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Walmart has purchased Small Society, a Portland-based mobile developer that's built apps for Starbucks, Amazon, Whole Foods, ZipCar, the Democratic National Committee, and others. Financial terms were not disclosed in an announcement on the retail giant's @WalmartLabs blog earlier today. Small Society's team will join an existing @WalmartLabs location in Oregon, according to the post. Launched in 2011, @WalmartLabs is designed to create technologies that propel the multi-channel brand as a social-mobile commerce player in the years to come. The company also appears to be mounting an agency-like infrastructure that could bypass vendors, keeping some digital marketing development in-house at the Bentonville, AR-based big box merchandiser.

This website is designed as a social mirror to show the prevalence of casual homophobia in our society. Words and phrases like "faggot," "dyke," "no homo," and "so gay" are used casually in everyday language, despite promoting the continued alienation, isolation and - in some tragic cases - suicide of sexual and gender minority (LGBTQ) youth. We no longer tolerate racist language, we're getting better at dealing with sexist language, but sadly we're still not actively addressing homophobic and transphobic language in our society. Let's put an end to casual homophobia. Speak out when you see or hear homophobic or transphobic language from friends, at school, in the locker room, at work or online. Use #NoHomophobes to show your support. And visit one of our resource websites to get more involved.

Aguinis noted that the power-law approach has applications in groups of all types and sizes, including governments, nonprofits, education systems and corporations. However, changing theory and practice will be challenging, due partly to deeply entrenched notions of fairness and equality in society and business. Further, it could pose difficult ethical dilemmas, because it requires taking care of the "superstars" first in the context of treating everyone fairly.

Brad Feld, a venture capitalist, recently had a very uncomfortable experience with social media. The final quote from his account of the experience highlights the need to experience media to understand it: "I guess it's a good thing that this just happened and caused me to think harder about the implications. One of the reasons I immerse myself in this stuff is to understand the products and services, but also to understand the impact on humans and our society. While it's easy to think intellectually about privacy, it's a whole different deal when you have to process the ideas in the context of real issues that you encounter."

The king of Web corporations has been Google with its dominance of search. Recently, Facebook has become the second-most popular website. How do the purposes of each of these successful sites differ, and where do they compete?

The researchers found that fulfillment of a diversity of needs, as defined by Maslow, do appear to be universal and important to individual happiness. But the order in which "higher" and "lower" needs are met has little bearing on how much they contribute to life satisfaction and enjoyment, Diener said. They also found that the fulfillment of more basic needs - for money, food or shelter, for example - was more closely linked to a positive life evaluation, the way an individual ranked his or her life on a scale from worst to best. The satisfaction of higher needs - for social support, respect, autonomy or mastery - was "more strongly related to enjoying life - having more positive feelings and less negative feelings," Diener said. An important finding, Diener said, is that the research indicated that people have higher life evaluations when others in society also have their needs fulfilled.