Too noisy in your town; Find the quiet with these maps

Londoners are fed up with the noise. Now they can find the ‘quiet’ in maps provided by the Department of Environmental, Food and Rural Affairs in the UK. The BBC has reported on the maps, which are already available for Birmingham as well. Noise maps showing the decibel level of many other cities are planned.

WSJ: Autodesk Stages Revival

Don’t look now but Autodesk (ADSK) has caught the eye of Wall Street. Actually, the street, took notice a long time ago, pushing the stock to the point where the company split the stock last year. Now, with the report of the latest quarter’s earnings, the Wall Street Journal last Friday touted the strength of the company’s "revival." Most impressive is the "adjustment" in expected earnings for this fiscal year now pegged at betweeen $1.49 to $1.51 billion. This comes after years of Carol Bartz trying desparately to jaw the company past the billion dollar mark in revenue. Now, just six months after the company reported that they exceeded $1 billion for the first time, the company is looking for even more growth. In the latest quarter, net profits were $75 million or 92% above the same quarter last year. Revenue from Autodesk’s 3D products increased 93% over last year.

The Journal reported that "the choppy economic waters of recent years has forced many companies to revamp their design and engineering processes to cut costs and speed products to market. ‘All of a sudden, our world became front and center,’ said Bartz." The Journal’s report also cited that AutoCAD now accounts for less than half of the company’s revenue.

National Weather Service Experiments with Google Earth

Slashdot notes that among other RSS/XML feeds of weather, the National Weather Service is experimenting with KML files for Google Earth. Yes, the U.S. National Weather Service is using Google Earth.

Google Earth Data Update

Oogle Earth reports that Google Earth has updated data for Hamburg, Sydney, Mountain View California and other places.

Michael Fay Interview

National Geographic has an interview the “megaflyover” explorer who became a hero in the GIS community after speaking at the ESRI User Conference a few years ago.