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The secretive National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is rushing to get the latest, high-definition satellite photos of Afghanistan into the hands of U.S. ground troops as they ramp up operations in the country’s tangled terrain. The NGA analysts aren’t tapping the government’s huge network of highly classified spy satellites; they’re getting the pictures from commercial vendors. That’s the same stuff pretty much anyone can get, either through free, online programs, such as Google Earth, or by buying it from the same companies supplying Uncle Sam.

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Behind Yahoo’s push to open up Web search and advertising is software powerful enough to sort through the entire Library of Congress in less than half a minute. The software, called “Hadoop,” is part of Yahoo’s massive computing grid and is transforming the way that Yahoo and corporate giants like IBM extract meaning from enormous streams of data. Universities are also using the code — an open source version of software Google relies on for daily operation — to train a new generation of computer scientists and engineers.

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“Guitar Hero” is one of those “Why didn’t anyone think of this before?” kind of games, so it’s no surprise that the series’ popularity eventually led it to the Mac. Aspyr Media licensed “Guitar Hero III” and published it for Windows and Mac at the beginning of this year, and now they’ve followed that up with the Aerosmith edition, which is a standalone game, as opposed to being an expansion pack. The gameplay in “Guitar Hero: Aerosmith” is the same as the original.

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Like millions of other people, I was glued to the television Tuesday night. But I also was sending text messages on my cell phone and using my BlackBerry to check e-mail and read my Facebook friends’ updates as they reacted to election results. Change has come indeed. This year’s election made new use of the Internet to share information, raise money and foster civic engagement among younger voters. There was enormous hype around digital strategies created by the campaigns, partisan groups and the media.

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Online learning is evolving into much more than discussions via Blackboard. Today’s online learners are spending time engaged in discussions, meeting in virtual classrooms, and combining online and on-the-ground learning, even if they live time zones away from campus. In response, universities are adjusting their curriculum, learning expectations, and changing how instructors approach topics online. One major challenge, creating and maintaining learning communities in virtual space, is testing both existing and emerging online tools.

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