Shamus Khan, a sociologist at Columbia University, is analyzing the orchestra's subscriber lists to create a database mapping New York's elites in the seats of the concert hall.

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Give Web designers in Chicago and Oakland access to public police data, and they create innovative crime-mapping tools that prevent muggings.

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But in iOS 6, it decided to ditch Google and create a new app that uses mapping data that Apple itself has assembled.

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Additionally, the TV's picture engine employs multi-frame analysis to help create missing resolution, and Sony's Super Bit Mapping technology incorporates 14 bit up-scaling, processing and pixel mapping to smooth gradation and improve the quality of low-tone pictures.

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The artists at Legend3D began by studying every shot in the film and mapping out each element on screen in order to create a realistic sense of depth.

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Fortunately for them, assembling all that data back in Mountain View was a far less rigorous task: Google engineers use their mapping software to link the photos to their shooting locations and string them together to create the panoramic paths users walk through.

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