Google Maps has a new feature which shows real time traffic information for major highways in large cities. To view traffic information for a region, click the Traffic tab on the map. Red lines indicate stop-and-go, yellow indicates some slowdown, and green means the roads are fairly clear. Cities which have traffic information are noted on the traffic map with a stoplight symbol. Here are a few traffic examples: Bay Area, New York City, Austin, TX.

Read more in Google’s traffic blog post.

The Houston Chronicle is reporting that One-Third of Students in Texas Don’t Graduate. The article is not referring to college, but high school.

One out of three Texas students don’t graduate, and more students drop out than finish high school in the state’s largest cities, according to education experts.

Statewide, more than 2.5 million students have dropped out of Texas high schools in the last 20 years, and each graduating class loses about 120,000 students from freshman year to senior year, according to the San Antonio-based Intercultural Development Research Association.

The article does say that the dropout rate among blacks, Hispanics and low-income students is about 60 percent. I wonder how many of these are children of illegal immigrants? Regardless, this is really sad… the school system here definitely needs some work!

Wired has an article this month listing their Top Ten Tech (Geek) Towns, and Austin is on the list:

Inspiration for Slacker, epicenter of the first EFF battle, home to Dell, Whole Foods, and South by Southwest. Not to mention host to the most dorkbot attendees in the country. Only downside: It’s surrounded by Texas.

One of their criteria was “Number of attendees at local meetings of dorkbot, a group for ‘people doing strange things with electricity’” (10 for Austin). Why did they use something so obscure? Austin also has a pretty high rating for availability of free Wi-Fi according to the article. I have one question though… how exactly does Whole Foods make it a tech town? And yeah, Austin is in Texas, but you really don’t need to leave it much, so I have seen very little of the rest of Texas.

On another top ten note, a neighborhood in downtown Austin is in Natural Home’s Ten Best Eco-Neighborhoods (in America):

SOUTH CONGRESS NEIGHBORHOOD
Located near downtown Austin, South Congress (SoCo) has a lively commercial district full of retro shops, boutiques, neighborhood bars and coffee shops, mixed-use and mixed-priced housing, and outdoorsy orientation.

I don’t go downtown much, but go Austin!

In other local news, on Monday a section of Austin’s downtown area was shut down due to around 60 dead birds along the street. Apparently nothing else was wrong, so it was no more than a precaution. With bird flu in the news, people can be quick to jump to conclusions. The birds were pigeons, sparrows and grackles, so it was probably something more mundane… like poison!