BlueGene/L is still the cream of the supercomputing crop, according to a new list of the world’s 500 most powerful  machines. The computer, which is operated by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley, easily outpaced the competition: It has more than doubled its work rate since June, when it topped the rankings by performing more than 136 trillion calculations in a second.

At times the Grand Challenge, a robot race through the Mojave Desert sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense, resembled a Nascar event for nerds. A Nascar race, that is, without the low-slung sports cars: Most of the robots were simply SUV’s or trucks outfitted with sensors, computers, global-positioning systems, and other technologies. Many of the 23 teams that participated were led by college students and professors, often working in tandem with companies that had donated hardware and the time of their own researchers. College insignias and corporate logos, in fact, seemed to fight for space on a number of the computer-operated cars, trucks, Hummers, and dune buggies that showed up at the race. (The Chronicle, subscription required)

Purdue University at West Lafayette and Indiana University at Bloomington are fierce competitors on Big Ten basketball courts, but the institutions are joining forces to bolster their state’s technology infrastructure. Through a state-financed project, the universities will oversee the construction of a fiber-optic network, called I-Light2, that will let institutions across Indiana share data at high speeds. (The Exponent)

Officials at Princeton University are preparing to unveil a new supercomputer that will help astrophysics, engineering, and chemistry professors do some serious number-crunching. The machine—named "Orangena" in tribute to Princeton’s school color—is expected to crack the top 100 in a list of the world’s speediest supercomputers that will be published next week.

Supercomputers, of course, don’t come cheap, but researchers at Princeton were willing to make sacrifices to pay for Orangena: Seven professors pooled personal grant money to help buy the machine. (The Princeton Packet)

Just over half of the applications that Yale University received last year were submitted online, but campus officials would like to see that number much higher. It is much easier to review the applications on computers, the administrators say, than to look them over in print.

But a number of students still prefer hard-copy forms to their digital counterparts: Web applications, they say, aren’t especially user-friendly, and they don’t offer the writerly flexibility of the traditional documents. (Yale Daily News)

Faculty members at New York University are accusing administrators of surreptitiously listing deans and directors of undergraduate studies as instructors on course-management sites, allowing those administrators to monitor course discussions and other activity. (The Chronicle, subscription required)

Two controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act that library groups and civil libertarians have criticized as curtailing Americans’ privacy and free-speech rights were picked apart by members of Congress on Thursday. (The Chronicle, subscription required)

It would be foolish to expect to find much enlightened discourse on Fratty.net, a Web site with the motto "frat hard or go home." But posters to the Web site, which is popular with fraternity members nationwide, managed to outdo themselves with a series of complaints about a fraternity for African-American students at the University of South Carolina at Columbia. In messages riddled with racial epithets, posters—many of whom have been identified as South Carolina students—groused about Omega Psi Psi, a historically black frat that is building a house in the university’s previously all-white Greek Village.

Campus officials say they’re "appalled" by the messages, and they may start forcing students to take a quiz that teaches lessons about online speech and privacy. (The State)

"Serious gaming" might sound like an oxymoron, but for a number of professors it’s a pretty important business. Some academics say educational video games are particularly well-suited to teaching negotiation skills and military tactics—fields for which real-life lessons could easily cause embarrassment or injury. (The Globe and Mail)

For more on the academic applications of video games, see an article from The Chronicle by Scott Carlson.

Google’s ballyhooed book-scanning project promises to be "the greatest gift to knowledge since, well, Google," writes Lawrence Lessig, a digital-rights advocate and professor of law at Stanford University. Publishing groups that have objected to the project, he argues, are clinging to an antiquated notion of copyright that has become obsolete in the Internet age. (Wired Magazine)

Mr. Lessig reserves especially sharp criticism for the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild, whom he accuses of "the biggest land grab in the history of the Internet." For more on the Authors Guild, which filed suit against Google in September, see an article from The Chronicle by Jeffrey R. Young.