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UPDATE! This post has been so popular that we’ve searched the web and posted another, even better-rer, 50 Clever Life Hacks which you can see HERE!
Our recent blog 50 Life Hacks to Simplify your Worlddid so well that we thought we’d do another one. We all want to simplify and improve our lives; especially when a solution to a common problem is cheap, effective and easy to-do!
After spending a lot of time sifting through reddit, Buzzfeed’s Life Hack posts, we came up with the list below. Another 40 tips that will hopefully simplify your life! And don’t forget to check out the amazing Life Hacks account on instagram! CLICK HERE to follow it!
This is the rule your car insurance agent doesn't want you to know! Here's the deal - If you are currently insured, drive less than 35 miles/day and live in
North Carolina you can get an extremely high discount. Did you know that? Or DUI's... if you have no DUI's, you can get even more discounts. But do you think your auto insurance company will tell you that? Fat chance. Out of the 100's of insurers out there, only a handful will give you really big discounts. But they ARE out there, and they WANT to insure you - you just can't find each other.
So here's the rule we mentioned: NEVER buy insurance without comparing all discounts online first. You can automatically compare auto insurance companies right here, right now - it's fast, it's easy, and it's FREE. Heck, it's even fun (well, as fun as insurance can be!) Go ahead, try it out.
Stop Over-Paying for your auto insurance - see your lowest rate in less than 5 minutes!
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North Carolina) - Out-fox your insurance company and save $100's off your auto insurance rates.
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Here's the plain truth - our website visitors save tons of money. Over 2 Million US Drivers have trusted Comparisons.org to get significant insurance discounts. Want to cut your rates by 30%? 40%? Maybe 50%? How do you do it? Simple: Follow the easy instructions on this page to find the "hidden gem" insurance companies out there who offer super rates on great coverage - coverage and rates based on YOUR driving habits and driving record. Most insurance companies in
North Carolina get customers locked into a policy and keep them for life. However, with the Comparisons.org engine you can easily outsmart the insurers by getting a new insurance policy once a year (after comparing quotes and getting that competitive advantage back!). Look, you've seen those tons of commercials for different car insurance companies, right? They ALL say they can save you big money if you switch to them. Errr… that doesn't work. The truth is, they ALL can't save EVERYONE money. That's just common sense. What DOES work, however, is certain car insurance companies (remember, there are hundreds) CAN give you HUGE SAVINGS based on your driving habits and driving record. To give you a quick snapshot, you may be eligible for BIG discounts if you meet any (or all) of the following criteria:
You drive less than 35 miles per day.
You haven't been in any car accidents over the last 12 months.
You've never received a DWI/DUI.
You haven't been speeding recently (meaning having no speeding tickets over the last six months.)
You can say that you park your car in a garage.
Here's another brutally honest truth - if you are like most people, you probably didn't compare many insurance companies. You probably just used someone local, or maybe one of the big advertisers. And hey, that's ok. We all do it. But the reality is this: if you don't compare at least (at least!) 5 insurers before making your decision, you're almost certainly overpaying. Perhaps by a LOT! Did you get rates from 5 insurers? No? Then you are probably in the millions who are overpaying. Now let's answer the big question: How do you know which auto insurer (again, there are hundreds) will give you the biggest discount? There's really only one way: COMPARE THEM (which is what you can do right here.) Gee… could you use an extra $100...$200...$500?? For maybe five minutes worth of work? The above is why our car insurance comparison service has become so popular. By taking five minutes and entering in your driving history and details, you'll receive numerous FREE quotes from multiple insurers, all who want your business and, because they know you're using comparisons.org, will offer you their best deal right away. It's the ultimate win-win. Get the right policy and the right rate for YOU… and walk away with some extra cash (like maybe $100's extra!!)
Paul Kemp was asleep on his living room couch when the fire that would incinerate his Iowa home first started. His 3-year-old dog Sheba jumped onto his chest to wake him, saving hi...MorePaul Kemp was asleep on his living room couch when the fire that would incinerate his Iowa home first started. His 3-year-old dog Sheba jumped onto his chest to wake him, saving his life. When Paul darted outside to safety he discovered Sheba was not by his side. It was then that he went back into the blaze, calling for her until she came to his voice and they could escape together. Hours later Paul and Sheba were back at the donation center where they work side by side to benefit a local no-kill animal shelter. A grateful Paul says, "She showed me that she's my best friend." Find more KCCI - Des Moines Videos videos on Yahoo Screen.
Bob Barker speaks to the studio audience during his last taping of The Price is Right, on June 6, 2007, in Los Angeles.
Photo by Mark Davis/Getty Images
On a crisp November day eight years ago, I took the only sick day of my four years of high school. I was laid up with an awful fever, and annoyed that I was missing geometry class, which at the time was the highlight of my day. I flipped on the television in the hope of finding some distraction from my woes, but what I found only made me more upset: A contestant named Margie who was in the process of completely bungling her six chances of making it out of Contestants' Row on The Price is Right.
Many contestants fail to win anything on The Price is Right, of course. But as I watched the venerable game show that morning, it quickly became clear to me that most contestants haven't thought through the structure of the game they’re so excited to be playing. It didn't bother me that Margie didn’t know how much a stainless steel oven range costs; that's a relatively obscure fact. It bothered me, as a budding mathematician, that she failed to use basic game theory to help her advance. If she’d applied a few principles of game theory—the science of decision-making used by economists and generals—she could have planted a big kiss on Bob Barker’s cheek, and maybe have gone home with … a new car! Instead, she went home empty-handed.
In the Contestants' Row segment of the show, four lucky people who have been plucked from the audience are asked one by one to guess the price of an item. The contestant whose guess is closest to the actual price, without overbidding, wins the prize and progresses to the more lucrative pricing games where tens of thousands of dollars can be won.
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In one instance, when Margie was the last contestant to bid, she guessed the retail price of an oven was $1,150. There had already been one bid for $1,200 and another for $1,050. She therefore could only win if the actual price was between $1,150 and $1,200. Since she was the last to bid, she could have guessed $1051, expanding her range by almost $100 (any price from $1051 to $1199 would have made her a winner), with no downside. What she really should have done, however, is bid $1,201. Game theory says that when you are last to bid, you should bid one dollar more than the highest bidder. You obviously won’t win every time, but in the last 1,500 Contestants' Rows to have aired, had final bidders committed to this strategy, they would have won 54 percent of the time. Instead, last bidders too often rely on their intuition, or on suggestions called out by delirious audience members. As a result, they have won only 35 percent of the time. Contestants in this sample of 1,500 who guessed a value between the highest and second-highest current guesses, as Margie did, win only 20 percent of the time. In this instance, the oven cost $1,999. Margie lost again.
To help future contestants avoid Margie’s fate, I decided to make a handy cheat sheet explaining how to win The Price Is Right—not just the Contestants' Row segment, but all of its many pricing games. This guide, which conveniently fits on the front and back of an 8.5-by-11-inch piece of paper, does not rely on the prices of items. That may sound crazy, but there's good reason behind it. Cataloging all the possible items up for bid—from karaoke machines to Reese's Peanut Butter Cups—would be impossible, and even if you could, prices change frequently. For example, in the most recent season of Price Is Right, the Honda Accord LX was valued in different games as $22,587, $22,480 (twice), $22,934, $22,423, $22,791, and $22,841. In six of the seven times it appeared, the exact value was needed in order to win it. Memorizing prices ahead of time—even if you had a hunch you might have a shot at that Honda—has less value than you think.
Follow the right strategies, and this could be you.
Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images
Game theory, by contrast, can increase your chances of success even if you’ve never set foot in a Honda showroom. Had Margie been able to stumble her way to one of the pricing games, game theory would have been even more useful to her. Consider the game Now or Then. Contestants are asked to guess whether each of six small prizes, numbered 1–6 and placed in a circle, is labeled with the current NOW price or a THEN price from an earlier date. If the contestant guesses correctly on any three consecutive items, she wins a prize, like a digital piano or a trip to Savannah. Avid Price fans know that four items are always NOW and two are always THEN. Over the last 13 years, contestants have averaged a 68 percent win probability. They have largely done so by trying to accurately discern the NOW prices from the THEN prices, but this is the wrong way to approach the game. Given the limited combinations of NOW and THEN in the six slots, this game is no more complicated than tic-tac-toe and can be won 100 percent of the time, regardless of the contestant’s knowledge of Gold Bond body lotion prices in 1998. Below is the complete decision tree, so you can be assured of fulfilling your lifelong dream of winning a $6,000 digital piano.
NOW and THEN is hardly the only contest where game theory can greatly increase your chances. Many others can be cracked with a bit of knowledge of the show's (nonrandom) habits. Consider the pricing game called Squeeze Play. Current host Drew Carey shows the contestant either a five- or six-digit number and asks the player to remove one digit from the number—first and last digit excluded—to reveal the price of a prize. Over the last eight years, this game has been played 215 times with a five-digit number, meaning the contestant can either remove the second, third, or fourth digit. If every contestant had gone into the game opting to pick the third digit, regardless of the prize or the numbers displayed, the combined contestant winning percentage would have been 49.8 percent. Instead, players got wrapped up in guessing the exact price—and had a combined winning percentage of just 35.8 percent.
The reason that it's better to always pick digit No. 3 in Squeeze Play is that the show’s producers are clearly not placing the numbers randomly. The wrong digit was placed in the third slot 49 percent of the time as compared with 22 percent and 28 percent for the second and fourth, respectively. The discrepancy between the winning digit's location and what we would expect if that digit were placed randomly is statistically significant—meaning the placement is not, actually, random. Whether the show's producers are intentionally favoring the middle location, or are doing so simply because they’ve failed to simulate randomness, is unclear. What is clear is that guessing the middle digit is the safest bet in Squeeze Play.
This isn’t a knock on The Price is Right. The show makes no promises of behaving like a casino, with perfectly random distribution of numbers. And its nonrandom habits are great for the contestant—and presumably for the show, which doesn’t want to feature an endless parade of losers. There is a game called 2 For the Price of 1, where each digit in the price of a three-figure item must be guessed correctly. For every digit, contestants choose between two numbers, one placed above it on a top row or one below it on a bottom row. If the game were truly random, the correct digits should come from the same row (either all from the top or all from the bottom) one-in-four times. In the context of the game, however, these two instances occur less than a combined one-tenth of the time. Because these TOP-TOP-TOP and BOTTOM-BOTTOM-BOTTOM instances are so rare—and because one number is always revealed to the contestant at the beginning of the game—victory is relatively easy to achieve. Winning 2 For the Price of 1 is like counting cards in a three-card deck.
To be clear, not every game can be won quite so easily. Some have a simple strategy that produces a better projected win percentage than contestants’ current performance. In other games, there’s a clear pattern or bias, but some knowledge of pricing is useful. And in some games, there is no trick, and no pattern or bias—you really do just need to know your prices. (Sadly, the most famous and beloved pricing game, Plinko, falls into this last category.)
Should you spin the Big Wheel a second time? Depends on what you got in your fist spin and whether you're the first, second, or third contestant to spin it.
Photo by Valerie Macon/Getty Images
But you’d be surprised at how often a little game theory can improve your performance on the show. The Big Wheel, for example, may seem like the most random and luck-based aspect of the entire show. There is, however, a strategy here. In the Big Wheel, three contestants spin a giant wheel, marked with prices ranging from 5¢ to $1.00, up to two times. The person whose total ends up closest to $1.00 without going over wins and gets to compete for the show’s most lucrative prizes in the Showcase.* A paper published in the Economic Journal in 2002 by Rafael Tenorio of DePaul University and Timothy Cason of Purdue University found that contestants often “under-spin” by choosing not to use their second spin when they should. The rule of thumb, as explained in the study, is pretty straightforward:
-The first contestant should spin again if he has 65¢ or less.
-The second contestant should spin again if he is a) behind player one, b) ahead of player one but has less than 50¢, or c) is tied with player one but has less than 65¢.
-The final contestant (who has the benefit of knowing all the previous players’ actions) needs to spin again if he is not in the lead or is tied with one of the other contestants with a score of less than 50¢. (If the contestant has more than 50¢ and is in a tie, he is better off pressing his luck in the one-spin tiebreaker.
Unfortunately, once the contestant gets to the Showcase, game theory does not have as much wisdom to offer. Most of the strategies discussed thus far rely on either positioning yourself well compared with other contestants or being smart about guessing between given, nonrandom options. In the Showcase, two contestants are shown two packages of prizes and the one who guesses closest to the value of her showcase (without going over) wins. This requires a contestant to guess a price with no choices or range. Although one contestant bids first, she is not bidding on the same item as her competitor, so there is less benefit in going last compared with Contestants' Row or the Big Wheel. In a sample of the last 1,000 games, blindly guessing $20,000 would have resulted in a winning percentage of 54 percent, greater than the winning percentage of 45 that contestants actually have. (The winning percentage can be less than 50 because of the possibility of a double overbid, in which case both contestants lose.)
My cheat sheet offers advice for all 71 current pricing games. In order for a pattern, such as the one discovered in Squeeze Play, to be noted on the chart, it had to be statistically significant. The data used to reach all conclusions in the chart was gathered from tpirstats.com and episode transcripts from qwizx.com. I am indebted to the people who run these sites and have devoted their free time over many years to record this data. Their absurd work made my absurd work possible.
The next time you’re under the weather, or just playing hooky, come on down to Slate and use this guide to play along at home and see if you fare better than the Price Is Right contestants. And if you’re on your way to CBS Television City studio, print out this guide on a piece of paper, or on a T-shirt, for easy reference. It could be the difference between coming home with a new dinette set or suffering the sad fate of Margie.
*Correction, Nov. 13, 2013: This article originally misidentified the final segment of The Price Is Right as the Showcase Showdown. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
When Ted Larson, the CEO of a Silicon Valley robotics firm, hired Rohan Agrawal as his summer intern this year he was skeptical that Rowan could keep up with his team’s pace.
Rohan, afterall, is 12 yearsold. And Larson, whose firm, OLogic, usually hires college or graduate students as interns, had never worked with someone so young. But Larson’s worries were quickly dispelled.
“We had a large box of robot parts that some of the guys at Google gave us,” Larson said of Rowan’s first day at Ologic last summer. The box also contained a few laptops. “The goal was to get Linux and ROS (the Robot Operating System) up and running.”
Larson said that he could have given that box of parts to a grad student and they may have come back to him with a functioning robot in a couple of weeks. Rohan came back the next day with an assembled robot.
“And I was like, ‘oh my god,’ what will I do with him for the summer?” Larson said. “This was Day 2.”
By the end of the internship, Larson was comparing Rohan’s robotics aptitude and knowledge to that of a PhD: “And anyone who has a problem with that clearly hasn’t met Rohan.”
After hearing about Rohan’s very successful internship, we travelled to Silicon Valley to find out how Rohan learned so much about robots by such a young age. Watch the video above to meet Rohan and some of his robots.
When a Hartford, Connecticut police officer’s personal car was damaged while parked in the department’s lot, investigators turned to security video of the area. Hartford Police Department Lieutenant Brian Foley spoke to WVIT NBC News, "At the end of his shift, went off to his car and found a damaged, his rear view mirror had been damaged and it was lying right there next to the vehicle." The footage showed a very unusual “ghostly” image passing around the car then ripping off the driver side view mirror. The mirror is then thrown to the ground far away from the car and makes its way mysteriously back, landing right next to the vehicle.
The original assumption that the damage was caused by vandals was refuted by the video, but what explained the apparent paranormal display? Lt. Foley said, "Some of the officers said they think the parking lot's haunted." But as NBC Connecticut’s own meteorologist Brad Field explained, there’s a more scientific reason for the car’s curious damage. The atmospheric science expert was at first baffled by the video, but then realized that conditions that day in the parking lot were ideal for a dust devil, a tornado-like whirlwind, to form. Brad Field said, "The only way you can see the dust devil is that it picks up dust and debris into it.” The vertical columns of air tend to form over asphalt during dry, sunny, fair weather and can vary in diameter from 3 meters to greater than 30 meters.
No other cars were damaged in the parking lot and the Hartford PD was able to close the case on the mysterious “vandal.”
More info: WVIT
Justin Purcell and his family were out of their home in Surprise, Arizona when flames engulfed it in August. As reported by KSAZ Fox 10, by the time Justin arrived home with his family the firefighters were losing the battle to save the home. The cause of the fire was unknown. Justin told the station, "It's definitely a shocker when you come back and your house is gone." But Justin was in for another shock when two weeks later he received a bill from Rural Metro Fire Department, a private department, charging him $19,825 for their services in his unincorporated area that has no fire coverage. "Definitely was a surprise. It was a shocker when we got that," said Justin.
Justin reviewed the itemized bill and it listed a charge of $1,500/truck per hour and a significant cost for the three firefighters in each of the two trucks on the scene. "They were paying the firefighters $150 an hour and there were several of them," said Justin. Colin Williams, public information officer for Rural Metro defends the charges saying the rates are fair adding, "Those numbers are set based on 65 years on tradition buying equipment, training, operating a fire service." The family’s home insurance does not cover the charges.
Colin explained Rural Metro’s role in this fire saying, “In this case, [Surprise] firefighters responded. They did receive mutual aid from other departments. Once the fire is knocked down and brought under control, Rural Metro units then provide the overhaul and do essentially the mop up, if you will. So that takes a significant amount of time and a significant amount of resources." When KSAZ asked to see documentation about what the mutual aid agreement entailed, they were told by Colin, “We do have what I call a gentleman's agreement" and there was nothing in writing.
Surprise firefighters arrived at the house within 13 minutes and it took Rural Metro 24 minutes to arrive after the call. Their the closest firehouse is 20 miles away, Assessing the situation, neighbor Brian Repp said, "They got here late and his house is totally gone. OK. Then they're going to charge him $20,000 and they let his house go. I don't think that's right at all." Before the incident area residents thought they had fire coverage because they were paying a “fire district assistance tax.” But it turns out that that is a countywide tax that funds volunteer fire districts.
Arizona State Senator Chester Crandell admitted that fire coverage in Arizona’s rural areas is a mess, “Having county islands that have no service in, in uh, fireboards that are just packing up and leaving, going bankrupt… It's certainly something that needs to be addressed.” But until that time, residents of this unincorporated area have few options: Buy a yearly $500 subscription from Rural Metro for fire coverage, take the gamble of getting a bill if they have a house fire, or form their own fire district which could take months.
The Purcells have another place to stay for the time being they’re grateful to be safe especially with a newborn baby, but they have no idea where they will get the money to pay Rural Metro’s bill. Justin said, “If it was reasonable, and I don’t know what reasonable is on the amount of putting out the fire, but $20,000 you know to do a mop up on the fire is just ridiculous. I can’t believe it.”
