“An Architects Code”, from 99% Invisible – Are American Prisons Humane? – Audio Blog

An Architects Code

Audio Source: 99% Invisible

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Click Here to view the AIA(s) Code of Ethics

More From Raphael Sperry:

In 2005, Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) launched a “Prison Design Boycott” on the grounds that prisons are inhumane environments. Raphael Sperry, its longtime leader, has recently begun to focus full-time on the matter with the aid of a prestigious Soros Justice Fellowship.

On behalf of ADPSR, Sperry has recently launched a Change.org petition–asking the American Institute of Architects to amend its Code of Ethics & Professional Conduct to prohibit the design of spaces for torture and killing. Sperry spoke yesterday at Architecture for Humanity‘s Design Like You Give a Damn: LIVE event in San Francisco, and is the subject of a lengthy feature and profile by Karrie Jacobs in ARCHITECT Magazine. Both Jacobs’ profile and the petition itself are well worth a read.

Source: Public Interest Design.org

One October afternoon in downtown Toronto, a small band of protestors clustered outside the Hilton holding handmade signs with slogans like “Food not Prisons” and “Housing not Prisons.” The so-called Prison Moratorium Action Coalition was denouncing a sprawling piece of legislation passed in Canada’s Parliament earlier this year, one that imposed mandatory minimum sentences for many offenses and authorized a multibillion-dollar program for prison construction.

The target of this demonstration, however, wasn’t government officials or law enforcement agencies. Instead, it was the annual fall meeting of the Academy of Architecture for Justice. The protestors had decided to go after “others who profit from locking people away.” In this case, the “others” were architects—specifically, the Toronto-based Zeidler Partnership, including senior partner Alan Munn and several of his colleagues—who were at the Hilton presenting their newly completed maximum security Toronto South Detention Centre.

Munn, for his part, argues that the “ragtag group” was off-base in its efforts because Toronto South had nothing to do with the federal crime initiative. Rather, the crisply modern facility with its Miesian entry pavilion was the solution to a provincial problem, a replacement for older Toronto prisons, one of which dated back to 1858. “It’s really a response to some terrible conditions in existing facilities,” Munn insists.

Rightly or wrongly, it seems almost unprecedented to hold architects accountable for decisions that are political in nature. Normally, the only dissent heard at AIA events comes from the architects themselves.

In fact, deep inside the Hilton, the protestors had an ally. On the agenda was a panel called “Long-Term Solitary Confinement in the U.S.: Design and Implications.” One of the panelists, Raphael Sperry, a 38-year-old Berkeley, Calif.–based architect, has dedicated the past 10 years of his life to persuading his colleagues to stop designing prisons. Currently, he has a grant from the Open Society Foundations, a nonprofit founded by George Soros, to focus on his mission—the first architect selected as one of that organization’s Justice Fellows.

The points he made that day in October were simple: “Long-term solitary confinement is torture. Execution chambers kill people. Architects should not be party to torture and killing.” He then announced his campaign to amend the AIA’s Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct to “prohibit the design of spaces intended for long-term solitary isolation and execution.”

At first glance, the idea that the AIA would take a stand on incarceration practices or capital punishment seems counterintuitive, the issue too far removed from the organization’s mission. But Sperry framed his argument using the existing language of the code, pointing out that Ethical Standard 1.4 says that “members should uphold human rights in all their professional endeavors.”

“The Jailing-ist Country on the Planet”
In truth, what Sperry is proposing is the outgrowth of the debate that has long been an undercurrent of the profession: Do architects have an obligation to improve the human condition? From the Bauhaus’s promise of cheaper, better dwellings for all, to the current generation of do-gooder architects designing emergency shelters and affordable housing, the profession’s humanitarian impulse is never far from the surface. On the other hand, we can all name architect-designed buildings that have been portrayed as cruel in ways big and small. Minoru Yamasaki’s Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis comes to mind. As does Philip Johnson’s Bobst Library at New York University with its vast, vertigo inducing atrium that seemingly acted as an inducement to three recent student suicides. Not to mention that architects routinely act as enablers and promoters of the worst excesses of commercial development.

Arguably, the watershed moments in prison design have generally been more philosophical than architectural in nature. In 1776, the Philadelphia Quakers introduced the idea of solitary confinement at the Walnut Street Jail, to give prisoners ample time to reflect. And in 1787, philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed the penitentiary panopticon, with a circular layout that placed an unseen jailer at the core of the building, giving him “invisible omniscience” as he watched over 1,000 prisoners. (Continue Reading Here)

Source: Architects Magazine

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More About Juan E. Méndez:

In 1970, he received his law degree from Stella Maris University in Mar del Plata, Argentina.

Early in his career, he became involved in representing political prisoners. As a result, he was arrested by the Argentinean military dictatorship and subjected to torture and administrative detention for 18 months. During this period, Amnesty International adopted him as a “Prisoner of Conscience,” and in 1977, he was expelled from the country and moved to the United States.

Subsequently, Mendez worked for the Catholic Church in Aurora, Illinois, protecting the rights of migrant workers. In 1978 he joined the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights under the Law in Washington, D.C., and in 1982, he launched Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) Americas Program. He continued to work at HRW for 15 years, becoming their general counsel in 1994.He is also a visiting scholar at American University Washington College of Law’s Academy on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law.

From 1996 to 1999, Mendez served as the Executive Director of the Inter-American Institute of Costa Rica. He then worked as a Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Civil and Human Rights at the University of Notre Dame from October 1999 to 2004.

In 2001, Mendez began working for the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), an international human rights NGO. He served as its president from 2004 to 2009, and currently is its President Emeritus. He is also currently the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.

Mendez has taught human rights law at Georgetown Law School, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and the University of Oxford Masters Program in International Human Rights Law in the UK.

He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Goler T. Butcher Medal from the American Society of International Law; a Doctorate Honoris Causa from the Université du Québec à Montréal (University of Quebec in Montreal); the “Monsignor Oscar A. Romero Award for Leadership in Service to Human Rights” by the University of Dayton; and the “Jeanne and Joseph Sullivan Award” of the Heartland Alliance.

Source: Wikipedia.org

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Lawyers have an ethics code. Journalists have an ethics code. Architects do, too. According to Ethical Standard 1.4 of the American Institute of Architects (AIA):

“Members should uphold human rights in all their professional endeavors.”

A group called Architects, Designers, and Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) has taken the stance that there are some buildings that just should not have been built. Buildings that, by design, violate standards of human rights.

Specifically, this refers to prisons with execution chambers, or prisons that are designed keep people in long-term isolation (or as prison officials call it, “segregation”). The latter kind of prison is called a “supermax,” or “security housing unit” (SHU). There is no legal definition for solitary confinement, so it’s up for debate as to whether the SHU constitutes solitary confinement.

There has been a lot of controversy surrounding one SHU at a Northern California prison called Pelican Bay.

(Credit: California Department of Corrections)

Pelican Bay State Prison was designed by San Francisco-based architecture firm KMD. KMD declined to speak with us for this story. But Jim Mueller, an architect with KMD who worked on Pelican Bay, told Architect Magazine: ”“The inmates have no contact with other inmates during the vast majority, if not all, of the day. They are only allowed out of their cells for very short periods of time for constitutionally required exercise periods.”

 

(Rendering of the Pelican Bay SHU. Each “pod” contains six cells, a shower, and an exercise yard. Control rooms monitor the pods, and can open and close cell doors remotely. The control rooms are accessed by an upper deck, which has a metal mesh floor allowing officers to fire a shotgun down into the pod in the event of a security breach. Courtesy of Raphael Sperry.)

Life inside of the SHU at Pelican Bay means 22 to 23 hours a day inside of 7.5 by 12 foot room. It’s not a space that’s designed to keep you comfortable. But it’s not just these architectural features, that concern humanitarian activists and psychiatrists. It’s the amount of time many prisoners spend in that cells, alone, without any meaningful activity. Some psychiatrists, such as Terry Kupers, say there is a whole litany of effects that a SHU can have on a person: massive anxiety, paranoia, depression, concentration and memory problems, and loss of ability to control one’s anger (which can get a prisoner in trouble and lengthen the SHU sentence). In California, SHU inmates are 33 times more likely to commit suicide than other prisoners incarcerated elsewhere in the state. There are even reports of eye damage  due to the restriction on distance viewing.  Terry Kupers says that a SHU ”destroys people as human beings.”

(Terry Kupers at the Conference on Solitary Confinement and Human Rights, November 2012.)

Compared with some other prisons in the California system, the Pelican Bay SHU has some redeeming architectural features. Inmates can get natural light from skylights outside of their cells, which drifts in through doors made of a perforated metal. These porous doors also allow for inmates to communicate with each other, even though there are no lines of sight to any prisoner from within the cell.

(Prisoner Robert Luca sitting outside of his cell. Notice that the cell faces a blank wall, seen through the visual distortion of the perforated metal door. Credit: Nancy Mullane.)

But on the other hand, cells don’t have windows. Inmates never get to see the horizon. The only times prisoners get to leave the cell is to visit the shower, or the exercise yard—which is an empty, windowless room not that much bigger than a cell, with twenty-foot high concrete walls.

(KQED and the Center for Investigative Reporting launched an investigation on Pelican Bay in February, 2013)

Again, there is no universally accepted definition of solitary confinement. But some groups, like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have gone beyond calling the SHU solitary confinement—they call it torture. In 2011, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture said anything over 15 days in solitary confinement is a human rights abuse—which other sources have interpreted as torture.

So if it is the ethical code of architects to promote human rights…what is their responsibility to the people who are incarcerated in their buildings?

Enter Raphael Sperry, a San Francisco-based architect and president of ADPSR. He believes it’s up to architects to lead the charge against these buildings. Sperry and the ADPSR are trying to get the American Institute of Architects to adopt an amendment to their ethics code:

“Members shall not design spaces intended for execution or for torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, including prolonged solitary confinement.”

(Under surveillance in the exercise yard. Credit: Nancy Mullane)

This episode is a special collaboration between 99% Invisible and the podcast Life of the Law. 99% Invisible producer Sam Greenspan spoke with Raphael Sperry and Terry Kupers about the effects of these kinds of prisons on the people who inhabit them, and what they say about the practice of architecture as a whole in the US.

In addition, Life of the Law’s Nancy Mullane drove very, very far to visit the SHU at Pelican Bay State Prison, where she spoke with prisoners and prison officials about life in the SHU.

Source: 99% Invisible.org
Compiled By: Josh Martin
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“Hot in my backyard” – This American Life – Video Blog

MAY 17, 2013
After years of being stuck, the national conversation on climate change finally started to shift — just a little — last year, the hottest year on record in the U.S., with Hurricane Sandy flooding the New York subway, drought devastating Midwest farms, and California and Colorado on fire. Lots of people were wondering if global warming had finally arrived, here at home. This week, stories about this new reality.

Source: ThisAmericanLife.org

More about Nolan Doesken

AASC President (2008-2010)
Colorado State Climatologist and Senior Research Associate
Director, Fort Collins Weather Station
nolan@atmos.colostate.edu
970-491-3690 (phone)
970-491-3314 (fax)
Location Annex A 201

Source: Colorado Climate Center

More About Bob Inglis

Robert Durden “Bob” Inglis, Sr. (born October 11, 1959) is an American politician who was the U.S. Representative for South Carolina’s 4th congressional district from 1993 to 1999 and again from 2005 to 2011. He is a member of the Republican Party. Inglis was defeated in the Republican primary in June 2010. In July 2012, Inglis launched the Energy and Enterprise Initiative, a nationwide public engagement campaign promoting conservative and free-enterprise solutions to energy and climate challenges. E&EI is based out of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and is working to build support for energy policies that are true to conservative principles of limited government, accountability, reasonable risk-avoidance, and free enterprise.

Source: Wikipedia.org

More about “The Energy and Enterprise Initiative

The Energy and Enterprise Initiative (E&EI) is a campaign to unleash the power of free enterprise to deliver the fuels of the future.

America needs a long-term, stable energy policy to achieve energy security and avoid the unnecessary risks of a changing climate. E&EI promotes conservative alternatives to big-government mandates and fickle tax incentives: set the economics right and get the government out of the way.

Conservatives can take the lead on energy and climate by embracing solutions that are true to conservative principles. Conservatism is not about passing problems and costs down to the next generations; conservatives want to solve problems efficiently while protecting liberty. E&EI is a campaign rooted in conservative principles.

Source: Energy and Enterprise.com

More About Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books about the environment, beginning with The End of Nature in 1989, which is regarded as the first book for a general audience on climate change. He is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org, which has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189 countries since 2009. Time Magazine called him ‘the planet’s best green journalist’ and the Boston Globe said in 2010 that he was ‘probably the country’s most important environmentalist.’ Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, he holds honorary degrees from a dozen colleges, including the Universities of Massachusetts and Maine, the State University of New York, and Whittier and Colgate Colleges. In 2011 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Bill grew up in suburban Lexington, Massachusetts. He was president of the Harvard Crimson newspaper in college. Immediately after college he joined the New Yorker magazine as a staff writer, and wrote much of the “Talk of the Town” column from 1982 to early 1987. He quit the magazine when its longtime editor William Shawn was forced out of his job, and soon moved to the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York.

His first book, The End of Nature, was published in 1989 by Random House after being serialized in the New Yorker. It is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has been printed in more than 20 languages. Several editions have come out in the United States, including an updated version published in 2006.

His next book, The Age of Missing Information, was published in 1992. It is an account of an experiment: McKibben collected everything that came across the 100 channels of cable tv on the Fairfax, Virginia system (at the time among the nation’s largest) for a single day. He spent a year watching the 2,400 hours of videotape, and then compared it to a day spent on the mountaintop near his home. This book has been widely used in colleges and high schools, and was reissued in a new edition in 2006.

Subsequent books include Hope, Human and Wild, about Curitiba, Brazil and Kerala, India, which he cites as examples of people living more lightly on the earth; The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation, which is about the Book of Job and the environment; Maybe One, about human population; Long Distance: A Year of Living Strenuously, about a year spent training for endurance events at an elite level; Enough, about what he sees as the existential dangers of genetic engineering; Wandering Home, about a long solo hiking trip from his current home in the mountains east of Lake Champlain in Ripton, Vermont back to his longtime neighborhood of the Adirondacks.

In March 2007 McKibben published Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. It addresses what the author sees as shortcomings of the growth economy and envisions a transition to more local-scale enterprise.

In late summer 2006, Bill helped lead a five-day walk across Vermont to demand action on global warming that some newspaper accounts called the largest demonstration to date in America about climate change. Beginning in January 2007 he founded stepitup07.org to demand that Congress enact curbs on carbon emissions that would cut global warming pollution 80 percent by 2050. With six college students, he organized 1,400 global warming demonstrations across all 50 states of America on April 14, 2007. Step It Up 2007 has been described as the largest day of protest about climate change in the nation’s history. A guide to help people initiate environmental activism in their community coming out of the Step It Up 2007 experience entitled Fight Global Warming Now was published in October 2007 and a second day of action on climate change was held the following November 3.

March 2008 saw the publication of The Bill McKibben Reader, a collection of 44 essays written for various publications over the past 25 years.

Bill is a frequent contributor to various magazines including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Orion Magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Review of Books, Granta, Rolling Stone, and Outside. He is also a board member and contributor to Grist Magazine.

Bill has been awarded Guggenheim and Lyndhurst Fellowships, and won the Lannan Prize for nonfiction writing in 2000. He has honorary degrees from Green Mountain College, Unity College, Lebanon Valley College and Sterling College.

Bill currently resides with his wife, writer Sue Halpern, and his daughter, Sophie, who was born in 1993, in Ripton, Vermont. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College.

Source: Bill McKibben.com

Compiled By: Josh Martin
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Top 4 Tips To Get Automotive FInancing After A Bankruptcy – Video Blog

If you need to buy a car during your Chapter 7 bankruptcy, or after your bankruptcy is over, don’t despair. Most likely you will be able to get a car loan. Or, you might be able to pay cash for a very cheap car. Here are some strategies to consider if you need to buy a car during or after your bankruptcy:

1. Stop making car payments, enjoy your ‘free ride’ and then buy something cheap for cash with the money you saved..

As soon as you file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, you ordinarily get a “free ride” due to bankruptcy’s automatic stay. The automatic stay ordinarily protects your vehicle from repossession for about two and one-half months (that is, until 45 days after the first meeting of creditors in your bankruptcy case). In fact most car lenders will not repossess your car until after the bankruptcy discharge.

If you already received your bankruptcy discharge, you can still quit making payments and have a “free ride.” Most lenders won’t repossess a car until you behind about two months. Save up the money and use it to get yourself a cheap “runner” to drive until you can get into something better.

Some organizations offer very cheap cars for sale, and sometimes private parties so too. For example, both the Salvation Army and Goodwill sell cheap running cars that have been donated.

Tip: If your car is in danger of repossession, remove any valuables and personal effects from the car.

2. Buy a car with financing after bankruptcy.

In Los Angeles where I practice bankruptcy law, my clients are aggressively solicited by new car dealers, offering to finance or lease them a new car. They specifically target people emerging from bankruptcy as sales leads. The debtor can usually get into a new car, or even a late model used car still under warranty, even with bad credit, provided they have decent income. This may be a far better alternative than it would have been to make a bad reaffirmation deal in the bankruptcy. (Learn more about reaffirming a car loan in Chapter 7 bankruptcy.)

Why buy a new car when you really don’t need one? A new car loan can quickly improve your credit if you pay on time, where as the unreaffirmed car loan will not help your credit. It likely will represent a better investment than keeping the old car with upside down financing on it. It’s also likely that the new car will probably be more reliable transportation, and will come with a warranty.

3. Get help from a friend.

Turn in the old car if a friend, loved one, or family member will buy or lease something for you.

4. Rent or borrow a car while waiting for your discharge.

Some companies will rent cheap used cars on a monthly basis. The payment for these monthly rentals can be less than the payments on your existing car loan. After you receive a discharge you can probably purchase and finance a new car if you have steady income.

Source: Car Credit Master
By: Josh Martin
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History of in Car Computers – Video Blog

A Breif History of in Car Computers:

Microsoft U.V.O.

Kia UVO is an in-car infotainment system with advanced voice- and touch-activated features. Kia UVO, short for ‘Your Voice,’ provides simple and quick access to vehicle’s multimedia and infotainment systems. Developed by Microsoft and Kia, it is much like Ford Sync and is available on new models of the Kia Sorento and Kia Optima. It is only available with a 4.3″ inch touch screen with reversing camera unlike Ford’s Sync which is available without a touch screen.

Carputer

A carputer is a category of mobile computer designed or modified specifically to be installed and run in automobiles. Originally these were based on industrial personal computer technology, but as smartphones and PDAs have become more powerful, and have included useful technologies like GPS and Bluetooth, they have become the predominant base platform for developing carputers.

Many do-it-your-selfers have built carputers from laptops and small form factor computers like netbooks.

The recent popularity of carputers has caused the creation of more advanced units that use touch screen interfaces, integrate with vehicles via OBD-II link, and offer a variety of other add-ons like rear-view cameras and GPS. It is now possible to find assembled carputers complete with wireless capabilities and built-in microphones for sale on the internet.

Police cars often have carputers, known as Mobile data terminals.

AutoPC

The AutoPC is a brand of carputer jointly developed by Clarion and Microsoft.

The first (and only) product was sold by Clarion as an aftermarket product. This product utilized a 60 MHz Hitachi‘s SH3 processor running Windows CE. The device had a 256×64 8 color LCD screen capable of displaying information from the navigation program as well as voice recognition and speech capabilities. It also included contacts and calendar applications. The standard version of the AutoPC (sometimes called Auto PC) also included a simple “directions” application which used an add-on GPS module to get the user to their destination. Clarion followed this up with a more sophisticated navigation application with a map display and turn-by-turn directions. It had a MSRP of $1799.

Clarion created a follow-up using a next generation version of the Windows CE for Automotive operating system called the Joyride. This included MP3 playback via CD-R and compact flash cards. It also included an improved navigation system, including GPS receiver and gyroscope for inertial navigation.

The AutoPC was created by Microsoft‘s Automotive Business Unit. This group has gone on to develop several products for car manufacturers, including Ford‘s Sync, released in 2007.

Source: Wikipedia

Kia Motors and Microsoft Usher in New Era of In-Car Technology:

Jan. 05, 2010
With UVO, drivers and passengers can quickly and directly access music files, change radio stations, make or answer phone calls, send and receive SMS text messages, and operate a rear-view camera when the driver shifts into reverse, all through voice-activated controls using Microsoft speech recognition technology. The hands-free system helps drivers stay focused on the road.

Features of UVO include advanced speech recognition; a 4.3-inch full-color display screen; and MyMusic, a jukebox-type function that enables drivers to shuffle between music sources including personal music folders, an MP3 player, or AM/FM and satellite radio.

Co-designed by Kia Motors and Microsoft, UVO is built on the award-winning Microsoft Windows Embedded Auto software platform. The system will be offered during the third quarter of 2010, starting with the 2011 Kia Sorento CUV.

Microsoft and Kia will demonstrate UVO at the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week

Source: Microsoft

Compiled By: Josh Martin

 

Colorado Rejects Googles Driverless Car Proposal – Video Blog

Video Produced By: ABC News

**Update**

DENVER – Automated cars won’t be allowed in Colorado this year after a state Senate committee rejected a bill to allow driverless vehicles.

The Senate Transportation Committee decided against the bill to make Colorado at least the fifth state where automatic cars are legal. The cars are under development and are touted as safer than human-operated vehicles.

The bill would have stated that automated cars must still contain licensed drivers, and that the cars would have to have an override switch so they can be driven manually if needed.

Source: The Associated Press
DENVER – Cars without drivers could be possible on Colorado roads – but first lawmakers have to change state law to make them legal.

The state Legislature is poised to do just that under a bill up for its first debate in a Colorado Senate committee this week. The Transportation Committee will consider whether Colorado should become at least the fifth state to change the law to specifically allow automated cars.

The driver-less cars are developed in California by Google. Colorado’s proposal would state that automated cars must still contain licensed drivers, and the cars must contain an “override switch” so they can be driven manually if needed. The “drivers” in automated cars would be allowed to text or type.

Source: The Associated Press

 

MAZDASPEED Daytona Recap

Video Produced By: Mazda of Lakewood

January 26th, 2012

(Daytona, Florida) Endurance racing is a cruel sport at times.  Months of preparations and thousands of hours of labor can be swept away in moments of simply being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

The four Mazda RX-8 Grand-AM GT race cars were fast, their rotary engines powerful and reliable, yet the final result was a single top-ten finish.  After the race, car owners Sylvain Tremblay, Jon Mirachi, Joe Foster, and Patrick Dempsey had nothing but praise and appreciation for their crews and drivers, for all went above and beyond the call of duty.

Team Recaps

Team: SpeedSource #70

Car: Castrol Syntec Mazda RX-8
Drivers: Sylvain Tremblay, Nick Ham, David Haskell, Jonathan Bomarito
2009 Result: Started first, finished 19th
Notes:  Led the first 20 minutes of the race until a hard bump to the curbing damaged the fuel cell.  The replacement of the fuel cell took over an hour, losing over 40 laps in the process, dropping the team to dead last after 90 minutes.  During the night, the team driving was superb – The #70 car the fast car on the track.  The combination of Tremblay, Ham, Haskell, and Bomarito made up six laps on the leader and it looked like a top-ten finish was still possible until a broken exhaust and half shaft further delayed the team.

Team: SpeedSource #69

Car: FXDD Mazda RX-8
Drivers: Emil Assentato, Nick Longhi, Matt Plumb, Jeff Segal
2009 Result: Started fourth, finished ninth.
Notes: The FXDD car was well prepared to uphold the SpeedSource honor until an on-track incident with a slower car caused extensive front end damage.  The team spent almost an hour behind the pit wall replacing the front clip and the left front suspension.  The team carried on to score valuable points with a solid ninth-place finish.

Team: Racers Edge #30

Car: 3-Dimensional Services Group/ Idemitsu Mazda RX-8
Drivers:  Doug Peterson, Dane Cameron, Bryan Sellers, Dion von Moltke
2009 Result: Started 17th, finished 13th
Notes:  The team ran very strong with Dane Cameron setting the second fastest lap of the race – especially impressive as it was set in the night.  The team was delayed by difficult to diagnose electrical problems for the first half of the race.  The team left Florida knowing they had a car and team capable of finishing on the podium, but confident for the races to come.

Team: Dempsey Racing #40

Car: Avon Walk for Breast Cancer Mazda RX-8
Drivers: Patrick Dempsey, Joe Foster, Charles Espenlaub, Tim Lewis Jr., Jep Thornton
2009 Result: Started 28th, finished 22nd
Notes:  Needless to say, Patrick Dempsey was the star of pre-race activities.  The team partnership with the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer generated a great deal of favorable attention from beyond the motorsports press.  The team was on-track for a strong finish until Jep Thornton crashed the car in the evening.  The team rebuilt the front of the car only to have Jep involved in a second accident in the middle of the night.  This was the first ever DNF for Dempsey Racing/Hypersport in the Rolex Grand-Am series.

Source: Mazda Speed Development
Compiled By: Josh Martin