My friend Ben Casnocha recently wrote a paper for school – he’s got an adapted version up on his website titled Analysis: H-1B Visa Issue in America.  He dug up a deliciously moronic quote and summary from a CRS Report for Congress titled Immigration Reform: Brief Synthesis of Issue. 

"Those opposing increases in temporary workers assert that there is no compelling evidence of labor shortages."  Norman Matloff of UC Davis, a forceful critic of H-1B expansion, says that U.S. companies do not import foreign workers to fill a labor shortage. If there were truly a shortage, starting salaries for grads with bachelor’s degrees in computer science or engineering would be rising (they are not), and technology companies wouldn’t hire only 2% of their job applicants as they wouldn’t have the luxury to be so picky.  And they don’t want more foreign workers in hopes of recruiting the best and brightest, according to Matloff. The average H-1B visa employee earns in the $65,000/yr range, far below what top talent commands. Rather, they want more foreign workers because they can pay them less to do the tasks currently done by domestic workers. (The law requiring employers to pay the "prevailing wage" is largely ignored in the industry.) In short, an increase in cheap H-1B talent would probably displace the American IT worker.

Aha – I’ve got it.  Let’s make sure we only hire American’s and keep everyone else out of the country.  And technology companies – stop being so damn picky with your hiring.  If you’d just hire people that weren’t as smart, you wouldn’t need non-Americans. 

Gross.

And – if you need more for your inner cynic, how about the article in today’s Rocky Mountain News titled Clouds hover in ethanol sky.  E85 (assuming you can find it) apparently costs 78% less than regular unleaded gas but gets 71% less per gallon.  Since it’s 85% ethanol, it presumably is less polluting (assuming that the total ethanol lifecycle consumes less energy than gasoline) but doesn’t save the consumer any short term money. 

I’m looking for a handful of the "best" Wii and Xbox 360 games for my super gaming rig in Keystone.  Any suggestions?

While John Furrier would like me to actually think and respond to Alex Iskold’s post titled Software Engineering Tips for Startups, I’d rather try to get into the holiday spirit and make some chocolate chip cookies.

Pete Warden demonstrates his programming versatility by giving us a program for how to bake cookies your friends will beg for.  Maybe #8 should be "must be able to make great chocolate chip cookies."

The Boston Globe has a great "Office Invasion" series on their web site.  If you are into Guitar Hero or Rock Band, take a look at the Harmonix office and some of the interesting folks that work there.

You are going to hear me talk a lot about user interfaces and human computer interaction in 2008.  It’s an area that I’m intensely interested in as I think the way we interact with computers 20 years from now will make our current UI / HCI paradigms look as quaint as DOS and 3270 emulation mode looks today.

One of my friends working in this area is Bruce Wyman, the director of technology at the Denver Art Museum.  Bruce periodically writes a blog called DAM Technology and recently put up a post titled The Sapir-WIMP Hypothesis.

""The more easily you can talk about a user interface, the more easily you can understand how to manipulate it." … it’s been a fundamental part to how we’ve approached a lot of our interface works in the galleries here at the museum. I think the amount of time someone is going to devote to whatever experience we create is pretty minimal and that having complex interfaces and interactions quickly chew into that engagement time. So, wherever we can make the interface immediately intuitable or simplify the experience so that are no incorrect actions, the better of we are and the quicker someone can get into an experience."

Sometimes you need a paragraph to describe the UI.  But keep it short. 

I’m looking for a great book on the history of the CIA.  Any recommendations from out there in the blogosphere?

Ok – it’s actually a Keynote presentation.  The Onion demonstrates their deep insight once again with the article Gore Wins Oscar, Nobel Peace Prize For Slide-Show Presentation.  I’m so pleased that someone has finally gotten recognition for their mastery of presentation technology (thanks Dave.)

A few weeks ago, Slashdot pointed out that a Critic of Software Patents Wins [the] Nobel Prize in Economics.  I finally got around to reading the paper that Slashdot referred to – Sequential Innovation, Patents, and Imitation by James Bessen and Eric Maskin (the aforementioned Nobel Prize winner.)  The paper was written in 1999 and is an MIT Economics Department Working Paper #00-01 (one of first working papers to be published at MIT in 2000.)

The paper is a crunchy one (lots of equations that I wasn’t able to follow now that it has been 20 years since I took an economics class, although the abstract summarizes things nicely (as all good abstracts should).

"Abstract: How could such industries as software, semiconductors, and computers have been so innovative despite historically weak patent protection? We argue that if innovation is both sequential and complementary—as it certainly has been in those industries—competition can increase firms’ future profits thus offsetting short-term dissipation of rents. A simple model also shows that in such a dynamic industry, patent protection may reduce overall innovation and social welfare. The natural experiment that occurred when patent protection was extended to software in the 1980’s provides a test of this model. Standard arguments would predict that R&D intensity and productivity should have increased among patenting firms. Consistent with our model, however, these increases did not occur. Other evidence supporting our model includes a distinctive pattern of cross-licensing in these industries and a positive relationship between rates of innovation and firm entry."

Much of the stuff I read on software patents generally ignores (or hand waves) over the empirical data as well as any rigorous quantitative analysis of the real economic dynamics of software patents.  There is also an excellent and short section that discusses the pattern of cross-licensing entire patent portfolios within the software industry.

I also found a couple of other great software patent sites as a result of this, including the Research on Innovation Working papers (many papers by James Bessen and Michael Meurer discussing software patents), an overview of Bessen and Meurer’s upcoming book titled Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk (Princeton University Press: March 2008), and the summary from a conference from 2006 titled Software Patents: A Time for Change?

There are a handful of hysterical VC Holiday Cards.  I think the best one is The Adventures of Gary Snoman (produced by Blueprint Ventures.)

Gary travels the world this year and helps us understand how VCs think about different cultures (or at least loads us up with a bunch of new cliches from the past year.)  The deleted scenes are a nice add on – watch Gary struggle in Paris and abuse his assistant for no good reason.  Gary’s 2005 and 2006 adventures are also available.  To the gang at Blueprint – nicely done!