A podium place and a hospital place for the FiveTwo team |

Posted on April 2, 2012 by ukdiamondback

A bit of an up and down weekend for our Leicestershire-based Diamondback riders.

Podium place for Phil Evans

Phil Evans scored a hat trick of firsts in the quarters, semi and finals at the Lemington Spa 4X track on his Diamondback Bandito. Meanwhile Matt Charter took a tumble at the same track and has been lying in bed with a fractured spine and John Lee dislocated his shoulder for the sixth time this year – oww!

Matt said: “Two weeks ago I was riding Leamington Spa 4X track in preparation for a race. I was getting to grips with it well and feeling a good speed. I decided to go flat out down the first straight and try a tight triple at the end. When I reached the third jump (the first reasonably sized) I tried squashing it more than normal with the idea to maintain more speed into the next triple. I misjudged the landing and caught my front wheel on the top of the landing, this sent me over the bars.

“When I came down I landed head first flipping onto my back at the next takeoff, I landed very hard and decided to stop riding for the day.

 ”After painfully driving home and getting sorted the following afternoon we decided to go down to A&E to get it checked out. I got taken for and x-ray and the results were that I had vertebrae in my spine that looked abnormal. The whole mood changed and I was told not to move and lie flat on my back. After a bit of a wait I was taken for a CT scan that confirmed I had fractured my spine in 3 places!

“This meant spending a few nights in hospital, I stayed one night in Hinchinbrook Hospital then the following day I was transferred to Addenbrookes as they had a more specialist spinal ward. When I arrived here there was a 50/50 chance that an operation would be needed. Thankfully as the week went on it was decided that an operation wasn’t necessary and the bones would fuse together naturally and all that was needed is bed rest. After 5 days in hospital I was allowed home with a back brace.

“I can’t wait to get back on the bike again but I’ve got to make sure my spine’s fully fixed so I don’t have more problems in the future!”

Matt will be away from his Diamondback Bandito for two to three months so we wish him well with his recovery. Matt – check out these Diamondback videos if you need some motivation for your recovery!

John Lee also told us more about his injury: “So this week ups my shoulder dislocations to six times this year. My new shoulder consultant has bumped me up the surgery waiting list and until then I’ll get ready for the next race, brace it up and get ready to make my weird come back from over nine months of injury! I feel like I have a mountain to move so it’s time to get back on it (again) and attempt to juggle life, work, family, money and everything else to try and get back in the mindset for this again! Thanks to everyone who supports me when I feel like I’m letting you down, it means a lot!”

Podium place for Phil Evans

Like this:

Be the first to like this post.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Bandito, bmx, Diamondback, injury. Bookmark the permalink.

How to Effectively Integrate Social Media and Email Marketing for ...

The debate on email marketing versus social media marketing is a complete waste of time. Rather than hammer away at their differences, why not focus on how to combine their strengths into one seamless marketing plan? Social media and email marketing lists work well together. In fact, they complement each other.

Combining email and social media marketing involves looking at three major processes: content repurposing, email to social media integration, and social media to email link. Each of these has their own set of tactics that help fuse together email and social media into a single workable strategy. Here are some of the ways to achieve this.

Repurposing Content. Whenever you’re trying to link an email marketing campaign with social media marketing, it helps to have article or blog content which can easily be readapted and redeployed to fit any of these channels. If you’re trying to build Singapore marketing lists, for example, it’s probably helpful to tell your Twitter followers to read the full article plus updates by subscribing to your newsletter service.

Email to Social Media. Allowing your subscribers to share or connect your newsletter content to social sites is a great way to grow your marketing lists. By giving them the ability to redistribute your material to their personal or professional networks, you’re looking at an exponential increase in brand awareness with very minimal resources committed.

Social Media to Email. By leveraging your fan base in social networks, you’re tapping into a huge pool of new prospects waiting to be reached. Adding opt-in forms on your Facebook page is among the most effective ways of looking for new subscribers. Redirecting your YouTube channel subscribers or Twitter followers to your email sign up page is also a good practice to expand your marketing lists.

These are some of the techniques you can take advantage of in order to really bring email and social media marketing together in a productive way. This combination, along with the help of a good marketing lists provider, can take your small business to newer heights.

. Bookmark the

.

Triple-Protected Nanoparticles | April 2, 2012 Issue - Vol. 90 Issue ...

Applying a uniform oxide coating to metal nanoparticles used for catalytic hydrocarbon processing simultaneously protects the particles from three common deactivation processes that can lead to frequent chemical reactor shutdowns, according to a study conducted by researchers at Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory.

The findings, which may help avoid costly chemical plant interruptions, were reported at the American Chemical Society national meeting last week in San Diego and in Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1212906 ).

A number of chemical and physical processes can rob nanosized metal catalyst particles of their ability to mediate chemical reactions. In hydrocarbon catalysis, the two most common routes to deactivation for such particles are sintering—which causes the particles to agglomerate and fuse together, thereby reducing the surface area available for chemical reactions—and accumulation of coke, a carbonaceous layer that blocks reactants’ access to catalytically active sites. Nanoparticle catalysts are also often ruined by forces that leach the particles from their supports.

Numerous strategies have been devised to avoid these debilitating processes. Yet none of those procedures simultaneously protects catalysts from sintering, coking, and leaching, while enabling the catalysts to maintain high activity in high-temperature applications.

Peter C. Stair, a Northwestern chemistry professor who also holds an appointment at Argonne, reported that oxide coatings made via atomic layer deposition (ALD) can indeed provide that type of catalyst protection.

The team, which also includes Junling Lu, Mayfair C. Kung, and Jeffrey W. Elam, grew an 8-nm ALD shell of alumina (45 atomic layers) on otherwise conventionally supported-palladium nanoparticles and compared the coated particles with uncoated ones in catalysis tests. They found that when the catalysts were used for one hour to dehydrogenate ethane to ethylene in oxygen at 650 °C, the coated catalysts accumulated only 6% as much coke as the uncoated ones and maintained high activity and product selectivity. In contrast, uncoated catalysts stopped making products after just 30 minutes. In addition, microscopy analysis showed that under reaction conditions, uncoated particles quickly sintered and were leached from the support. Stair reported that the ALD-treated catalysts showed no morphology changes even after reaction at 675 °C for 28 hours.

ALD encapsulation not only minimizes sintering of the palladium but “remarkably leads to selective poisoning of the catalytic sites for undesired side reactions,” says Bruce C. Gates of the University of California, Davis. But given the high cost of ALD, he predicts researchers may find it challenging to design economical ways to create such uniform coatings.

---

C&EN Covers The ACS National Meeting

Want the scoop on the ACS meeting in San Diego? Check out C&EN Picks, a series of videos that spotlight sessions selected by C&EN staff. Reporters also fan out across the meeting to bring you news coverage. Find it all collected at C&EN's meeting page, cenatacs.tumblr.com.

---

Home Video Hovel- Wizards (reviewed by West Anthony ...

The ’70s were weird, man.  There is a strain of technophobia that has run through our cinema for a long time now, from the bemoaning of the march of progress in Orson Welles’ 1942 film The Magnificent Ambersons (based on the Booth Tarkington novel of the same name), to the ’50s Cold War hysteria that saw atomic radiation making things very very big (The Amazing Colossal Man) or very very teeny (The Incredible Shrinking Man), to James Cameron’s dire cinematic warnings of mankind’s technological hubris (Terminator, Titanic, Avatar).  It seems like it took the ’70s to fuse together a battle between modern technology and the most readily available and attractive alternative, the Tolkienesque back-to-nature faerie/hippie dream that was gradually abandoned by the Woodstock generation in favor of the pensions and vacation homes that they currently enjoy… and are in the process of denying to future generations.  This sort of thing eventually gave way to the “greed is good” mojo of the Reagan ’80s, and as the “Me Decade” drew to a close one could see technophobic concerns fading toward more personal matters.  For the most part.  Consider two ’70s technophobe classics:  in 1970′s Colossus: The Forbin Project, a supercomputer is created that instantly becomes self-aware, claims absolute dominion over the Earth and proceeds to tell mankind what to do at all times and everywhere under the threat of nuclear devastation.  Later came 1977′s Demon Seed, in which another supercomputer traps Julie Christie in her house because it wants to impregnate her so she can have its baby.  You heard me.  This pretty much sums up the ’70s — at the dawn of the decade, computers wanted to take over the world, and by the end they just wanted to get laid.  Yet there were some who still fought the good fight, who were still sounding the clarion call to throw down your pocket calculators and your Pong and instead run away to romp and frolic together in sylvan glens living off the land, at least until being torn to shreds by bears and mountain lions.

Which brings us to Wizards, a 1977 animated film whose message has been usurped by, ironically, more technologically-advanced films, but still has a great deal of natural — dare I say, unshaven — charms.  When animator Ralph Bakshi (Fritz The Cat, Heavy Traffic) decided to turn his attentions to a more family-oriented fantasy story, it was inevitable that the results would still be a bit wide of the mark compared to the stuff Disney was (and is) doing.  While not approaching the X-rated sex-and-drugs anarchy of his earlier work, Wizards still has its share of mature imagery and unsettling moments that are decidedly more adult in nature interspersed amongst the cuter cartoon elements.  In this technology vs. magic tale set on a distant-future Earth in which we have long since been wiped out, two wizard brothers, Avatar and Blackwolf — no points for guessing which is the good one and the bad one — go to battle in an epic showdown between an army of gun-toting mutants and an opposing army of sword-wielding elves.  As Avatar makes his perilous journey across various striking cartoon landscapes, he is accompanied by elf warrior Weehawk and a scantily-clad fairy hottie named Elinore.  (Note to parents number one:  OK, this film doesn’t approach the heights of admittedly delightful animated nudity found in, say, Heavy Metal, but the amply-endowed Elinore is always… um… cold.)  Blackwolf awaits their arrival with an ace up his bony sleeve, a newfound weapon that promises to neutralize the elf army and make his mutant army invincible:  Nazi propaganda films.  (Note to parents number two:  yes folks, Hitler appears rather prominently in this picture.  So if you’re planning on showing Wizards to your wee tots, get ready to answer some heavy questions.)

Here is where we find a most unique technophobe argument for a movie:  Wizards presents the notion that cinema itself can be used as a weapon of mass destruction, a concept that is undoubtedly true (witness the 1940 anti-Semitic propaganda of Jew Süss, or the more recent military recruitment poster that is Act Of Valor), but it’s so rare to see anyone in Hollywood making this argument that I give Bakshi major points for doing so, especially in what is generally considered to be a family film.  In fact, this could be a potent rejoinder to Martin Scorsese’s Hugo — where that film sings the praises of cinema in a family-friendly environment, this one is the flip side, warning of the misuse of the very tools that tell both of their stories.  As the fascist Germany newsreel footage unfurls, some left untouched and some rotoscoped to give it an eerie psychedelic kick, and the Nazi iconography known to any reasonably intelligent viewer is recontextualized by its animated fantasy surroundings, the effect is jarring and hypnotic.  We are watching a children’s cartoon on one level, and on another we are witnessing a deconstruction of cinematic propaganda that is undeniably striking to look at; as if that weren’t enough, Bakshi uses repurposed footage from old live-action battle scenes from films such as Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (also rotoscoped) that further turns the film into a dizzying meta-cinematic Mobius strip.

Needless to say, kids aren’t going to get any of this.  But it is part of what makes Wizards remarkable among animated family films:  while children can get a kick out of the splendid visuals and adorable fairies and occasional moments of kartoon komedy, Ralph Bakshi has a very potent message for the grownups about the perils of both technology and cinema whose sophistication was sorely lacking in the Disney fare of its day.  And this is in no small way due to the entirely personal nature of Bakshi’s work, a singular and independent artistic vision that no corporate behemoth could hope to match.  It is his independence and provocative viewpoint that makes Wizards one of the more enduring and rewatchable artifacts of its time.

The Hunger Games · Amanda Sage

Sunday, April 1st, 2012 7:50 pm—Film

The Hunger Games (USA 2012, Action/Drama/Sci-Fi/Thriller), Writers: Gary Ross, Suzanne Collins, Billy Ray; Director: Gary Ross

Uh-oh, my first post since January… I’ve been neglecting this blog a bit.

I’m back at it with The Hunger Games courtesy of my brilliant eldest nephew Jon. Only nine years old, he’d already gobbled up the Suzanne Collins trilogy last December over the holidays. So I quickly followed suit to prepare for this joint post.

I’d heard of the books before Jon started talking about them, but hadn’t read them because they seemed a little simplistic when I flipped through them at the bookstore. Still, I thought the premise was fascinating.

The Hunger Games trilogy is set in a post-apocalyptic North America known as Panem. Twelve districts of people live at the mercy of the wealthy Capitol. Every year, each district pays penance for a rebellion led by the decimated District 13 by offering up one boy and one girl (known as “tributes”) between the ages of 12 and 18 for a televised fight to the death. Tributes are drawn by lottery, and viewing of the Games is mandatory.

Collins says she got the idea for The Hunger Games while channel surfing one night. Flipping through the stations, she caught flashes of reality shows featuring young people competing at all costs for the given prize (money, weight loss, love, you name it), intercut with footage from the Iraq war. “These two things began to fuse together in a very unsettling way,” she said. “And that is where I got the idea for Katniss’ story.”

Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is the heroine of The Hunger Games. A resident of District 12, she volunteers as tribute when her younger sister’s name is drawn. She leaves behind her family and the boy she loves (Gale Hawthorne, played by Liam Hemsworth) to fight fellow tribute Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson)—the boy who loves her—along with 22 other youth.

The idea is incredibly disturbing, perhaps all the more so because of its timeliness. Those in power viciously exploit those with the least. People with almost nothing forced to throw everything on the line to sacrifice for the bare minimum. Children killed for the world to see. People’s lives reduced to entertainment, with viewers playing the odds, hedging bets and even sponsoring their favourite tributes.

Collins had plenty of source material, and she draws on a lot. I ended up liking the books much more than I expected, particularly the first. But the horror of her idea was somewhat lost in translation to the screen.

That’s largely due to the fact that The Hunger Games is a horrifying story targeted at teens and pre-teens. In her books, Collins found the right tone to capture her dark subject matter without indulging in gory detail that might scare away a Young Adult rating. But when the film shies away from getting too gritty, it winds up being less powerful and disturbing than it should be. I’m not asking for explicit violence, but I think something like The Hunger Games merits a somewhat heavier treatment. You don’t want to make killing too pretty, after all.

Jon lives in another province, so we didn’t see the movie together. But one of the first things he mentioned during our debrief was that his screening had a warning that The Hunger Games wasn’t recommended for younger audiences. I asked if he found the movie scary. He said, “It wasn’t even really that scary, but it was a bit sad. Twenty-four people being put in an arena and forced to kill each other is kind of sad.”

Jon also said there wasn’t really anything about the movie he didn’t like. “It cut out a lot of parts, it added in some parts. In some parts you can’t understand the movie as well without the book.”

Generally, I agree. It’s a solid adaptation that lost some details along the way, and threw in others to try to make up for them in short order. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.

In some cases, the transition to film brought key moments to life. When District 12 silently salutes Katniss for her bravery, the absence of sound and the mood it creates is captured in a way that can’t be matched in writing. In other cases, there were missed opportunities, like when Katniss and Peeta are first paraded before the Capitol. The glory of their fiery robes wasn’t anywhere near what I’d imagined from the book.

One overriding issue for me was that the movie took away too much from Katniss’ perspective, which is all we have in the book. It’s too bad, because Lawrence, who was so amazing in Winter’s Bone (see August 22, 2010 post), was perfectly cast and could have carried the piece. But that would have been a very different film that might not suit its young target audience—especially not if they haven’t been prepped by the books.

At the end of the day, Jon came out a happy camper, which makes the movie a success in my mind. He liked the costumes and the characters, and had this to say in sum: “People should watch The Hunger Games because it’s quite a good movie. But they should also probably read the books first, because the books have more in them.”

*            *            *

I love you Jon. Keep reading.

Leave a Reply

Quiche Lorraine & all her friends. « Guiltless Splurge

Quiche Lorraine & all her friends.

April 1, 2012, 3:17 PM
Filed under: Admire & Inspire, breakfast, College Cooking | Tags: bisquick, breakfast, cheese, crust, egg beaters, eggs, fat free, fat free breakfast, guiltless, half and half, healthy, healthy breakfast, lorraine, low fat quiche, omelet, pie, pie crust, quiche, spinach, splurge, tomato, tomatoes

Quiche: n. A baked flan or tart with a savory filling thickened with eggs.

An omelet inside of a pie? Quite simply one of the most satisfying brunch foods made possible. It’s that blend of savory breakfast with the subtle sweetness of flaky crust, and pairing of the creamy filling with the flaky crust.

The bad news: the typical slice of quiche (ya know, the fluffy yet somehow dense blend of cheese, meat, and vegetables) has anywhere from around 400-500 calories. Fat being the primary contributor.

The good news: there’s a bunch of recipes out there that replace the fat by making simple substitutions. The recipe below took me no more than 7-8 minutes to add to a blender & then place in the oven. *Make sure to read the bisquick & PAM tricks!

OUT: Pre-made Pie Crust               IN: Bisquick

OUT: Heavy Cream                            IN: Fat Free Half & Half

OUT: 6 Eggs                                           IN: Egg beaters (or egg whites + 2 eggs)

OUT: Full Fat Cheese                        IN: Fat Free Cheddar & Reduced Fat Mozz.

OUT: Meat                                             IN: Lots & lots of veggies to make it packed

QUICHE

prep time: 8 minutes 

cook time: 40-50 minutes

1 cup Bisquick*

Fat-free Half and Half

1 + 1/2 cup Egg Beaters** (or egg whites + 2 eggs)

Fat Free Shredded Cheese

Frozen Vegetables (spinach, broccoli, peppers)

Tomatoes

Sundried Tomato & Basil Seasoning

The measures are all estimates depending on what you like. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Spray a pie plate with PAM. Thaw or defrost your vegetables. Squeeze out any excess water. Add the egg beaters, half and half, bisquick, and seasoning to a blender. Blend until well incorporated. Add your vegetables to the pie plate and pour the egg mixture on top of it. Add the shredded cheese, using a fork to mix it through out.

Layer the tomatoes on top of everything, and add more shredded cheese on top. **Lightly spray the cheese with PAM. (This breaks down molecules in fat free cheese and allows it to melt more evenly – see the previous pizza post from Chef’s Chemistry! http://guiltlesssplurge.wordpress.com/2010/04/15/italians-say-amore-i-just-say-more/) Place in the oven for about 40-50 minutes.

*Although the bisquick is incorporated through out the entire egg-mixture, when placed in the oven it spreads evenly out to the edges.

GUILTESS SPLURGE QUICHE (makes about 5 LARGE slices), 1 slice ~ 145 calories, 2 g fat, 17 g carb, 15 g protein, 3 g sugar.

Like this:

Be the first to like this post.

Leave a Comment so far
Leave a comment

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Zoloft Birth Defects Lawsuit

Pregnant women who are taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), such as Zoloft (also known as sertraline), may be placing their babies at risk of serious birth defects. Please contact us for the most recent Zoloft birth defects lawsuit litigation news. Numerous studies have shown that prenatal exposure to SSRIs can increase the odds of certain congenital malformations. For example, a Swedish study showed a 2-fold increase in the risk for heart defects. Another study published in The New England Journal of Medicine showed a 6-fold increase in the risk of persistent pulmonary hypertension (PPHN), a potentially fatal lung disorder. There are several Zoloft birth defects that can jeopardize the health of a baby.

One class of congenital disorders, known as neural tube defects (NTDs), affect the baby’s spinal cord. The most common presentation is spina bifida, a condition that forms during the first month of fetal development. Its side effects may be mild or severe, and can last a lifetime. We’ll explain how the disorder is treated and managed below. Mothers who used sertraline while pregnant, and gave birth to babies with spina bifida may be eligible to file Zoloft lawsuit claims against Pfizer, the drug’s manufacturer.

How Zoloft And Pregnancy Side Effects Present

Early during fetal development, the central nervous system begins as the neural plate, a flat structure of specialized cells. The plate starts to curl during the first month to form the neural tube. Normally, the cells of the tube fuse together during the fourth week to form a solid, unbroken structure. Sometimes, however, they fail to do so, and allow one or more openings to remain in the tube.

At birth, the openings appear between the baby’s vertebrae. If they are too small for any portion of the spinal cord or nerves to protrude through them, the condition is called spina bifida occulta. It rarely presents symptoms. In fact, many people never realize they have it.

A more serious form of the disorder is called meningocele. An opening between the baby’s vertebrae is large enough for a group of membranes called the meninges to protrude through it. Since the nerves and spinal cord remain in place, housed within the vertebrae, there are rarely lasting side effects.

The most severe form of spina bifida is also the most common: myelomeningocele. Here, the vertebral opening is large enough that a portion of the spinal cord, along with nerves, herniates through it. Because these spinal elements are exposed to damage, the baby will usually suffer limited paralysis, limb weakness, and loss of sensation. Many babies also develop neurological complications as well as problems with urinary and bowel function.

Prenatal Surgery To Minimize Spinal Damage

A surgeon can sometimes repair the defect while the baby is still in the womb. Because occulta and meningocele pose few lasting problems, surgery is usually reserved for myelomeningocele. The surgeon will expose and open the mother’s uterus to access the fetus’s spinal cord. Any herniating spinal elements are returned, and the opening through which they protruded is closed.

The baby is still likely to display physical dysfunction after birth since the spinal cord and nerves will have been exposed. But surgery can minimize the damage. Many experts also believe that prenatal surgery can minimize the likelihood of intracranial pressure and cognitive dysfunction.

Postnatal Surgery For Zoloft Birth Defects – Spina Bifida

Most cases of spina bifida are addressed after the baby is born. This is because prenatal intervention for the disorder is still a relatively new procedure and poses risks. Many surgeons lack the requisite skills and equipment to perform the operation.

Babies born with meningocele or myelomeningocele undergo surgery within the first forty-eight hours of life. The meninges and exposed spinal elements are returned through the vertebral opening. Then, the wound is closed to prevent infection.

Babies with severe spina bifida usually require multiple surgeries to correct deformities. Additionally, they need ongoing therapy later in life to learn how to live with paralysis. Many people with myelomeningocele are forced to use a wheelchair throughout their lives.

Other Zoloft birth defects, such as heart defects, craniosynostosis (a congenital malformation of the skull), and PPHN are more common than spina bifida. However, severe spina bifida is serious. It can cause pain, disability, and neurological challenges.

If you used Zoloft during your pregnancy, and your child was born with birth defects, you may be able to file a Zoloft lawsuit claim for compensation. Contact an experienced Zoloft birth defects lawsuit attorney to discuss your case.

. Bookmark the

.