How uncertainty can be more persuasive

According to a Stanford Graduate School of Business article on persuasion by Zakary Tormala:

If your basic message is compelling or contains strong arguments, then non-experts get more attention and can have more impact when they express certainty in their messages. Experts, on the other hand, get more attention and can have more impact when they express uncertainty.

How your presence affects behavior

The article How to manage behaviour was written by Paul Dix for teachers. It's interesting how many of the 10 tips in this article can be applied to the workplace. Behavior management tip #4, for example, explains how your presence affects behavior:

Get out and about

Perhaps your greatest contribution to managing behaviour around the school site is your presence. If you have your coffee in the playground, your lunch with the students (what % of your students eat at a table with an adult every day?) and are ever-present in the corridor outside your classroom students will see consistency in your expectations for behaviour both in and out of class.

They will grow used to your interventions in social areas and your presence will slowly have an impact on their behaviour. The relationships you forge will be strengthened, with opportunities for less formal conversation presenting themselves daily...

2 communication tactics of a successful CEO

In this Inc article, CEO Jordan Zimmerman, whose advertising company has billings in excess of $2.6 billion a year, shares two of his communication tactics:

I call the CEO or chairperson of every one of my major clients every single day. These people are the brilliance behind the brand, and my job is to keep them in the loop, to make sure that as a team, we're making the right decisions for the brand. The calls last only about 10 minutes. We talk about the numbers--what we plan to do, what they think of it. Even if things are going well, are there things they see that we might miss?

I also carry my cell around the building, and my employees do as well: It's how we communicate. The office is 85,000 square feet on several floors, and my executives are located with their functions, so it's inefficient to chase after people. And if they're out of their offices, I don't want to wait until they get back.

Social media cheat sheet

Drew McLellan offers a Social Media Cheat Sheet to let you compare customer communication, brand exposure, traffic to your site, and search-engine optimization among social media tools and platforms. There's also a PDF version if you prefer.

Free decision-making spreadsheet

Lyndsay Swinton at Mftrou.com (Management For The Rest Of Us) provides this free spreadsheet to help with decision making.

The strategy that separates rapid learners

From the article How I Was Able to Ace Exams Without Studying at ZenHabits:

Rote memorization is based on the theory that if you look at information enough times it will magically be stored inside your head....The strategy of rapid learners is different. Instead of memorizing by rote, rapid learners store information by linking ideas together. Instead of repetition, they find connections. These connections create a web of knowledge that can succeed even when you forget one part.

Here are some techniques for making connections:

Metaphors and Analogy--Create your own metaphors for different ideas. For example, the balance sheet for a corporation can be like the circulatory system.

The 5-Year Old Method--It may be impossible to explain thermodynamics to a first grader, but the process of explanation forces you to link ideas. How would you explain the broader concepts in simpler terms a child would understand?

Diagramming--Creating diagrams or pictures can allow you to connect ideas together on paper. Instead of having linear notes, organized in a hierarchy, what if you had notes that showed the relationships between all the ideas you were learning?

4 tips for powerful video storytelling

Some of the tips from the ReelSEO article 7 Tips for More Powerful Online Video Storytelling by former news anchor Donna Davis:

1. Tell the story through the eyes of one person. It’s more affective to show one good person than to tell me about hundreds of anonymous people.
2. Don’t use the sales pitch person in your video. Instead, show how a client’s life was changed by the service or product offered.
3. Use the interview portions to convey opinion and emotion. Work to capture that emotion and your story will be more compelling.
4. Let the video more than the audio tell the story. People are more visual and the mantra of news was always write to your video; don’t write first and then match video to your script. You are basically narrating pictures.

What is the best travel search site?

According to CNNMoney.com, Kayak is the best travel search site.

If you go to only one travel search site, make it Kayak. It ropes in not just the deals offered at such big online travel agents as Orbitz and Expedia but also those from dozens of other travel sites and airlines that many tools miss. A recent search for a spring flight from New York to Lima, for example, turned up one on Copa Airlines' site that cost $30 less than the same flight on Orbitz.

Coolest feature: Kayak shares the deals its users have found on your route. If you can adjust your itinerary to match their dates, you may score the cheaper fare.

The top 25 most dangerous programming errors

Whether you're building a new website or want to better secure your existing one, here is a list of the 25 most dangerous programming errors, thanks to CWE. Even if you don't have a technical background, you'll be able to understand these errors enough to communicate them to your programmer.

Programmers will appreciate the prevention and mitigation explanations plus the technical details, code examples, detection methods, and references that are included with each error.

Here is the number one error from the list:

Failure to Preserve Web Page Structure (Cross-site Scripting)
Cross-site scripting (XSS) is one of the most prevalent, obstinate, and dangerous vulnerabilities in web applications. It's pretty much inevitable when you combine the stateless nature of HTTP, the mixture of data and script in HTML, lots of data passing between web sites, diverse encoding schemes, and feature-rich web browsers. If you're not careful, attackers can inject Javascript or other browser-executable content into a web page that your application generates. Your web page is then accessed by other users, whose browsers execute that malicious script as if it came from you (because, after all, it "did" come from you). Suddenly, your web site is serving code that you didn't write. The attacker can use a variety of techniques to get the input directly into your server, or use an unwitting victim as the middle man in a technical version of the "why do you keep hitting yourself?" game.