Red Velvet Cupcakes : The Healthy Chef ? Teresa Cutter

Red Velvet Cupcakes

Posted by Teresa Cutter on Monday, August 27, 2012 ? 18 Comments?

This is my healthy take on the traditional red velvet chocolate cake. ?It?s lovely and moist from the fresh grated beetroot that i?ve added into my cupcake batter and it replaces the traditional red food colouring found in traditional recipes. I?ve thrown in a handful of raisins to add a touch more sweetness and it marries well with the cocoa and cinnamon. You can also add prunes in place of the raisins that provide a lower glycemic response and suited for more mature palettes. The final cupcake looks wholesome and healthy, quite rustic actually which I really love. I enjoyed them topped simply with a spoonful of thick Greek style yoghurt, but check out my frosting recipes below to choose the one that suits you ! ?If you?re entertaining, then adding a few raspberries over the top will add another amazing flavour sensation.

What?s good about it:
Beetroots are packed with phytonutrients called betalains that provide antioxidant and anti-inflammatory support to the body. Dark chocolate is associated with a reduced risk for heart disease, stroke, and diabetes according to studies from the British Medical Journal.?Chocolate contains compounds that act as stimulants believed to boost serotonin and endorphin levels in the brain.? It contains the stimulants theobromine and caffeine that can increase alertness and give you a pleasurable sensation similar to the high people get after exercise. Egg and almonds are packed with protein your body needs to help it repair as well as support a healthy immune system.

260 g ( about 2 large/ 9 oz) ) beetroot, grated raw with skin
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract or paste
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Pinch of sea salt
150 g (1? ? cups/ 5 ?1/4 oz) ground almonds or almond meal
? cup ?or 3 tablespoons cocoa powder or raw cacao powder
3 tablespoons your choice (macadamia oil, olive oil, coconut oil, avocado oil) or melted butter
? cup (60 ml) ?honey or pure maple syrup
? cup raisins or prunes chopped (optional but lovely)
1 teaspoon gluten free baking powder or 1/4 teaspoon bicarb soda or baking soda

Preheat your oven to 160 C. (320 F) fan forced or 180 C (356 F) no fan.
Combine raw beetroot, eggs, vanilla, cinnamon, ground almonds, cocoa, honey, raisins or prunes if using and baking powder into a large bowl.
Mix well with your hands until combined.
Spoon into paper lined cupcake or small muffin tins.
Bake for 45 minutes or until cooked through.
Remove from the oven and cool completely in the tin.
Serve alone or topped with your desired flavoured frosting (see below for frosting recipes)

NB: I love to serve mine simply with thick vanilla, Greek Style yoghurt.
Serve topped with raspberries which add that extra layer of deliciousness to the eating experience.
You can buy almond meal or almond flour from most health food stores. ?You can also make your own almond meal by blending in a Vitamix dry jug.
For those who want to use a wholemeal spelt flour 1 cup should replace the almond meal. ?You will need to add another 1/4 your choice of oil or butter to the recipe.

Makes 12 cupcakes

Protein: 4.7 g
Total fat: 11.8 g
Saturated: 1.4 g
Carbs: 12 g
Sodium: 31.4 mg
Calories: 171
kilojoules: 714
Fiber: 2.4 g

Yummy Simple Frosting ideas:

1 ?Thick Greek Style yoghurt or coconut yoghurt.

2 For a delicious almond or rice milk cream combine 1 1/2 cups ?milk, 1 teaspoon vanilla bean paste, 1 tablespoon honey or pure maple syrup and 2 heaped tablespoons arrowroot or corn flour then heave over a low heat until thick like a custard. Remove from the heat and cool in the fridge. ?Once cold place into a blender and blend until smooth and creamy?add a little splash of milk or even coconut milk if you want a creamy consistency. This is based on a blancmange style custard cream recipe.

3 For yummy cashew nut cream combine 1 cup of raw cashew nuts or macadamia nuts with 1/2 cup of water or orange juice and a little vanilla. Blend in a good high speed blender until smooth and creamy.

4 To make the vanilla soy cream, combine in a high speed blender like a Vitamix 300 g silken tofu with 2 teaspoons honey and 2 teaspoons natural vanilla extract.? Process until smooth and creamy.? For a thicker cream, add 50 g cashew nuts and process until creamy.

5 ?For a chocolate cream frosting combine 2 ripe avocados, 1/4 cup cocoa or cacao powder, 1/4 cup honey, a pinch of sea salt and 1 teaspoon vanilla bean paste. ?Blend in a Vitamix until smooth and creamy. ?Add a little splash of water for a smoother and fluffier consistency.

6 ?for a creamy cheesecake style frosting, combine 250 g (9oz) soft cream cheese such as quark with a little lemon zest, juice, vanilla ?and a little maple syrup or honey to taste. Beat well until combined and creamy.

7 A simple dollop of marscarpone or whipped ricotta.

?

Filed under Cakes, biscuits, pies & breads, Recipes ? Tagged with almonds, antioxidants, beetroot, chocolate, dairy free, desserts, diabetic friendly, gluten free, grain free, healthy cooking, heart healthy, low carb, Low gi, organic, paleo, protein, red velvet cake, snack, sugar free, sustained energy, vegetarian, weight loss, well-being, wheat free

Source: http://www.thehealthychef.com/2012/08/red-velvet-cupcakes/

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How to feed data-hungry mobile devices? Use more antennas

ScienceDaily (Aug. 23, 2012) ? Researchers from Rice University have just unveiled a new multi-antenna technology that could help wireless providers keep pace with the voracious demands of data-hungry smartphones and tablets. The technology aims to dramatically increase network capacity by allowing cell towers to simultaneously beam signals to more than a dozen customers on the same frequency.

Details about the new technology, dubbed Argos, were presented August 23 at the Association for Computing Machinery's MobiCom 2012 wireless research conference in Istanbul. Argos is under development by researchers from Rice, Bell Labs and Yale University. A prototype built at Rice this year uses 64 antennas to allow a single wireless base station to communicate directly to 15 users simultaneously with narrowly focused directional beams.

Thanks to the growing popularity of smartphones and other data-hungry devices, the demand for mobile data is expected to grow 18-fold within the next five years. To meet demand, wireless carriers are scrambling to boost network capacity by installing more wireless base stations and shelling out billions of dollars for the rights to broadcast on additional frequencies.

In tests at Rice, Argos allowed a single base station to track and send highly directional beams to more than a dozen users on the same frequency at the same time. The upshot is that Argos could allow carriers to increase network capacity without acquiring more spectrum.

"The technical term for this is multi-user beamforming," said Argos project co-leader Lin Zhong, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and of computer science at Rice. "The key is to have many antennas, because the more antennas you have, the more users you can serve."

Zhong said the theory for multi-user beamforming has been around for quite some time, but implementing technology has proven extremely difficult. Prior to Argos, labs struggled to roll out prototype test beds with a handful of antennas.

"There are all kinds of technical challenges related to synchronization, computational requirements, scaling up and wireless standards," he said. "People have really questioned whether this is practical, so it's significant that we've been able to create a prototype that actually demonstrates that this works."

Argos presents new techniques that allow the number of antennas on base stations to grow to unprecedented scales. The Argos prototype, which was built by Rice graduate student Clayton Shepard, uses an array of 64 antennas and off-the-shelf hardware -- including several dozen open-access test devices called WARP boards that were invented at Rice's Center for Multimedia Communications. In tests, Argos was able to simultaneously beam signals to as many as 15 users on the same frequency. For wireless carriers, that performance would translate to more than a six-fold increase in network capacity. Zhong said the base-station design can be scaled up to work with hundreds of antennas and several dozen concurrent users, which would result in much higher capacity gains.

"There's also a big payoff in energy savings," Shepard said. "The amount of power you need for transmission goes down in proportion to the number of antennas you have. So in Argos' case, we need only about one-sixty-fourth as much energy to serve those 15 users as you would need with a traditional antenna."

Zhong and Shepard said Argos is at least five years away from being available on the commercial market. It would require new network hardware and a new generation of smartphones and tablets. It might also require changes in wireless standards. Those are big hurdles, but Zhong said the potential benefits of multi-user beamforming technology make it a very likely next big step for the wireless industry.

"The bandwidth crunch is here, and carriers need options," Zhong said. "They're going to pay close attention to any new technologies that may allow them to serve more customers with fewer resources."

Research co-authors include Hang Yu and Narendra Anand, both of Rice; Li Erran Li and Tom Marzetta, both of Bell Labs; and Yang Richard Yang of Yale University. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, Bell Labs, Alcatel Lucent and the Air Force Office of Sponsored Research.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Rice University. The original article was written by Jade Boyd.

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Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_technology/~3/2RkZfGUrBYY/120823143741.htm

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Mass autonomous cars project lets 3000 vehicles talk

Hal Hodson, technology reporter

(Image: US Department of Transportation)

On Tuesday this week, something unprecedented happened in a medium-sized town just east of Detroit, Michigan - 3000 cars, trucks and buses started talking to each other.

They are part of a US Department of Transport (DOT) pilot project which aims to make driving safer. For a year, 3000 volunteer motorists in Ann Arbor will have equipment installed in their vehicles which wirelessly exchanges speed and location data with others in the area, as well as with infrastructure such as traffic lights.

A small loudspeaker warns drivers of danger in their area, such as a sudden deceleration on the road ahead, or a sudden lane change nearby. The vehicles store all the data they collect for researchers at the University of Michigan and the DOT to analyse at the end of the year.

The pilot is testing the real-world performance of vehicle-to-vehicle communications systems. These have never been tried on such a grand scale, and naturally, security and privacy are a concern.

In a risk assessment paper last year, the DOT's Intelligent Transport Systems office outlined the security risk to the system's 3000 users, suggesting that a sufficiently funded organisation might be able to steal the encryption keys that protect the communication channels between the vehicles and use these to broadcast erroneous messages into the system. That kind of attack would require physical access to the car.

On the privacy side, the document describes how personally identifying information can be scrubbed from the signals, making it impossible for individual drivers to be tracked across the city via their vehicle's wireless signal. This "anti-linking" technology changes all the identifying data sent out by the pilot cars every 5 minutes, including their encryption certificates, so no one number or data point is continuously associated with any one vehicle.

The paper ends with a list of pros and cons about the project. On the plus side, it says, the system is scalable to more than 250 million users, and is difficult to attack with significant knowledge of the system.

On the downside, the paper notes that there is no clear financial model to keep the project going. Also noted, somewhat disturbingly, was the fact that the system cannot instantly identify misbehaving drivers, saying that there is inevitably a "delay in identification and [a] delay in removing misbehaving actors from system".

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/22a7289b/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Conepercent0C20A120C0A80Cmass0Eautonomous0Ecars0Eproject0El0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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America Has Now Become An Aristocracy Of Elites ... - Yahoo! Finance

Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook!

One of the most important trends in America over the last three decades is the rise of extreme inequality: The wealth gap between the "1%" and the "99%" is now higher than it has been in 70 years, since the latter half of the 1920s.

In connection with this, argues MSNBC host and author Chris Hayes in a new book called Twilight Of The Elites, America has become a self-perpetuating aristocracy, in which the small percentage of Americans who benefit from the power and wealth imbalance do what they need to do to ensure that they and their friends and families cling to power.

Importantly, this new aristocracy crosses racial and gender lines--it's not the "old white boy" network of prior generations.

But it's just as insidious in terms of removing the meritocracy that is part and parcel of the now-rare "American Dream" and replacing it with what amounts to an old-world aristocracy. Even President Barack Obama, Hayes argues, succumbed to this trend when he gained power. Although his own story represents the epitome of the old American dream, Obama's policies now seem designed to preserve the power of the elites, a class in which he is now firmly entrenched.

So how do we fix this?

In Hayes' view, we should start by raising taxes on high incomes and raising the minimum wage.

Back in the 1950s, 60s. and 70s, Hayes notes, the country's highest tax brackets were vastly higher, and this helped produce not only a more equal society, but--contrary to popular wisdom--one in which American business thrived. The business strength was a result of the strong middle class, which collectively represented vast purchasing power.

Hayes doesn't think we should raise taxes back to the levels of that golden era, but he does argue for raising them. Hiking the top income tax bracket to 50%, for example, would help fix the inequality problem without removing all incentive for Americans to build businesses and earn lots of money.

At the same time, Hayes argues, we should raise the national minimum wage to $12, which will put a lot more money (and spending power) in the hands of the lower-middle class. This, in turn, will help all American businesses, because it will give American consumers more money to spend.

SEE ALSO: 23 Mind-Blowing Facts About Inequality In America

Source: http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/america-now-become-aristocracy-elites-chris-hayes-133824134.html

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A Canard That Will Not Die: 'Legitimate Rape' Doesn't Cause Pregnancy (Atlantic Politics Channel)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories News, RSS and RSS Feed via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/242047009?client_source=feed&format=rss

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That???s not the real me: How vanity sabotages Facebook advertising

When the elaborate self-portrait known as a Facebook profile seldom resembles the real thing, can advertisers really reach the right people?

I?m not the real me on Facebook.

?Facebook Louie? records music, cofounded a record label, and is friends with notable musicians, producers, and visual artists. ?Facebook Louie? is kind of cool, and, when he heard from at all, confines his views to the least controversial of topics.

The person writing this column is not ?Facebook Louie,? it?s the Louie that has invested at least 150 hours into Diablo 3 (as nerdy as that might be), and adores?The Real World/Road Rules Challenge?(as embarrassing as that is). This ?Authentic Louie? is less cool, but more real.

None of us are our authentic, honest selves on Facebook. We censor things which are embarrassing and which disagree with the personas we have constructed there. Social science agrees with me (well, two theories do, at least). That could be bad news for Facebook.

You vs. you

The sheer amount of information we pour into social networks like Facebook might make them seem like ideal advertising platforms, but they?re actually at an odd disadvantage in some ways: Facebook?s public nature makes us behave more like characters and less like our authentic selves. In that regard, Facebook has less accurate information about us than competitors like Google. That means that Facebook ads are often less relevant to us, and, therefore, less valuable to advertisers ? a serious problem for a company that rakes in all of its revenue from targeted advertising.

All the world?s a stage

A theatrical metaphor developed by Canadian sociologist?Erving Goffman?is useful for understanding our behavior on Facebook. First put forth in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman offered the following description of his dramaturgical theory of communication in his later work, Frame Analysis.

I am suggesting that often what talkers undertake to do is not to provide information to a recipient, but to present dramas to an audience. Indeed, it seems that we spend most of our time not engaged in giving information, but in giving shows.

According to Goffman?s theory, when communicating we adopt a role suitable to our environment and capable of achieving our goals. We are actors on a stage. Shakespeare, as ever, proves prescient.

This model describes my activities on Facebook with uncanny accuracy. My goal on Facebook is to cultivate new and strengthen existing social connections. Many of those connections are within Portland?s music?scene?(a word particularly apt to the metaphor), so I portray myself in a way that fits that scene and my goals within it. This means leaving some things ? Diablo 3, for example ? out of that portrayal.

Because of Facebook?s interpersonal nature, the version of self I reveal there will never be as complete as my portrayal when using Google search. It is unlikely that my Google search habits will become publicly known, so I don?t give censorship a second thought. Google knows about my love-hate relationship with Diablo 3. Facebook does not, because this trait does not fit the role I portray there.

Absent self-censorship, the information I reveal indirectly via Google search paints a more complete picture of me than what I disclose directly via Facebook. This is one reason that Google Adwords can be a better product than Facebook?s ads. Google knows more about me, and can therefore offer better targeting data to its advertisers.

Sex, drugs, and reality TV

Role-based censorship is just one of the ways that we limit the depictions of ourselves on Facebook. We may censor ourselves just as much or more when it comes to topics we find private or embarrassing.

Drawing on research dating back to the mid-1950?s, Robert J. Fisher writes of this bias in the introduction to?Social Desirability Bias and the Validity of Indirect Questioning.

Unfortunately, the basic human tendency to present oneself in the best possible light can significantly distort the information gained from self-reports. ? The result is data that are systematically biased toward respondents? perceptions of what is ?correct? or socially acceptable.

Questions about sexual behavior or illicit drug use often return skewed results, as research subjects will seek to avoid disparaging or incriminating responses.

Because Facebook is a public medium based largely on self reporting through status updates and other posts, it?s susceptible to the same bias. Therefore, it will see fewer posts relating to subjects traditionally biased against, like sex and drugs. Because we all want to be cool, there will be more posts about subjects not traditionally biased against.

For example, I am a recent devotee of?The Real World/Road Rules Challenge. I?m ashamed to admit it, but Johnny Bananas? epic season 16 performance hooked me.?The Challenge?might actually be my favorite show. However, you will see no mention of it on my Facebook profile. Why? Well, what would people think, if they knew? Suddenly I?m ?reality TV guy.? Who wants to be ?reality TV guy??

There are sites out there that know my secret. Google, because my general research about the show, and Amazon, from whom I can purchase full seasons of the show. Once again, Facebook?s competitors have more information about me due to my tendency to reveal more information indirectly than directly. Google and Amazon can target ads based on those details. Facebook cannot.

Facebook?s problem

Of course, Facebook has problems beyond these, not least of which the astronomical expectations for the service at the time of its IPO. Facebook?s ads must improve if it is to meet those expectations. There are two ways that it can do so. The first is to roll out new products from which it can yield new sources of targeting data. The service?s rumored ?Want? button may be the most significant step in this direction.

The second way Facebook can improve its targeting data is much more difficult, and challenges the two communications theories outlined above. Facebook needs us to share more honestly ? even when we find that sharing out-of-sync with who we pretend to be, or when that sharing reveals embarrassing things.

However, it remains to be seen if the information we give Facebook voluntarily will ever equal the value of the information we give its competitors involuntarily. Facebook certainly has the ambition to change our behavior. The future of the company may depend on whether it is successful.

Source: http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/thats-not-the-real-me-how-vanity-sabotages-facebook-advertising/

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Live Concerts in Google+ Hangouts Improve With New Studio Mode

NASA's newly landed Curiosity rover is busy taking pictures, roving, and just being awesome on another planet. A few of Curiosity's pictures revealed, for lack of a more appropriate word, some curiosities of their own, including a mysterious shape on ? Continue??

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/live-concerts-google-hangouts-improve-studio-mode-145821125.html

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