Google descriptions

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?rd=1

Prevent search engines from displaying DMOZ data in search results for your site

One source Google uses to generate snippets is the Open Directory Project. You can direct us not to use this as a source by adding a meta tag to your pages.

Create good meta descriptions

The description attribute within the <meta> tag is a good way to provide a concise, human-readable summary of each page’s content. Google will sometimes use the meta description of a page in search results snippets, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content. Accurate meta descriptions can help improve your clickthrough; here are some guidelines for properly using the meta description.

• Make sure that every page on your site has a meta description. The HTML suggestions page in Webmaster Tools lists pages where Google has detected missing or problematic meta descriptions.


• Differentiate the descriptions for different pages. Identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site aren't helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. In these cases we're less likely to display the boilerplate text. Wherever possible, create descriptions that accurately describe the specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and use page-level descriptions everywhere else. If you don't have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content: At the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.


• Include clearly tagged facts in the description. The meta description doesn't just have to be in sentence format; it's also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of information—price, age, manufacturer—scattered throughout a page. A good meta description can bring all this data together. For example, the following meta description provides detailed information about a book.

  <meta name="Description" content="Author: A.N. Author, 
  Illustrator: P. Picture, Category: Books, Price: $17.99, 
  Length: 784 pages">

  In this example, information is clearly tagged and separated.


• Programmatically generate descriptions. For some sites, like news media sources, generating an accurate and unique description for each page is easy: since each article is hand-written, it takes minimal effort to also add a one-sentence description. For larger database-driven sites, like product aggregators, hand-written descriptions can be impossible. In the latter case, however, programmatic generation of the descriptions can be appropriate and are encouraged. Good descriptions are human-readable and diverse, as we talked about in the first point above. The page-specific data we mentioned in the second point is a good candidate for programmatic generation. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don't give users a clear idea of the page's content, and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular snippet.


• Use quality descriptions. Finally, make sure your descriptions are truly descriptive. Because the meta descriptions aren't displayed in the pages the user sees, it's easy to let this content slide. But high-quality descriptions can be displayed in Google's search results, and can go a long way to improving the quality and quantity of your search tr

13th year of High School

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/10/high_schools_offer_a_fifth_year_of_high_school_13th_grade_is_a_great_idea.html

Actually, using state high school funding for a 5th year of high school at a community college and receive their high school diploma after the community college and get collage credit

Grit

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141015-angela-duckworth-success-grit-psychology-self-control-science-nginnovators/

Grit scales:

https://sites.sas.upenn.edu/duckworth/pages/research

"We validated it," Angela says. "We showed it predicted objective measures like graduating West Point's first summer [cadet basic training] and winning the National Spelling Bee. And then in all the studies we measured IQ and consistently found that IQ really is something else." Being a hardworking or self-controlled kid is not the same as being a smart kid. Angela and her team had parents rate their kids, had teachers rate their kids, and had kids take two different questionnaires and a delayed-gratification test ("Do you want a dollar today or two dollars in a week?"). They had them do a hypothetical delayed-gratification test with a large number of choices (two dollars today, seven in three months).

"When you average across all of those things, we found you can predict things like their grade point average startlingly well—much better, in fact, than IQ does—as well as changes in grades," Angela says, a finding described by like-minded Stanford colleague Carol Dweck, whom Angela thinks of as a role model, as "a landmark piece of work."

Decision Fatigue

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/productivity/2014/10/decision_fatigue_ego_depletion_how_to_make_better_decisions.2.html

Next, decrease your range of options. This may seem counterintuitive, since it requires making even more decisions. For instance, if you’re picking a restaurant for an important lunch meeting, first deciding on a certain part of town or type of cuisine can narrow your options. Like the participants in the jams study, you’re less likely to be paralyzed by choice if you have few options instead of dozens.

Once you’ve arrived at a decision, stick with it. Ignore the naysaying voice in your head asking if this is the mutual fund that will make you the most money in 15 years or if the route your GPS gave you is the most gas-efficient. Just accept that no decision is ever completely perfect, and remind yourself that it is the best you can do with the tools you have in the moment. Second-guessing yourself only requires making more decisions, which further depletes your cognitive resources. You might also end up happier; researchers have found that people who “satisfice, “or pick an option that meets requirements, are more content with their choices than people who try to pick the best option.

Changing your beliefs may actually make you more productive, too. Someresearchers believe that the notion of ego depletion is all in your head, and that rejecting the idea of self-control as a muscle can combat its effects. People who instead believe that self-control is an infinite resource are less likely to show effects of ego depletion—they actually show increased performance on self-control tests after completing boring, ego-draining tasks like crossing out e’s from a document. Even weirder, how you feel about free will also affects your productivity: The more strongly you believe in it, the more likely you are to enjoy making decisions and to be happy with your choices. My apologies, readers, but your best bet at boosting your productivity may actually be to disregard what you’ve learned in this article.

Source: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2691607/one-in-three-jobs-will-be-taken-by-software-or-robots-by-2025.html?google_editors_picks=true

 Gartner sees things like robots and drones replacing a third of all workers by 2025, and whether you want to believe it or not, is entirely your business.

Smart machines are an emerging "super class" of technologies that perform a wide variety of work, both the physical and the intellectual kind, said Sondergaard. Machines, for instance, have been grading multiple choice for years, but now they are grading essays and unstructured text.

This cognitive capability in software will extend to other areas, including financial analysis, medical diagnostics and data analytic jobs of all sorts, says Gartner.

Following the Process

Following the process can be perceived as a negative phrase - more red tape.  Without well defined processes, a company will loose value through duplication of efforts (two similar processes that were created to achieve the same goal, duplicating the same power point presentation, etc), low quality (high variability), and wasted efforts (efforts which are considered waste in lean methodologies).  The Art is knowing when the situation does not fit the process.

Future of enterprise search

Rebecca Hawkes posted a link to Stephen E. Arnold's summery of "Enterprise Search: 14 Industry Experts Predict the Future of Search" by Cóbhan Phillipson


A few of the quotes
"Effective enterprise search represents one of the most challenging areas in business today"

"In my opinion the enterprise search market today has little appetite for more sophisticated products the likes of which we have seen come and go in recent years."

"Why should you have to ask first?: Search has been traditionally driven by the searcher (duh), but interesting projects that allow for integrated understanding of where/what the user is doing allows for proactive intervention."

"Buzzwords like “federated search” and “enterprise search” place too much focus on “search”, and not enough on getting the right information, transparently and rapidly to the consumer."

"Search will continue to become more implicit, connecting users to knowledge transparently. Users do not want to “search”, they want to get information. We are trying to collapse the “time to information”, and this is not just about extremely fast search of vast amounts of data. It is also about not wasting time searching and presenting irrelevant information, and about creating results that are fine-grained. People are accustomed to doing a search and getting say 10 best results, each one a document, and then sifting through the documents. We are trying to improve that by returning finer grained results that are not documents, but the exact sentence, the exact spreadsheet cell, or exact information the user is looking for."

"The global enterprise search market reaped revenues of more than $1.47 billion in 2012. That figure is forecast to be $4.68 billion by 2019."

"In the future enterprise search will become more personal. With users being able to add and delete their own search sources. True federation will come in to play, and the ‘super index’ will start to take a back seat to ‘Click-Time’ information access. This change will mean that users gain power to control their own results, Bringing in cloud stores, internal applications, such as CRM and Doc management, as well as pulling in external non-corporate content from web sites, such as Linked-In, Facebook and other social networks. This will then give the user a 100% view of their data and information points."

Stephen Arnold's summary:
Several observations occurred to me as I worked through the compilation of expert opinions in “Enterprise Search: 14 Industry Experts Predict the Future of Search”.

First, the confusion about what enterprise search is characterizes the experts’ approach to findability. A knowledge management professional would set about gathering other writings by these individuals and attempting to provide a context for their “information” and opinions. Without a knowledge framework, the collection of opinions is confusing.

Second, the selection of companies represented provides a wide spectrum of starting points. The inclusion of search engine optimization experts mixed with vendors of primary systems and component vendors provides a surprising consensus. Automation is likely to be more important with each passing day. Also, users want to be relieved of the burden of formulating a query or will be given systems that reduce the user’s dependence on keywords and formal queries. The approach is likely to be given considerable attention because automation reduces some of the costs associated with finding information. Will automated search provide knowledge management systems with appropriate inputs? If not, perhaps the discontinuity between enterprise search and knowledge management becomes another challenge for both disciplines to resolve.

Third, the vendors, with the sole exception of LTU in Paris, focus on text. The data about the volume of content by file type is not definitive. The need to be able to search audio, images and video within an organization is increasing. Videos posted on YouTube, Vimeo or other file sharing systems are proliferating. IBM creates big data podcasts each week, distributing them via Apple iTunes. Videos about search, content processing and analytics systems are key parts of the marketing efforts of Attensity, MarkLogic, Oracle and other firms. The future of enterprise search is more than text. The Docurated analysis makes clear that enterprise search vendors and experts may be their own worst enemy.

There may be some challenges for enterprise search in the organizations of tomorrow. Without innovation, enterprise search is likely to find itself marginalized as enterprise knowledge management solutions proliferate. Search without search may be shorthand for who needs old-fashioned search?