Sheriff's response time is longer in unincorporated areas, audit finds

It took Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies a minute longer to respond to emergency calls from unincorporated parts of the county than from cities that contract with the department for police services, according to a county audit.

The finding comes days after Supervisor Gloria Molina accused Sheriff Lee Baca of "stealing" police resources from residents in unincorporated neighborhoods and threatened to hire "independent private patrol cars" to backfill cuts in sheriff's patrols. She has accused Baca of providing better service to contract cities than to unincorporated areas.

According to the audit, which examined the last fiscal year, it took deputies, on average, 4.8 minutes to respond to emergency calls in contract cities compared with 5.8 minutes in unincorporated areas.

Sheriff's officials said the extra minute was because neighborhoods in unincorporated areas are more spread out and have more difficult road conditions.

The audit also found that Baca provided 91% of promised patrol hours to unincorporated areas, compared with 99% for cities and agencies that buy his services. Sheriff's officials blamed the difference on deep budget cuts imposed by the board that caused the department to leave dozens of deputy positions unfilled.

Adjusted for those cuts, the department was much closer to its goal — averaging 98.5% fulfillment of its pledged patrol hours, according to the audit.

The findings by the county's auditor-controller are expected to add more fuel to the ongoing debate between the sheriff and the board about whether the sheriff is shortchanging county residents who live outside city borders.

Baca and his predecessors have long wrangled with supervisors over funding and patrol resources.

Although the board sets the sheriff's budget, Baca, an elected official, has wide discretion on how to spend it. The Sheriff's Department polices about three-fourths of the county. Along with the unincorporated areas, Baca's deputies patrol more than 40 cities within the county that don't have their own police forces. The patrol obligations for those cities are set in contracts with the department, so county budget cuts are more likely to affect unincorporated areas.

On Tuesday, the board is expected to discuss Molina's idea to empower unincorporated neighborhoods to negotiate police contracts with the Sheriff's Department or some other agency — the same way incorporated cities do.

According to the audit, it costs the sheriff about $552 million to provide police services for contract cities and agencies, but the department gets approximately $371 million back. The auditor-controller suggested pursuing changes in state law or board policy to allow the sheriff to recoup more.

State law prohibits sheriffs from billing contract cities for non-patrol services provided countywide. So the department has provided a broad range of services — such as homicide and narcotics detectives, bomb squads and the county crime lab — at no extra charge.

Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said those rigid agreements — with contract cities, the county's courts, community colleges and public transit lines — limited where the sheriff could slash in the face of county budget woes.

The board has cut the sheriff's budget — now at $2.8 billion — by $128 million in 2010, $96 million in 2011 and $140 million last year, according to Whitmore.

The sheriff has already reassigned about two dozen gang enforcement deputies to patrol in unincorporated areas and has identified more than 90 other deputies to do the same, Whitmore said.

Molina's spokeswoman declined to suggest other areas where sheriff's officials should slash in light of funding cuts from the board but said that services to unincorporated areas should not be one of them.

"We respectfully request they go back to the drawing board," spokeswoman Roxane Márquez said.

robert.faturechi@latimes.com

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Google's Plan to Snatch Shopping From Amazon Is Working

Of all the great match-ups among tech’s Fantastic Four — Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon — it’s Google versus Amazon that’s becoming the most fascinating, and not because of who has the better tablet.

Quietly, Google has been retooling in a bid to beat Amazon as the place to shop — and some early evidence suggests the search giant isn’t crazy to try.

In a survey released today, Google’s transition last fall to all-paid product listing display ads in search results is paying off. (These are the product photos that show up next to price and seller info at the top of “organic” Google search results for products, such as at the top of this search for “iPhone 5.”) Digital ad management provider Marin Software found that advertisers managing $4 billion annually in online ad campaigns through its platform spent 600 percent more on Google product listing ads after the change in October than before. That result alone doesn’t necessarily surprise: If Google says pay to play, advertisers have little choice.

But they may be paying gladly. Marin found that the paid product listings were turning up more in Google search results, especially around the holidays, which means advertisers’ products are getting seen more by potential buyers. And that visibility is translating into action: Marin says click-throughs on product listing ads have increased 210 percent since last year.

(Marin also is releasing a new product today to help advertisers manage Google paid product listing campaigns, though the company says it has no strong reason to show bias toward Google, since advertisers also use its software to manage campaigns on competing sites such as Yahoo, Bing and Facebook.)

When Google announced its plans to require companies to pay to be listed in product searches, critics and competitors complained the change would hurt consumers by tainting the objectivity of the search results. While the results may now be plainly biased, Marin vice president of marketing Matt Lawson says users are responding to the paid listings more because Google is putting more effort into them.

And so are advertisers, who had less incentive to care about the quality of listings they got for free. “As soon as it became clear they were going to be paying for them and contributing a significant amount of their budget to them, then they became interested in managing it,” Lawson says.

What does any of this have to do with Amazon? Lawson and Marin Software CEO Chris Lien say that online shoppers today tend to start in one of two places for product information: Google or Amazon. In effect, Amazon has become a “commerce search engine,” which cuts into Google’s core function. To compete, Google wants to give shoppers every reason not to go straight to Amazon by becoming as reliable a destination not just to learn about products, but to buy them.

“What you’re going to see them do is do everything they can to enable marketers to sell through their platform,” Lawson says.

Not that Google likely plans to set up its own warehouses, he says. But he adds that the days when merchants see Google as a conduit for clicks to their own sites is fading. If Google can package the sale from search to checkout, merchants can handle the inventory and shipping themselves. If Google and retailers — especially brick-and-mortar Amazon competitors — can come together in that way, suddenly online shoppers have another broad, deep Amazon alternative.

At the same time, Lien says, the competition between Google and Amazon isn’t all-or-nothing. Shoppers are too smart for that.

“Consumers are looking on Amazon and they’re looking on Google,” Lien says. “I think most thoughtful consumers are to take the best deal.”

Homepage photo: Halilgokdal/Flickr

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Philadelphia opera co.: New name, new vision

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The Opera Company of Philadelphia is getting a name change that officials say is in better harmony with its move toward more innovative programming and greater diversity in its repertoire.

The company said Tuesday it will now be known simply as Opera Philadelphia. The new name and logo will appear on all of its brochures and ads.

The announcement was made in conjunction with the unveiling of the 2013-2014 season.

The company plans to continue bringing opera to new audiences with surprise “pop-up” concerts in famous Philadelphia locations. Past performances at a downtown Macy’s and the Reading Terminal Market have received millions of views on YouTube.

Opera Philadelphia says it has five new operas in development and aims to present challenging contemporary works along with classics like “Carmen” and “La Boheme.”

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Well: Ask Well: Long-Term Use of Nicotine Gum

In small doses, like those contained in the gum, nicotine is generally considered safe. But it does have stimulant properties that can raise blood pressure, increase heart rate and constrict blood vessels. One large report from 2010 found that compared to people given a placebo, those who used nicotine replacement therapies had a higher risk of heart palpitations and chest pains.

That’s one reason that nicotine gum should, ideally, be used for no more than four to six months, said Lauren Indorf, a nurse practitioner with the Cleveland Clinic’s Tobacco Treatment Center. Yet up to 10 percent of people use it for longer periods, in some cases for a decade or more she said.

Some research has raised speculation that long-term use of nicotine might also raise the risk of cancer, though it has mostly involved laboratory and animal research, and there have not been any long-term randomized studies specifically addressing this question in people. One recent report that reviewed the evidence on nicotine replacement therapy and cancer concluded that, “the risk, if any, seems small compared with continued smoking.”

Ultimately, the biggest problem with using nicotine gum for long periods is that the longer you stay on it, the longer you remain dependent on nicotine, and thus the greater your odds of a smoking relapse, said Ms. Indorf. “What if the gum is not available one day?” she said. “Your body is still relying on nicotine.”

If you find yourself using it for longer than six months, it may be time to consider switching to sugar-free gum or even another replacement therapy, like the patch or nasal spray.

“Getting people on a different regimen helps them break the gum habit and can help taper them off nicotine,” Ms. Indorf said.

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The Caucus: LaHood to Leave Transportation Department

Ray LaHood, the former Republican congressman from Illinois who has run the nation’s Transportation Department under President Obama, will not serve a second term, he told department employees in a letter on Tuesday.

“I’ve told President Obama, and I’ve told many of you, that this is the best job I’ve ever had. I’m grateful to have the opportunity to work with all of you,” Mr. LaHood wrote. He cited the department’s efforts to curb distracted driving and to increase the efficiency of automobiles by raising emissions standards.

As transportation secretary, Mr. LaHood was at the center of efforts to reduce fatigue among pilots and called for greater investment in high-speed rail. He also pushed for large fines against Toyota for safety problems and for a new transportation bill in Congress.

“We have made great progress in improving the safety of our transit systems, pipelines, and highways, and in reducing roadway fatalities to historic lows,” he said. “We have strengthened consumer protections with new regulations on buses, trucks, and airlines.”

Mr. LaHood’s decision makes him the latest in a series of members of the president’s original cabinet to announce their departure in the last several weeks.

In a statement, Mr. Obama praised Mr. LaHood, the last remaining Republican from the president’s first-term cabinet, as a public servant who has been more interested in practical solutions than in partisan politics.

“Years ago, we were drawn together by a shared belief that those of us in public service owe an allegiance not to party or faction, but to the people we were elected to represent,” the president wrote. “And Ray has never wavered in that belief.”

Several people have been mentioned as possible replacements for Mr. LaHood at the Transportation Department. Among them: Antonio Villaraigosa, the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles; Ed Rendell, the former governor of Pennsylvania; Debbie Hersman, the chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board; and Jennifer Granholm, the former Democratic governor of Michigan.

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Follow Michael D. Shear on Twitter at @shearm.

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This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 29, 2013

Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this post said that Mr. LaHood was the sole Republican to serve in Mr. Obama's first-term cabinet. Robert Gates, a Republican who served as defense secretary under President George W. Bush, was re-appointed by Mr. Obama.

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'Argo' producer scours for the next stranger-than-fiction story

Hunched over a desk in his spartan Westwood apartment, David Klawans squints at his computer monitor and knits his brow in concentration. "I'm perusing," he says.

His eyes dart between headlines almost indecipherable on a Web page displaying about 800 stamp-sized images of newspapers from 90 different countries.

"Two kids running? What's that?" he exclaims before clicking on a photo. "Oh, it's refugees. Whatever. Moving on."

SAG 2013: Winners | Quotes | Photo Booth | Red carpet | Backstage | Best & Worst

Nearly every day, for upward of 10-hour stretches, the independent film producer speed-reads police blogs, articles from RSS feeds and niche-interest journals in dogged pursuit of an elusive prize: a story on which to base his next movie.

His biggest hit to date is "Argo." Before the film landed seven Oscar nominations (including one for best picture) and two Golden Globes (including best drama picture), before it generated more than $180 million in worldwide grosses, "Argo" existed as a declassified story in the quarterly CIA journal Studies in Intelligence, which Klawans happens to have been perusing one day in 1998.

"It's like going on the beach with a metal detector," the self-described news junkie says of his process. "Like Kanye West looks through records to sample on his songs, I'm looking for stories to turn into films."

Klawans, 44, has established himself as Hollywood's least likely movie macher by heeding the advice of his mentor, the old-school producer David Brown ("Jaws," "A Few Good Men"): "Read everything you can get your hands on."

Indefatigable in his quest to root out oddball, overlooked true-life stories, Klawans spins material most others ignore into cinematic gold.

OSCAR WATCH: "ARGO"

"Argo" took nearly 14 years to reach the big screen after Klawans read about CIA exfiltration expert Tony Mendez's rescue of six American diplomats hiding in Tehran during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. Mendez (portrayed in the movie by "Argo's" director, Ben Affleck) posed the group as Canadian filmmakers scouting locations for a science-fiction film, created a fictitious production company and planted articles about the bogus project in Hollywood trade papers.

Throughout the '90s Klawans was scraping by as a production assistant for an L.A.-based Japanese TV commercial firm. He didn't own a car, so he bicycled to UCLA's magazine archive to check the story. In microfiche files, he came across the CIA's planted articles in the Hollywood Reporter and Variety from January 1980. "My jaw dropped," he says.

Problem was, Mendez already had representation at Creative Artists Agency and was preparing to publish a memoir, "The Master of Disguise." Even so, Klawans persuaded Mendez to let him attempt to set up a movie project. He eventually bought the rights to Mendez's life story as well.

OSCARS 2013: Nominations

"I'm cycling to pitch meetings wearing a backpack with a change of clothes. It's summertime and I'm sweating. And I'm getting to know studio security. They call me 'bike boy,'" remembers Klawans, who would switch from bike to business attire outside the studio gates. "I would basically throw my backpack behind a bush — I was embarrassed to look like a messenger guy."

The New York University film school graduate was born in Chicago. His family moved to Belgium when he was 2 and he grew up in Europe and the U.S. consuming a steady diet of sci-fi and fantasy films including "Star Wars."

He came close to setting up the "Argo" project as a cable TV movie. But when that deal fell through, Klawans says, "it hit me that Tony had planted stories in Variety and Hollywood Reporter as a cover. For the CIA, it's all about illusions and perception. I thought, 'That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to plant an "Argo" story in a magazine.'"

The producer had met former L.A. Weekly staff writer and "This American Life" contributor Joshuah Bearman through friends who thought the two shared an appreciation for offbeat material. Bearman also had experience turning a magazine story into a movie; an article he reported for Harper's became the 2007 documentary "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters," about two die-hard video game players vying for the world's highest score in the vintage arcade game "Donkey Kong."

Klawans handed over his research and contacts to Bearman and proposed that the journalist write "Argo" as a magazine article that would entice movie backers.

Bearman landed an assignment from Wired magazine, then interviewed everyone he could: Mendez, officials in the State Department with knowledge of the exfiltration and Ken Taylor, the Canadian ambassador to Iran who housed some of the fugitive American diplomats, as well as the six embassy "houseguests."

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The Physics of Awesome People

Who doesn’t love epic videos like this? Not only that, there are some great physics assignments in here. Let’s break it down and see what kind of questions can be asked in this video. There’s a lot there. You can consider this homework if you like.

Goal Line Flip

Here, Jerome Simpson does a flip going into the end zone. Oh. I already did this one. I guess you could consider it an example to go on. Here, I looked at how high he jumped and what kind of power it took. Also, is it real or fake? It’s real of course. It was on TV, you can’t fake that.

Double Front Tuck Over a Car

Notice how I said “front tuck” instead of “flip”? That’s because I know all the gymnastics lingo that my daughters use. Well, I still can’t spell “Yurchenko”, but it is fun to say.

In this part of the video, you could make a plot of the guy’s vertical and horizontal position as a function of time. It would be cool to see that his center of mass is just like a tossed ball. Oh, he does push off the front of the car. Also, if he wanted to do a triple front tuck, how fast would he have to spin? With the rotation rate he has in this jump, how high would he have to jump to make a triple front tuck?

High Jumping Basketball Guy

How high does he jump? Does moving his arms like that help him get higher? What about his center of mass?

Rope Swing

You will need to make some estimates here – but I think you can do it. How fast would she be going at the bottom of the swing? How long would she feel weightless? (You can say weightless is an apparent weight less than 10% of standing on Earth). What if you include air drag – how much will that change your answer? I already did something like this before – but not for this exact video.

Giant Basketball Shot

Really, I have done this one before too. Well, I haven’t looked at THIS shot, but similar ones. I have several posts on this, but maybe I will just link to this one. In short, you need to model the motion of a thrown basketball including air resistance forces. Really, the only way to do this is with a numerical model. Python would be a good choice. In the linked post, I looked at how much a thrower could vary the initial throw and still make the shot.

Giant Blob Jump

Have you noticed how many of these titles have the word “giant” in them? Well, I have already looked at the Giant Blog Jump before. How high does the launched person go? What kind of acceleration would the person have on launch? How much energy is lost from the original jumpers to the launched person?

Triple Behind the Back Football Catch

This is Chris Chambers from an NFL Fantasy Football commercial. I don’t know for sure, but I think this is fake. If you want, you could try to show it’s indeed a fakeorama. How? Well, first is to look at the background motion due to the motion of the camera. For many fake videos, they record with a tripod and then add a fake camera shake. Next, you could try to plot the motion of the football – but it might be difficult with the camera angle. You could look at the time of flight and compare that to a ball thrown from some similar distance. I suspect you could estimate the distance pretty easily. There is one last thing. What kind of frictional force would have to be exerted by the glove on the ball to catch it like that?

Behind the Back Baseball

I’m almost positive this one is fake also. In fact, I think I recall reading an article about it being fake. Anyway, you could analyze this one just like the previous football scene.

Giant Skateboard Jump

Do you notice how I am sticking with the “giant” theme whenever possible? This isn’t the coolest video, but it looks like it would work very well with video analysis. The camera is stationary and mostly perpendicular to the motion. You could at least see how fast he was going.

64 Inch Box Jump

I already looked at this one too. It’s not fake.

Rope Swing Jump – It’s Giant

This is another rope swing, so let’s look at something different. How many flips does this guy do? If he pulled his knees in just a bit tighter, he would reduce his moment of inertia. Estimate the number of turns due to this change in position.

Motorcycle Flip

I’m not sure I have a great question – but the video would be easy to do a video analysis of. At least you could find the speed and height of the jump.

Homework Help

Someone is going to ask: “What chapter in the book is this homework from?”  The answer: Chapter 1-8, the video analysis section.  Here are some video analysis resources for you.  Note that some of these are used with an older code, but they still check out.

Sorry, I had more but they are past the expiration date.  I need to make some more video analysis tutorials.

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“Zero Dark Thirty” hits the U.K.: did critics zero in on torture scenes?

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “Zero Dark Thirty” landed this week in the United Kingdom, where the Kathryn Bigelow drama continued to stir debate over its depiction of the use of torture in the CIA’s decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden.

As they have in the U.S., some critics accused the filmmakers of implying that enhanced interrogation techniques could be a useful form of intelligence gathering, while others believed that Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal were more ambiguous in their portrayal of torture’s efficacy.

Most reviewers were floored by the propulsive storyline, the performance of star Jessica Chastain and the gripping dramatization of the raid on bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.

In the Evening Standard, David Sexton argues that the film is ambivalent about waterboarding and other brutal methods, noting that a key piece of information is only discovered after interrogators ply a detainee with food and kindness.

“This has proved offensive to those who, to avoid having to accept there may be negative consequences from taking the moral high ground, prefer to believe that torture must always be ineffective as well as wrong,” Sexton writes. “Some of these critics – most notably nitwit Naomi Wolf, who has tastefully compared Bigelow to Leni Riefensthal and dubbed her ‘torture’s handmaiden’ – have claimed the film’s disturbing representation of torture amounts to a blithe commendation of the practice, not really a possible interpretation for those who have actually seen the movie.”

In a four-star review, Sexton went on to hail “Zero Dark Thirty” as “terrifically good” and said the depiction of the raid was a “masterclass in action filmmaking.”

In The Independent, Anthony Quinn praised the film for avoiding simplistic conclusions about America’s controversial interrogation methods.

“The waterboarding, the beatings, the dog collars, all the stuff you’ve heard about is here, and perhaps some you haven’t – the spectacle of a man being forced inside a small wooden box is as harrowing as any,” Quinn writes. “Is this an abhorrent crime? Would the information be impossible to gain by other means? The film isn’t saying either way; it is asking us to make up our own minds.”

Quinn also argued that the film is more effective because it was directed by a woman and that because of her gender, Bigelow has a less “gung-ho” relationship to violence than a Ridley Scott or Michael Mann might bring to the same material (he may not have seen “Point Break”)

Robbie Collins maintains in his review of the film in the Telegraph that Bigelow and Boal leave it to audiences to decide whether torture is right or wrong.

“These scenes are every bit as hellish to watch as they should be, and Bigelow’s genius is to make them feel at once gratuitous and necessary,” Collins writes.

He also praised the film for eschewing jingoism and for having the courage to end on a deflated note.

“Where, then, does Zero Dark Thirty leave us?” Collins asks.

“In the same place it leaves Maya: with our thirst for justice quenched, but our sense of rightness shaken. “Where do you want to go?” a pilot asks her, and she starts shedding tear after tear. This, finally, is what victory looks like, and its likeness to defeat is terrifying.”

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian was more unsettled by the film’s relationship with torture and seemed to wish it had taken a firmer position.

“There is nothing in Zero Dark Thirty comparable to Gavin Hood’s soul-searching 2007 movie, Rendition, in which Jake Gyllenhaal’s CIA agent denounces waterboarding information as valueless; he quotes Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and says torture victims ‘speak upon the rack,/ Where men enforced do speak anything,’” Bradshaw writes. “I can well believe that, but for me the most sinister depiction of torture is non-depiction. Many Hollywood movies about the war on terror have managed to ignore the subject, implying non-existence. Despite its fence-sitting, I prefer Bigelow’s account.”

Bradshaw was also less enamored of the film on an artistic level, writing that “It is well made, with a relentless, dour drumbeat of tension and a great final sequence, but nowhere near as good as the first season of Homeland.”

Empire Magazine’s Kim Newman mostly skirted the political debate surrounding “Zero Dark Thirty,” but was ecstatic about Bigelow’s directing, the film’s pacing and star turns.

“Like Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, it’s a relatively new kind of American patriotic war movie, counterprogramming jaded paranoid fantasies like the Bourne movies or the liberal horror stories (Redacted, Rendition, In The Valley Of Elah, Green Zone etc.) thrown up by the War On Terror,” Newman writes. “It’s measured, seething with suppressed emotion, unafraid of slow stretches and false trails, snapping shut like a mantrap when blood is shed. If it grips in a more intellectual, journalistic manner than its Oscar-winning predecessor, it’s because Chastain’s character is necessarily absent during the climax – though she has a terrific post-traumatic outburst when the case is closed.”

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Recipes for Health: Gluten-Free Banana Chocolate Muffins

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

My son Liam still doesn’t know that the muffins he has been devouring all week are gluten-free. I am a big believer that there is no need to forego gluten unless you are truly gluten intolerant; indeed, nutritionists are concerned that a gluten-free diet can be lacking in essential nutrients and digestive enzymes. But I have a sister who is gluten intolerant, so this year I finally made some forays into gluten-free baking in preparation for her annual visit. When she comes I make sure to pick up plenty of gluten-free pasta and bread for her, and we go to holiday parties armed with gluten-free crackers so she doesn’t have to forego hors d’oeuvres.

This year I decided to experiment with gluten-free pastries. I substituted a commercial gluten-free flour mix for all-purpose flour in a pâte sablée recipe and the resulting cookies and tart shells had a wonderful texture – no threat of toughening the dough by working the gluten too much. But I wasn’t crazy about the flavor because the commercial mix I used had a fair amount of bean flour in it and it tasted too strong.

So I put together my own gluten-free flour mix, one without bean flour, and turned to America’s favorite Gluten-Free Girl, Shauna James Ahem for guidance. I was already thinking about making muffins and I wanted a mix that could replace the whole wheat flour I usually use in conjunction with other grains or flours. Her formula for a whole-grain flour mix is simple – 70 percent ground gluten-free grain like rice flour, millet flour, buckwheat flour or teff (the list on her site is a long one) and 30 percent starch like potato starch, cornstarch or arrowroot. For this week’s recipes, I used what I had, which was brown rice flour, potato starch and cornstarch – 20 percent potato starch and 10 percent cornstarch -- and that’s the basis for the nutritional analyses of this week’s recipes. I used this mix in conjunction with a gluten-free meal or flour, so the amount of pure starch in the batters is much less than 30 percent.

When you bake anything it is much simpler and results are more consistent if you use grams and scale your ingredients. This is especially true with gluten-free baking, since you are working with grain and starch formulas. Digital scales are not expensive and I urge you to switch over to this method if you like to bake. I have given approximate cup measures so the recipes will work both ways, but scaling is more accurate.

Gluten-Free Banana Chocolate Muffins

These dark chocolate muffins taste more extravagant than they are. Cacao – raw chocolate -- is considered by many to be a “super food.” It is high in antioxidants and an excellent source of magnesium, iron, chromium, manganese, zinc, and copper. It is also a good source of omega-6 fatty acids and vitamin C.

75 grams (approximately 1/2 cup) buckwheat flour

75 grams (approximately 3/4 cup) almond powder (also known as almond flour)

140 grams (approximately 1 cup) whole grain or all-purpose gluten-free flour mix*

32 grams (approximately 6 tablespoons) dark cocoa powder

10 grams (2 teaspoons) baking powder

5 grams (1 teaspoon) baking soda

3.5 grams (rounded 1/2 teaspoon) salt

100 grams (approximately 1/2 cup) raw brown sugar or packed light brown sugar

2 eggs

75 grams (1/3 cup) canola or grape seed oil

120 grams (1/2 cup) plain low-fat yogurt or buttermilk

5 grams (1 teaspoon) vanilla extract

330 grams ripe bananas (peeled weight), about 3 medium, mashed (1 1/4 cups)

115 grams (about 2/3 cup) semi-sweet or bittersweet chocolate chips or chopped bittersweet chocolate

*For the gluten-free flour mix I used 98 grams (about 2/3 cup) rice flour and 42 grams -- about 1/3 cup -- of a mix of cornstarch and potato starch)

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Oil or butter muffin tins. Sift the dry ingredients into a large bowl. Pour in any bits that remain in the sifter.

2. In another large bowl or in the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with the whip attachment beat together the oil and sugar until creamy. Beat in the eggs and beat until incorporated, then beat in the yogurt or buttermilk, the vanilla and the mashed bananas. Add the dry ingredients and mix at low speed or whisk gently until combined. If using a mixer, scrape down the sides of the bowl and the beaters. Fold in the chocolate chips.

3. Using a spoon or ice cream scoop, fill muffin cups to the top. Place in the oven and bake 30 minutes, until a muffin springs back lightly when touched. Remove from the heat and if the muffins come out of the tins easily, remove from the tins and place on a rack. I like these best served warm, but if they don’t release easily allow them to cool, then remove from the tins.

Yield: 16 muffins (1/3 cup capacity)

Advance preparation: These keep for a couple of days out of the refrigerator, for a few more days in the refrigerator, and for a few months in the freezer.

Nutritional information per serving: 217 calories; 10 grams fat; 2 grams saturated fat; 2 grams polyunsaturated fat; 3 grams monounsaturated fat; 24 milligrams cholesterol; 29 grams carbohydrates; 2 grams dietary fiber; 251 milligrams sodium; 4 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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Media Decoder Blog: Dodgers, Signing Lucrative TV Deal, Plan to Start Regional Sports Network

The owners of the Los Angeles Dodgers said Monday that they intended to start a regional sports network in southern California, confirming weeks of reports about the team’s plans.

The network, to be named SportsNet LA, will be backed by Time Warner Cable, one of the main television distributors in the region, with a commitment of $7 billion to $8 billion over the next 25 years. The price tag, though not made public by the parties, was confirmed by a person with direct knowledge of the deal. Analysts said it was the most lucrative television deal for a single team in sports history.

Time Warner Cable will carry the Dodgers network and will be in charge of convincing others to carry it, as well. In exchange, Time Warner Cable will keep all the advertising revenue that it sells for the network. The Dodgers owners said in a news release on Monday that SportsNet LA would carry all the team’s games and “comprehensive behind-the-scenes Dodger programming.”

The multibillion-dollar deal with the Dodgers seemingly flies in the face of Time Warner Cable’s public statements about tamping down on the rising costs of programming. SportsNet LA is likely to amount to $4 to $5 a month per subscriber in southern California, and some of that cost will be passed on subscribers through their monthly cable bills, with Time Warner Cable also absorbing some of the cost.

But Time Warner Cable says that doing business directly with the Dodgers cuts out the middleman, in this case Fox Sports, which was also bidding for rights to the Dodgers games. The company said the same thing when it outbid Fox to carry Los Angeles Lakers games in 2011, a 20-year deal valued at $3 billion.

“This deal, like our Lakers’ deal, furthers our efforts to attain greater certainty and control over local and regional sports programming costs,” David Rone, the president of Time Warner Cable Sports, said of the Dodgers agreement in a statement.

Fox Sports, owned by the News Corporation, disputes this notion, in part because its bid for the Dodgers was significantly less than Time Warner Cable’s bid. Dodgers games will continue to be televised on Fox Sports’ Prime Ticket network until the new network starts in 2014.

A group led by Magic Johnson and financed by Guggenheim Partners bought the Dodgers last year in a deal valued at $2.3 billion. “We concluded last year that the best way to give our fans what they want — more content and more Dodger baseball — was to launch our own network,” Mark Walter, the founder of Guggenheim Partners and the chairman of the Dodgers franchise, said in a statement.

The network will be operated by American Media Productions, a subsidiary of the Dodgers ownership group. “The creation of AMP will provide substantial financial resources over the coming years for the Dodgers to build on their storied legacy and bring a World Championship home to Los Angeles,” Mr. Walter said.

The financial terms of the arrangement were not released. The arrangement will require the approval of Major League Baseball.

Assessing the impending deal last week, the Nomura analyst Michael Nathanson said Time Warner Cable should “be careful what they wish for.” In a note to investors, he pointed out that the News Corporation is likely to use the high rates for the Lakers and Dodgers channels as negotiating leverage for other regional sports networks. News Corp. recently acquired 49 percent of YES, the Yankees channel in New York, and full ownership of a channel that carries the Cleveland Indians in Ohio. Time Warner Cable is a major distributor in New York and Ohio.

Mr. Nathanson said Los Angeles, which will have six regional sports networks once the Dodgers network starts, is “experiencing significant price inflation.” It’s too soon to know, he said, “whether these levels of investments will prove to be justified many years down the road or if we have reached the top of the sports-rights bubble.”

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