Last week, Bank of America completed just the second Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities (CMBS) deal this year, and the first that doesn't take advantage of the Federal Reserve's Term Asset-Backed Security Loan Facility in over a year. This news is significant, as it's quite an accomplishment in a market that remains otherwise closed. While a good sign, the deal still indicates that investors are quite wary of CMBS.
Somehow, I missed this news until today. The Wall Street Journal has the most detailed report that I could find. The deal was a measly $460 million. That's significantly smaller than the deals the CMBS market was used to a few years ago, when they regularly exceeded $1 billion. So while there was some demand in the market, it obviously couldn't have been too robust.
The spread that investors required to purchase the deal was also quite wide. The AAA-rated bonds sold for 225 basis points over the benchmark rate -- even wider than Bank of America expected by at least 15 basis points, according to the Journal. And bear in mind, a few years ago no one could have imagined a three-digit basis point spread on AAA-rated CMBS.
What's most surprising about the deal is the collateral. Although I couldn't find any very specific details, the Journal says:
The securities are backed by a single, seven-year, fixed-rate loan to entities of hedge-fund manager Fortress Investment Group LLC. The loan is secured by payments flowing from 44 office and industrial properties in Florida, and cash flows related to a 351-mile railway corridor and land parcels adjacent to that corridor.
This unusual type of security--commercial-mortgage backed securities are typically backed by leases on properties such as offices and hotels--may also have pushed up the returns investors demanded despite the portfolio's otherwise conservative structure, with loan-to-value ratios averaging 50%.
I'm a little perplexed about why the first successful CMBS deal not to utilize the Fed program would be so non-vanilla. Although the Journal speculates that this might have made investors demand more spread, I'm not entirely sure. Investors might have liked that there was some diversification through non-commercial real estate driven cash flows that will result from the leasing of fiber-optic cables, land and billboards along that corridor. Heck, I might prefer that to Florida commercial real estate, even with 50% loan-to-value ratios. Of course, I suspect that the rating agencies also demanded a healthy amount of credit enhancement (cushioning for collateral losses) to achieve AAA-ratings.
Just when you think it cannot get battier, National Review chooses this moment in time to defend the Crusades. Of course, murdering Muslims is fine and dandy, but, er ...:
Of course there were attacks on several Jewish communities along the Rhine associated with the First Crusade. However, these were not committed by one of the main groups, but by several bands of German stragglers. It is significant that local bishops risked their lives to defend the Jews. These incidents are covered fully in God’s Battalions.
If we are to have the Crusades thrown at us by the likes of Osama bin Laden, let us at least not abjure them.
It is true that we can barely recognize anything of ourselves in the Crusaders. They were coarse and unwashed. Most of them were illiterate. Of the physical world, they were ignorant beyond our imagining, believing the earth to be flat and the sky a crystal dome. Such medicine as they had was far more likely to kill than to heal Richard Lionheart and Amalric, sixth king of Jerusalem, were both killed by the ministrations of their surgeons. Their honor was often truculent, their loyalty sometimes fickle, their piety was barnacled with the grossest kinds of superstition.
We turn in disgust from the spectacle of them wading through blood to the Holy Sepulchre of Christ, and wonder if we would not have found their enemies the silk-clad viziers of Islam, or the suave, scented courtiers of Constantinople more to our liking. Well, perhaps we would; but let us at least acknowledge that these rough soldiers carried with them to the East the germ-seeds of modern civil society. Palestine proved to be stony ground: but that is the East's loss, as the eventual flowering of those seeds elsewhere was all of humanity's immeasurable gain. In spirit and in values, though at an immense distance, the Crusaders were our kin. While not forgetting their many transgressions, we should weep for what they lost and remember with pride their few astonishing victories. Ville gagnée!
A paper on overdose-reversal drugs reached a conclusion no one liked. The pushback raised questions about sexism and scientific methods.
With the opioid epidemic claiming more than 100 lives a day in the United States, every state now has some sort of law expanding access to naloxone, also known as Narcan. Naloxone is an opioid antagonist that makes someone who has overdosed start breathing again. Sometimes, its powers are said to bring an overdose victim “back to life.” That led two economists to wonder, does the prospect of not dying from opioids make people more likely to use opioids? And are they more likely to, ultimately, die as a result?
After naloxone-access laws take effect, they found, arrests related to the possession and sale of opioids went up, as did opioid-related ER visits. Meanwhile—and most worryingly—there was no overall impact on the death rate. In fact, in the Midwest, the implementation of naloxone laws led to a 14 percent increase in opioid-related mortality, they found.
To Doleac, it’s an example of moral hazard. In other words, “anytime you make something less dangerous, people are going to do more of it,” she told me. In one study, for example, giving teens free condoms actually led to an increase in teen pregnancy. In this case, the study purports that heroin users figured they stood a good chance of being revived if they overdosed, so they kept on using.
She was not quite “ratioed,” to use the digerati term for a tweet that garners more responses than approvals. But she nevertheless prompted a vigorous online debate that raged for nearly a week. In the white-paper reading realm, that’s practically World War III.
Public-health people were, perhaps understandably, alarmed by Doleac and Mukherjee’s findings, suggesting they might lead cities and states to pull back from providing naloxone freely. Naloxone access is considered a pillar of “harm reduction,” or the idea that if people can’t immediately be cured of addiction, we should at least make it less dangerous for them to keep using.
As someone working on the front lines with actual overdose patients and drug users, these kind of unfounded claims increase stigma and impede harm reduction. It’s incredibly ridiculous and uninformed to say that ‘naloxone distribution “led to” increased fentanyl use.’
As with almost every study, there are other studies that came to different conclusions. One 2012 study in Massachusetts found that opioid-overdose death rates were reduced in communities where people were given nasal-naloxone rescue kits, and another paper last year came to a similar conclusion. One study found naloxone did not lead to increased heroin use.
Leana Wen, Baltimore’s health commissioner and an advocate for the expansion of access to naloxone, pointed out that just because the laws around naloxone changed doesn’t mean people were able to instantly obtain it more easily. “[Doleac and Mukherjee’s] study assumes that passage of these laws lead immediately to everyone having easy access to naloxone when they need it, when this is not the case,” she says. “The Massachusetts study shows that actual naloxone distribution shows a decrease in mortality. This is consistent with what we see in Baltimore, where over 1,600 lives have been saved as a result of our naloxone distribution program.”
Wen also said that even though there was no reduction in opioid-related mortality, the death rate might have been even higher without naloxone.
Several critics of the study claimed it is yet another example of the classic problem of confusing correlation with causation. “The first problem is that they seem to be making the big mistake of assuming that correlation equals causation,” says Jermaine Jones, a Columbia University neurobiologist whose study found naloxone didn’t increase heroin use. “This misinterpretation of data is one of the first things we are taught in psychology.” Jones went on to tell me about the classic example of ice-cream sales and murder rates. Of course, the sugar high doesn’t spark killing rampages; the hidden variable there is summertime.
But Doleac and other economists say this is one of the differences between public-health research and economics. Economists often make “causal inferences”: They study natural experiments like law changes, use statistical tools to rule out other explanations, and draw conclusions about cause and effect. (Doleac, in turn, criticized the methods used in the studies that came to different conclusions than her own.)
“Public-health people believe things that are not randomized are correlative,” says Craig Garthwaite, a health economist at Northwestern University. “But [economists] have developed tools to make causal claims from nonrandomized data.”
This difference of opinion about causality led to exchanges like this one, between one of Doleac’s critics and another female economist, Analisa Packham:
The other thing critics brought up is that Doleac and Mukherjee’s article is not yet peer reviewed—they plan to submit it to journals soon. But this, too, is an important difference between economics and some other types of health research. Economists tend to put out working papers and circulate them among colleagues long before they submit to journals. For example, Doleac and Mukherjee’s paper thanks several economic conferences and their participants in its acknowledgments. These colleagues—sometimes in pressure-cooker-esque seminars—ask questions and make suggestions, after which the paper is revised, then submitted.
Though this is not quite the same as a journal’s peer-review process, it’s not quite a personal Word document uploaded to the internet, either. Because of that, economics working papers are regularly discussed by journalists, academics, and even policymakers before they’re formally published in a journal.
What’s more, the Twitter conversation at times turned unusually venomous and condescending, especially for an economics paper.
In some cases, it seemed more suited to, say, debates about putting peas in guacamole or the potential outcomes of single-payer health care. The tone “felt sort of accusatory and ‘let me explain to you simple authors about how this works,’” Garthwaite says.
You are a ghoul who explicitly and in a published paper said saving people’s lives is a downside, the Brookings Institute should be razed and the earth salted
Another implied that Doleac hates poor people. (It’s worth noting, of course, that opioid addicts aren’t always poor.)
just say you hate poor people it’s a thousand times easier than arguing against basic safety measures
It led some to wonder how much of the pushback was about peoples’ interest in the opioid epidemic and how much was simply what happens when female researchers’ findings don’t quite toe the party line.
All of this isn’t to say that Doleac and Mukherjee’s findings are the last word on the matter, or that they shouldn’t be scrutinized and (respectfully) questioned. They might still hit snags in peer review, or another study might come along and refute their findings. Such is the nature of science.
But it does suggest two things: First, more research is (almost) always good. Doleac told me she tried to replicate an earlier study on naloxone and mortality, and she failed. Maybe someone else might try to replicate her work and fail, too.
Second, when studies come along that find something we don’t like, the instinct can be to flinch and look away—or worse, to insult the study author. But it’s important not to dismiss findings like these, because if they hold up, they might tell us how to better shape public policy.
The other famous example of moral hazard involves car-safety regulations: Safer cars make people drive more recklessly, according to an infamous 1970s study. But, Garthwaite told me, “no one who’s serious would say that just because moral hazard exists means we shouldn’t put seat belts in cars.” In this case, it might mean that cities should dispense naloxone, but that they should also invest more in treatment—something Doleac and Mukherjee themselves call for in this study. Naloxone, Garthwaite says, might be a good intervention, but it might not be a good intervention on its own.
Doleac says this was the last round of comments she was hoping to get before she submits to peer review. “And we have gotten it,” she added, in the form of the hundreds of tweets and emails.
Doleac is no stranger to controversy. Previously, she studied racism and gun violence. “The response to this has been so much more negative and hostile than anything else I’ve worked on,” she says. She says one doctor emailed her to explain how to write an academic paper. “I was like, ‘I’ve actually done this before!’”
She also says she hasn’t heard anything that would change the overall conclusions of the study. “We might clarify some things in the text,” but those changes, she acknowledges, “probably won’t make anyone happy.”
The most disruptive part of Paul Ryan's speech last night, aside from those not-quite-truths, came when two hecklers from the female anti-war group Code Pink pulled off the most successful protester infiltration yet at this year's conventions — and maybe the last one.
The most disruptive part of Paul Ryan's speech last night, aside from those not-quite-truths, came when two hecklers from the female anti-war group Code Pink pulled off the most successful protester infiltration yet at this year's conventions — and maybe the last one. Just as Ryan finished reading the words "...that have no place in a free country" (he was talking about Obamacare), the two women appeared by Mitt Romney's VIP box, depending on whose coverage you were following, there was a sign, maybe a couple inaudible yells. Knoxnews.com's Greg Johnson was right next to the kerfluffle:
It happened so quickly I could only get a glimpse of the banner, enough to make out the word "Vagina" in black letters on the pink background. One woman, middle-aged (or perhaps a bit past) with bobbed blond hair, started shouting, "Hands off my healthcare" The younger of the two, a brown-haired woman appearing to be in her 20s, waved the banner and chanted, "My body, my choice."
Granted, Code Pink's protests earlier this week at the Republican National Convention, complete with vagina costumes, garnered them novelty attention, which they kept up with trying to perform a citizen's arrest on former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and heckling Rick Santorum. But infiltrating the heavy security of the RNC, and then interrupting the biggest event of the convention so far, has been the highlight so far for the 10-year-old organization.
"Code Pink is a women-initiated grassroots peace and social justice movement working to end U.S. funded wars and occupations, to challenge militarism globally, and to redirect our resources into health care, education, green jobs and other life-affirming activities," reads their official website. The health care angle is the center of this protest against the RNC. They add:
We have become famous for confronting the warmongers, whether in the halls and hearing rooms of Congress, the national conventions of both the Republicans and Democrats, George Bush's fundraisers, the publicity tours of Karl Rove, Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and others, and Nancy Pelosi's house.
That doesn't sound unlike parts and portions of the Occupy Movement. But Code Pink is tighter and better funded. "I think people did expect a large crowd because of Occupy Wall Street, but Occupy Wall Street tends to be very poor people. To get the funds to come all the way to Tampa is a really tough thing to do," founder Medea Benjamin told The Daily Beast in a recent interview.
Getting to Tampa is one thing. Getting past the heavy security there is another. "Still, after the close encounter with Code Pink, I had to wonder how the heck they got in the convention in the first place," wrote Johnson, referencing the Tampa Bay Times Forum's tight security and credential-heavy protocol. "I had credentials," is all Ally McCracken, Code Pink's D.C. Coordinator, would tell the Global Post.
So the next question, with protests expected to be lighter at next week's Democratic convention, is what's next for Code Pink? Well, according to their website, today will be the group's final convention rally, and founder Medea Benjamin will speak. Which sounds pretty, well, mundane for this ballsy crew. But then again, Paul Ryan's speech wasn't on the agenda last night, and there's always Clint Eastwood.
We get it, America. We get it. You're interested in 2016. Well, there is absolutely no reason to delay one minute further. Here's your real-time Republican primary footrace to 2016 victory.
We get it, America. We get it. You're interested in 2016. Well, since that's the case, there is absolutely no reason to delay one minute further. Below, your real-time Republican primary footrace to 2016 victory.
Here's how this works. Whenever you come to this page, we grab the latest odds from Irish gambling site PaddyPower.com (Rodman-endorsed!). Then, we position each of the eight main candidates according to where they are in the race, listing the odds that each might win under their names. And then, we show you the racetrack. Depending on when you're visiting the page, the track will be as long as there are days until the first primary. As the first primary gets closer, the track left in front of our intrepid politicians will grow shorter.
Our advice, since you are so excited about 2016: just buy a new computer and keep this page open on it, reloading every five or 10 minutes. If you don't do that, it's almost like you don't care about the 2016 primaries, and are therefore a Bad American. Incidentally, we were going to make a Democratic one, but you can guess who would always be winning.
Included in the race (a list subject to change): Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, and Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio.
Attorney General Eric Holder and the Justice Department announced Tuesday afternoon that a record $13 billion settlement with JPMorgan has been finalized.
Attorney General Eric Holder and the Justice Department announced on Tuesday afternoon that a record $13 billion settlement with JPMorgan has been finalized. At the end of October, it looked like the deal could fall through, but CEO Jamie Dimon apparently came around. Holder said in a statement, “Without a doubt, [JPMorgan's] conduct uncovered in this investigation helped sow the seeds of the mortgage meltdown."
The bank contributed to the 2008 financial crisis by selling residential mortgage-backed securities. The DOJ found that JPMorgan "made serious misrepresentations to the public — including the investing public — about numerous RMBS transactions." At least $4 billion of the bank's settlement will go directly to consumer relief. The rest will settle various lawsuits.
“Abuses in the mortgage-backed securities industry helped turn a crisis in the housing market into an international financial crisis. The impacts were staggering. JPMorgan sold securities knowing that many of the loans backing those certificates were toxic. Credit unions, banks and other investor victims across the country, including many in the Eastern District of California, continue to struggle with losses they suffered as a result."
The settlement is good news for the DOJ and bad news for other banks that sold RMBS before 2009. Holder has made it clear he's using the JPMorgan deal as a template to investigate at least nine other banks.
The long awaited announcement that the entire genetic material of a tiny microorganism was replaced with a chemical replica came late last week. The announcement was greeted by the global press with great fanfare. The cover of the May 22 issue of the Economist reads, "And Man Made Life: The First Artificial Organism and Its Consequences" -- illustrated with the famous Sistine Chapel Adam, modesty preserved by laptop, reaching heavenward to give life to new bacteria.
What was actually done and what does it mean? The chemical synthesis of an entire bacterial genome, a very long string of DNA, about a million units in length, is a significant technical achievement. The DNA molecule was stitched together by joining about one thousand smaller fragments each about one thousand units long. To assemble these in the correct order, without significant error, is a great feat of modern organic chemistry. It is the largest single molecule ever made. Now that it has been done, it can be done again with different genomes.
Step two was the replacement of a natural genome with the replica. This also ranks as a significant achievement. The natural defenses bacteria have to protect themselves from invading DNA had to be overcome. Done once, this, too, can be done again.
Does this experiment raise new moral and ethical issues? This genie has long been out of the laboratory flask. For decades we have had the ability to genetically alter life forms to suit our purpose. The vast majority of applications have been for good: to heal the sick and feed the hungry. If the technology has been seriously misused, the results are hidden, shrouded in secrecy, perhaps in military laboratories. Yes, we must be vigilant as always, but these new results do not change the game.
Healthcare.gov: Code Developed by the People and for the People, Released Back to the People - The Atlantic
This new flagship federal .gov website is "open by design, open by default." That's a huge win for the American people.
As the first website to be demonstrated by a sitting President of the United States, Healthcare.gov already occupies an unusual place in history. In October, it will take on an even more important historic role, guiding millions of Americans through the process of choosing health insurance.
How a website is built or designed may seem mundane to many people, but when the site in question is focused upon such an important function, what it looks like and how it works matter. Last week, the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) relaunched Healthcare.gov with a new appearance and modern technology that is unusual in federal-government websites.
"It's fast, built in static HTML, completely scalable and secure," said Bryan Sivak, chief technology officer of HHS, in an interview. "It's basically setting up a web server. That's the beauty of it." What makes such an ambitious experiment in social coding more unusual is that the larger political and health-care policy context that it's being been built within is more fraught with tension and scrutiny than any other arena in the federal government.
The implementation and outcomes of the Affordable Care Act -- AKA "Obamacare" -- will affect millions of people, from the premiums they pay to the incentives for the health care they receive. "The goal is get people enrolled," said Sivak. "A step to that goal is to build a health insurance marketplace. It is so much better to build it in a way that's open, transparent and enables updates. This is better than a big block of proprietary code locked up in a CMS [content management system]."
The new site has been built in public for months, iteratively created on Github using cutting edge open-source technologies. Healthcare.gov is the rarest of birds: a next-generation website that also happens to be a .gov.
"We needed to evolve from the previous site but didn't want a total departure," said Ed Mullen, a user experience designer who has worked on Healthcare.gov since it was first launched, in an interview. "The web has changed dramatically in that time. Part of adapting to that [change] has been creating a site that really understands consumers. Today, consumers are doing all kinds of things across the web. We're comparing ourselves to Rdio and similar services. We want to be aligned with the current thinking of the Web."
The people that helped to build the new Healthcare.gov are unusual: Instead of some obscure sub-contractor in a nameless office park in northern Virginia, the site was iteratively created by a cross-disciplinary team of developers and editors at HHS, and contractors at Teal Design, Edward Mullen Studio, and Development Seed, a scrappy startup in a garage in the District of Columbia.
"This is such a lean site," said Jon Booth, head of the web and new media group at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), in an interview. "HHS had a blanket contract when we when awarded this. Aquilent got creative and brought people on with powerful skills, like Ed and Jessica, a designer at Teal Media, and Development Seed. Most of my team is working on this site; we have internal UX, information architects, designers, developers, and infrastructure people that stood up the cloud environment. Their collaboration is one of the high points of this process."
The involvement of Development Seed drove specific technology choices that led to substantial improvements in design and function. The startup first made its mark in the DC tech scene consulting on Drupal, an open source content management system that has become popular in the federal government over the past several years. Recently, Development Seed has been pushing the limits of lightweight Web design, open data-driven maps and open-source code.
"This is our ultimate dogfooding experience," said Eric Gundersen, the co-founder of Development Seed, in an interview. "We're going to build it and then buy insurance through it."
"The work that they're doing is amazing," said Sivak, "like how they organize their sprints and code. It's incredible what can happen when you give a team of talented developers and managers and let them go."
The new Healthcare.gov will fill a yawning gap in the technology infrastructure deployed to support the mammoth law, providing a federal choice engine for the more than 30 different states that did not develop their own health-insurance exchanges, but the site is just one component of the insurance exchanges. Others may not be ready by the October deadline. According to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office, the Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is behind in implementing key aspects of the law, such as training the workers who will help people navigate the process, certifying the plans that will be sold on the exchanges, and determining the eligibility of consumers for federal subsidies. Despite all this, HHS expressed confidence to the GAO that exchanges will be open and functioning in every state on October 1.
On that day, Healthcare.gov will be the primary interface for Americans to learn about and shop for health insurance, as Dave Cole, a lead developer at Development Seed, wrote in a blog post this March. Cole, who served as a senior advisor to the United States chief information officer and deputy director of new media at the White House, was a key part of the team that moved WhiteHouse.gov to Drupal. As he explained, the code will be open in two important ways:
First, Bryan [Sivak] pledged, "everything we do will be published on GitHub," meaning the entire code-base will be available for reuse. This is incredibly valuable because some states will set up their own state-based health insurance marketplaces. They can easily check out and build upon the work being done at the federal level. GitHub is the new standard for sharing and collaborating on all sorts of projects, from city geographic data and laws to home renovation projects and even wedding planning, as well as traditional software projects.
Moreover, all content will be available through a JSON API, for even simpler reusability. Other government or private sector websites will be able to use the API to embed content from healthcare.gov. As official content gets updated on healthcare.gov, the updates will reflect through the API on all other websites. The White House has taken the lead in defining clear best practices for web APIs.
According to Sivak, his team didn't get directly involved in the new Healthcare.gov until November 2012.
After that, "we facilitated the right conversations around what to build and how to build it, emphasizing the consumer-facing aspects of it," he said. "The other part was to figure what the right infrastructure was going to be to build this thing."
That decision is where this story gets especially interesting, if you're interested in how government uses technology to deliver information to the people it serves.
Government websites have not, historically, been sterling examples of design or usability. Unfortunately, in many cases, they're also built at great expense, given the dependence of government agencies on contractors and systems integrators, and use technologies that are years behind the rest of the web.
Healthcare.gov could have gone in the same direction, but for the influence of its young chief technology officer, an "entrepreneur-in-residence" who had successfully navigated the bureaucracies of the District of Columbia and state of Maryland. "Our first plan was to leverage Percussion, a commercial CMS that we'd been using for a long time," said Sivak. "The problem I had with that plan was that it wasn't going to be easy to update the code. The process was complicated. Simple changes to navigation were going to take a month."
At that point, Sivak did what most people do in this new millennium when making a technology choice: He reached out to his social networks and went online. "We started talking to people about a better way, including people who had just come off the Obama campaign," he said. "I learned about the ground they had broken for the political space, from A/B testing to lightweight infrastructure, and started reading about where all that came from. We started thinking about Jekyll as a platform and using Prose.io."
After Sivak and his team read about Development Seed's work with Jekyll, they contacted the startup directly. After a little convincing, Development Seed agreed to consult on one more .gov project.
"A Presidential Innovation Fellow used same tech we're using for several of their projects," said Cole. "Bryan [Sivak] heard about it and talked to us. He asked where we would go. We wanted to be on Github. We knew there were performance and reliability benefits from building the stack on HTML."
Jekyll, for those who are unfamiliar with web-development trends, is a way for developers to build a static website from dynamic components. Instead of running a traditional website with a relational database and server-side code, using Jekyll enables programmers to create content like they create code. The end result of this approach is a site that loads faster for users, a crucial performance issue, particularly on mobile devices. "Instead of [running] farms of application servers to handle massive load, you're basically slimming down to two," said Sivak. "You're just using HTML5, CSS, and Javascript, all being done in responsive design. The way it's being built matters. You could in theory do the same with application servers and a CMS, but it would be much more complex. What we're doing here is giving anyone with basic skills to basic changes on the fly. You don't need expensive consultants."
That adds up to cost savings. Sites that are heavily trafficked -- as Healthcare.gov can reasonably expected to be - normally have to use a caching layer to serve static content and add more server capacity as demand increases.
"When we worked with the World Bank, they chose a plan from Rackspace for 16 servers," said Gundersen. "That added tens of thousands of dollars, with a huge hosting bill every month."
HHS had similar strategic plans for the new site, at least at first. "They were planning 32 servers, between staging, production and disaster recovery, with application servers for different environments," said Cole. "You're just talking about content. There just needs to be one server. We're going to have two, with one for backup. That's a deduction of 30 servers."
Why was Development Seed able to succeed in selling this approach to coding and collaboration with a federal agency and other contractors, in contrast to traditional systems integrators? Or to put it another way, what could a mapping startup teach the world about making government work better? Quite a lot, as it turns out.
"It helps that we're running a cloud SaaS business," said Cole, referring to MapBox. "If you're not doing your own products and using your own products, you're not going to have a sense of what the future is. You can put Wordpress into Amazon but then you'll have problems; it wasn't designed to be a cloud application. In this case, the code is completely cloud-ready and able to be scaled through a CDN [content delivery network], through Akamai. Understanding that comes from running a cloud company."
While Jekyll eliminates the need for a full-blown content management system for Healthcare.gov (and with it, related costs) people managing the site still need to be able to update it. That's where Prose.io comes in.
Prose.io is an open-source content editor developed by Development Seed that gives non-programmers a clean user interface to update pages. "If you create content and run Jekyll, it requires content editors to know code," said Cole. "Prose is the next piece. You can run it on your on own servers or use a hosted version. It gives access to content in a CMS-like interface, basically adding a WYSIWYG [What You See Is What You Get] skin, giving you a text editor in the browser."
To non-technical users, Prose.io looks much like the standard "What you see is what you get" interface, familiar from Wordpress or Microsoft Word, with a couple bells and whistles, such as mobile editing.
"You can basically preview in live," said Cole. "You usually don't get a full in-browser preview. The difference is you have this with no backend CMS. It's just a directory and text files, with a web interface that exposes it. There are no servers, no infrastructure, and no monthly costs. All you need is a need free web app and Github. If you don't want to use that, use Git and Github Enterprise."
Prose was built by Development Seed to enable them to pass management of code off to the owners of websites. That's exactly how it's being used here.
"We were doing Jekyll sites and wanted to turn them over to clients who could then maintain them themselves," said Cole. "It's just a wrapper around the workflow, with design aesthetic to make it clean and something in the backend that's technical."
The technology behind Healthcare.gov also delivered on a crucial feature: a version geared toward a growing Spanish-speaking population that is quite likely to access the site on a mobile device.
"When you look at providing a Spanish translation or a mobile site, it becomes really complicated trying to have a site render in different ways, in different configurations," said Cole. "A CMS needs a different version for each one. That's not true here, with a responsive, easy-to-iterate upon design. A change is a quick process, not altering any application code."
"One of the strong attractions for working in Jekyll is that you can have multiple versions of everything," said Booth. "We can provide the exact same experience and mobile capacity on the Spanish website as on the English version."
While the front end of Healthcare.gov is distributed over Akamai, the back end of the site will be be hosted in a secure cloud.
"The servers are hosted in Terramark, a cloud computing firm that's a subsidiary of Verizon," said Booth. "When we got involved, Terramark had already been selected as the vendor. We inherited that; it was our first major cloud deployment. It's wonderful, compared to the traditional 'buy a lot of boxes and get the servers set up.' Percussion was fine as a CMS but the scalability issue was huge for us, really overarching."
Combining these two approaches finally realized some of the more aspirational rhetoric about the potential of "cloud computing" to deliver better savings and services that has bounced around Washington over the past four years.
"For us, it's a combination of Terramark as data center and Akamai as content distribution network," said Cole. "For the relaunch, no consumer traffic hits Terramark at all, with the exception of search queries. We have completely pushed the website out to Akamai, which gives us a lot of flexibility. This is by far the fastest site we've ever built. We wanted to make sure that this site is not adding any overhead, is as lightweight as it can be."
"Thinking differently" about this site went beyond technical choices for architecture or how rules and regulations were instantiated in code. If you visit Healthcare.gov on a smartphone or tablet, you'll notice how quickly it loads, how clean the design is on mobile, and how the site renders to fit the size of your screen.
"Across the board, there was agreement that it needed to be all about the consumer," said Mullen. "That was the mantra from the beginning. It comes down to understanding the audience, from thinking about the reading level of all content to writing clear, declarative sentences."
Focusing on the consumer -- or the citizen -- as the primary driver for design and technical decisions may sound like common sense but it's not a principle that appears to have animated the construction of many .gov websites over the past two decades. In recent years, however, design principles are redefining how online government is created and delivered, with notable results.
"We knew, building this marketplace from scratch, that we needed to have consistency," said Mullen. "We had to make sure all efforts work together, from outreach, engagement, education, to enrollment. We knew there was an opportunity to make some changes and largely to simplify. The first time around, the site was a pretty big success. When it came time to reassess, what was the core mission? It boiled down to being a strictly consumer site."
"Before we made any decisions on what the site was going to be, we did a lot of research into the population we were going to try to reach," explained Booth. "One of our goals was to reach a much younger demographic," said Booth. "That pointed us to doing mobile. Mobile is growing, representing about 10 percent of the traffic to medicare.gov now."
The goal of speaking clearly to the people that HHS is trying to reach drove a series of choices for design and content.
"One of the things we saw was the need to explain the project really clearly to people, not to introduce other topics that might be confusing," said Booth. "The marketplace program was separate. We've moved away other parts, like the text of the law or implementation timeline. It's important to keep those materials online but on other properties. Policy guidelines also were moved over to other websites. We needed something that could speak clearly to the people we're trying to reach."
In design, choosing what not to include is as important as what elements do appear. The involvement of Teal Design early on and Edward Mullen throughout, focusing on user experience, made a difference in how Healthcare.gov looks and works on a mobile device today.
Performance, citzen-centric design, and management aside, there's a deeper importance to how Healthcare.gov is being built that will remain relevant for years to come, perhaps even setting a new standard for federal government as a whole: updates to the code repository on Github can be adopted by every health insurance exchange using this code. (The only difference between different state sites is a skin with the state logo.) "We have been working in the .gov space for a while," said Gundersen. "Government people want to make the right decisions. What's nice about what Bryan [Sivak] is doing is that he's trying to make sure that everyone can learn from what HHS is doing in real-time. From a process standpoint, what Bryan is doing is going to change how tech is built. FCC is watching the repository on Github. When agencies can collaborate around code, what will happen? The amount of money we have the opportunity to save agencies is huge. Think about servers alone."
"You can't underestimate the cost of complexity," said Gundersen. "If you think the servers are expensive, consider the team required to maintain them."
With Healthcare.gov, something quite important happened that could also be lost in the mix: Code developed for the people, by the people, was released back to the people.
"There's an important legal detail here," said Cole. "Public domain doesn't apply to works for hire and it doesn't apply to code developed by a contractor. Healthcare.gov and other code was developed under BSD, the most permissive license possible."
While the website, funding from the federal government paid for the improvement of a series of open source software tools that it itself used.
"It's nice when government doesn't just take from open source but contributes code back to the community," said Gundersen.
The choice that HHS made in working with Development Seed meant that upgraded code for that tool was released on Github for the use of the public, over the course of the project.
"All of those contributions were made in real-time on Github as they were developed," said Cole. "The code now pulls in Google Analytics to analyze content for popularity."
"We got 10,000 authenticated users through Github and more through repository," said Cole. "Recently, we did a complete redesign, adding mobile and responsive development. HHS paid for that development. They also paid for enhancement of other open source tools that people are already using." Collaboration and cascading updates aren't an extra, in this context: they're mission-critical.
"This was a really distributed team, with design done by another party," said Cole."It started with a 'lock in' that laid out architecture and design, then tech followed. We wanted something really agile, to get it right first and keep iterating. After four months of development, we put together a site that's responsive and multilingual, and did so scalably."
Sivak said that he expects the new site to continue to be improved iteratively over time, in response to how people are actually using it. "We're going to be collecting all kinds of data," said Sivak. "We will be using tools like Optimizely to do A/B and multivariate testing, seeing what works on the fly and adapting from there. We're trying to treat this like a consumer website. The goal of this is to get people enrolled in health care coverage and get insurance. It's not simple. It's relatively complex process. We need to provide a lot of information to help people make decisions. The more this site can act in a consumer-friendly fashion, surfacing information, helping people in simple ways, tracking how people are using it and where they're getting stuck, the more we can improve."
Sivak is a fan of the agile development methodology that has become part of start-up development everywhere, including using analytics tools to track usage and design accordingly.
Notably, the HHS team has been using feedback to drive design choices from the beginning, applying the "lean startup" model to development.
"We did rounds of usability testing, starting early on with a card sort for taxonomy," said Booth. "We built out wireframes and did testing on look and feel. From my point of view, that was informed by a mix of designers, then getting user feedback."
This approach may be maturing in the private sector but still feels novel in some parts of government.
"One thing that has been nice that isn't always there on federal projects was a lot of support from leadership to look at user feedback, watch what users tell us and then go from that," he said. "It's not about what someone's favorite color might be."
"It's not a case where they needed developers," said Cole. "They just needed to adapt an agile workflow, have a good conversation and manage requirements dynamically, not create a huge spreadsheet of what they wanted and come back in two months.
Using Jekyll and Prose.io to build the new Healthcare.gov is the latest chapter in government IT's quiet open source evolution. Across the federal government, judicious adoption of open source is slowly but surely leading to leaner, more interoperable systems.
An open, agile approach to development gave Sivak and his team transparency into the status of the project through issue trackers on Github.
"Put yourself in Bryan's perspective, with his ability to know what's going on," said Gundersen. "He could just open up an issue tracker and look at what's been done, not wait for a briefing."
Talking at length with HHS' CTO, it's clear that he's happy with the process and outcomes, though he emphasized repeatedly that the site will continue to improve. "The thing that Git is all about is social coding," said Sivak, "leveraging the community to help build projects in a better way. It's the embodiment of the open source movement, in many ways: it allows for truly democratic coding, sharing, modifications and updates in a nice interface that a lot of people use."
Sivak has high aspirations that publishing the code for Healthcare.gov will lead to a different kind of citizen engagement. "I have this idea that when we release this code, there may be people out there who will help make improvements, maybe fork the repository, and suggest changes we can choose to add," he said. "Instead of just internal consultants who help build this, we suddenly have legions of developers."
The long game for the code behind Healthcare.gov may be quite interesting, given the status of exchanges in the states. If their health insurance exchanges aren't ready or robust, they can simply pull this code and adopt it. While states and federal government sharing code might make for fertile fodder for constitutional scholars and philosophical discussions of federalism in the future, for the moment, the stakeholders all just need something that works.
"This is multi-lingual, 508-compliant, and hits on mobile," said Gundersen. "So many states and fed agencies can look at this as part of a new, different way of building websites. Part of that is process-based, from the start, using tech that is faster and more flexible."
In fact, Booth says that there have already been a couple of states that have asked CMS if they can pull the code on their sites.
"We don't have to ask if you're on Microsoft, Unix or Application Server Pages," he said. "It's on Github and you can pull it down. Open source is not always applicable but when it is, it's very powerful."
Not everything is innovative in the new Healthcare.gov, as Nick Judd reported at TechPresident in March: The procurement process that led to Development Seed is complicated, with some potential conflicts of interest present. The end result, however, is a small startup in a garage in DC collaborating with the federal government to relaunch one of the most important federal websites of the 21st century in a decidedly 21st-century way: cheaper, faster and scalable, using open source tools and open standards.
That's a huge win for the American people, and while the vast majority of visitors to Healthcare.gov this fall will never know or perhaps care about how the site was built, the delivery of better service at lowered cost to taxpayers is an outcome that matters to everyone.
"Open by design, open by default," said Sivak. "That's what we're doing. It just makes a lot of sense. If you think about what should happen after this year, all of the states that didn't implement their systems, would it make sense for them to have code to use as their own? Or add to it? Think about the amount of money and effort that would save."
The West End's acclaimed new production of Dreamgirls has announced a final performance date of January 12, 2019 at the Savoy Theatre. The new staging, directed and choreographed by Tony-winning Broadway hitmaker Casey Nicholaw (Mean Girls, The Book of Mormon), will launch a U.K. tour with full dates to be announced.
With book and lyrics by Tom Eyen and music by Henry Krieger, Dreamgirls tells the story of The Dreams—Effie, Lorrell and Deena—three talented young singers in the turbulent 1960s as they embark upon a musical rollercoaster ride through a world of fame, fortune and the ruthless realities of show business.
The West End's Dreamgirls won an Olivier Award for Glee alum Amber Riley for her turn as Effie and Adam J. Bernard for his turn as Jimmy Early. The current cast includes Marisha Wallace, Moya Angela and Karen Mav alternating in the role of Effie, alongside Brennyn Lark as Deena, Asmeret Ghebremichael as Lorrell, Kimmy Edwards as Michelle Morris, Tosh Wanogho-Maud as Jimmy Early and Joe Aaron Reid as Curtis Taylor Jr.
London's Dreamgirls has been rumored for a Broadway transfer but no solidified plans have yet been announced.
I am really excited to announce that my work is now being made available to a worldwide audience through The Script Store.
If you'd like to see what else they have to offer in addition to my work for young people, then click on the picture below.
Caravan of Love is the debut piece by Tom Daldry. It consists of two one-act plays: charting a catastrophic honeymoon, and then an anniversary from hell. The writing has been described as a 'love-child of Beckett, Pinter and Orton' - dark, disturbing and with a streak of black humour.
The piece toured in Eastbourne, Prague Fringe Festival and Barnstaple Fringe Festival in May/June 2018.
Literature is curative. I've said it before, and I will say it again because it's true. It allows you to escape from the everyday world, but it makes it so you do so while simultaneously immersing yourself in even more humanity. It allows you to see through different eyes and to consider new perspectives. It allows you to travel and to know the unknowable. Before you realize, your momentary escape has taught you something new.
Late last year, I wrote about the reparative nature of reading contemporary fiction. I thought that might be a one time piece, but I ought to have known better – after all that wasn't the first time I'd broached the topic and I certainly haven't stopped turning to contemporary fiction every chance I get. Time and time again, reading has cured me. It's allowed me to escape from whatever it is – deep anxiety, academic stress, burn out, or even an afternoon's boredom – and to refresh my mind. So, I think it's only right to turn "Reparative Reading" into an occasional series.
Just as I did last autumn, I've repeatedly turned to contemporary fiction this spring to take breaks from working on my thesis. Anxiety worsened as submission drew nearer, and in my free time, I needed to turn away from the turn of the century and to our present day. (A questionable move considering the current state of affairs.)
I've already talked about one of my important reads this spring – Meg Wolitzer's The Female Persuasion – but here are a few more books I've enjoyed lately. Each of these is deeply rooted in the current day, so while they're refreshing each in their own way, they won't fill you with guilt for escaping from the real world either.
The Ensemble follows a quartet of musicians over twenty years as they reach different levels of failure and success, dipping in and out of different perspectives and beautifully weaving all of the personal stories together into a harmonious whole. The novel filled the gap left behind by Mozart in the Jungle's cancellation and I can guarantee that it can do the same for you, even though the two have very little do with each other beyond taking place in the classical music world and being really exciting to follow. The Ensemble is original and unique, and I'm sure it will stay with me for a long time.
A spectacular debut novel, What We Lose is a bildungsroman about loss. Loosely based on the author's experience of caring for her mother as she was dying for cancer, the novel focuses on Thandi, a biracial and binational girl who comes of age while juggling her American upbringing with the influence of her mother's family in South Africa. It's a stunning, haunting read that deals with illness, death, and identity in a refreshingly honest and creatively communicative way. Definitely a favorite read of the year.
I talked about Celeste Ng's new novel, Little Fires Everywhere, in my last Reparative Reading post. It was my favorite book of 2017 and no doubt you've heard about it from the rest of the world, if not from me. I've been following Ng on Twitter since then, and I quickly turned to her first novel when I needed a break after finishing the first draft of my thesis. Everything I Never Told You was everything I needed it to be and possibly spoke to me more than Little Fires Everywhere in its explicit focus on multiculturalism and even on academia. Focusing on one biracial family in the 1970s, the novel delves into the disappearance and death of its eldest daughter while providing a stunning look into family dynamics and cultural prejudice. It too is a haunting, deeply human read, and I highly recommend it for our current cultural climate.
You Think It, I'll Say It is definitely the "lightest" read on this list, but it's still very much a piece of its time, touching repeatedly on politics and sexuality (including a short story positively focused on bisexuality). I devoured each of the stories in the collection, and I described it to Lee as giving off "Nora Ephron vibes" for our current times. I heartily recommend it if you want to get back into reading after a slump or are looking for something pleasant to read without totally disconnecting from the world.
Another short story collection, Florida is my current read. I read Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies last summer, and like everyone who's ever read it, I was blown away. Florida has many of the same qualities – it's dark, staunchly honest, and beautifully constructed. Each of the short stories has marked me so far, and I'm looking forward to those I have yet to read.
Culture, Literature, TravelM. A. McCuen July 24, 2018 podcasts, literature, audiobooks, road trips, road trip, summer, contributor post, Summertime at the Attic
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In an effort to reach Catholics who have not yet heard about coming changes to the Mass from the Catholic press, Church officials met with members of the secular media to explain the changes, which take effect on the First Sunday of Advent, Nov. 30, 2003. A series of columns explaining the Mass changes have appeared in The Pilot since October.
Father Brian E. Mahoney, director of the Office of Worship, accompanied by Father Christopher Coyne, spokesman for the archdiocese, outlined a number of the changes at the Nov. 24 press conference, describing them more as clarifications than as major changes.
Father Mahoney said that the changes will affect “all places of worship in the archdiocese” and every diocese in the United States. Some changes, he said, will be implemented throughout the worldwide Catholic Church.
These changes are the result of revisions to the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (GIRM). According to Father Mahoney, the revisions affected approximately 20 percent of the missal’s text.
Changes to the Mass include: the congregation kneel at the conclusion of the Agnus Dei; communicants bow their heads before receiving the Body and Blood of Christ; the Lectionary should no longer be carried in procession; a period of silence will follow the proclamation of each reading and the homily; and distribution of consecrated bread and wine to the vessels will be reserved to priests and deacons.
Father Mahoney explained that “different customs” of standing or kneeling at different points during the Mass have developed in parishes in the 34 years since the promulgation of the first general instruction. The revisions to the new general instruction will promote more uniformity in the Church through “common postures” that all parishes will put into practice, such as bowing before the reception of Communion.
"The common postures bring about a better sense of the theology" of the Mass and help Catholics more actively participate in the celebration, Father Mahoney said.
Another change affecting the archdiocese will be the observation of Jan. 22, the anniversary of the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing abortion, as a day of penance for Catholics. Priests celebrating the special Mass for “Peace and Justice” that day will wear purple vestments rather than the green vestments normally worn. The change is the result of a petition by the U.S. bishops to change the Church calendar for the United States.
Father Mahoney spent the month of October meeting with priests, deacons and lay leaders throughout the archdiocese to explain these changes. He has also written The Pilot’s series of columns on the revisions. In addition, Father Mahoney has provided priests with materials that can be used as bulletin inserts explaining the changes.
"„Hackedepicciotto“ are Alexander Hacke and Danielle de Picciotto. Both are legends of their own making: Danielle de Picciotto moved from NYC to Berlin in 1987, to become the lead singer of the band „Space Cowboys“, the co-initiator of the Love Parade, a collaborator of the Ocean Club with Gudrun Gut, and Alexander’s partner in crime. Alexander Hacke is founding member and bass player of Einstürzende Neubauten. The artist couple, romantically married since 2006, has creatively interacted with countless international projects for almost 2 decades now besides regularly releasing their own compositions. Their live shows are, to put it mildly, intense. Danielle specializes in unusual instruments such as the Hurdy Gurdy, the auto harp and the cemence besides playing the violin and piano; Alexander is master of the bass, guitar and drums. Together they create beautiful, existentialistic, acoustic soundscapes, which roar and vibrate simultaneously leaving their audiences shaken but overjoyed. Danielle, author of two books, writes most of their lyrics, be it the poetic spoken word moments or the momentous choirs they compose together. Alexander Hacke, an excellent throat singer and vocalist, growls his grnarly, rumbling cries that float eerily over their nomadic desert drones, with screeching birds, bees or wild wind accompanying slow, heavy riffs that start as a whisper and end in a volcanic, rolling wave of apocalyptic frenzy. The collage of this mixed with melancholic, translucent harmonies, very heavy & low bass chords, and electronics has generated an ever growing group of enthusiastic listeners.
Hackede Piciotto have been touring now for almost two years presenting their opus “Perseverantia” an album recorded in the Mojave desert and which can be seen as a diary of their ongoing travels:
Danielle & Alexander gave up their home in Berlin in 2010 and have been touring the world ever since trying to find a sanctuary comparable to the artists haven Berlin used to be in the 80ies. But times have changed and it is each to his own now. The icy winds blowing are everywhere and thousands of homeless souls are wandering our roads, their personal search becoming a universal cry for deliverance.
On Dec 1st they will be presenting their new album ”Menetekel” which is darker than “Perseverantia”. Menetekel is another word for “the writing on the wall” and here the artist couple projects our collective despair of what is happening worldwide into a monumental symphony of sound, twirling and twisting it into a biblical frenzy”. The first song on the double LP whispers in harmony and sings” Welcome to my home” “Welcome to be heart” but very quickly the shadows grow deeper and the mood becomes wilder, the trumpets sound and the fall of Jericho is eminent or is it the exile from paradise? “The great rains have begun” Danielle whispers on the second last track of the album “The Prophesy” a whirlwind of oriental and western sounds dancing with each other faster ad faster until they are morphed into the minimal and last song of the album “ Crossroad” “Standing on the crossroad. Cause and Effect. Our reaction is the only one in nature which has a choice”.
The symbolic and spiritual questions asked give an unusual depth to the album, giving it a universal and very poignant touch of the current human quest.
The artist couple will be celebrating both albums on a small tour through North America in December 2017:
Yeah, I seem to have a weird relationship with the full moon. My monthly cycle follows the full moon. So the week before the full moon I am very short tempered and pms-y. The candida has made my pms so so so much worse.
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For the seventh season of Red Bull GRC, three fully-fledged manufacturer entries have been confirmed, with no fewer than three race-winning IndyCar teams fielding entries in the Supercars class alone.
10 drivers have so far been named for the season opener, with more expected to join as the season goes on. Volkswagen Andretti Rallycross and Scott Speed will be defending their crown for the second consecutive year with Tanner Foust once again remaining with the team.
Steve Arpin will be back again with his own Loenbro Motorsports outfit, looking to add to his single race win from last year. He’s yet to confirm a team mate, but they have been understood to be talking to a number of drivers.
Olsbergs will again campaign Hondas, with a youthful three-car assault being led by Sebastian Eriksson. 2014 and 2015 Red Bull GRC Lites champions Mitchell DeJong and Oliver Eriksson complete that lineup. 2009 Formula 1 world champion Jenson Button is also thought to be in line for a part-time campaign with the team throughout the year.
He will be joined by Chris Atkinson with Travis Pastrana also expected to feature at some point during the season.
Austin Dyne will also return, this time with Rahal Letterman Lanigan running his Ford Fiesta ST from their sports car shop in Ohio.
Former champion Joni Wiman, plus race winners Sverre Isachsen and Brian Deegan have all left the series and aren’t expected to race in Red Bull GRC this year, while three-time podium finisher Bucky Lasek has yet to confirm his plans for the year ahead.
Fan favourites Daytona and Washington DC are the notable absences from last year’s calendar, although rounds in Memphis, Tennessee; Louisville, Kentucky; Thompson, Connecticut, and Indianapolis, Indiana have all been added.
Another new addition is the return to international competition with the series visiting Canada in June for a double header event in Ottawa. Thompson will also host a double header event, as will Atlantic City and Seattle. Los Angeles will again host the final round of the season.
Four drivers will tackle the full Red Bull Global Rallycross championship for the first time this season, here’s a look at the ‘class of 2017’:
Cabot Bigham made his rallycross debut in Red Bull GRC Lites last year after an impressive apprenticeship in single seaters. The teenager made the transition effortlessly, winning the title in his first attempt.
Oliver Eriksson is arguably the best prepared of all of the 2017 rookies and driving for his family’s Olsbergs team he’ll definitely have the best tools at his disposal.
2017 will be the long-awaited first full Supercars season for Mitchell DeJong – Credit: Chris Tedesco/Red Bull Content Pool
Another Olsbergs Honda rookie, DeJong made a cameo appearance at the end of last year but besides that (and some spotter appearances) he’s been out of the Red Bull GRC picture since taking a dominant Lites title in 2014.
He’s spent the winter racing in Rally X on Ice in Europe and clearly hasn’t lost his speed. He’ll be one to watch.
Atkinson may have ended up making more appearances than any other driver for Subaru in the Supercars class last year, but 2017 will be his first full season in the championship.
The Japanese marque has been working hard over the winter with partners Vermont Sports Car to make a winning car. Should they nail that, expect ‘Atko’ to be the top ‘rookie’ in the field.
Reigning champion team Dreyer & Reinbold Racing have signed up Travis PeCoy and Christian Brooks, as well as multiple race winner Alex Keyes who will finally be competing in his first full Lites season after part time schedules for the last two years.
The former F4 driver is a French Super 1600 rallycross champion, and won the 2016 RX Lites Cup on the World Rallycross bill.
Finally, AF Racing have announced that Alejandro Fernandez will continue to race for the team at the opening round of the season. He will be joined by off-road and sports car racer Burt Jenner with former motocross star Jeremy Stenberg is expected to feature for them at some point in the season.
The development series will again race at every round of the Red Bull GRC, and feature spec 310 horsepower, mid engined spaceframe cars.
Dominik Wilde is a motorsport writer and content creator who has covered events in both the UK and USA. His main focus for the Checkered Flag is covering Americas Rallycross.
Fredrik Ahlin won the first round of the 2017 Prestone MSA British Rally Championship, the Brick and Steel Border Counties Rally
UPDATE: AS THE Melbourne Cup was run and won around television sets around the Bundaberg region, one lucky local owner of Prince of Penzance was sharing the spoils of winning the richest race in Australia.
Dalton Racing, which involves local lawyer Bruce Dalton, was celebrating long into the night as its horse stunned the sporting world yesterday to win the Melbourne Cup.
Bruce, along with his brothers Joe and Jonathon, own a 15 percent stake in the horse after purchasing it at a yearling sale in New Zealand in 2011.
Now they can officially call themselves Melbourne Cup winners after also claiming the Moonee Valley Cup last year with the same horse.
Joe Dalton, who was still coming to terms with the win, told the NewsMail's sister paper the Observer it was a wonderful feeling to win the race.
"Unbelievable, unbelievable and it takes a little bit of the sting after losing the World Cup, but winning the Melbourne Cup... I'll take that," Dalton said.
"We thought he was up for a top five and that top 10 would certainly be within his grasp," Dalton said.
The horse, which is trained by Darren Weir, created history with Michelle Payne becoming the first female jockey to win the cup.
Denpurr - part-owned by Bundaberg couple Warren and Carol Childs placed third in the Lexus Hybrid Plate, which was taken out by Don't Doubt Mamma.
EARLIER: TUESDAY'S Melbourne Cup has a local connection with Prince of Penzance, which is part owned by Bundaberg residents.
Dalton Racing - owned by Bruce Dalton and his brothers Joe and Jonathon - own part of the horse which has won the 2015 Melbourne Cup.
A winner of six races, out of 23 in its career so far, the horse drew barrier 11, cloth 19, for the race at 2pm Queensland time today.
Not a favourite with the bookies, with odds of more than $60 to win with the majority of the bookmakers, it was considered a long shot to take out the crown.
Last week, trying to defend the Moonee Valley cup it won in 2014, it finished second behind The United States.
Before that race, in the four events it competed in this year, it didn't register a top four finish.
This is the sixth time the horse had competed at Flemington but the first time it has attempted the 3200m distance.
After a winter break, a walkover and a postponement, the DCU first team finally got to take their second semester bow last Wednesday. NUI Maynooth were the opponents and while DCU were defeated 35-25, there were still plenty of positives to take from the game, not least because of DCU’s long layoff.
The game hung finely in the balance at 25-25 entering the final stages, until a Maynooth penalty and breakaway try sealed the points for the Kildare college. But DCU Rugby Chairman David Burson was still reasonably happy with his side’s effort.
“It was a good physical game and was entertaining for the neutral. There was a lot of good forward play from both sides and we were happy enough with the performance considering the amount of injuries we had coming into the match. We were nowhere near our strongest.”
There were some strong individual performances for DCU that would give the side hope. Cormac O’Leary continued his development at 10, having played the second half there in DCU’s opening group fixture and is improving game by game in the position. Flanker and scholarship player Akhlaque Khan was another who stood out, with his ball carrying making inroads in the Maynooth defence. So there were certainly enough positives on show to think that DCU are improving.
“We made good ground in the pack but we realised the Maynooth backline wasn’t very strong so we should have went wide more than we did. The one time we really attacked them in the wide channels our fullback Colin Doyle burnt the winger for a great finish in the corner,” said Burson.
It hasn’t just been the lack of game time which has hampered DCU. The nature of the academic calendar means when many sides are on the training pitch, many DCU students are burning the midnight oil in preparation for the January exams.
The weather hasn’t been conducive to holding training sessions either. DCU’s two main training facilities, the sports grounds and Clontarf RFC, have been frequently waterlogged over the past few weeks.
“The amount of time each team can spend training varies greatly from college to college. Our freshers had a game with just one day’s training because of the exams. The weather has been pretty biblical lately and that’s meant we haven’t been able to train nearly as much as we would like.
“In DCU, rugby is more of a social outlet than in some of the other colleges. We would have one or two trainings a week, while in colleges like Athlone IT they might have four, including gym sessions,” continued Burson.
Although DCU have lost two group games, they have also gotten four points for a walkover so they are still on course for the knockout stages. The top side from the two groups go into the semi-finals, while the second and third place teams play each other in what amounts to the quarter-finals. As things stand, DCU would travel to IT Cork. Burson is looking forward to the clash but recognises DCU’s chances are partly governed by outside forces.
“I’m sure every college in Ireland has 15 good players, but their availability depends on the week that’s in it. If it’s an AIL weekend you could be short two or three key players who need to rest. As it stands, we’re down to travel to Cork and I’m looking forward to having a last hurrah down there with the team and hopefully we can come away with a good result.”