Felix Baumgartner to attempt record-breaking supersonic freefall Tuesday

October 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

By Mike Wall | Published October 08, 2012 |Space.com

  • Felix Baumgartner prejump 2.jpg

    July 25, 2012: Pilot Felix Baumgartner of Austria steps out from the capsule during the second manned test flight for Red Bull Stratos in Roswell, New Mexico. (Jay Nemeth / Red Bull)

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    July 25, 2012: The balloon lifts up during the second manned test flight for Red Bull Stratos in Roswell, New Mexico. (Jorg Mitter/Red Bull)

  • Felix Baumgartner prejump 4.jpg
    Red Bull
  • Felix Baumgartner prejump 5.jpg

    The Red Bull Stratos balloon is ten times larger than the balloon used by the current record holder, Joe Kittinger, who jumped from an altitude of 102,800 ft in 1960. This graphic gives you a comparison. (Red Bull)

  • Felix Baumgartner prejump.jpg

    July 25, 2012: Pilot Felix Baumgartner of Austria celebrates after he lands at the desert during the second manned test flight for Red Bull Stratos in Roswell, New Mexico. (balazsgardi.com / Red Bull)

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UPDATE: Baumgartner’s jump on hold Tues. a.m., pending better weather. Read more

On Tuesday morning, Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner will attempt to break the world record for highest-ever skydive, leaping from a balloon nearly 23 miles above Earth’s surface.

If all goes according to plan, Baumgartner will step into the void 120,000 feet (36,576 meters) above southeastern New Mexico early Tuesday, then plummet to Earth in a harrowing freefall that will see him become the first skydiver to break the sound barrier.

After Baumgartner deploys his parachute and floats safely to the desert floor, he and the other architects of his mission — which is known as Red Bull Stratos — can celebrate breaking a skydiving record that has stood for more than 50 years.

One of those congratulating Baumgartner will likely be Joe Kittinger, who set the current record of 102,800 feet (31,333 m) back in 1960 while a captain in the U.S. Air Force. Kittinger serves as a Red Bull Stratos adviser.

If everything works out on Tuesday, Baumgartner will also shatter the marks for fastest freefall, longest-duration freefall and highest manned balloon flight. But the daredevil says his leap is about more than just etching his name in the record books.

 

‘Fear has become a friend of mine. It’s what prevents me from stepping too far over the line.’

- Felix Baumgartner

 

“Red Bull Stratos is an opportunity to gather information that could contribute to the development of life-saving measures for astronauts and pilots — and maybe for the space tourists of tomorrow,” Baumgartner said in a statement. “Proving that a human can break the speed of sound in the stratosphere and return to Earth would be a step toward creating near-space bailout procedures that currently don’t exist.”

Baumgartner’s 55-story-high balloon is slated to launch from Roswell, N.M. at dawn Tuesday, weather permitting. Winds must not exceed 2 mph (3.2 kph) at liftoff to ensure that the balloon — whose material is 10 times thinner than a plastic sandwich bag — isn’t damaged, Red Bull Stratos officials said.

Baumgartner will ride aboard a custom-built pressurized capsule that weighs about 2,900 pounds (1,315 kilograms). A hard landing during a July 25 practice jump from 97,146 feet (29,610 m) damaged the capsule, and the daredevil’s record-breaking attempt was delayed while his team made the necessary repairs.

During the July 25 jump, Baumgartner reached a top freefall speed of 537 mph (864 kph) — about as fast as a commercial airliner. But while his capsule got knocked around a bit, the skydiver landed safe and sound.

Baumgartner said he is nervous about Tuesday’s leap from the stratosphere. But the 43-year-old daredevil — who has jumped from some of the world’s tallest buildings and soared across the English Channel in freefall using a carbon wing — regards a tinge of fear as a good thing.

“Having been involved in extreme endeavors for so long, I’ve learned to use my fear to my advantage,” Baumgartner said. “Fear has become a friend of mine. It’s what prevents me from stepping too far over the line.”

Red Bull Stratos has described the Oct. 9 attempt as a jump from the edge of space. However, space is generally considered to begin at an altitude of 62 miles (100 km), or 327,000 feet.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/science/2012/10/08/skydiver-record-breaking-supersonic-freefall/#ixzz28ow9lrTH

 

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Will The Real Credit Score Please Stand Up?

October 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment
by Broderick Perkins

The credit score you buy may not be the credit score your lender uses when you apply for credit and, fortunately, most of the time it doesn’t matter.

However, for what the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) considers a “substantial minority,” the difference could make or break a mortgage application or application for other credit.

In from 1 percent to 24 percent of the time, the difference between consumer-purchased and creditor-purchased credit scores could toss consumers into one, two or more different credit-quality categories.

Which way the score goes, better or worse, often isn’t clear.

The CFPB’s new ”Analysis of Differences between Consumer- and Creditor-Purchased Credit Scores”is a follow up to CFPB’s report earlier this year, ”The Impact of Differences Between Consumer- and Creditor-Purchased Credit Scores,” which revealed the different sources and types of credit scores and potential for harm associated with the differences.

The new report attempts to quantify the impact of those differences and says consumers do not know ahead of time whether the scores they purchase will closely track, vary moderately or vary significantly from a score sold to creditors.

What’s a credit score?

Credit scores are a numerical representation of your credit report. The lower the score, the worse your credit and the greater your risk for default on credit. Conversely, the higher the score, the lower your risk. How you handle your credit raises or lowers your score.

Lenders widely use credit scores to make a decision about your application for most types of credit, including mortgages, auto loans, credit cards, personal loans and others. Credit scores are also used to make decisions about insurance, rental applications, even jobs.

Scores also determine if your creditor will raise or lower your credit limits, change your interest rate or cut you off from existing credit. High credit scores will also get you the best credit rates and terms, while low scores will make you pay more for credit — if you can get it.

By federal law, credit scores are free under certain circumstances, typically after the fact, say, because a lender rejected your application.

Otherwise you pay $10 to $20 for the privilege of buying your score, often from companies that attempt to sell you other questionable services bundled with your credit score purchase.

Purchased credit scores aren’t gospel

CFPB’s new report advises consumers not to rely upon purchased credit scores as a guide to how creditors will actually view their credit quality.

Because credit scores can vary from the scores actually used to approve or decline credit, consumers have no way of knowing if the purchased scores are the same, higher or lower than those used by creditors.

• If a purchased score leads the consumer to overestimate lenders’ likely assessment of his or her creditworthiness, the consumer might be likely to apply for credit lines that would not be approved, with a cost of wasted time and effort on both the consumer’s and lender’s part.

• A consumer who underestimates a lender’s likely assessment of his or her creditworthiness, might fail to or delay applying for credit to buy a house or a refinance.

A consumer might also apply to lenders who offer less favorable terms than the borrower is qualified for or accept a less favorable offer than necessary.

The study also admonishes and advises firms selling scores to consumers to disclose to consumers those credit score differences and the potential impact from those differences.

Given the CFPB’s new oversight on consumer financial matters, including the operations of consumer credit reporting agencies, regulations to mandate such disclosures are likely.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act directed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to compare credit scores sold to creditors and those sold to consumers by nationwide credit reporting agencies to look at the differences.

CFPB analyzed credit scores from 200,000 credit files from each of the three major nationwide CRAs: TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian.

CFPB found:

• Different scoring models would place consumers in the same credit-quality category 73 to 80 percent of the time.

That is, if a consumer had a good score from one scoring model, the consumer likely had a good score on another model.

• Different scoring models would place consumers in credit-quality categories that are off by one category 19 to 24 percent of the time.

• Different scoring models would place consumers in credit-quality categories that are off by two or more categories from 1 to 3 percent of the time.

Published: October 4, 2012

COURTESY OF YOUR NUMBER ONE ARCADIA REAL ESTATE AGENT

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How to choose your next neighborhood wisely

October 2, 2012 By 1 Comment

Mood of the Market

BY TARA-NICHOLLE NELSON, MONDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2012.

Inman News®

<a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic.mhtml?id=92728492" target="_blank">Neighborhood</a> image via Shutterstock.Neighborhood image via Shutterstock.

If you plan to buy your next home in your current town, you probably think you already know precisely what neighborhood(s) you’d entertain.

You might have driven around and spotted a street you’d love to call your own, or maybe you’ve always heard rave reviews of the schools, shops and other quintessential elements of a particular part of town. But there are numerous Internet resources that can surface gems you might not know about.

And, needless to say, if you’re relocating to a new area entirely, these same sites can make the daunting challenge of narrowing your house hunt down to the just-right city and neighborhood much less overwhelming — and much more likely to result in success.

Here are a handful of the online neighborhood-finding resources that I believe are vastly underutilized by house hunters:

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1. NabeWise. NabeWise is where you go to get a real taste for a neighborhood’s flavor, online. This is where you find out where the hipsters, families, pet lovers or musicians live in your target town. It’s also where you can get a feel for whether the neighborhood tends more toward dive bars or farmers markets, and whether residents who’ve rated it were more inclined to call it gritty or peaceful; these are actual neighborhood reputation label options that the site offers and that visitors freely use.

Beyond the helpful and, in my experience, accurate neighborhood “flavor” ratings and many photos of the most popular neighborhoods in the couple of dozen cities it covers, NabeWise also offers uber-helpful, insight-rich blog posts from neighborhood residents, and surfaces nearby neighborhoods for those who think the location of a particular neighborhood is perfect, but not the noise level

2. Nextdoor. The age-old measure of friendly neighbors was how amenable they might be to a request to borrow a cup of sugar. Then, it was all about whether an area had its own Neighborhood Watch, then whether it throws a block party for National Night Out. Increasingly, though, the measure of a connected neighborhood is its social infrastructure online: Email lists and Facebook groups can be a good sign, but are often tough to find unless a home’s seller or the neighbors simply tell you they exist.

Nextdoor is a site where nothing but neighborhood social networks live and operate in one user-friendly place. It’s relatively new, so chances are good that your target neighborhood might not be there (yet), but if you do happen to see that the neighborhood of your dreams has a Nextdoor network, that’s a very good sign.

3. Walk Score. If you’re looking for a neighborhood with high “walkability” (as defined by WalkScore.com to encompass everything from ample amenities for everyone from bus riders to walkers to bicyclists, to shopping areas where the storefronts are very near to the sidewalks), this is the authoritative resource.

Walk Score actually assigns cities, neighborhoods, streets and individual addresses a numerical Walk Score rating that is exceedingly useful in helping buyers compare homes and neighborhoods on walkability; helping relocators start to get a feel for the daily lifestyle they would experience in various parts of the same town; and even helping sellers communicate their home’s walkability in a meaningful way to buyers.

4. StreetAdvisor. StreetAdvisor is like Yelp for neighborhoods: You type in a city price range or “personality” factor, and it gives you the local neighborhoods that have rated the highest on these elements, along with oodles of reviews of that part of town by the locals who live there. It also has a handy Q-and-A feature, where neighborhood residents-to-be ask very detailed questions, and those who live there readily reply, and a leaderboard that lives on the home page, showing which neighborhoods’ rankings have been moving up or down, of late.

5. Trulia Local. Trulia Local offers all sorts of beautiful, easy-to-use, data-driven interactive maps for homebuyers considering a property in a given neighborhood.

Type in a given city, and you’ll be given color-coded heat maps that allow you to surface, in a single click, everything from the rate of violent-to-non-violent crimes across town and in specific, zoomed-in neighborhoods, to grocery stores, restaurants, banks and post offices and even the actual homes listed for sale overlaid on this same map with little price tags, so you can see at a glance how prices are different in different parts of town.

And this map also has a feature I’ve never seen anywhere else: a commute-time map. You can use a simple slider to give the map your maximum desired commute time, and the map adjusts in color and scope to show you what areas you can reach from a given address on the map within that commute time frame. As you move your map to various spots, the map gives you even more precise time frames for how long it would take to get to your mouse from the “from” address.

6. National Clandestine Laboratory Locator. The title of this site sounds almost intriguing, with its hint of James Bond-style mystery. But the subject matter is super-serious: The federal Drug Enforcement Agency operates this database of homes that have been used to operate drug laboratories — mostly for the manufacture of methamphetamines.

A number of homebuyers have been hit with the horror of buying a bargain-priced home from an estate or bank, only to realize after moving in and after suffering medical symptoms that their home was once a drug lab and is completely contaminated with costly-to-eradicate chemicals.

Many times, these homes are sweet-looking, older homes that had been left vacant by an elderly owner’s illness or had been longtime rentals. This is more a neighborhood- and property-specific vetting tool than one you would use to find a neighborhood in the first place, but you’d be remiss not to click the link for your state and search for the name of your prospective street(s) before you buy a home.

Similarly, many states offer their own meth lab property database(s), and some third-party real estate disclosure providers will even search these databases for a homebuyer.

Tara-Nicholle Nelson is author of “The Savvy Woman’s Homebuying Handbook” and “Trillion Dollar Women: Use Your Power to Make Buying and Remodeling Decisions.” Tara is also the Consumer Ambassador and Educator for real estate listings search site Trulia.com. Ask her a real estate question online or visit her website, www.rethinkrealestate.com.

 

COURTESY OF YOUR NUMBER ONE ARCADIA REAL ESTATE AGENT

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