Brewed Fresh Daily

The Pecan Street Project is a community-wide collaboration to fully reinvent the energy delivery system. It’s more than a smart grid project. Pecan Street is an ambitious effort to empower customers and innovators to use the energy system in new ways while making energy cleaner, water usage more efficient and the economy stronger.

More background here:

Austin’s Pecan Street Project heads directly toward the future

Video here.

So, I was reading about community gardens in DC this morning, when I tripped across this site, listed in the article.

Kickstarter: A New Way to Fund Ideas and Endeavors

Pew has published an interesting report: State of the News Media 2010. Among the points:

[T]he future of news ultimately rests on more long-term concerns: What are the prospects for alternative journalism organizations that are forming around the country? Will traditional media adapt and innovate amid continuing pressures to thin their ranks?

And with growing evidence that conventional advertising online will never sustain the industry, what progress is being made to find new revenue for financing the gathering and reporting of news?

Normally, it goes without saying that on April 1, you should be prepared for some spoofs. Well, some readers of BFD apparently were taken aback by some of our posts on April Fool’s Day. I extend my sincere, no-fooling apology to any who were put off by these posts.

(I had thought that the BBC’s classic on the spaghetti harvest might alert readers to the spoofs.)

Northeast Ohio has recruited a British company, Auto Windscreens, that has produced the first prescription windshield for automobiles. The company will be setting up a production facility in Stow.

Working with engineers at NASA Glenn, Google has announced release of text-only video. Brokered by NorTech, the new partnership promises to strengthen NASA Glenn’s long term future.

TEXTp is the result of months of intense transcoding efforts by our engineers, who toiled for weeks with NASA Glenn engineers to ensure that a large chunk of videos on the platform could be reduced to their most basic elements. By replacing the images in the video with a series of letters and numbers, the videos are far less taxing on our system — and have the added benefit of promoting literacy.

Bridging the rural-urban divide in broadband coverage is a key issue in the recently released national broadband plan.

In NEO, OneCommunity will be adapting a solution developed by Virgin Media to use ferrets to lay underground cables throughout the region.

Ferrets key to bridging the digital divide between cities and rural areas

A Canadian graduate student at Duke University, Julia Gaffield, has discovered from the British National Archives the first known, government-issued version of Haiti’s founding document.

Haiti’s Founding Document Found in London

During the same visit, she unearthed another major find: a 1950’s video on the Swiss spaghetti harvest.

This competition will be interesting to watch:

Google Fiber for Communities: Next steps

190,000 People and 600 Cities Want Google’s Fast Fiber

Baltimore’s Google site

Baltimore vies for Google Fiber dollars, expertise

Ravenstahl declares Friday ‘Google Day’ in Pittsburgh

March has its share of strange and obscure holidays. The first of the month is National Pig Day, the fifth is Multiple Personality Day (a chance for anyone to get in touch with themselves), and the fourteenth is National Pi Day (the decimal expansion of pi starts 3.14). And now there is a new March holiday…

First Physics Day! It’s being celebrated today because the particles in the Large Hadron Collider are finally being smashed together at super-high energies that mirror conditions after the Big Bang. The physics community is aflutter over the potential of bagging the elusive Higgs boson, and the rest of us are grateful that, improbable as it seemed, the collider did not create a fatal black hole.

Happy “First Physics Day”
Why the Large Hadron Collider Experiment Matters