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Let's say you're a team leader, and your team has a problem. Maybe your team meetings always start late because nobody shows up on time. Maybe it's a vicious circle: because the meetings always start late, people know if they turn up on time they'll be sitting waiting for five or ten minutes. Maybe it's a problem endemic throughout your organisation.

Please now go and read this short extract from a psychology book. It's only a paragraph. Done? Good.

Now imagine that each time you have your team meeting, at the end of the meeting, you say, “I'd like to thank Joe, Dave, and Michelle for making the effort to get here on time. We need all the time we can get, so I really appreciate it.” What effect do you think it'll have? Note that to do this, you need to be at the meeting on time too. You don't need to pick on the people who showed up late, or tut, or remove half the chairs, or deliberately start the meeting when only half the participants are there. Decades of psychology experiments have taught us that out of reward and punishment, reward is the stronger.

Let's take a different example: say you're trying to encourage individuals in your team to contribute more in meetings, design discussions, post-mortems, or even when they're at their desks. I use this example because it's a common problem in the software industry: sometimes there's one particular quiet genius and you'd like him to share his ideas more; sometimes, it's a whole team with an elephant in the drawing room (that is, something they all know but nobody wants to be the first to mention). Again, imagine what will happen if, when someone contributes in the way you want, you show appreciation for them speaking up, whatever you think of the idea itself, and even if the delivery was not as good as you'd like.

In short, this is a process of two steps:

1. Decide what behaviour you want to encourage.
2. Encourage it.

It sounds really easy, but sometimes it can be hard. To start, you have to think of a behaviour to encourage: it's easy to get stuck in a mindset of what you don't want people to do. You have to learn to replace, “I want people to stop arriving late,” with, “I want people to arrive on time.” It's not always easy to see what is the positive form of the change, and even when you can, you have to remember to keep seeing it that way.

The desired behaviour can't be too hard or too easy. Thinking back to the professor's example, he asked his students to compliment every girl who wore red. If he'd limited the compliments to girls wearing red polka dots, would the behaviour have spread so quickly? If he'd had his students compliment every girl who wore clothes of any form, would the girls have changed their behaviour, or would they just assume everyone was very flirty this week?

You have to be careful with the second stage as well. In a way, it's hard to get encouragement wrong. The professor's story shows this admirably: did he train his students how to compliment girls first, or did he just let them get on with it? Encouragement can be more or less effective, but it's very rarely discouraging.

There is a way it can be. Imagine if the professor had found a lot of dirty old men and had them compliment the girls in red. By the end of the week the atmosphere would be far from friendly, and red would not be the colour everyone was wearing. Encouragement or praise has to come from someone you want to be praised by; someone appropriate to the nature of the praise. A compliment on appearance sounds better from an attractive suitor than a peeping tom; a compliment on professionalism better from a manager than a tramp in the street; a compliment on engineering insight better from a fellow engineer than a lover.

But overall, this kind of soft encouragement is something that's easy to do, and can have immense benefits. Even if you think it's unlikely to work for your particular problem, it costs nothing, and it might just let you start your next meeting on time.

I work in an industry which is almost entirely populated by men. Lately, I've been working somewhere that has several hundred highly intelligent men on-site, many of them around my age. Having something nice to look at for most of the day improves my mood considerably.

This is something only a gay man can appreciate fully, but to share a little of it with you, I want to describe one chap. I don't work with him directly, but I see him a few times a week. He looks like a model.

He has a nice face with a wide jaw, such as was popular in models before the latest trend towards narrow, bony faces. A quick glance would tell you he's about 21, but closer inspection reveals he's into his late twenties. His hair is eye-length, and he usually wears it in a cutely emo style, covering his face a little. But when he gets off his bike and flicks his head to one side, his hair moves so freely he could be the money shot in a shampoo commercial—if he weren't so un-self-conscious about it.

The lad carries himself with an upright stance that suggests confidence. He smiles in a friendly and open way. He looks like a man's man, who everyone wants to be, who could convince you of anything with a flash of his teeth.

And then you say hello to him, and the spell breaks. His poise disappears. He breaks step, and narrows his stance. His smile turns into a mousey expression of shyness, and he squeaks out a reply. It was weeks before I actually heard him talk, and when he did it was a real surprise. The smallness of his voice is completely out of keeping from the air of confidence he usually manages to project.

My company is full of cute guys. This has been about one of them.

As it was on special offer on Steam, I took the opportunity to buy the new Prince of Persia game. The marketing spiel describes it as a new Prince of Persia, “for next-generation consoles,” and luckily this includes the PC. I've never bought a Prince of Persia game before: my stay-at-home sense of excitement has always been satiated by watching speedruns of previous games in the series. So although I'm familiar with the gameplay and the tongue-in-cheek style, experiencing it for myself is new and exciting. I play the game on the XBox 360 controller, and like many cross-platform titles, it's designed to be played this way.

The new Prince isn't the arrogant, naïve teenager he was in Sands of Time: he's grown up a bit, but those who appreciate a bit of flesh will be glad to hear he hasn't lost his old fondness for showing off his torso in true action-hero style. My mum always complains that heroines in video games are always exaggerated stereotypes of the feminine form, with a tiny waist and prominent … polygons, but the march of technology, with normal mapping, subdivision surfaces, and detailed meshes, means Ubisoft can show how even-handed they are with the Prince's bare chest. Despite this, his new headscarf and swept-back hair, along with his slightly pointy chin, make him look like a displaced, and very gay, Pirate of the Caribbean.

A quick note on the graphics. Outlining must be trendy this season - Borderlands is doing it, and Prince of Persia is doing it too. The characters have slightly flat shading and a black outline that gives them a slightly cel-shaded look. I was suspicious of it at first, but it soon grew on me. Cel-shading is often an escape route for poor texturing and lighting - as in the Appleseed film - but that's not the case here. The characters are very detailed, and the environments they play in are likewise lush. The grass is a little weak, but the lighting is very good, and the depth-of-field effect is just nicely subtle.

As for the gameplay, it's more forgiving than the relative you missed off your Christmas shopping list. It gives you a gentle introduction to moving around and to combat, like many games these days, and it does well at it, by reinforcing without becoming repetitive, and by consistently labelling each button with its colour and an icon representing the action it performs. This consistency extends to the menus, though it's a little strange to see the OK button labelled with jumping and the Back button with a gauntlet—especially the first time you start it. These buttons are used consistently too. To wall-run, you head towards the wall and press ‘jump’ (A). If there's a something on the wall you can grab onto, hitting ‘gauntlet’ (B) lets you swing on it and extend your run. Even the combos work the same way: gauntlet, sword, sword lets you grab the enemy, throw him into the air, slash him in the air, and then slash him when he lands. Jump, magic, sword makes the dynamic duo perform a flying leap onto the enemy, stun him with a magical blow, and then slash him as you land. As a member of the ‘mash the buttons until it dies’ school of playing beat-em-ups, I find a combo system even I can understand must be the work of genius.

You don't have the Sands of Time in this game, but you do have a companion. Instead of chasing after the girl all the time when she goes the easy way leaving you to show off your athleticism (and talk to yourself the meanwhile), she follows you around, telling you the plot one line at a time (every time you press LT to get a tidbit). Not only that, this girl has magical powers, not least of which is, if you fall (or jump) off a cliff, she flies down and saves you, Superman-esque. As for her appearance, she hardly registers on the Lara Croft scale: she wears a revealing dress that flutters nicely in the wind, and most impractically walks in bare feet, but she's merely well-proportioned, not exaggerated.

The chick also comes in handy for letting you pull off longer jumps, and to perform more intricate combo moves as a duo. The fighting mechanic is similar to previous games, but there's no hitpoints, which again, makes it very forgiving. Fail to dodge or block when you need to, and there's a quick animation and the edges of your screen tint blood-red. Fail a few more times, and there's an animation of the enemy levelling a killing blow. One of the action buttons flashes up on screen, and you have to hit it quickly. I don't use the XBox 360 controller enough to know the buttons that well, so despite the friendly labelling mentioned above I often miss this ‘saving throw’ too, at which your heroine casts a spell to save you. It makes the enemy regain some health, but the upshot of all this is that you just can't die. It's great for me—despite being dire at the combat, I've defeated three end-of-level bosses so far—but it does make the combat feel a little pointless. In addition, there aren't anywhere near as many random enemies scattered around the map to fight, so it lets you focus much more on brachiating from one platform to the next.

The character movements are very enjoyable to watch, and my hat comes off to the animators and mocap actors (if mocap was used). The dialogue is also pretty good, if a little less light-hearted than in previous games. There are one or two nice touches that add some continuity.

If Prince of Persia were Mario—and their acrobatic antics and love of rescuing princesses certainly unites them—this game would be Super Mario 64. There's a world map, which shows you the connectivity of each level in the four regions of the game. Not only that, upon defeating the “Corrupted” guardian of each level, some stars light seeds appear, mostly in, surprise surprise, hard-to-reach parts of the level. When you've collected a certain number, you can take these back to the temple, where you start, to activate some “power plates.” These are scattered throughout the levels and act as springboards once active, which lets you get to the later levels.

It's so common when making a series (not just of games, but of books and films too) that they get more and more involved and extreme over time, effectively limiting their audience to people who've already played (or read or watched) all the predecessors. But as a newcomer to Prince of Persia, I can say this game is a great introduction to the series, and I'll definitely be leaping and swinging my way through the rest of the game.

I wish to start this article by saying that I have no intention of inciting criminal behaviour. Drunk in charge of a bicycle is a serious offence under the Licensing Act 1872, as Rob Ainsley points out, and I can't possibly recommend that anyone do it. That said, I write under the influence of alcohol, having just now returned from a formal hall at Fitzwilliam College to which I took a bottle of Malbec and from which I returned without said bottle, but with most of the contents thereof securely inside my stomach.

So after that, I want to defend drunk cycling as compared to drunk driving. According to Greater Manchester Police, drunk driving results in 3500 deaths and serious injuries a year. Cycling, overall, results in less than one death a year, and a correspondingly small number of serious injuries. The only recent (i.e. last five years) cycling death where alcohol was a factor involved a drunk pedestrian, who knew the cyclist involved and, the court heard, was playing chicken with him. The primary reason my moral compass tells me it's OK to drink-ride and not drink-drive (not that the latter is an opportunity for me, as a non-driver), is that the only risk I'm taking is hurting myself. It seems no different from sky-diving or climbing a tree, in that respect, whereas drink-driving is indisputably dangerous to other people. Further, my own experience is that I've had several accidents and near-misses while sober, but none while drunk. You can, of course, say that the reason for this is that the roads are much quieter at night, when I am most likely to be drunk, and I wouldn't hesitate to agree with you, but I don't think it makes a difference.

Having, I hope, dealt with the controversy, let's get down to what I wanted to say, which is that drunk cycling is actually an interesting experience. Once or twice, I've been very drunk on my bike. It's completely obvious when you're too drunk to ride in a straight line, because you can see the beam of your headlight wobbling all over the road. I've never been drunk enough that I couldn't stay upright on my bike, but I hear that that provides a useful upper bound on drunkenness.

But, the order in which things start failing is most informative. After one or two drinks, when I'm still within the theoretical limit (theoretical, because cyclists don't have to accept a breath or blood test), I find myself riding faster than usual—not recklessly fast, just that I get more out of riding as hard as I can than I do when sober.

But, with increasing numbers of units, more things stop working. If I've had more than two or three drinks, I'll be extra careful because I know my judgement is impaired. Tonight after a bottle of wine, I noticed that it took me about a second to notice a set of traffic lights had gone green, but after they did, I was still able to determine that the car behind me (which I couldn't see) was going to turn left behind me, just by assessing its approach speed from the engine noise and its headlights shining on the tarmac around me. I could ride in a straight line just as well as I can when sober (I checked twice against the double-yellows), and certainly better than I could walk in straight line.

But on the rare occasion when I've been really drunk, and couldn't even ride in a straight line, I could still notice a car behind me from a hundred yards away; I could still pick out the sound of a siren from the other side of town and react to it appropriately; I could still stop exactly on the stop line at a red light, and in the right gear.

All this leads me to the conclusion that habit is everything when your judgement is impaired by alcohol, and maybe by other causes too. I can still type better than most people can type sober; I can still control a bicycle effectively and recognise hazards in a timely fashion; I can still do arithmetic and more complex mathematical manipulations; all this when I can no longer walk in a straight line and when I might say something I will later regret.

But still, if I'm planning a heavy night out, the sort that nowadays is called, “binge drinking,” but, I'm told, was once only called “drinking,” I'll be careful to leave my bike behind. Very drunken cycling can be informative once or twice, but it's still very scary and something I'd like to avoid.

To summarise: don't break the law, but at the same time realise that drink-cycling is not a social problem that needs to be outlawed; also, some experiments in this area give interesting results about what you can do (drunk or sober) without really thinking about it.

So, I ordered a new phone recently, the T-Mobile G2 Touch (AKA HTC Hero). One of its phone 2.0 features is Twitter integration. I've never really had a need for Twitter, but I've seen it increasingly used as a lightweight blog commenting tool.

And then one day last week, one of my colleagues pointed me to a video. I don't usually follow such links, because they are invariably time-wasters, but this was an early promotional video by the inventors of Erlang promoting their language. If you enjoyed the BBC's ‘Look Around You’, you'll find it hilarious. What can I do with such a link?, I thought. It's too trivial for a blog post. And in fact, this kind of thing happens quite often: I see an interesting tidbit, like a bizarre anniversary, that's too short to make a reasonable blog post, but that I'll tell my friends when I see them. It's one of the reasons I've been quiet here, the other being that when I do have a big enough idea, I find I don't have the time to do it justice like I used to.

You have probably already guessed where this is heading, and my new Twitter account is nasaldemons, named for the creatures of lore that your C or C++ program might invoke if you write some code whose effect is described in the standard as “undefined”. I posted (umm, tweeted) a link to the Erlang video and a few things since then. Don't worry, I'm not planning to report every trip to the shops, and I'm not planning to become one of those people who just repeat, “I'm posting this from such-and-such airport on the way to Whatevercon,” but I hope to keep putting interesting stuff there, and I hope that some of you will find it interesting too.

While I'm on the line, I'd like to encourage people to come to the Brass in the Park event in Royston this Sunday, where I'll be playing. Bring a picnic and be ready to have fun.