"Expose to the right"

[Golden Ape]

I remember reading a thread on here a couple of weeks ago - someone had been taking shots at night and were getting quite a bit of noise. At the time someone else suggested that they could cut down on the noise by "exposing to the right". I was kind of confused by this at the time as I couldn't see what the advantage would be however I've just read an interesting article on Adobe's site about why exactly this is. Incidently the same article suggests that using negative exposure compensation to preserve highlights might not be the great idea I thought it was.