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Essentially the trick is to use a stab-blender for 20 seconds to aerate the wine very quickly. It's definitely something I'll run a double-blind test on over Christmas!

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The article is making the point that programmers are becoming a core economic factor for successful companies, so much so that large companies are buying smaller companies purely for their programming teams. He points out that companies such as Google nurture young programming talent as a strategic investment.

Of course the message is hugely appealing to me as a software developer. My own opinion is that technology is exponentially increasing the potential "value space" for possible investment. For example, consider the introduction of Facebook. With that particular advance in social networking, it opened up all sorts of opportunities for individuals and companies to promote themselves and establish new kinds of dialogues with their clients. With this advance, a large number of opportunities were created, which in turn leads to more specialised development that wasn't possible before the large-scale take up of social networking. Thereby creating a lot more potential work for a larger number of programmers.

If companies don't keep up with the introduction of new technologies, they run the risk of falling behind their competitors. Not only those competitors who are able to utilise technology to make their workers more productive, but also those competitors that make better use of social networks and internet search to gain new customers and retain older ones, and data modeling and analysis to determine new markets and optimise existing ones. It seems to me that not only are developers the creators of wealth, but we are currently living in a technological arms race.

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Before the negotiation

Firstly, try and build information profile about your counter-party. You are interested in working out what their utility function (or value profile) is. You want to try and determine their "walk-away" number - the price at which they will walk away from the negotiation. You want to try and work out what alternatives they have to an agreement. What pressures do they have to getting an agreement?

Also, determine what your walk-away price is. What is the point at which you will walk away from the agreement? Try and come up with alternatives, this will help take the pressure off you during the negotiation. Work out what your utility profile is - what are your priorities? What points won't you compromise on?

During the negotiation

Firstly, you should set the initial price. This will help determine the expectation range that your counter-party has. The only time when you should allow the counter-party to determine the initial price is if they have a lot more information about what the item/service is worth than you do.

With your initial price, you take your estimation of the negotiating counter-party's walk-away price and offer slightly lower. Don't go too low. You want the counter-party to take your initial offer seriously.

Also, try and establish rapport before you begin the negotiation. You can reveal unimportant information about yourself to help the flow of information. Ask questions - try and determine what is important to them. Are there any pressures on them to get the deal done? Are there any time pressures involved? Do other people have any expectations on the results of the negotiations?

Sometimes some small things may give you an edge. Having the appearance of authority may help you during the negotiation. Helping to boost the attractiveness to the counter-party by making the object of the negotiation appear scarce. "Only one left, so you should get it now". Social proof - all these other people have also bought this item and been completely satisfied.

It's important during the negotiation to try and seek mutual benefit.

If someone is over-aggressive or too emotional during the negotiation, take a time-out. Don't mirror negativity. If the counter-party starts with with an insultingly low offer try a technique called "Re-Anchoring". The Re-anchoring technique involves making a counter-proposal, and then repeating it numerous times. You are trying to "anchor" your counter-proposal in their mind.

If you get stuck in a negotiation, try adding in embedded options. For example; if [some situation] happens, then you must do [this other thing].

Closing the negotiation

Create a solution "package". This is a complete solution - listing all the negotiating points and your proposal. Don't try and negotiate each point separately, seek agreement for a "package" of solutions.

Potentially try embedding options into the solution.

Also, once you have an agreement, think about shelving the agreement temporarily to try and "re-factor" it, i.e. to try get a better agreement. You can always come back to your original agreement if no better solution can be found.

Take your time during the negotiation.

Practice!

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Although the origins sound quite dodgy, apparently the exercises have been verified as a form of Tibetan Yoga. The key point for me is that the exercises can be done in 10 minutes a day.

There are 5 exercises:

1. The first is extremely lame and is essentially spinning around with your arms outstretched, turning from left to right. Lame. Ignore.

2. The second exercise is leg raises, while raising the head to the chest at the same time. Good core strength workout.

3. The third exercise seems to be stretching forward from a kneeling position to child's pose, and then back to a seated back bend.

4. The fourth exercise goes from seated staff pose, and then pushing up to bridge pose.

5. The fifth exercise goes from downward dog to cobra pose.

Apart from the first exercise, which seems quite silly and pointless, these sound like a great set of exercises for a quick workout routine.

Here are some links to THT demos on youtube:

• Sarah Kline demoing
• Maryse Moerel demoing

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In the silicon.com post "Your brain vs technology: How our wired world is changing the way we think", Baroness Susan Greenfield is quoted, professor of Synaptic Pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford: "If the human brain is exquisitely adapted to the environment, which it is, if the environment is changing, which it is, then it's a given the brain will change". She is concerned by how our brain changes as a result of increasingly spending our time in front of technology, that areas of the cortex may be going dark as we spend our lives immersed in Big Brother and Facebook.

It seems to me that in order to get good things out of our interactions with technology, we should focus on how we can use our screen time to exercise areas of our brain in ways that wouldn't normally happen.

A good example of this was a recent post on Scientific American called "In the mind of others - Reading fiction can strengthen your social ties and even change your personality". This article is about research that indicates how reading fiction may help social interaction by building experience on how to interact with other people, without physically interacting with other people. As people empathise with characters in the book and those characters relate to other characters in the story, they build up this mental database on how to behave. This mental database helps with later, "meat-space" interactions.

I remember reading related work on using virtual reality to overcome phobias through repeatedly experiencing a fear-inducing situation in a safe, virtual environment.

Is it just our thinking and behaviour we can affect through computer interaction? The BBC had a news story about how a virtual gym could help with weight loss which suggests that maybe our virtual experiences also affect our body. What are the limits for this? This sounds like a wonderful area to explore. How can we re-wire the brain in beneficial ways using our computers?

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Apparently over 75% of honey sold in US grocery stores isn't strictly "honey". It's been "ultra-filtered", a process that removes the natural pollen from the honey. A process whose only purpose appears to be to disguise the origin of the honey.

There are laboratories in the US that can determine the origin of honey by the different pollen contained within it. By ultra-filtering the honey, it becomes impossible to determine where the honey came from.

Ultra-filtering involves heating the honey, potentially watering it down, and then forcing it through extremely fine filters to remove the pollen.

The process appears to have sprung from the high tariffs imposed on China's honey producers in 2001 that were aimed at protecting the local US honey industry. The Chinese producers responded by ultra-filtering the honey and transshipping it through other countries without the tariffs - changing labels to hide the originating country in the meantime.

A fascinating insight into a small, dark corner of the food industry.

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The second blog post is about generating a Monty Python parody using markov chains. Even though the code is very simple, it generates very convincing nonsense!

How long will it be before the prose in our stories, the plots on our TV series, the lyrics in our songs are all machine generated?

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Created by: Public Administration

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This technique of cooling the hand to reduce core body temperature works because mammals have specialised blood vessels in their palms that are designed to dissipate heat. By applying temperature changes to the palms, the core body temperature is more efficiently altered.

It's going to be interesting to apply this and see how much of a difference it makes to my own work-outs.

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