans to explore these issues, Emily Bell, director of the Columbia J-School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, said at Betaworks Betaday on Thursday. To that end, the Tow Center will run a weekend workshop on sensor journalism in June and will fund a few projects. And next year, Bell said, the Tow Center plans to run a “sensor newsroom classroom” in partnership with the architecture school.

Some of the challenges are technical: How can journalists and newsrooms build their own low-cost sensing techniques? WNYC’s John Keefe, for instance, built a cicada tracker to figure out exactly when the expected cicada plague will hit New York City this summer. Can other organizations do the same thing?

“How do you get the really efficient things from sense networks in a way that helps you do human reporting?” Bell said. The techniques also create ethical questions: “We are moving into this world where the line between transparency and privacy is constantly in tension. When you can survey everything, what do you report?”

“Practically, we’re very close to being able to survey most of what people do most of the time,” Bell told Betaworks’ Andrew McLaughlin. “I come from Europe, where everything is solved by regulation, In America, the momentum is very much with business rather than the individual. [Google CEO] Eric Schmidt said at the journalism school the other day that privacy is all about making good judgment calls about what you put online. That’s just not true. You can’t make adequate judgment calls to control your own data. That’s only going to get worse.”

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Following Larry Page’s impromptu speech and Q&A session at Google I/O, long time Apple observer/writer John Gruber wrote a post entitled Google Versus, wherein he questioned Page’s feel-good commentary. Dave Winer also pointed out this double talk. Here are three comments by Page that got Dave and John riled up:

Let’s be positive

Every story I read about Google is us versus some other company or some stupid thing. Being negative is not how we make progress. The most important things are not zero sum.

Except Microsoft is not playing ball

The Web is not advancing as fast as it should be. Certainly, we struggle with companies like Microsoft. We would like to see more open standards and more people involved in those ecosystems. I wouldn’t grade the industry well with where we have gotten to.

And that other Larry is just greedy

We’ve had a difficult relationship with Oracle, including having to appear in court. Money is obviously more important to them than any collaboration.”

Google has been fighting with Microsoft for a while and well, Oracle is a tough adversary, especially when it comes to Java.

While I am complete agreement with Page’s general sentiment about opportunities and the importance of being positive, I think Larry (and all other technology industry leaders) should actually practice what they preach if they want others to follow.

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Google’s effort to unify its messaging platforms isn’t done yet. The new Hangouts app, introduced on Wednesday at the Google I/O developer event, will soon see SMS integration.

Community Manager for Hangouts and Chat, Dori Storbeck, confirmed in a Google+ thread that SMS support is “coming soon” and is one of the most requested features. The Verge also noted that the new Google Play Services supports SMS, likely to receive or send game play requests to other users.

After installing the new Hangouts app for iOS and also using the service on my Chromebook Pixel, bringing Chat, Talk and Hangout features all together is a welcome experience. And one that’s long overdue as Google has had several overlapping message services not long after Android arrived on the scene. Oddly, at least to me, is that Google Voice hasn’t been talked about in any of the message unification efforts.

This addition of SMS for Hangouts, which makes sense, is what has me wondering where Google Voice fits in to Google’s grand plans. Since it’s not a true VoIP service, maybe its outside the technical bounds of Hangouts. But traditional SMS is handled by cellular networks and it’s clearly in the scope of Hangouts if it’s coming soon. As a result, Google Voice still feels like the unloved child in Google’s family of services.

I actually use Google Voice to make calls through my computer when working, which essentially are VoIP calls, at least for part of the transmission; the calls originate on my Chromebook over Wi-Fi or LTE. I do this through what used to be Google Talk — there’s a phone icon to place the call.

Perhaps Google is simply leaving well enough alone with Google Voice until data networks mature further and voice over LTE takes root. For now, however, the service just seems left behind while all other Google messaging features are growing up.

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It’s been almost two decades since Peter Shor came up with a a breakthrough algorithm for finding the prime factors of a number with a quantum computer, sparking great interest in quantum computing. But commercial adoption has been pretty much nonexistent. On Thursday, though, Google came forward with news that it’s launching a Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab that will include a quantum computer, apparently making it the second company to pay for a quantum computer. The development suggests that quantum computing could finally be taking off.

Earlier this year Lockheed Martin shared details of its implementation of a D-Wave Systems quantum computer, which reportedly cost $10 million: The contractor is using the computer to develop new aircraft, radar and space systems.

Now Google is taking steps at incorporating more quantum computing into its operations with the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, which will be located at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. Researchers from the Universities Space Research Association will be able to use the machine 20 percent of the time, Forbes reports. That could lead to lots of interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration.

For Google, though, the goal of the initiative is to make strides in machine learning, according to a Thursday Google Research blog post. The best results could trickle down to end users, perhaps in search results and speech-recognition applications.

Quantum computing could mean smarter smartphones

Google has already assembled machine-learning algorithms that involve quantum elements, Hartmut Neven, a Google director of engineering, explained in the post:

One produces very compact, efficient recognizers — very useful when you’re short on power, as on a mobile device. Another can handle highly polluted training data, where a high percentage of the examples are mislabeled, as they often are in the real world.

It’s not hard to imagine how quantum computing could inform machine learning on a smartphone with just a drop of battery life left. It could be that a smarter smartphone one day will take a minuscule amount of input and determine with a high probability who a user wants to talk to or what information it needs right away, rather than forcing the user to cycle through a string of commands and risking the death of the battery altogether.

The applications might have arisen after Google’s earlier partnership with D-Wave, which came to light in a different blog post from Neven in 2009.

Google has already used machine learning to recognize faces and other things in photos and videos. New technology Google executives talked about at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco on Wednesday also appears to use machine learning to stitch together photos and clean them up.

What Google has learned so far is the best results come from blending regular binary computing using ones and zeros with quantum style computing. Quantum computing accommodates the space between a one and a zero with quantum bits of information, or qubits. It can express likelihood as well as take shortcuts by approximating when handling certain kinds of workloads. Given what Google has observed thus far, it could decide to build hardware combining quantum and classical computing capabilities.

For now, though, Google is diving deeper into quantum computing with the D-Wave machine. The move could kick off a sort of arms race for webscale companies to buy quantum computers and come up with new notions by way of probabilistic logic. In this way, Google could help push the development of quantum computing much like its invention of MapReduce changed the way firms do distributed data processing.

In any case, quantum computing has a long way to go before reaching commercial viability. That could take decades (so far it has). But because the organization at the helm of the quantum research is Google and not IBM or Bell Labs, regular people could start seeing much more of the advantages in just a few years’ time, which in turn could drive commercialization.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user pixeldreams.eu.

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Bea Arthur rose to fame as a strong, take-no-crap woman on sitcoms like “Maude” and “The Golden Girls”, and though her deep voice and severe, no-nonsense haircut were usually regarded as masculine traits, some men found her attitude sexy. One man in particular found it sexy enough to want to paint her in the buff, and he did.

Artist John Currin painted the Golden Girl in a nude pose in 1991, although he stressed that he worked from a clothed photo of the actress. The painting has now gone for $1.9 million at auction, but Facebook apparently doesn’t want the photo posted on their site. According to The Daily Beast, they weren’t allowed to upload it due to the exposed breasts in the painting, although Facebook has said before that art doesn’t apply to that rule.

Neither I, nor any of the journalists who are admins of @thedailybeast’s Facebook page can post. 24 hr ban b/c of a piece of Bea Arthur art.

— Brian Ries (@moneyries) May 15, 2013

Facebook has caught some backlash before due to their strict “no breast” policy after taking down photos of mothers breastfeeding and showing off pregnant body art. Site reps eventually apologized to The Daily Beast, saying, “Our policy prohibits photos of actual nude people, not paintings or sculptures. Unfortunately, this image was erroneously removed under the same clause we use to prevent more graphic images from propagating on the site.”

Christie’s Auction House sold the piece to an anonymous bidder, but the price was expected to go much higher than it did. When Currin’s show opened in the early ’90s it was lambasted by art critics, one of whom said that the pieces were “acrid fantasy portraits of menopausal women — images suspended, in his words, ‘between the object of desire and the object of loathing.’”

Arthur was aware of the painting before her death in 2009 and said that perhaps Currin was simply drawn to strong women.

“Maybe [Currin] was attracted to the feminist movement of the 1970s. Because of ‘Maude,’ I was the Joan of Arc of feminism. He certainly couldn’t have done anything with Marlo Thomas of ‘That Girl.’”

Check out the painting below, courtesy of Christie’s. Could be NSFW depending on your view of nude art.

Attention Yahoo users: you’re about to see a big change to the homepage newsfeed – tweets.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced the new partnership today in a post on the Yahoo blog. “Tweets have become an important information source for many of our users, so we are thrilled to announce our partnership with Twitter to bring Tweets directly into the Yahoo! newsfeed,” saus Mayer.

Look above. Notice anything different about the Yahoo newsfeed? I know, it looks the same – but look closer. Direct your attention to the third item on the main feed. Yes, there it is – at tweet from ABC World News, complete with a timestamp, link, and a follow button.

“As users explore our nearly endless stream of content, we will seamlessly include relevant and personalized Tweets alongside stories from Yahoo! and our other sources. With this greater breadth of compelling content, we’re excited to give our users even more opportunities to learn and connect. Users now also have an easy way to discover relevant and interesting people and publishers to follow on Twitter, personalized to their interests and preferences,” says Mayer.

Relevant and personalized – so that seems to indicate that users that are signed-in to Twitter will enjoy a more robust experience with the new integration. The types of tweets that will fill Yahoo’s newsfeed will come from all types of newsworthy areas including sports, entertainment, music, and more.

Mayer says that the Twitter integration will rollout to U.S. desktop and mobile users in the next few days. No mention on the terms of the deal, however.

Speaking of partnerships between Twitter and search companies (I know, but Yahoo is still primarily a search company), Google and Twitter had a famous falling out back in the summer of 2011. Thanks to an inability to reach an agreement Google’s realtime search, which leveraged tweets, got the ax. Google talked about it’s imminent return shortly after the failed deal, but nearly two years later Twitter and Google are still on the outs.

It’s never a good idea for a chef to argue or fight with customers. This is especially true if those customers are capable of beating someone to death.

According to an Australian Associated Press (AAP) report, Japanese chef Miki Nozawa died on Monday after a fight with two “disgruntled” customers. The incident took place on the German island of Sylt, and the argument was reportedly about the quality of a fried noodle dish. The customer did not like dish, and left the restaurant without paying. The AAP report states that Nozawa ran into the two customers later that same day at a “table-dance bar,” where the fight broke out.

The 57-year-old Nozawa was taken to a nearby hospital with brain trauma and internal injuries, but died while in intensive care. The specific cause of death is not yet known, though a German prosecutor has stated an autopsy is being performed.

The customers suspected in Nozawa’s death had not yet been found by authorities as of Wednesday.

Warner Bros. Games is going to milk the Arkham franchise for all its worth later this year with the release of Batman: Arkham Origins. The title is a prequel to Arkham Asylum, and its puts players into the role of a younger Batman facing off against a number of assassins that have been hired to take him down.

Nearly a month after the game’s announcement, Warner Bros. has deemed it fit to finally release a trailer for the title. There’s no gameplay, but it’s nice to confirm that pre-rendered footage still looks pretty:

This is only a teaser of a full trailer that will be released on May 20. Even then, a pre-rendered CGI trailer will do little to allay fears that WB Games Montreal can’t make a good Batman game. The studio’s previous effort was the Wii U port of Arkham City. This will be the studio’s first AAA title developed entirely in-house.

We’ll know if WB Montreal can hold up the good name of Batman come October 25 when Batman: Arkham Origins launches across the Xbox 360, PS3, Wii U and PC. A prequel to Arkham Origins called Arkham Origins Blackgate will also be released on the same day for 3DS and PlayStation Vita.

If you were thinking of signing up for a TweetBackup account to create an archive of your Twitter account, it is now too late. Having been bought by Backupify around two and a half years ago, the project has been sidelined, and no new registrations are being accepted. So where does this leave anyone who has come to rely on the service?

Although there are no new sign-ups, TweetBackup is not just going to vanish in a puff of smoke. Existing users will be able to log into their accounts until June 28 2013 but after this time it will no longer be possible to access your backup — so be sure to download your data before this date.

So what are you supposed to do if you’ve become reliant on TweetBackup? As the service closes down, it does so with the recommendation that users check out Norton Ditto. This is another free backup service, but one that is not focused solely on Twitter.

Norton’s offering can be used to automatically backup not only your Twitter account, but also Facebook and Gmail. All of this can be done on a schedule so even the forgetful Twitter user can rest assured that their data is kept safe.

And of course, there’s always the option of manually downloading your Twitter archive; just head over to the Settings side of your account and hit “Request your archive”.

Photo credit: Vitezslav Valka/Shutterstock

I read a great Tumblr post today. No idea who wrote it, but it’s an expression of extreme annoyance with Google, PayPal and other online behemoths that have grown way beyond the “startup” stage but that still don’t provide proper, human customer support because it’s hard to scale at low cost.

“It’s easy to make big money when you get to keep all the profits,” the post points out, before complaining about the impact of these low-outlay ways on real people:

“Relying on automated support systems is no longer adequate. As the amount of online fraud grows over the years, automated systems are becoming less efficient. There is no accurate measure for that, however it’s anecdotally known that it’s more common nowadays for Google to shut down perfectly well-standing and long-standing AdSense accounts for invalid activity without providing the actual reasons for shutdown. Ditto for PayPal withholding the funds of customers.”

We all marvel at how quickly these companies grow and at their bounteous financials, but we don’t often enough sit back and consider why it is these companies can perform so well.

A huge part of that is down to enabling technologies, from the web itself to cloud computing and, yes, natural language processing and other technologies that will make automated customer service more useful and reliable. But that’s only part of the picture.

At this stage in the game, these companies are playing by different rules to everyone else. In the context of the post I mentioned above, customers are not customers: instead, they are users. If the exchange of money isn’t central to the relationship, as it is with an e-commerce operation such as Amazon, then customer support becomes an afterthought – after all, most of the users aren’t paying with anything more than their personal data anyway, so what should they expect?

But that’s only one facet. Pull back, and this iconoclasm becomes even more concerning.

Taxing times

I’m not suggesting that Amazon, Google and Facebook are breaking any laws, but they certainly don’t pay much tax either, relative to their revenues. In Europe, this is becoming a big issue, which is unsurprising given our current age of austerity. After all, if small businesses are struggling in this economic and technological environment, is it really fair that the megacorps taking their business away (particularly in retail) are so big and international that they don’t have to play by the same rules?

Bear in mind that Amazon is supposedly operating at a loss. The company’s margins are so low that it can destroy most competition, yet it somehow continues to expand. If the company paid taxes at the rate that small businesses need to, this situation would be entirely unsustainable.

The economic benefits for anyone other than Amazon are sometimes hard to see. Small businesses that would have paid their taxes in full are going under, and those public revenues are not being replaced. Of course these web giants are based somewhere – usually the U.S. – but their money often goes through a dizzying series of countries before it finds some tax haven where it can rest quietly. And from the companies’ perspective, why not? They operate everywhere; they can pick and choose.

That can sometimes lead to a sense that the web giants don’t feel beholden to any particular society. Consider these extraordinary quotes from Larry Page at yesterday’s Google I/O Q&A session:

“The pace of change in the world is increasing… We haven’t adapted mechanisms to deal with that. Maybe some of our old institutions like the law and so on aren’t keeping up with the rate of change that we’ve caused through technology. The laws when we went public were 50 years old. The law can’t be right if it’s 50 years old, that’s before the internet…

“We also haven’t built mechanisms to allow experimentation. There’s many exciting things you can do that you just can’t do because they’re illegal or against regulation. That makes sense, we don’t want our world to change too fast, but maybe we should set aside a small part of the world. I like going to Burning Man, for example, that’s an environment where people can try different things.”

Some have mocked Page for “wanting to start his own country”, but that risks missing Page’s point. He just sees Google as a special case that should enjoy at least limited exemptions from the rules that apply to smaller, pre-internet-style concerns. “If your rules weren’t written for us,” he seemed to say, “they shouldn’t apply to us.”

Competition

I sympathize with this view to a very limited extent: the pace of technological change does mean that regulators and legislators need to speed up their own operations if they want to keep up. Where Page and I part company, though, is that he wants Google to be hassled less and I want to see, for example, new data privacy laws that put meaningful and practical limitations on what companies such as his can do.

The great benefits of the free market system are supposed to be its enabling of genuine, merit-based competition and the resulting benefits to society. What we’re seeing here is a reduction in competition and variety, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few giants, and the rise of players so big as to feel untouchable. The lack of genuine customer service mentioned at the start of this article is both symptomatic of this situation and one of its many drivers.

That sense of invulnerability and entitlement will affect us all, not only in terms of public finances, but in other fields too, such as data protection. These companies are worth more than many countries, and you can tell they know it.

In short, I’m worried about where this industry is going. I’m all for progress – I’d have chosen a strange field of journalism if that wasn’t the case – but perhaps it’s time to aim for a wider evaluation of what’s going on here. It’s not about being positive or negative. It’s about making sure that the massive societal changes this industry is effecting work out for the benefit of society as a whole.

After all, that’s why many of us are in this game to start with.

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