links for 2010-03-02

At an event in downtown San Francisco on Tuesday, a representative of the Obama administration went before a gathering of Silicon Valley cleantech entrepreneurs to spread the good news about what's resulted from the stimulus package, and to get their feedback.
Peter Roehrig, a political appointee in the Department of Energy's office of energy efficiency and renewable energy, pointed to numbers released by the Congressional Budget Office that day suggesting that stimulus funding led to as many as 2.1 million jobs by the end of last year. The Department of Energy administrates $36.7 billion of the stimulus funds. Part of this, Roehrig noted, is going to a program to encourage energy-efficient retrofits for cities–a program being dubbed "cash for caulkers."

In the Gmail Labs Class of 2010, six experimental features have graduated to become supported features and five have been expelled.
Google introduced Gmail Labs in June 2008 as a testing ground for experimental Gmail features, some of which Gmail product manager Keith Coleman acknowledged at the time might be bad ideas.
Gmail Labs began with 13 experiments: Quick Links, Superstars, Old Snakey, Pictures In Chat, Fixed Width Font, Custom Keyboard Shortcuts, Mouse Gestures, Signature Tweaks, Random Signature, Custom Date Formats, Muzzle, Hide Unread Counts, and Email Addict.
And it later reached 60, including features that range from useful, like Message Translation, to quirky amusements, like Mail Goggles, which requires users to prove their sobriety by solving a math problem before sending a message.