During this Christmas and Holiday Season, whatever your faith, I wish you the most blessed time with your friends and family. Here are a few photos of "Hoeg Hollow" with my holiday greetings. I also invite you to view some beautiful Chinese Christian folk art, including a Chinese Nativity created by my friend, He Qi.
.

During this morning’s drive to work I listened to a fascinating podcast from Business Week, Google’s Next Big Dream. Here is a brief description:

"They call it cloud computing. The idea is to deliver incredible processing power to students, researchers, and entrepreneurs—while expanding Google’s footprint well beyond search, media, and advertising" or "supercomputing for everyone".

This podcast is extremely interesting, and thought provoking. Given the source is Business Week, the story is NOT delivered in geek speak. I recommend you spend the fifteen minutes required to listen:

Upon completion of the podcast, I used Google (what else!) and discovered some additional resources:

• Introduction to Problem Solving on Large Scale Clusters
  (free online course with videos and lecture notes)
  .
• Google’s own Computer Science Curriculum Search Engine
  .
• Google Code Video Lectures
  (AJAX, C++, JAVA, Python and more)
  .
• Rich Hoeg’s Drivetime Podcast Tutorial
  (how I listen to podcasts in my car)

I will definitely add these resources to the software engineering section of the engineering learning wiki.
.

Knol is not a typo, but a new Google term for "unit of knowledge". Via Ross Mayfield’s blog I learned this morning that not only does Google want to index the web … they appear to want to create it also! I’m not sure I like this trend. Anyhow from the "official Google blog":

"Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project" … Google VP of Engineering, Udi Manber

More … Google – The Next Big Thing

I graduated from Dartmouth in 1978. If I had stopped learning, I would now be unemployed.  Estimates state that in as little as six years, 1/2 of what you learned about technology in your college is now obsolete. What have you done to remain current?

One of my favorite sites for engineering education is back for Winter term, and the price is right … no charge.  Attend a research engineering seminar this Winter from Stanford:

• AA-297: Seminar in Guidance, Navigation, & Control
• CS-547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar
• EE-203: the Entrepreneurial Engineer
• EE-380: Seminar on Computer Systems
• ME-396: Design and Manufacturing Forum
• MSE-472: Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar

Here is the enrollment link.

This link pushes you to the Staford enrollment form. The Winter courses are not yet listed on the Stanford page … however upon completion this form will give you access to all Stanford free courses. Make certain to bookmark the confirmation page.

Do these courses not hit the mark? Check out my engineering learning wiki. The wiki’s only rules are:

• Content should support engineering knowledge transfer
• Content should be available without charge
• Anyone may contribute to this wiki. Learn how!

Earlier this year I explored Second Life for my company. Although the project was fun, it was difficult to imagine any actual payback that would accrue given the large investment required to create and maintain an island. However, the concept of using advanced simulation is an area that any engineering company should actively pursue. With that thought in mind, I enjoyed listening to the most recent Design News Podcast:

• Virtual Reality: The New Weapon in Product Design

The ability to innovate and use simulated environments will ultimately reap huge benefits, just not in Second Life. Continuing the theme of design innovation, my good friend Rafael Sidi just blogged yesterday about innovation, and the "key to success". Via his post, he also link’s to a Booz, Allen and Hamilton study just released on corporate R&D (pdf). As a fyi, Rafael practices what he preaches.  His company, Elsevier, was an early adopter of "Search" integrated with "RSS". Elsevier’s Compendex engineering research tool added this capability based upon customer input. Thus, you may wish to review my recent post on customer centric innovation.