Hide Amazon's list price to prevent impulsive shopping

Would you prefer

to this?

Note the missing list price and savings. If you want the only factor in your buying decisions to be the actual price of the item, install this stylish extension.

Edit:

Use in conjunction with an extension like Priceblink to know the true value of an item, by comparing with multiple vendors.

Using visualization to mislead

Here's a recent advertisement in the Times of India, touting the Times Now television channel's viewership:

The difference between Times Now and CNN IBN is barely four percentage points, and yet, the three dimensional pie exaggerates the difference.  In fact, at this angle, CNN IBN would have lesser projected surface area even if it's share of the viewership was larger than Times Now's.

Here's the full advertisement, which appeared on page 9 of the Mumbai edition of The Times of India on 27th of December. It should be accessible from here, with a few clicks.

Authenticating people over telephone

Never seen this being done before.

I contacted a Bank of America representative over the telephone, and they needed to authenticate me before we could get down to business. I was asked my name, and was then asked to confirm a series of questions. I was not asked to state these facts myself - they stated it themselves, and asked me to confirm it.

Silly way to verify a person's identity, one would think. Anyone could pass of as me, if they had my name and my account number - and if they simply confirmed every detail that the CSR gave them. However, the CSR did make one minor mistake while stating the details - my phone number was off by one number, and I corrected them promptly. Looking back, it is quite clear that the mistake was deliberate. In this way, I did not say out any of my personal details out loud (which would have been terrible in public), and I pretty much authenticated myself by correcting one random mistake that they chose to make.

Using unicode to annotate emails

I have been using unicode characters like ★, ✘, ✔, ⚠ to annotate my gmail labels. I used it today to mark the subject of one of my mails as a high-priority mail. Wonder if it'll work.