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DEMO: Consumer Apps Show Promise
I had to leave Demo before the consumer products made their official debuts, which was disappointing because they were some of the most interesting ones at the show. I was able, however, to get a quick look at most of them in the demonstration pavilion. I came away particularly impressed by the Z-board electric skateboard, the Penveu interactive pen, a smart projector, a new set-top box, a Fantasy Politics league, and software that looks at search results in a new way. Not all of these are really consumer products—the pen is really aimed more at education and the projector has more professional uses as well—but they were quite interesting.
Probably the most fascinating product was a weight-sensitive electric skateboard, known as the Z-board from Intuitive Motion. It looks like a skateboard but works somewhat like a Segway; you lean forward to go and lean back to stop. It can go up to 17 miles per hour and has a 10 to 15 mile range on a charge. The company actually has several different models, including those tuned for San Francisco (hilly) and Santa Monica (flat), as well as a model with built-in speakers. I'm clearly not the target customer, but this looks like a lot of fun.
Interphase showed Penveu, a very cool interactive pen that is designed as an alternative to interactive whiteboards. Essentially, it works as a remote mouse or pen that you hook up to a computer and display (or a projector surface). You can then "write" on a surface by motioning from the pen from a distance. This would let a teacher walk around a classroom, yet still update the display. There are versions for education and business expected to be out in July. Prices are expected to start at $499 for an 8GB model and versions with more storage are also coming.
Brytewerks showed a smart home projector that combines storage and a projector, aimed at both consumers and the professional market. Its Model One will retail from $2,499 to $4,999 (depending in part on processor and storage options) with a $3,000 model on display. It offers 11,000 lumens of brightness from a 1,200 watt bulb, capable of showing a 1920-by-1200 image at 60 frames per second. It also has a 720p touch control panel that runs what is effectively a full PC on board, based on an ATX motherboard with Intel Atom, Core i5 or i7 processors, and storage ranging from a 60 GB SSD to 2.5 TB with hard drives added to the SSD, running the XBMC software. It looked quite strong, especially for the money.
Fantasy Politics takes the appeal of fantasy sports leagues and applies it to politics. What makes it work is something called a "power score," a measure of the political momentum each politician has based on 18 scoring criteria, such as polling, campaign funding, friends on Facebook, and Twitter followers. All of this is updated in "real-time," or at least as frequently as the available data is updated. As a player, you create a team of politicians and then can compete against your friends' teams. This has a freemium model; it's free to play, but there's also a competition for money. I'm not sure we need more emphasis on the "horserace" aspects of modern politics, but this looks fun and anything that can get people to focus more on our national decision makers is a good thing.
Slikk is a different search site with some interesting new features. You can use it just like any other search engine but when you click on results, they open on the webpage rather than in a separate tab. In fact, you can have multiple tabs within that page, and then package them all together as a collection called MySlikk, which you can save and return to later. Alternatively, you can use it to do multiple kinds of searches simultaneously, such as looking for Web results and news, or images and videos. Slikk gets its search results from either Google or Yahoo/Bing. (You can pick.) It's a very nice user interface, one that is particularly suited to researching. The company is initially targeting high school and college students, though it is open to everyone. Still, it's very difficult to get people to switch search sites.
Whiteman Technology showed Delta DVR, basically a set-top box based on Windows 7 embedded with Windows Media Center. This looks like a standard set-top box but has the ability to record up to six channels at once and can store your content in up to 3 TB of hard disk space. It has a full set of features, from playing Blu-ray disks to watching live TV and streaming from all the major services. It also has a built-in Internet browser and the ability to run Android applications through BlueStacks. This should be out later this year and will be sold directly to consumers, who would then need to add a CableCard to connect to their local TV provider.
A couple of products were aimed at keeping you healthier:
BodyMedia, which earlier showed off an armband that can monitor your body functions, introduced its BodyMedia Patch, a disposable patch that you stick to your body for a week. It has sensors, including a three-axis accelerometer, that measure skin temperature, heat flux, and galvanic skin response. It uses those sensors to predict things such as your calorie expenditure. In addition, the company was showing off a new version of its software, this one aimed at trainers to track the progress of multiple clients. There's a lot going on with health products and I can see a good market with athletes and other health-focused people.
NeedToEat generates meal plans to help users eat a more healthful diet. Tell the system about yourself—your preferences, dietary restrictions, and fitness goals—and it will factor in things like location, weather, and local deals to generate meal plans in real-time. It's an interesting idea for health-conscious users.
I saw two interesting travel sites:
Georama lets you plan, book, and share your travel, all from a single site. It starts with a map interface of the world. As you choose a city, you can see all sorts of information from hotels and restaurants to events and nightlife. Of course, you can also book reservations on the site and share your itineraries (or later, your thoughts on the trip) with your friends, creating a travel diary of the places you've been. While many of the services are familiar, what makes this different is that they are all integrated in one place. It will be hard to stand out in the crowded travel market, but it looks interesting.
Taking a somewhat different view of the travel market is DealAngel, which works by helping you find the best deals in a particular city on a particular date. Most travel sites highlight the hotels that give them the biggest commission but DealAngel figures out what it thinks a hotel room should be going for on a particular night (based on the quality of the hotel and the popularity of the night) and compares that with the prices offered, showing you the best deals. The site is currently in beta with North American hotels. Again, the category is very crowded, but it's a very lucrative market and DealAngel takes an interesting angle so there may be room for more.
There were two games aimed at children:
FriendsLearn takes a social approach to learning with Fooya, an upcoming Facebook game that lets users have a food fight. In the game, you throw food at another player, forcing that player to eat the item. The player thus gets slower and heavier until the loser finally "bursts." The game uses what the company calls "learnification," teaching about the nutritional content of various foods. The company has previously created a Facebook game called Your 5 Steps to US Study. It actually looks like a lot of fun.
In somewhat the same vein, Tucoola has a site with social games aimed at teaching young children various skills, such as memorization, attention, and planning. It varies by setting specific enhancement programs for each child. Parents will be able to log in and see their child's progress. It's an interesting idea, albeit one in a crowded market.
Other products I really didn't get a chance to see were Eva from Evature, a virtual travel agent that lets customers search for travel using free text, LykeBox from StorNetworks, which lets people follow companies they like, and Yogurtistan, a 3D virtual world where users can interact and shop online.


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Brigit Pegeen Kelly was born in Palo Alto, California, in 1951.
Her first collection of poems, To The Place of Trumpets (1987), was selected by James Merrill for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Song (BOA Editions), which followed in 1995, was the 1994 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her third collection, The Orchard (2004), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry.
About her work, the poet Stephen Dobyns has said, "Brigit Pegeen Kelly is one of the very best poets now writing in the United States. In fact, there is no one who is any better. Not only are her poems brilliantly made, but they also give great pleasure. Rarely are those two qualities seen together in one poet."
Kelly was the 2008 recipient of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. Her other honors include a "Discovery"/The Nation Award, the Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest, and a Whiting Writers Award, as well as fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois State Council on the Arts, and the New Jersey Council on the Arts.
Her work has also appeared in several volumes of the Pushcart Prize Anthology and several volumes of The Best American Poetry.
She has taught at the University of California at Irvine, Purdue University, Warren Wilson College, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, as well as numerous writers' conferences in the United States and Ireland. In 2002 the University of Illinois awarded her both humanities and campus-wide awards for excellence in teaching. She died in October 2016.
Selected Bibliography
Poems: Song and the Orchard (Carcanet Press Ltd, 2008)
The Orchard (BOA Editions, 2004)
Song (BOA Editions, 1995)
To The Place of Trumpets (Yale University Press, 1987)

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Focus Themes Financial Inclusion
At Credit Suisse, we provide leadership and develop innovative solutions to link the top with the base of the income pyramid and promote financial inclusion.
What is Microfinance?
Microfinance is the providing of small or very small loans and other financial services to microenterprises in emerging economies. It is an effective way of helping people to help themselves and makes an important contribution to fighting poverty through financial inclusion.
Latest Articles
Microfinance started as an amazingly simple concept: to provide working capital loans as small as USD 100 or less to the poor – who have little or no collateral – in groups, so that members guarantee repayments. Over time, the services have expanded from these group loans to individual lending, and from loans to insurance, savings and fund transfers. Microfinance offers interested clients an investment opportunity that generates both a social and a financial return.
- Microcredits of between 50 and 5,000 US Dollars
- Short terms of between three months and two years
- Proximity to customers – close contact between lenders and borrowers
- A detailed knowledge of the circumstances of individual borrowers and in-depth credit analysis instead of traditional forms of collateral
- increased income, social stability and economic participation
- access to financial services and funding for entrepreneurs who are otherwise 'unbankable'
- improved standard of living
- empowerment, often for women
The close contact between lenders and borrowers is one of the reasons that microentrepreneurs are such reliable clients. More than 90% of them pay their installments back on time. Many take out another microcredit later on to expand their business.
Microfinance continued double-digit growth in 2013-2014. At the end of 2013, the 1,391 institutions communicating data to the MIX platform had reached a credit portfolio of 95.1 billion USD. Anticipated global growth for 2016 is estimated at 10-15% with strong regional differences.
There are actually around 10,000 microfinance institutions world-wide.
According to estimates, there are approximately 500 million microentrepreneurs across the globe. Approximately 200 million of these entrepreneurs currently receive loans from MFI s, which in turn – apart from public funding – are predominantly refinanced from commercial sources such as investment funds in addition to public and private contributions. Among the most important providers of this type of fund is responsAbility Investments AG, which was co-founded by Credit Suisse.
Microfinance has become established worldwide: 2005 was the UN Year of Microcredit, and in 2006 Muhammad Yunus, founder of the microfinance institution Grameen Bank, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Our Engagement
Credit Suisse offers its clients investment opportunities in the area of financial inclusion and microfinance. It also gives microfinance institutions access to the capital markets through the investment bank and facilitates market development and innovation through the Financial Inclusion Initiative (FII; formerly the Microfinance Capacity Building Initiative).
Because of the large and constantly growing demand for small loans and other financial services, microfinance institutions (MFI s) need access to refinancing, for example through so-called Microfinance Investment Vehicles (MIV). Demand for microfinance investments is rising steadily as they yield both financial and social returns.
Credit Suisse was one of the first financial institutions in Switzerland to recognize the potential of microloans. We have been involved in this field at various levels for many years. For example, together with partner banks we founded responsAbility Investments AG in 2001 and now offer a range of microfinance investment funds in conjunction with this company.
- By end of March 2018, the responsAbility Micro and SME Finance Fund, which reported more than 1 billion USD in assets under management, had provided loans to over 705,000 microentrepreneurs in 84 countries through more than 290 microfinance institutions (MFI).
- A private equity fund that was launched in 2007 also enables investors to participate directly in small and medium-sized enterprises and microfinance institutions. At the same time, we offer various investment and advisory services in the microfinance sector.
Credit Suisse has also collaborated to meet the industry's larger capital needs by providing a variety of advisory services through its investment bank, including the landmark IPO for Banco Compartamos in April 2007 and the Indian microfinance institution SKS in July 2010. Credit Suisse sponsored various international and regional conferences and symposia in the area of financial inclusion, microfinance and impact investing.
Developing Microfinance Institutions and Innovation
Around the world, only a fraction of those who need financial services are able to access them. Traditional microcredits and savings programs have proven to be effective solutions for micro entrepreneurs and low-income households in developing countries. However, as their financial needs evolve, so does the demand for more sophisticated products and services from microfinance institutions. Through the Financial Inclusion Initiative (FII), Credit Suisse works with Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) to strengthen their ability to serve the increasingly diverse financial needs of clients living at the base of the income pyramid (BOP). This is done by developing MFIs' know-how and expertise to better serve clients and innovate at the BOP and also fostering industry knowledge sharing and exchange of expertise.
Financial Inclusion Initiative
The Financial Inclusion Initiative (FII) aims to strengthen the microfinance industry by providing financial and human resources to train the management of MFIs, and to drive further market development.
This is done by:
- Enabling product and services development and innovation across sectors
- Developing strong industry partnerships and knowledge sharing
- Effectively leveraging Credit Suisse's skills, expertise, financial and social capital
- Continuous measurement and optimization of impact
The FII is the bank's grant and technical assistance initiative for microfinance institutions (MFIs). Launched in 2008, the FII aims to strengthen the microfinance industry, its institutions and their management.
Key Figures for 2017
local employees of microfinance institutions trained
thousand people with access to new or improved products and services
microfinance institutions and fintech start-ups benefited from our support
Implementation of the Initiative
Grants fund the implementation of projects with our global partners. Through the FII, partners engage experts and develop new financial products and services in collaboration with Credit Suisse across their global network. They then ensure that the knowledge and expertise built up in one MFI is replicated, adapted and applied in other MFIs in different regions, building on the acquired know-how, in order to achieve even greater impact. Our partners also share their knowledge at industry conferences and events, as well as through publications. In addition, the FII supports industry coordination and development efforts and training and industry thought leadership.
The Initiative provides financial and human resources to train and develop management and to drive product and process innovation – enabling organizations to meet their social and financial goals in an efficient and responsible manner. In doing so, in addition to serving the needs of low-income households, the Initiative and our partners are building new market opportunities and mechanisms for innovative microfinance and impact investing efforts at the BOP. Our employees also contribute to this capacity building through our virtual and field volunteering efforts, such as the Global Citizens Program, in which they share their skills and knowledge directly with our partners in the field. The FII is the final link between Credit Suisse's clients, experts and employees and the base of the economic pyramid. Together with our partners, we are finding new ways of facilitating poor people's access to financial services and advice.
Our Partners and Programs
Credit Suisse works with five carefully selected partner organizations to enable microfinance institutions to develop the people, products and processes they need to meet the increasingly diverse financial needs of people living at the base of the pyramid, including housing, agriculture and education.
Accion is a global nonprofit organization dedicated to building a financially inclusive world with access to economic opportunity for all, by giving people the financial tools they need to improve their lives.
- Ongoing partnership with Center for Financial Inclusion (CFI), a unique "solutions lab" for the industry, icluding the leading industry initiative on consumer protection;
- Support of Venture Lab, an investment initiative that provides seed capital and support for early-stage start-ups in financial inclusion
Social Impact
Advance financial inclusion globally by expanding quality financial services
Business Impact
Over time, Accion has helped build 65 microfinance institutions in 32 countries on four continents
Geographical Focus
Opportunity International is a microfinance organization that invests philanthropic and social impact capital in order to spark and scale innovative solutions to global poverty, particularly in the area of education. The organization has increased the number of loans available to improve the quality, availability and affordability of education in impoverished regions.
Empowers Generational Change through Education Finance
Social Impact
Improved economic growth through greater access to high-quality education
Business Impact
Students and families are better equipped to afford educational costs and schools are more accessible
Geographical Focus
Africa, Asia, Latin America
Swisscontact is a business-oriented independent foundation for international development cooperation. Represented in 36 countries with more than 1,400 employees, it has promoted economic, social and environmental development since 1959.
Building of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems
Social Impact
Creation of self-sustaining enterprises
Business Impact
Fostering of economic growth and employment
Geographical Focus
Africa, Asia, Latin America
Women's World Banking works closely with 50 financial institutions from 30 countries to create new credit, savings and insurance products designed for the unique needs of women.
Leadership and Diversity for Innovation Program
Social Impact
Expands access to quality financial services for low-income women
Business Impact
Equipping leaders of microfinance institutions with the training and tools to better serve the women's market
Geographical Focus
Our Strategy
Credit Suisse strives to increase social results by understanding and managing resources more effectively. Through a systematic program management and impact measurement approach the Financial Inclusion Initiative is able to support economic growth in emerging markets and developing countries and create more value and impact for clients, microfinance institutions and micro entrepreneurs.
1. Establish mission and objective of program and/or foundation
2. Identify specific impact intended
3. Select partners and/or specific project according to established criteria e.g.
- geography
- scale
- innovation potential
- ability to share knowledge
- replicate (bigger impact!)
4. Structure project and implementation plan with clear outputs, outcomes and impact indicators
5. Design impact measurement tool and defined control processes
- 6 month reports
- Monthly/weekly update calls
- Annual field trips
- Annual (re)evaluation
6. Provide external communications e.g. website, articles, program fact sheets, blogs;
7. Annual reporting through formal publication e.g. Corporate Responsibility Report and external ratings e.g. DJSI, Sustainalytics;
Industry Initiatives and Thought Leadership
Credit Suisse participates in key industry initiatives and networks to foster the exchange of knowledge, stimulate innovation and provide thought leadership.
Credit Suisse is Part of Key Networks and Industry Initiatives
- Global network dedicated to increasing the scale and effectiveness of impact investing
- Addresses systematic barriers to effective impact investing by building critical infrastructure and developing activities, drives education and research.
- European network to promote co-operation amongst microfinance bodies working in developing countries, by facilitating communication and the exchange of information
- Drives innovative and inclusive financial sector policy, development strategy, and development modeling, based on research and good practice.
- Swiss public-private development partnership to assist financial institutions in significantly scaling up their outreach to poor people in developing countries
- Drives development and retention of skilled and dedicated management and staff and mobilizes funding from investors in order to maintain and grow their institutions.
- The Smart Campaign is a global campaign committed to embedding client protection practices into the institutional culture and operations of the microfinance industry
- Goal is to provide microfinance institutions with the tools and resources they need to deliver transparent, respectful, and prudent financial services to all clients.
- International network to put principles for Responsible Investment into practice contributing to the development of a more sustainable global financial system
- Addresses obstacles to a sustainable financial system that lie within market practices, structures and regulation.
- The Asian Development Bank aims for an Asia and Pacific free from poverty. Economists, sociologists, engineers, gender experts and environmental scientists are amongst the hundreds of professions at the bank working together to reduce poverty, and ensure growth across the Asia and Pacific region is sustainable and inclusive.
Read more about how Microfinance Robustness program upgrades risk management in the Chinese microfinance sector:
- The Chinese micro and small lending sector: paving the road for sustainable growth
- Publication on "Emerging Risks on China's Path towards Financial Inclusion" (PDF)
- Joint research study with the People's Bank of China on "Microcredit Companies Accessing the Short- and Medium- Term Bond Market in China"
Sharing Expertise
A key objective of the FII is to leverage the skills and enthusiasm of employees in order to build partner capacity, raise awareness and advance financial inclusion, microfinance and impact investing at the firm.
Credit Suisse employees can actively support the Financial Inclusion Initiative (FII) reaching these objectives through a variety of exciting skill sharing programs:
Supporting partners with specific organizational or business challenges
in the field/international
- Development of new savings products for microfinance clients in Ghana
- Development of financial forecasting and budgeting tools for an education NGO in Colombia
Contribute to cutting-edge research and thought leadership projects
at your work place/virtual
- Frameworks for Social Investing: Cross-Country Comparisons
- Smart Campaign (Client Protection) Endorser Feedback
- What Makes Certification Work? Case Studies and Key Lessons for the Smart Campaign (Client Protection)
Contribute to a global network of +1.400 members, plan regional events and awareness-raising activities
at your work place
- Regional events and awareness raising activities
- On April 20, 2018 the Swiss Financial Inclusion Advocates Network hosted a lively presentation about the history and outlook of financial inclusion with almost 200 employees


text:
Let's be honest. It was the name first and foremost.
Zelmo Beaty.
It wasn't just unique, it was fun to say. So for a kid growing up in the Chicago suburbs in the late 1960s and '70s – with the Bulls constantly seeking a star big man to plug into Tom Boerwinkle's spot to help out against the likes of Chamberlain, Russell, Reed, Unseld, Lanier and others – the allure of this exotic-sounding center playing in an alternative league (ABA), in an unfamiliar place (Salt Lake City), was profound.
So I wrote Beaty a fan letter without ever seeing him play a game. And Beaty – who died Saturday at age 73 – wrote back. A couple of times, sending along his autograph each time.
By then Beaty was into the second half of a career split between the NBA and the ABA. He had joined the Utah Stars in 1970-71, sitting out the 1969-70 season in making his jump to the upstart league while the Stars jumped themselves from Los Angeles to the future home of the Jazz.
Beaty's impact was immediate: The Stars improved from 43-41 to 57-27 and went from fourth place in the ABA's Western Division in 1970 to beating Texas, Indiana and Kentucky for the ABA championship a year later.
The 6-foot-9 Beaty, at age 31 and despite his layoff, had his best season to that point: 22.9 ppg, 15.7 rpg and 55.5 percent shooting. He made the first of three ABA All-Star appearances, after being similarly honored twice in the NBA with the St. Louis/Atlanta Hawks, earned a second-team all-ABA berth and was considered the biggest and best star on a squad featuring Donnie Freeman, Willie Wise, Glen Combs and Ron Boone.
In a piece written 15 years ago for the RememberTheABA.com Web site, sportswriter Dan Pattison recalled highlights of Beaty's career and talked with admirers:
"I want to make this clear. . . Zelmo could flat play!" says former rival coach Bobby "Slick" Leonard, ex-coach of the Indiana Pacers. "If you went to war against him, you better pack a lunch, because you knew your team was always going to be in a battle with him. And you knew you were going to be there awhile. He wasn't going to hide.
"He was always up for the challenge. I know our guy (Mel Daniels), who was about four years younger, learned an awful lot from him. But leave those textbooks home! You had to learn on the job against him. When he jumped from the NBA to the ABA (1970-71), Zelmo brought a sense of toughness with him.
"He was a banger! He was not only physically tough, but mentally tough, too," added Leonard. "But at the same time, he played the game with dignity and grace. His play demanded respect."
In Beaty's four ABA seasons, Utah went 223-113, won at least 51 games each year and made it back to the championship round I 1974. But he was no junior-league wonder. He spent his first seven seasons in the NBA from 1963-69, averaging 17.4 ppg and 11.2 rpg. Those are Kevin Love numbers these days, worthy of an eight- or nine-figure deal, but Beaty never made more than $30,000 in a season with the Hawks.
St. Louis had drafted Beaty third overall, a pick made by legendary NBA scout and then-GM Marty Blake, and reaped immediate dividends: the Hawks improved from 29-51 to 48-32 and Beaty was named to the first NBA All-Rookie team. After Hall of Fame forward Bob Pettit retired in 1965, Beaty's contributions shot up from 13.4 ppg and 10.3 rpg to 20.5 and 11.9.
The native of Hillister, Texas, and product of Prairie View A&M played a final season in the NBA at age 35 and, on a 36-minute basis, still averaged 11.3 points and 9.7 rebounds for the 1974-75 Lakers. He rarely gets mentioned in regards to the Hall of Fame but on enshrinement weekend in Springfield, Mass., it's worth noting that Beaty still ranks 41st in career rebounds (9,655, more than Larry Bird, Shawn Kemp, Terry Cummings and Willis Reed). His combined NBA/ABA player-efficiency rating of 18.7 is better than Reed's, Scottie Pippen's and Elvin Hayes'.
And if there were a wing for Hall of Fame names, Zelmo Beaty would have been a first ballot shoo-in. R.I.P.


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text: On Mon, 14 Nov 2005, Olivier Marsden wrote: > Hello everyone, > this might be a stupid question, but I haven't found a simple > answer to it yet: is there any "easy" way of looking at the memory > bandwidth that a program uses? What I basically want to know is > whether my mpi-based program would benefit from dual-core processors > or not, and this depends on whether the program's execution is badly > memory-bandwidth-limited or not. > So far I have not found anything better than looking at cpu usage thanks to > ganglia, > or 'top' or something like that, and looking for times when the processors > are idling, > but this method is definitely not very precise, and for all I know might be > wrong. > Could anyone give me any suggestions? > Thanks in advance, The obvious suggestion is to find a dual core processor cluster that somebody will loan you and run your application on it. That way there is no possibility of mistake. Penguin has a test cluster running, usually, and are pretty good about letting people try out code on it (especially if they are potential customers, of course, but I think they are easy about it even if not). Several other companies ditto. Whoever you might actually buy from should be willing to help you here, and on this list you might well find people with dual core clusters who will let you bench on their cluster during an idle spell. Application-specific memory bandwidth isn't terribly easy to measure because it tends to be SO bound up in the code that is being executed. One resource that won't answer your question but that will give you some hints about the problem is the Intel optimization reference for the Pentium family -- it has an entire chapter devoted to prefetch, for example, and how one can take certain code segments and basically shift them completely from being mostly memory bandwidth bound to CPU bound by layering prefetches in just the right pattern so that the next numbers to be multiplied are always loaded into the pipeline by the time they are needed. It has nice sections on SSE (SIMD) and several other optimizations, a bit dated but still relevant. You can google it up from the Intel website. The way I'd usually suggest proceeding is by a) studying your code's core loop(s). If they are highly vectorized -- lots of linear algebra, then they are relatively likely to be memory bound and stream is likely to be your relevant microbenchmark. If they are almost anything else, the code is REASONABLY likely to be CPU bound and to scale linearly or nearly so on N-processor cores or N-processor SMP systems or N-processor UP-node clusters. You can then look at stream results (or SPEC results) and see how the relevant constellations scale from UP to dual core to SMP in the architecture(s) you are looking at. If they scale linearly, then your application probably will too, although a benchmark is worth a whole lot of "probably". Alternatively, you COULD insert timing instructions in your core loops (as opposed to around the whole application) and measure actual timings of those loops. Then if you could get permission to run on just ONE dual core system you could measure those timings when running applications two at a time and one at a time. If the same, then relax, you're CPU bound not memory bound on THAT HARDWARE (YMMV, of course, especially as you switch hardware e.g. from Intel to AMD or vv). Last suggestion is that if you ARE memory bound and do lots of linear algebra, I'd strongly suggest that you use ATLAS, possibly ATLAS tuned up still further with prefetch. ATLAS alone can be worth a factor of 2-3 in speed, as its cache-friendly algorithms are much more likely to be efficient than a naive flat implementation of a vector loop. In fact, you might well NOT be memory bound without ATLAS not because your code shouldn't be, but because the memory accesses are sufficiently inefficient that the alternation between memory access and instruction execution in the pipelines on the two processors permit memory to keep up with both, sort of. Not exactly the way you want to scale linearly... rgb > > Olivier Marsden > Ecole Centrale de Lyon > France > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf > -- Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/ Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305 Durham, N.C. 27708-0305 Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:rgb at phy.duke.edu


text:
Nate Berg
Nate Berg is a freelance reporter and a former staff writer for CityLab. He lives in Los Angeles.
It's kinda like skateboarding, only without the skateboard. Known as parkour or freerunning, it's an urban sport that basically consists of running around and jumping on, off of, over and through architecture and pieces of the built environment. Its acrobatic enthusiasts will bound like gymnasts down from rooftops, off of trees and over fountains in cities all over the world.
But for some communities in Florida, the sport is increasingly unwelcome. As the The Sun Sentinel reports, Florida State University has instituted an outright ban on parkour, which many students and locals had been practicing on the campus. The city of Margate, Florida, has followed suit and officially banned parkour from its public parks.
Though no injuries have been reported, the city's attorney is worried that someone will get hurt and the city will get sued.
But parkour enthusiasts, like skateboarders, are less interested in filing lawsuits over injuries than in using the urban realm as a playground. A recent film, My Playground, looks at parkour as a form of understanding and participating in the built city.
And the phenomenon is growing. Originally developed in France, the act of parkour spread throughout Europe and recently into the U.S., where some organized groups have formed, including within Florida.
According to the Sun Sentinel, local Florida groups plan to continue to practice parkour, even under threat of breaking the law. The city of Margate is reportedly willing to compromise, offering to designate a section of one of its public parks to parkour. But, like skateboarding, much of the thrill of the sport is in finding places and physical elements within the city not necessarily meant for parkour. And then jumping off them.
[Hat tip: Planetizen]
Photo credit: Tarek Mostafa / Reuters
A new report and accompanying map finds extreme gentrification in a few cities, but the dominant trend—particularly in the suburbs—is the concentration of low-income population.
A lot of software developers, according to an unprecedented new analysis.
Manhattan's new luxury mega-project was partially bankrolled by an investor visa program called EB-5, which was meant to help poverty-stricken areas.
As prices drop for renewable power, some researchers hope the island state could be the ideal testbed for hydrogen fuel cells in public transportation.
Despite established urban tech hubs, some smaller cities are attracting high-tech jobs with lower living costs, unique talent pools, and geographic diversity.


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This is the ninth installment of "12 Fun & Creative Things To Do In San Diego With Your Children", which can be downloaded for FREE from MontessoriAmerican.com.
"The child should live in an environment of beauty." ~ Maria Montessori
Give your child the opportunity to connect with nature, as you explore this interactive garden at the San Diego Botanic. The Children's Garden is designed for preschool age children, and features a dinosaur garden, a playhouse, topiary, and miniature garden railroad.
Throughout the year, the Garden features a variety of activities and programs for children, that will provide an enriching, fun, and educational experience as they explore the beautiful gardens. Children ages 1-6 will enjoy the "Seeds of Wonder" area of the Gardens. Here, there are ongoing programs which are free with admission or membership. These include:


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The fabric you select for your sofa contributes immensely to its usability and beauty. A sleeper sofa is a great multifunctional piece of furniture with the potential to turn any room into a bedroom. You can fit a sleeper sofa in so many places - a child room, an office or even an appropriately sized alcove. Almost any sofa can be bought as a sleeper sofa, and sleeper sofas come in all sizes.
A good salesperson will understand and not bother you while you are trying on different sofas for size. You need to get an understanding of how it feels when you stay sitting on it for a while. What should you look for before you buy an office chair? An office chair is a piece of furniture that is a sound investment for anyone who spends long hours at a desk.
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Drake (Feat. Lil Wayne) - Miss Me
Video for Drake's new single "Miss Me" featuring Lil
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Yankee Candle® Store: OAKVILLE, ON
Step into the world of fragrance and discover all the possibilities for creating a warm and welcoming home. From the inviting displays of our newest fragrances and familiar favorites, to home décor accessories, you'll experience America's best loved candles first hand. You can see, hold, and smell the true-to-life fragrances and find the one just right for you.
Our knowledgeable, welcoming staff is ready to help you find the perfect gift, a favorite in our Treasures area, or a new scent. As always, if you can't find it our store, we'll help you order it online.
Stop in and see us. At Yankee Candle, you're always family.
Email this Store's manager
If you have an urgent request, please call the store directly at 905-337-2584.
Happiness Guaranteed. Love it or exchange it-returns are just that simple.
We want you to love everything you purchase from us—candle, fragrance, home accent. If for any reason you don't—even if you just change your mind—simply return it to any of our 500+ Yankee Candle Stores for a full refund or exchange.


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In 1953, an Army officer by the name of Irving Peress was promoted from captain to major. Peress was a leftist, possibly a communist, and word of his advancement in rank reached Sen. Joseph McCarthy in Washington. He asserted that the promotion proved the Army was "soft on communism," and he launched an investigation that transfixed the nation. Peress, by the way, was a mere dentist. He was the Susan Rice of his day.
Rice, of course, is a much more substantial figure. She is the U.N. ambassador, a friend of Barack Obama's and a member of his Cabinet. Still, the attack on her is so disproportionate to what she is accused of having done — just what was it, exactly? — that as in the Peress case, you have to conclude that there is something more at work.
At first, I thought we were witnessing just another example of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) doing his Rumpelstiltskin number — throwing a fit and stomping his feet. It was McCain who first leveled the solemn charge that Rice had lied to the Sunday TV shows about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. She had characterized it as a spontaneous riot when it was, in fact, a planned attack by a local al-Qaeda affiliate. But Rice was hewing to the early line established by the intelligence community. If the CIA and others were wrong — or deceptive — then so, inevitably, was she.
Just as surely as day follows night, McCain's broadside was echoed by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). It was soon taken up by 97 Republicans in the House who found Rice unqualified to become secretary of state — a post to which she has not been nominated. "Ambassador Rice is widely viewed as having willfully or incompetently misled the American public," they bellowed.
I think Rice would make a dandy secretary of state. She's close to the president, and that matters a great deal. But she is also seen as overly political and that, as much as her version of Benghazi, is what troubles some others. Oddly enough, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), a former presidential candidate and another potential secretary of state, is seen as much more of a statesmen. He is indeed an independent foreign-policy thinker who has, as in days of old, restored the prestige and importance of the Foreign Relations Committee, of which he is chairman.
But the awful truth is that it hardly matters who Obama chooses. Foreign policy is run from the White House and not the State Department. Hillary Clinton is about to retire, and while she has done a commendable job at Foggy Bottom, we cannot expect the inevitable book by her to reveal a Clinton Doctrine. For the most part, she executed, not initiated, foreign policy.
So what is this fuss all about? Not Rice, that's for sure. It has turned instead into an expression of unease about Obama's foreign policy and its politicization. The unfortunate Peress came to personify the government's alleged indifference to the (equally alleged) communist infiltration of the military and virtually everything else (with the possible exception of the American Legion). Similarly, Rice has become the personification of unhappiness with the use of intelligence leaks to buff Obama's foreign policy image and the conducting of an amorphous foreign policy. Like Churchill's famous pudding, it lacks theme.
Syria is an example. U.S. inaction has allowed the crisis to fester. Bashar al-Assad's regime might be dusting off its formidable arsenal of chemical weapons, further evidence of how chaotic this crisis has become, but much of the time the White House has just trailed after Turkey or France. The war has spread, a refugee calamity has developed, 40,000 people have died, and jihadists have come to play a prominent role. The Obama administration has been as lethargic on Syria as it initially was with Libya.
This sense of an aimless foreign policy, one lacking any moral fervor (or fiber) irritates conservatives much more than liberals. It certainly enrages McCain, who cannot stomach the big guys kicking little guys around. He sees an administration that will not engage the American people on matters of foreign policy — make a case for intervention, not just say it's too hard to do.
The attack on Rice is unfair and excessive. But the issue is not the person but what she represents — in this case, the administration's inability to articulate a foreign policy that marries American morality to American power, not merely American politics.


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Well, this is predictable...
Today members of Congress had to reveal their stock holdings.
We were curious what anti-Fed, pro-gold Congressman Ron Paul held, and no surprise, he likes gold.
Lots of it.
Here are the stocks he owns.
- Agnico Eagle Mines
- Alumina Common
- Anglo Gold Ashanti Ltd.
- BrigusGold Corp. Com MPV (formerly Apollo Gold Corp)
- Barrick Gold Corp.
- Claude Research Inc
- Coeur D'Alene Minds Corp.
- Gold Corp Inc
- El Dorado Gold Corp.
- IAM Gold Corp.
- Kinross
- Lexam Explorations Inc.
- Mag Silver Corp.
- Metalline Mining Co.
- Mutual Securities Inc.
- Newmont Mining Corp.
- Pan American Silver
- Petrol Oil and Gas
- Silver Wheaton Corp
- Virginia Mines Inc.
- Vista Gold Corp.
- Viterra Inc
- Wesdome Gold Mines Ltd.
- Allied Nevada Gold Corp.
- Hecla Mining Co.
Looks like he's doing well these days.
Click here to see what some of his fellow Representatives are holdings as well.


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one of the most awesome characters in Runescape. he's really kind and very cool. A lot of female characters want to date him, so he's a very busy guy.
from Snoezles: wow Ghost! wanna date? from Ghostkool: sure babe meet me in the poisoned arrow in ardy. from Snoezles: w00t! mardirosd is gonna be so jealous
by Bantumie November 04, 2009
buy the domain for your travel blog


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The state-level Office of Prevention & Wellness (OPW), a division of the Ohio Department of Mental Health & Addiction Services (OhioMHAS), is committed to promoting evidence-based practices for the prevention of mental, emotional and behavioral health disorders and for assessment, early intervention and treatment of youth behavioral health problems, and gambling prevention and treatment for all ages.
The Office of Prevention and Wellness is focused on creating a service system structure that is integrated with other community service systems; utilizes evidence-based and promising practices to maximize return on investment; supports a well-trained, culturally competent workforce committed to sharing learning and best practices; and empowers individuals and communities to be solution-focused. Specifically, the goals are to utilize evidence-based and promising practices to:
OPW supports policy and programming areas to achieve the objectives outlined below, using a public health approach for prevention and the system of care framework for early identification, intervention and treatment engagement.
print close directions


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The Summer of EDM Festivals
First of all, I know I'm a horrible blogger for barely posting anything in the past month. But what can I say? I was super busy from hearing all these crazy festivals hitting Toronto this summer! I hope my readers will be stopping by to this beautiful (and crazy) city to check out the numerous concerts that are brought to you by fellow music promoters.
Within just one month, four major new festivals were announced through social networks with some of the biggest international DJ's and Producers headlining it. Toronto is used to having to accommodate weekly EDM events throughout the city, but having a two day, 12 hour festival featuring various genres of the EDM community? Never. That's why I'm more excited than ever to be living in Toronto this summer to experience all four hometown shows, I hope all of you have the same opportunity as well.
To celebrate these announcements and welcoming, as well as promoting international to local DJ's, I have compiled a list of mix tapes of DJ's that will be hitting Toronto this summer. Because believe it or not, this summer will be all about the EDM Festivals.
Which one are you most excited for? Tweet at us through @_RoomNoise or Like us on Facebook.
Kaskade Live At Coachella 2012 by Kaskade
Alesso – Essential Mix – 24.03.2012 by edmtunesTV
Chuckie – Essential Mix 27-01-2012 by edmtunesTV
Sirius XM Blow Your Head 11 by diplo
Eight And A Half – Scissors (TOKiMONSTA Remix) by TOKiMONSTA
Identity Festival Lovers Mix by Arty
Alexandra Palace, 26th November 2011 (Full Set) by Eric Prydz
Knife Party UKF – Liveset by Knife Party
Essential Mix BBC Radio 1 (28-04-2012) by Nicky Romero
Enjoy these mix tapes, it will keep you hyped until you see these guys live!
Constance Chan
This entry was posted by Constance Chan on May 9, 2012 at 10:50 PM, and is filed under Blog, Concerts, Mix Tapes, Music, Remixes. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0.You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.
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Thing more important than Japan's diaster
March 15 2011
Sorry about this unrelated news with Notepad++:
It's a horrible reality, but we have to admit: the humain lives have not the same value. It's not reasonable that 5000 Japanese lives are superior than 16000 children's lives per day.
The events such 911 or Japan earthquake get the intense attention whereas the more important events such as the issue of famine in Africa or Darfur conflict are ignored consciently by the world.
In theory, the human life should have the same value. In the real world, only the people's lives in the rich countries have been considered. It is totaly shameful.
Could we stop focusing on Japan's diaster and face to the problems more important in Africa?


text: This site enables you to watch all House online episodes free. Every episode from the Pilot to the most recently aired episode of House Season 7 can be watched free online here. To watch an episode, simply select the season and then the episode. The online episodes on this site are streamed from other sources, but the videos load fast and you will not experience long wait periods while they stream. Enjoy watching Dr. House MD online free and considers visiting our sister streaming sites to watch other shows online.


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PEAK SEARCH: Why The Google Era May Be Over (YHOO, GOOG, MSFT, AAPL, FB, AMZN, YELP)
Something crucial happened last month that no one seems to be paying attention to.
People searched less.
That's never happened before.
Ben Schachter of Macquarie Securities noted this in a research note:
Notably, total core organic searches declined 4% y/y, representing the first decline in total search volume since we began tracking the data in 2006. While this month marks the first y/y decline in total search volume, growth rates have been decelerating since February's recent peak at 14% y/y growth (for the prior two years, growth rates were largely stable in the high single-digit to low double-digit range).
Tech insiders have been predicting this would happen for some time, as people shifted from using websites, where search is a natural activity, to using mobile apps. No less a luminary than Steve Jobs made this prediction in 2010 at the D8 conference:
We discovered something—people are going into apps. They're not just going onto to websites. And people love apps. This is an entirely new thing—they aren't using search, they're using apps like Yelp.
That's terrible for Yahoo, which depends on search for most of its profits and, having handed most of its back-end search technology over to Microsoft, has precious little leverage to restore its momentum.
It's also horrible news for Microsoft, which continues to spend and lose billions of dollars to catch up with Google in a market that, it turns out, just peaked.
It's fantastic for Apple, of course, which doesn't have a stake in the search business but has a lock on most of the profits in the app economy.
It's also good for players like Amazon, Yelp, and eBay, which handle specialized kinds of commercial searches that work well when packaged into a mobile app.
Google is not as bad off as it might seem. Yes, most of its business is built around search. But it has its own mobile ecosystem in Android, so it's positioned to capture consumers as they shift from searching on the Web to using specialized apps to express and fulfill their desires. And with YouTube and Google+, it has strong social properties that don't depend on search.
Twitter will continue to benefit from its unique ability to deliver timely content that doesn't show up in conventional searches.
And Facebook, which admits it hasn't really bothered to pursue the search opportunity, might still do something interesting. Or it might look at search and realize that it's ultimately a declining business.
Please follow Business Insider on Twitter and Facebook.
Join the conversation about this story »


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- Parent Category: News
Police chase on SR 10 in Indiana
Police in Indiana used stop-sticks to bring a fleeing pickup to a stop Wednesday. A DeMotte man was arrested.
27-year-old Jason Van Buren faces charges. He was stopped on State Road 10 but then fled form the officer. Police report it was a routine traffic stop, but Van Buren ran thru a residential sub-division before the stop-sticks flattened his tires on a county road. He still tried running on the truck's rims before the vehicle was stopped on State Road 231. Police had to taze the driver before the arrest was made.


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Talking to Gary Faulkner's friends, the impression you get is that they had become so accustomed to this one unusual fact about good old Garythe pursuit that would eventually bring about his weird, jagged flash of famethat it had come to seem quite commonplace. Routine. Unremarkable. Just one more detail about a man they knew:
Gary was the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back. Gary could eat prodigious amounts of chicken wings. Gary was an inventive contractor and carpenter who excelled at tile countertops. Gary was always joking around. Gary disappeared every now and again to hunt down Osama bin Laden.
When it was reported in June that a 50-year-old from Greeley, Colorado, had been found high in the mountains of Pakistan near the Afghan border carrying a sword, a dagger, a pistol, and night-vision equipment and apparently declaring "I think Osama is responsible for bloodshed in the world, and I want to kill him," the romance of such a solo quest struck a chord around the globe.
There were skeptics, too. No wonderit already seemed such a lunatic and improbable tale. But one kind of skepticism, at least, made no sense at all: the notion that this was an act of publicity-seeking. If that had been all Gary Faulkner had wanted, then he would surely have tried to interest the world in his missions before now. This was, after all, his eleventh attempt.
Gary's youngest brother, Scott, a doctor in Fort Morgan, Colorado, drove him to the Denver airport two weeks earlier, on May 30. "He was in great spirits," says Scott. "He was excited about his trip. I remember he was looking at his crossbow, deciding whether or not he should take it." Outside the airport, Scott used his phone to snap what he feared might be the last photo of his brother, turning and grinning to the camera. Scott recalls his farewell: "Be safe, come back to me alive, and keep your head low."
"You got it!" Gary replied.
Scott began to discover how poorly this last injunctionthat his brother keep his head lowhad worked when his phone rang at four in the morning on June 15. Soon everyone knew, including their mother, who didn't even know Gary was in Pakistan until Fox News called.
"Yeah," she told them. "I know a Gary Faulkner. But he's on dialysis three times a week."
Scott, who became the family's de facto spokesman, gave interviews explaining that this mission wasn't some whim of his brother's but something he had been committed to for a long time, and for which he had planned carefully. Over these first few days the question Scott had to field most often was: Do you think your brother's crazy?
"Well, as a physician I see people with psychological problems all day," he says, "and I could attest that he did not have psychosis, paranoia, schizophrenia, any of those diagnoses. Yes, it's out of the norm, but that's what Gary does. It was his passion, his calling."
It wasn't clear whether Gary had committed, or would be charged with, a crime in Pakistan, but eventually the family was informed through the State Department that he could come home if they sent $683 to pay for his changed airline ticket. At the airport, Gary addressed the media scrum: "What this is about is the American people and the world," he told them. "We can't let people like this scare us. We don't get scared by people like this. We scare them. And that's what this is about."
"I believe that is going to go down in history," his other brother, Todd, tells me, "and kids are going to write essays about that 200 years from now."
We expect our heroes to be exactly how we want them to be. Our idiots, frauds, and madmen, too. But from the first moment that he was allowed to tell his own story, Gary Faulkner made clear that it would often not fit with anyone's expectations, and that furthermore he really wasn't too concerned with whether it did or whether it didn't.
From the start, he wanted to clear up some misconceptions about what he was doing in Pakistan. He told everyone who would listen that he had never planned to kill Osama bin Laden but rather to capture him and deliver him to the Pakistani authorities. It turned out that this information was contained in CNN's original report, but the narrative of Faulkner as the armed solo avenging assassin was so compelling that this was widely ignored. You could almost feel the disappointment when Faulkner kept insisting upon his nonlethal intentions, because it seemed less melodramatically satisfying, and also because it seemed even more impractical. (As did Faulkner's further puzzling suggestion that once he had found bin Laden he had hoped to use his dialysis machine, for if the reports are correct, they share an affliction.)
Faulkner soon flew to New York to appear on The Early Show, The View, Letterman, and Fox News, where he seemed, second by second, to charm, scare, and confuse his hosts. A few of his tropes became familiarhis habit of referring to his target as "Binny Boy," for instance, and, more annoyingly, his insistence on always referring to the former ruler of Iraq as "Saddam who was insane" with a lilt in his voice that suggested he had just said something both potent and witty. And despite protests from both Letterman and the View interviewers, as Faulkner explained his mission from God he persisted in calling the inhabitants of the country he had just visited "Pakis." It became clear that he was dancing to the beat of a very different drum and that, in his insistence on being honest to himself, he might say almost anything. This is one of the final questions he was asked when he was interviewed by his local TV station, on Denver's 9News, and his answer, in which one syllable of their question seems to trigger a quite unexpected series of revelations:
"You have been described as everything from a hero to a crackpot. What are you?"
"I'm a little of everything. I've done crack, I've done crank, I've done coke, I've done pot, I've done everything in the world out there. You know, I've been to prison, I've been shipwrecked, blown up, shot, stabbed. My story does not just start here; it started when I was 5 years old, the first time I tried to hot-wire a car."
The day after he returns from New York, I meet Faulkner at his local dialysis center in Greeley, where he's happy to talk while connected to a machine for four hours, as he must be three times every week. But when he arrives, he is taken straight to the hospital, the North Colorado Medical Center, with a temperature of 104. It is there, the following afternoon, that we finally begin to talk. Faulkner has various monitors connected to him, and on his chest just below his right shoulder hangs the catheter that is permanently plumbed into his circulatory system. This catheter has become infected. Official diagnosis: bacteremia. Patient's own description: "I'm feeling a little better, but I still feel very loopy. I'm jacked up. It's really getting me on the tizzy up and down and stuff. I've got so many toxins and poisons in my body, it's just like 'wow.' I've been having the shakes and the shivers. It's almost like convulsionsit's a pretty ugly sight. Hey, you know, the champ's down right now, but I'll be back up before the ten count."
Faulkner discovered that his kidneys weren't working last year while he was hiking in the Rockies, checking out some new high-altitude gear he'd gotten for his next trip to Pakistan. People might rush to assume he is somehow paying a rough price for youthful recklessness. He himself says, "I've tormented my body, I've been used and abused, but there's a saying that a very dear friend of mine has: We were not meant to go to the grave in a pristine, well-kept body but to come power-sliding in, totally spent, and say, 'Whoooooo! What a ride!' Well, I'm still on that ride." Even so, it is likely to have happened anyway. Polycystic kidney disease runs in the family; it's what caused Gary's father's fatal heart attack when he was 45.
Faulkner has plenty of colorful stories about the mischief he would get up to in his youth. He talks about transporting coke, marijuana, and pills across the border from Mexico, partying while the drugs were loaded or unloaded from wherever they were hidden: "It was just the excitement, the thrillI was an adrenaline junkie." He talks about a bank job. He has endless tales about driving too fast, and liberating vehicles that belonged to othersmost of his convictions involved this. (His longest stretch inside was for four years.) "I boosted everything, it didn't matterdump truck, forklift, cars, boats, whatever." One time he nearly stole a helicopter. He thought better of it when he saw all the gears, but he was tempted. "They should never have left the keys in there."
It's easy to romanticize this kind of thing, and Faulkner is not immune to that temptation. Part of his patter and self-justification is that it is his experiences in this part of his life that offer him a unique advantage in his missions. When you think like a thief, you are free of all those inflexible military rules and habits. The thief has a different style of approach: "Like I say, it's easier for a mouse to get into a castle than a lion." And that is his goalto steal away with a person as his loot. "I'm going in there as a thief, not as a military mind. I'm boosting this guy right out from underneath their noses."
But he can also be stern with himself and characterize those years as wasteful, repetitive, and ultimately fruitless.
"Yeah," he reflects, "high-speed chases are fun, and breaking into a vault is fun, but everyone at some point pays the piper, and when it ends, it normally ends ugly." One day I'll overhear him talking to someone he has just met, explaining something of his life and reflecting on his newfound celebrity: "People say, like, 'You're a wonderful guy.' They don't know the whole story. I was a piece of shit. I ruined people's lives, literally. But I'm honest about it."
September 11 took its time to fire Gary up. He remembers reading an article about bin Laden hiding out in the mountains of Pakistan, but he didn't even really know where that was. It was around 2004 that his mission came to him. "He just had a dream about hunting down bin Laden," remembers Jim Sage, who has worked on construction jobs with Faulkner over the past decade. "In his dream he was supposed to get there without his feet touching the ground." At first, Faulkner took this to mean that he had to go by boat. So he bought a twenty-one-foot yellow-and-white yacht called the Pia Colada. He'd never been in a boat before, other than on freshwater lakes and waterskiing, but a friend showed him how to put up the sail. Ignoring the Coast Guard's admonitions that his boat was illegal because he had no life jackets, no flares, and so on, he set sail from San Diego. He figured he'd head west across the Pacific and work it out from there. There is documentary evidence that supports much of what Faulkner says he did on future trips, but one wonders whether it can be true that he was really at sea for twenty-two days without any food to speak of before a hurricane threw his boat against a beach halfway down the Baja Peninsula in Mexico. Either way, it was his first failed attempt.
The next year, he bought another boat, which he was readying in his friend's driveway in Northern California when, in an accident involving the mast, he badly dislocated his shoulder. He decided that there had to be a better way. He sold the boat, bought a plane ticket, and within a week he was in Pakistan for the first time. It was the spring of 2005.
He had no idea about anything: "I didn't know how hot it was. I didn't know anything about the people, the language. I didn't know diddly-squat." But he had faith that what he needed to know would be revealed to him. He traveled from Islamabad to Lahore to Sialkot, where he stayed on a military base and was finally directed to a town in a northern tribal area called Gilgit. There he began to explore the remote mountainous hinterland.
It is hard to know how to judge Faulkner's accounts of what he discovered on each Pakistan trip. My hunch is that everything that he says happenedin terms of his own experience and of where he went and what he diddid actually happen. What might be more questionable is the significance of what was happening to others he came across, and their relevance to his stated quest. On his first trip, for instance, he says that he found himself more or less running for his life coming down from the mountains and that he lost his pack and his money and his blade. That evening, at the Madina Hotel Guest House in Gilgit, where he was staying, he says that the military guard who was posted outside was shot dead through the head, and that he was told that this was done by the same peopleAl Qaeda, he assumedwho had been chasing him down from the mountains. He also says that he found something encouraging in this turn of events: "I thought it was pretty cool, myself, because I shook the tree and at least I got a response."
He made four other similar visits before his most recent trip to Pakistan. (These were attempts numbers 4, 5, 9, and 10.) He describes them to me in some detail. Recently, he'd moved his attention to the mountains west and southwest of Chitral, toward the Afghan border. (When pressed on the reasons for such decisions, he generally alludes to an unspecified combination of inside information, local help, and divine guidance.) During the first of these Chitral trips, he believes he met a very high-ranking Al Qaeda official when he inadvertently shared a car with a man who had a particularly unwelcoming demeanor. That was also when Faulkner says he wandered for four days among Al Qaeda workers up near a cave mouth, in disguise and unidentified. "There were a lot of people running around with axes and all kinds of stuff," he says, "working on cutting down trees and making the new cave." On his second trip to Chitral, he says that he would sleep up there in the mountains on a bed of pine needles covered in a rug for days at a time. Watching that cave. Waiting for Binny Boy.
I visit him again in the hospital the next morning. When I walk in he is lying on his back with his eyes closed, headphones on. He is listening to Nickelback on the pink iPod Shuffle he had with him in Pakistan. (Also on the playlist of the dedicated Osama-hunter: Bon Jovi, the Eagles, the Zac Brown Band, Creedence.) He says that there's another song he likes a lot, "Voice of Truth," by the Christian rock group Casting Crowns, about having the faith to step out of a boat on top of the waves. "It's not like I'm in it for the money," he says. "I'm in it because of my faithand that's where he's at, too, so it's the two titans of their faith. He stood up on a world platform and made his announcement, I stood up on a world platform and made my announcement, and we're getting ready to go toe-to-toe."
Do you think Osama is fundamentally evil?
"Absolutely, yeah. There's no doubt. His god is actually Satan. Mine's the Living God."
Did God choose you for this?
"Oh yeah, absolutely. I'm always wondering: Why did you pick me instead of somebody else?"
And why do you think he did?
"Because I'm the only one crazy enough to do it."
Faulkner is feeling better today, though he says, "I can still smell the toxinsI've been sweating it out of my body." He rhapsodizes about the shower he had the previous night—his first since last December. "I flooded that thing! I didn't care. It felt soooooo good."
Today he'll be discharged. A nurse comes in and takes him through a medical summary prior to his release. "Primary diagnosis: bacteremia, dialysis catheter-related. Secondary diagnosis: CRF, chronic renal failure. Or ESRD, end-stage renal disease"
"Okay, cool," he says.
"PKD, polycystic kidney disease, hypertension anemia"
She says that aside from dialysis, the recommendation is for "normal activity." She pauses. "Whatever normal is."
Before he leaves the hospital, he orders lunch and eats it in his beda cheeseburger with olives, mustard, and Thousand Island dressing, with some cottage cheese and fresh fruit on the side.
"I don't want French fries," he specifies, "because of the potassium."
He talks about moving to a remote new home that has been found for him, and about his plans to get a wolf the following week. He says he'll train it by walking the property's perimeter over and over. He had a wolf once before, when he was married. She was called Jessie. She ran away while he was in prison.
I travel around Colorado, crisscrossing the Rockies, visiting his friends. On the warm afternoon of July Fourth, in a trailer park in Orchard Mesa, on the south side of Grand Junction, an extended family are celebrating, among them Daren Paredes, his mother, Esther, and her brother Tony, all close friends of Gary's.
"Man, he has a spirit," says Daren. "It's hard to be down around him." They reminisce about the firework fight they had on a previous July Fourth, and Tony points with pride to a scar on his torso from a firework of Gary's. He says Gary liked to come over to his house and watch shows like Survivorman. Tony gave him his pig sticker, the knife he was found with in Pakistan. ("I got it at a pawnshop. It cost me like eight bucks. He liked it and I was, 'You know what—go get bin Laden.'") Daren says they liked to go to the all-you-can-eat-buffalo-wings at the New Plantation Restaurant in Evans, and how sometimes they'd get through about six buckets—about sixty wings each.
When the local newspaper in Grand Junction, The Daily Sentinel, compared Gary to Forrest Gump, Esther was so incensed she phoned them up: "How dare you call my friend that? You guys don't know him."
Her daughter Kaya wanders in.
"She's 10, she loves Gary," says Esther.
"She got mad seeing him on TV," says Daren.
"They're jerks and they're stupid," says Kaya. "They were talking about Gary."
I ask her what he's like.
"He's a nice guy. He's funny. He's cool."
I meet two other friends, Jen Oliver and Peggy Gates, at Peggy's home in Golden. It was Jen he was staying with when he was diagnosed with kidney disease. Both of them have had Gary living with them while he worked on their houses. (It takes me a while to realize this, but for most of the last fifteen years before his diagnosis, Faulkner was technically homeless, living on the site of whatever job he was doing.) It was while watching Knife Show on TV with Jen and her husband that Gary spotted the $300 samurai sword.
I ask what he's like as a houseguest.
"He's entertainment plus," says Jen.
"Sometimes you're just happy when he falls asleep," Peggy says, laughing.
Both would ferry him down the mountain to Denver early in the morning for dialysis. They say that he seemed fine about his kidney problems at first, but then it really hit himthe reality of a life like this with no home, no savings, and little more than $449-a-month disability with a few food stamps. They thought he wouldn't go back to Pakistan, but it was Peggy who ended up buying his $1,700 plane ticket, money she owed him for work on the house. "I didn't think he would come back this time," says Jen. "I thought it was death for sure. But he was totally prepared for death."
So far, three of Faulkner's eleven attempts—attempts numbers 6, 7, and 8—have not been mentioned. None of these involved a successful visit to Pakistan.
Attempt number 8 faltered in the place that sometimes seems a rapacious machine invented purely to suck down well-intentioned plans: Las Vegas. Each time he wanted to fly to Pakistan, Faulkner had to first visit Los Angeles to apply for a visa. In January 2008, he decided to do the trip by road, accompanied by his friend Tony Montana and a man they knew as Pickles. They left on Friday, just after they'd been paid. On the way, they decided to stop off in Las Vegas. That was that. "I still don't remember all of Vegas," Gary says. "And I forgot the whole reason why I was going out that way anyway." No Los Angeles. No visa. Convinced that he would get in anyhow, he still made his scheduled flight to Pakistan.
There he was sternly informed that he should take the next plane home.
Attempts numbers 6 and 7 were failures of a different kind. Faulkner's vision that his feet wouldn't touch the ground led him to the certainty that on his next expedition to Pakistan, he should approach bin Laden in a new way—by hang glider. He also decided that the perfect and proper place to try out such a hang glider would be Israel: "I've got to test it somewhere, so in my mind: Well, if I go to Israelt—he Dead Sea! Hit the water, you float!" He found a hang glider for $500, cut it up into six-foot pieces that would fit into a long ski bag, and crafted brackets to reassemble it using the copper tubes from a cabin he was renovating at the time. In Israel in September 2006, he put it back together and prepared to launch himself off a cliff by the Dead Sea. He had never flown a hang glider in his life. "I just figured everything else I'd ever done in my life is: Jump on and go for the ride."
This ride was short. Three seconds later, he had several broken ribs and a dislocated shoulder. "Damn, I crashed hard," he says. "I still feel that one."
A sensible man might have decided to put hang gliding behind him. Faulkner asked a local hostel to store his flying machine until he could return.
He was back the following August. This time, he decided, he should take off much closer to the water. There was maybe twenty feet between him and the water when he launched himself. "You think I could hit the water? Not on your life. I was dragged and smashed and beat down by the rocks. I ripped up my shins this time." He undid his harness, left the remains of his glider on the rocks, and hobbled to the road.
"I normally give stuff two tries," he explains. "And if it doesn't work by the second time, I'm through."
As far as Faulkner is concerned, analyzing the tactical sense or practicality of his plans is, when it comes down to it, beside the point. He is on a mission from God. He follows his heart, not his mind: "If you have the heart to go out and do something, you go do it. If you have a mind to go out and do something, you're going to be in trouble, because your mind is going to try and calculate and figure things out."
And God has told him that he is the man to do this. "I'm the one that the Lord put his finger on and said, 'You're it.' I accept thatI take that responsibility all the way to the grave with me if I have to. When you really look at this story, you stop and you think, Okay, here's this guy now, is he just crazy, is he a fool, or what's happening? People just still don't get the real gist of what's happening. God's making a statement. It isn't me. I'm just doing what I am programmed to do through my faith. Nothing is actually a thought process; it's emotion out of my heart. Because when I start thinking about stuff, I'll get confused. I don't have a clue. And I'll be the first to say it."
He knows some people think he has a death wish: "I don't have a death wish. What I do have is a wish to be obedient and to do what I'm designed to do. Everybody's designed to do something. Other people are, 'Oh, I'd be scared to go there.' " He grins. "That's why you're not going there."
There is little reason for those who do not share Faulkner's faith to accept his interpretation of what has happened or what will happen. But if you suspect he is simply some kind of fantasist, I think you are wrong. Though he sometimes seems prone to elaboration, his specific accounts of events over a period of time are generally consistent down to small details. His passport confirms that he made these trips. And an unedited sampling of his recent e-mails shows that his current account of what he was up to matches what he wrote at the time.
"I'm a very bold person, and I can be a little obnoxious sometimes," he says, "and I can be a little bit boastful sometimes, too, but I'm true to my faith, and I'm true to my God and my heart. I can't be anything else. If you don't want to hear the answer, don't ask. I'll try to be as nice and gentle as I can, but there's a point where, you know what? Parole's denied!"
On this last trip, he flew into Islamabad carrying with him his new pig sticker, a few light clothes, some mountaineering pants meant to be worn over clothing to keep the wind off (he didn't use a tent), his King James Bible, a copy of Andrew Wommack's A Better Way to Pray, and the Liberty Dollar he has taken on all his travels for many years.
In Pakistan he was reunited with the rest of his equipment: the night-vision scope, a Night Hawk that he'd originally bought at Big 5 in Greeley; his samurai sword; his Smith Wesson handcuffs; and a .30-caliber Chinese pistol that carried eight rounds and had no safety. He'd picked up this gun on a previous visit. The first time he mentions it, he tells me that he bought it for about $100 "in Chitral in the back alleys," but another time, when he is trying to impress on me that he has had more informal encouragement from the authorities than he is able to let on, he says, "I mean, how do you think I got the gun? Yeah, we tell everybody it was the back alley and stuff, but a very special person delivered that gun to me as a matter of fact. Shit, this is a brand-new gun."
He checked into room 4 of the Ishpata Inn in the Bumboret Valley south of Chitral. He spent some of this first week making preparations, but when he finally tried to climb toward the cave where he believed bin Laden was now hiding, he found his strength lacking. He called Jen. "He came down," she says, "and he goes, 'Whoa, I can't do it. I tried to do it, I can't go up there, I'm real weak now.' " He'd also come to realize that Pakistan wasn't without medical resources, so he asked her to research not just dialysis but also kidney transplants in the area. She e-mailed back to him a number of options; the closest dialysis center was the Rehman Medical Institute in Hayatabad, Peshawar, so he took an all-day bus ride there and got two hours of dialysis. On his return, after a day in which he says maybe seventy Al Qaeda members came down from the mountains to threaten the locals, he e-mailed her with a requested update on his physical, mental, and spiritual well-being:
I'm physically ok, mentally demented, SPIRITUAL I'M ON FIRE!!!!!!!!!! I went to a al quida meeting today at the P.T.D.C. They told the elders that they now have the north hill side and every body is freaked out because they don't know what is going on next, Well I have to get ready to go.
Gary says he was told that Al Qaeda had not only noticed him but photographed him and was circulating his picture. After dark that night, believing they were soon coming to get him, he headed up the mountain. He heard barking he believes revealed Al Qaeda's movement through a nearby ravine. They were searching for him; the military police were searching, too. "It's old-school for me, because I used to be a thief, so nighttime is my time. I laugh. Here I am in the middle, they've got a squeeze play going on, and once again I slipped away in the night." He laughs. "I love it. I'm glad that I was a criminal."
At daybreak, what would be portrayed in press reports as his "capture" by the government took place, though he insists that he simply stepped out from where he had been hiding and flagged two policemen walking below. Faulkner is likewise convinced that he connived with the police to put on a show that he was being arrested so that no one who had helped him would be implicated. "We came up with a plan," he insists. "Everyone played it off cool. They did it by the book to make it look like an arrest—they had me blindfolded and a hood on, the whole works. But that was also at my request." When I suggest that some people may wonder, just because this was what Gary thought was going on here, whether it really was, he replies: "What do I give a shit what anyone thinks? Hey, kiss my ass, I'm the one that was there." In support of his narrative, he points out that they didn't take his gun. As he sees it, the custody he was in until he left the country was part of the same continuing act of theater by authorities who tacitly endorsed and supported his actions and intentions. He points out that while he was in their care, they gave him Pizza Hut pizza.
If one were making a bad bio-pic, there are a few obvious moments of redemption and revelation one might choose to depict in the life of Gary Faulkner. The first came when he was 5. Faulkner maintains that he had the specific vision that set him upon this path before his sixth birthday. It would happen over and over. There were these monsters coming at him—well, what seemed like monsters to a 5-year-old, though he now recognizes them as men dressed as they are in the Himalayan foothills. He told his mother that these creatures were trying to kill him. One day the Faulkner family went to the carnival, and Gary got a balloon on a stick. When the balloon popped, leaving nothing but the stick, he says that his mother said to him: "Here, this is your sword, and when they come at you again, you kill them." The next time they came at him, he wielded his sword, and he killed every single one of them; he says that his mother saw him do so and that she told him he had seemed like a real man with a real sword.
He believes that this is the dream he has been living out, and the search he has been on, ever since. In his vision, after the bad people had been conquered, he would find himself in a cave. "Once I get to the cave," he explains, "then the earthquake hits. That's how people will know that he's been captured around the world without hearing the report. I'm standing here in the cave watching it, and I'm seeing the dirt and the rocks and everything come crashing down. I never actually saw Binny Boy. He's in the cave, but he's trapped because it all caves in on him."
This is what you saw when you were 5?
"Yeah. Exactly, and I still feel it. You experience something and you know you were there, but this is so much far beyond that. It's like you read a book and then all of a sudden the movie comes outnow you see all the color and the peoples and everything else. I know it sounds strange."
So you're just making the movie of a book you've already read?
"Right. See, I already know how it ends, because I've read the book. I know the ending of this. And that's why I'm so positive and how I'm so determined and without that fear. It's incredible."
So, specifically, do you really believe that's how it will endthat you won't lead him out. You'll just be there and then the cave will collapse?
"Yeah. Then the people will come up and dig him out. It's already been prepared. Everything is set and ready to go. I just got to get there. They know the signal, they know what to look for. And then they'll drag him down."
He won't be killed by the collapsing cave?
"No, he's just going to be trapped in there. He's going to be trapped in there because he can't die in battle."
I do try to discuss it with his mother, this vision her eldest son says he had when he was 5.
She shrugs.
"He never mentioned it," she says.
So I ask her whether there was any clear ambition or calling that Gary seemed to have when he was a young child. She allows that there was:
"He wanted to be a fireman."
We had made plans to meet up again in Colorado, but instead Faulkner heads east in his brother Scott's truck to help his niece Nikki, who is moving to Massachusetts. I catch up with him in a motel there, fresh out of the bath. He sits talking to me in nothing but a towel, his twin green and blue catheter nozzles hanging down his chest. He tells me that he has hurt his right foot on a curb, though tomorrow he will change his mind and diagnose it as gout caused by the pizza he ordered with everything on it. On the bedside table is a prescription bottle. He says someonethe maid, he suspectshas helped themselves to his medical marijuana. ("I'm a sativa guy, not an indica guy," he tells me; when he was searched at the end of his recent Pakistan adventure, aside from his weapons, they found a small amount of hash.) Gary's unlicensed Glock .40 and his hollow-point bullets are in his day bag. (There is a fairly long list of rules Gary eschews. Seat belts, for instance. Also taxes.)
The next morning, at the hotel's buffet breakfast, we pore over a map of Pakistan on my computer as he talks me through his travels. When he describes his most recent trip, we close in on Bumboret. He points to a valley that heads west-northwest from there toward the Afghan border, and then an area reached by climbing over the range to your left after you have headed far up that valley. "Homeboy's right here," he says.
After he has dialysis at a West Springfield center, we head south in Scott's truck, stopping when he needs something to drink because his hand is cramping badly from the lack of fluid. Wherever we eat, he flirts shamelessly with the waitress. "I'm a dogat least I'm honest about it," he'll repeat at such times. He has told me that he doesn't particularly care for the media nickname that seems to have stuck the most, Rocky Mountain Rambo, but I'm not so sure. When I see him write down his name for strangers, he'll write "Rocky Mountain Rambo" beneath it, and when there's a problem finding a New York hotel reservation, he wonders aloud whether he might have been booked under the name Rocky Mountain Rambo.
On the road, having to raise even his unbridled voice over the thumping of the rain on the truck, he suddenly starts to tell me about the whippings his father used to give him. When it comes to the moment in the story when he finally stands up to his father, he still gets belted one more time, but then tells his father, "If you ever touch me again, I'm going to cut your throat in your sleep," and says how much better their relationship was from that day on. He follows this with the strange statement: "I think he actually wanted to create me like this." Gary says that that day, the day he stood up to his father, was the day he decided something. "I'm not going to put up with anybody's bullshit," he says. "And from that day on, I was hell on wheels. And I was purposely looking for this moment, but I was also looking for what would make me afraid. Still haven't found it. That's why I'm able to go and do what I do. No fear."
These are not necessarily the words you want to hear from a man behind the wheel of a truck on a freeway on a rainy night with an unlicensed gun in a bag beside him who has just had a rum and Coke at the Olive Garden, but I think they nonetheless explain something about such a man.
All the time Faulkner returns to the same theme. "I can't wait to get back and finish the mission," he says. "I'm tired, but I have one more rodeo to go." He constantly talks about the money he needs to buy equipment for his return to Pakistan. "People don't realize this isn't overI've still got to finish this," he says. "If I gotta go boost a bank, I'm going after this guy. There is nothing that's going to stop my ass from getting this dude."
Two sensible ways of judging the sincerity of someone's beliefs are by how consistently they are held over a long period of time and by what someone is prepared to sacrifice for them. By these standards, Faulkner scores well.
On other counts? If I wanted to play up Gary Faulkner's heroism, I would point out that his claim that he's betting his life on what he believes in is quite probably true. If I wanted to make him seem unlikable, perhaps I would detail some of his less anchored rants, full of anger and misogyny (for instance, his account of his murderous state of mind during a bitter dispute with his sister: "As God is my witness, I wanted to break that bitch's neck. If I'd have got hold of her neck, I had a place where I was going to put the body"). If I wanted to bolster his credibility, I would quote from the New York Times blog that cited Pentagon sources and suggested that Faulkner may very well turn out to be looking in the right place.
And if I wanted to convince most people that he was crazy beyond belief, then perhaps all I would have to do is betray what he considers sensitive operational secrets about his forthcoming twelfth and final attempt, a plan that makes hang gliding your way into the Pakistani tribal areas seem both practical and foolproof by comparison. I would also explain how he has a fixed date by which this must be achieved before Al Qaeda detonates a small nuclear device at Mecca and unleashes a global holy war of unimaginable proportions upon us all. And then perhaps I might mention how, after the successful resolution of his mission, he believes that he will become king of a Central American nation.
But there is little point. For him, ultimately this is not about strategy or sanity or feasibility or probability. It is about faith, and faith cannot be fought by argument, and when faced with doubt and scorn it often thrives. Its only repudiation is disbelief. And whatever you choose to believe or disbelieve, Gary Faulkner intends to continue as he has.
"The thing I'm about to do is the least likely," he says. "The most improbably unlikely, outrageous, crazier-than-hell idea is the one that will get my mission accomplished. And that is sweet. I giggle to myself."
Gary Faulkner believes that by the time this article is published, he will be triumphantly completing his mission in the rubble of a cave in northwest Pakistan.
If he fails, it will be one more victory for rationality; one more victory for everyone who likes to see the world carry on spinning evenly and predictably; one more victory for common sense. It will be one more sad victory for all of us who never really tried.
Chris Heath is a GQ correspondent.
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Home Based Business
What do Apple Computer, Hershey's, Mary Kay Cosmetics, and the Ford Motor Company have in common? These well-known corporations all started out as home based businesses. In fact, more than half of all U.S. businesses are based out of an owner's home.
Starting a home based business has many rewards as well as challenges. This guide provides resources that will help you learn more about working out of your house, starting a home-based business and managing your business within the law.
Before you Begin
Can you live and work in the same area? Find the answer by asking yourself the following questions: Where in the home will the business be located? What adjustments to living arrangements will be required? What will be the cost of changes? How will your family react? What will the neighbors think?
Zoning - How to find out whether you can work from your home. Learn about several factors you should consider when starting a home based business.
Starting a Business in Your Home: Weighing the Pros and Cons. Have you thought about the characteristics and challenges that are most commonly involved in launching home based businesses? View the pros and cons before you begin a home based business.
Start a Home Business
If you decided you are ready to start a home based business, then you might already have an idea and/or the products you want to market. If not, think about your background, what you are good at, and what experience you have. This exploration can get you on your way to coming up with a sound idea. For additional guidance on how to start your business, use the resources listed below.
Check out the first steps for starting any small business.Obtain a checklist of things to do at How to Set Up a Home Based Business.
Get planning ideas by reading an article that provides a comprehensive approach to developing a business plan for a home based business.
Learn how your local government's zoning ordinances may affect your business. Not knowing the potential legal and community problems associated with having a business at home, and the rules, can have devastating consequences.
Buying a Work-at-Home Franchise
Home based franchises are becoming more common, but buyer beware! Some "work at home" franchise opportunities are schemes to get your money.
Visit the Consumer Guide to Buying a Franchise for more information about evaluating and buying into franchises and related work-at-home business opportunities.
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Federal agencies do not provide grants for starting a home based business. However, there are a number of low-interest loan programs that help individuals obtain startup financing. Visit the Loans and Grants Search Tool to get a full list of grant, loan and venture capital programs for which you might qualify.
Marketing a Home Based Business
There are several ways to market your business and get in touch with your customers. Customers are a key component to business success. Learn how to successfully market your home based business: Home-Based Business - Market Your Product.
Filing Taxes for a Home Based Business
Doing your personal taxes can be a pain, but now you have to do the taxes for your home based business as well. Use the resources below to learn how to correctly file your small business taxes and get the proper deductions.
Small Business Self-Employed One-Stop Resource
Provides access to the official IRS gateway for tax information for small business owners.
Small Business Expenses and Tax Deductions
Explains how to deduct business expenses on your income taxes
Social Security Guide for the Self-Employees
Covers how to report your earning since you are self-employed.
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