Four separate studies led by a Washington State University social psychologist have found that unselfish workers who are the first to throw their hat in the ring are also among those that coworkers most want to, in effect, vote off the island.

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Parks and Stone found that unselfish colleagues come to be resented because they "raise the bar" for what is expected of everyone. As a result, workers feel the new standard will make everyone else look bad.

Lately I've been reading about user security and privacy -- control, really -- on social networking sites. The issues are hard and the solutions harder, but I'm seeing a lot of confusion in even forming the questions. Social networking sites deal with several different types of user data, and it's essential to separate them.

Below is my taxonomy of social networking data, which I first presented at the Internet Governance Forum meeting last November, and again -- revised -- at an OECD workshop on the role of Internet intermediaries in June.

“We view the speed of light as simply a conversion factor between time and space in spacetime,” Shu writes. “It is simply one of the properties of the spacetime geometry. Since the universe is expanding, we speculate that the conversion factor somehow varies in accordance with the evolution of the universe, hence the speed of light varies with cosmic time.”

The Fault-Tolerant Shell (ftsh) is a small language for system integration that makes failures a first class concept. Ftsh aims to combine the ease of scripting with very precise error semantics. It is especially useful in building distributed systems, where failures are common, making timeouts, retry, and alternation necessary techniques.

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If any element of the script fails, all running process trees are reliably cleaned up, and the block is tried again with an exponential backoff. You might think of this as exception handling for scripts.

Many fast-growing parts of the Web, such as Facebook or Google's Picasa, are populated with user-generated images. They could become a rich advertising opportunity with the right technology, says Yang. "Many photos in online photo albums and video scenes do not have texts to describe them," he says. "People browsing through their own or others' online photo albums are a potential audience for adverts." Today, he says, it's impossible to reach people where there is no surrounding text.

To match an advertisement to an image, the group's software first converts the image to a collection of words. The software was trained to do this by crawling around 60,000 images on Flickr that have tags added by users.

This guide will show you how to build a variety of apps in Django 1.2, including a Todo List App, a simple Blog, a Photo Manager / Sharing App and a simple Forum App. (Nearly all of the code will work on Django 1.1, as well.)

KWallet is a service provided by KDE that provides a convenient way to save and read this kind of data. Lets take a look at a simple example of how we can use the KWallet service from a Python application.

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

“Shaking Tokyo” is about an agoraphobic man, called hikikomori in Japanese. He sustains himself on pizza, living off of money left to him by his father. One day, he does the unthinkable: he makes eye contact with a pretty delivery girl — the first eyes he’s set upon in 10 years. At this moment, the earthquake occurs.

We recently had a fun post about Hollywood accounting, about how the movie industry makes sure even big hit movies "lose money" on paper. So how about the recording industry? Well, they're pretty famous for doing something quite similar. Reader Jay pointed out in the comments an article from The Root that goes through who gets paid what for music sales, and the basic answer is not the musician. That report suggests that for every $1,000 sold, the average musician gets $23.40.

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And that explains why huge megastars like Lyle Lovett have pointed out that he sold 4.6 million records and never made a dime from album sales. It's why the band 30 Seconds to Mars went platinum and sold 2 million records and never made a dime from album sales. You hear these stories quite often.