Yet another reason to keep your attendees in an upbeat mood: It can prevent colds. Between travel and hand-shaking, meetings can be serious disease-spreaders. From the article:

In that project, [psychologist Sheldon Cohen of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh]’s team interviewed 193 healthy adults by phone each evening for 2 weeks. The participants reported their positive and negative emotions during that day. They then received nasal drops containing a rhinovirus or an influenza virus that causes a coldlike illness.

Each person was quarantined in a separate room and monitored for 5 or 6 days. Although a positive emotional style bore no relation to whether participants became infected, it protected against the emergence of cold symptoms. For instance, among people infected by the influenza virus, 14 of 50 (28 percent) who often reported positive emotions developed coughs, congestion, and other cold symptoms, as compared with 23 of 56 infected individuals (41 percent) who rarely reported positive emotions.

The article suggests that it’s not necessarily situational, that generally happy people tend to have fewer symptoms, but if you can make them happier, maybe there will be less tissue consumption on the show floor.

I was oh so glad to run across this article from Business Pundit on networking advice for introverts. Business Pundit’s Rob puts it so well:

I have a problem. I’m an introvert. I’m not shy. I’m not afraid of being in public. But I am horrible at chit-chat and gossip. If I spend an evening at a social function with people I don’t know or don’t like, I get home and feel like I’ve spent all day at the ocean. It’s that fighting-the-waves and drained-by-the-sun kind of tired.

And he offers some ways to work around introversion when it comes to networking. It’s funny, because I just did an interview with Josh at Business Networking Advice, so I’ve been doing some thinking about networking and how I’m really bad at it in the traditional sense. I really don’t like networking events, or even the word “networking.” I like to build relationships by learning what someone needs and, if at all possible, helping them out. That person may or may not ever be able to reciprocate, but I believe s/he will pay it forward, and the person they helped will do the same, and ultimately the circle closes back to me. Or not. It really doesn’t matter. See, I told you I’m a terrible networker.

What I’d love to see is a networking event that isn’t so painfully all about “what’s in it for me?” and collecting a bunch of business cards, but rather helps people find and nourish human, rather than business, connections. I know, I’m naive and proving it once again, but that’s an event even I would find meaningful.

According to this New York Times article, hotel Internet connections still need some work. I have to admit that I’m on board with this one: Sometimes it’s great, and sometimes, well, not-so-great to terrible. Here’s one guy’s take, from the article:

Will Allen III, an organizational development consultant who travels most weeks, attributes growing connectivity problems to the shift to wireless access, estimating that he has trouble with Wi-Fi service in hotels about 50 percent of the time, in contrast to 5 percent of the time with a wired connection.

“Wireless is just not reliable yet, and hotels are just catching up to the fact that they’ve got to be on top of this,” he said, noting that he has turned down free upgrades to a room with Wi-Fi in favor of a wired connection in a lesser room. And if he is planning a long-term stay, he and his colleagues will test a hotel’s Internet service in advance.

“We can’t stay at a hotel unless the Internet works,” he said. “It’s like oxygen — we have to have it.”

Sounds like it would be a good idea these days to add testing connectivity in various guest rooms to your site selection checklist.