"The debate on Seattle’s homeless tax provokes an important question: What responsibility do companies have toward the communities in which they function?" write UW professors Nives Dolšak (marine and environmental affairs) and Aseem Prakash (Center for Environmental Politics).

Walmart has killed Scan & Go, a service that let customers scan and pay for items without checkout lanes, cashiers, or registers.
"There was low participation," Walmart spokesman Ragan Dickens told Business Insider.
At the same time, Amazon is doubling down on its own version of the technology with the expansion of its cashierless store, called Amazon Go. 
The failed test highlights a key challenge for Walmart in its battle with Amazon: getting Walmart's core customers to adopt new technologies and engage with the company digitally. 

Turkers—and the larger online survey ecosystem of which they are a part—have helped address several methodological problems that have long bedevilled academic researchers. First, online survey respondents give academic researchers an alternative to the tried-and-tired practice of treating undergraduates as guinea pigs. As psychology scholars Michael Buhrmester et al. note in their 2011 assessment of Mechanical Turk data, “[c]ommentators have long lamented the heavy reliance on American college samples in the field of psychology and more generally those from a small sector of humanity.”

tags: example of amazon Pay new invention inventions needsEditing questionable ;;;

The size and scale of Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft threaten American democracy. Is it too late to stop them?