Here’s an argument, from Vivek Wadhwa over at Techchrunch, that to increase the number of H-1B visas in the United States would be a way to spur economic growth, and actually add jobs. Sounds counter-intuitive, but the idea is that immigrants to the US actually create more jobs than fill existing positions.

Xenophobes will claim that immigrants take jobs away and blame them for everything that is wrong in their lives and in America. But as TechCrunch wrote last week, skilled immigrants create more jobs than they take away. That is a fact. My research team documented that one quarter of all technology and engineering startups nationwide from 1995 to 2005 were started by immigrants. In Boston, it was 31%, in New York, 44%, and in Silicon Valley an astonishing 52%. In 2005, these immigrant founded companies employed 450,000 workers. Add it up. That’s far more than all the tech workers we gave green cards to in that period.

In an economic downturn, during a time of rapid change, new businesses are vitally important to the US. They are nimbler, probably better able to create or exploit niche tech advances, and behave like they have less to lose than entrenched purveyors of the status quo. I’ve known a few 1st generation Americans who behaved like that too. (You could make a case that the same holds true of 1st gen immigrants anywhere I suppose, but I’d argue that it’s even more true in the relative free-for-all that is the US economy.)
This is not about carving the pie into more slices. Growth is about increasing the size of the pie, and a disproportionate number of supremely motivated new immigrants would help with exactly that in starting new businesses. I believe Mr. Wadhwa convinced me.

Mouse dominance won’t go away overnight, but soon it won’t be the only way, and things are going to change quickly. Windows 7 will offer good support for touchscreen hardware, and take a look at early multitouch support on Firefox. Instead of just mouse events, web developers will have a whole bunch of new tools to work with, and obviously users will have all kinds of new games and interfaces– it’s exciting stuff.

Multitouch on Firefox from Felipe on Vimeo.

OK, assuming you have a Gmail account and are using Firefox, check out a cool tip for getting to Gmail from a browser window, without having to hit a button or bookmark: just enter ‘g’ into the URL field. That’s it.
OK that was pretty short. Here are 35 more Gmail tips. Hey, did you know that every Gmail message has its own URL, and so can be bookmarked? Or that extra space in your Gmail account can be used as an external drive via a Windows drive shell extension/gDisk on Mac/GmailFS on Linux? You did? Well I didn’t…

Ext JS is a cross-browser JavaScript library for building Rich Internet Applications, with a powerful effects library and GUI toolkit. Here’s a cool tutorial from sixrevisions on how to use it for elastic textareas, which are elements that automatically get bigger or smaller based on the amount of text input by the user. (You’ve seen elastic textareas on Facebook, for example)

At 2,391 posts, Digital Media Minute is getting to be a fairly serious repository, right at the intersection of tech, the internet, and media.

For me it’s a way to stay current, as I stick to my one-plus-post-a-day schedule. There is always a development to cover, or a tip to pass along, but I’d like to remind regular readers that we do accept contributions. If you have a handy tip or an opinion relevant to the subject matter, feel free to run it by me. I keep it pretty broad on purpose, and other voices keep it fresh.

And, my sincere thanks for visiting.

There’s a bit of a dilemma at Burning Man this year: to bring your connectivity, or not? It might be tempting to do so, as the Burning Man organization is rolling out an API, an iPhone app, an effort to make use of Flickr’s machine tags, and more. With all these tools it’ll be interesting to see what people come up with, in a place that comes alive out of nothing. More at O’Reilly Radar.

At a time when it’s seen as critical to keep your site design and marketing efforts optimized and right on the bleeding edge, how can it be that one of the most visited sites on the internet shuns these ideas and a whole lot more conventional wisdom, yet continues to grow? With just 30 employees.

I guess the short answers are ‘free’ and customer loyalty…. still, what an enigma…

Here’s a brief article from Carsonified about the different parts of a cookie and their implications for security. It’s introductory, a good overview on how cookies work, cookie options and configuration, etc.

Wow, when it comes to screencasts, no more Jing for me. All I have to do with Screenr is go to the Screenr record page, size the window and hit ‘record’. It’s a Java-powered, web-based tool, hosted on the Rackspace cloud. Record screencasts of up to five minutes. After you record it sends you a link to your media via Twitter. It’s beyond simple. What a great tool.

With Polymorphic Associations, we can associate a single attribute of a class to any number of specified classes. Here’s a nice explanation of how they are used in Ruby on Rails, from Charles Max Wood.