text:
EHR Solutions
Our staff of senior consultants has an average of ten years of EHR implementation experience and five certifications.
Which came first – happy clients or happy consultants? Consultants, of course. Consultants came to Nordic because they could feel how we treat them differently. They, in turn, delivered excellent quality to our first clients. Now we're at over 190 happy clients and 700 happy consultants – many of our originals, on both sides, still with Nordic.
So, why do clients and consultants stay with Nordic? Here are a few reasons:
|Collected about Nordic by KLAS 2014-2016 © KLAS Enterprises, LLC. All rights reserved. www.KLASresearch.com
|KLAS recognized Nordic as the only firm to be a top performer in both Clinical Optimization and Revenue Cycle Optimization in the 2017 Best in KLAS report. In the report, Nordic had the most validated engagements in the Clinical Optimization category and was one of only three firms with at least 10 validated engagements in the Revenue Cycle category. Not only did Nordic post scores of 92 or higher in both optimization categories, but in HIT Advisory Services as well. Read our press release here. Healthcare IT Advisory 2016 report, © KLAS Enterprises, LLC. All rights reserved.
|Nordic's Advisory Services was rated a top performing comprehensive vendor for overall performance in the KLAS Healthcare IT Advisory 2016 report. Nordic matched the highest percentage of clients identifying what KLAS refers to as a "Sweet Spot" of Providing Knowledgeable and Expert Resources. Another "Sweet Spot" in which Nordic was mentioned above all but one firm is Overall Communication and Executive Touch Points. The report praises Nordic's consultants for their ability to mesh with client team members and features clients describing their meaningful partnerships with Nordic as opposed to a transactional relationship. Read our press release here. Healthcare IT Advisory 2016 report, © KLAS Enterprises, LLC. All rights reserved.
|Nordic's Optimization Solutions has been recognized as a top performer in terms of producing the highest positive impact on efficiency and outcomes with over 80 percent of clients reporting a significant positive impact, according to the 2016 KLAS report, Optimization Services 2016 Driving Outcomes from Implementation to Performance Improvement. Nordic has a rating of 92.9 for overall performance, and no other firm has more than its 13 validated client engagements in the report. Read our press release here. Optimization Services 2016, © KLAS Enterprises, LLC. All rights reserved.
|In the Epic Services 2016 report, we debuted in the IT Advisory Services category as a top performer with a 92.6, showing particularly strong depth in the area of revenue cycle optimization. Additionally, we were covered in Implementation and Staffing with scores that continued to improve over the last two reports (in which we were #1). KLAS also described us as a "strong performer" in our preliminary showing within the Enterprise Implementation Leadership category. Read our press release here. Epic Consulting 2016, © KLAS Enterprises, LLC. All rights reserved.
"Many consulting firms out there want to be my best friend, but at this point, when I need consulting resources, I go to Nordic Consulting. I have looked at lots of résumés from lots of companies, and the best people have been brought to me by Nordic Consulting. I have come to feel that while I could spend a lot of time reading through résumés from various vendors, Nordic Consulting has recently provided me with the highest-quality people."
|In the 2014 Best in KLAS report, Nordic was recognized as a KLAS Category Leader for Other Implementation, a category which includes all non-clinical work. This includes services and methodology in revenue cycle, integration, lab and reporting. Best in KLAS 2014 Software and Services © KLAS Enterprises, LLC. All rights reserved.
|We are proud that Nordic was ranked #1 in Epic Staffing and Implementation Support in each KLAS Report on Epic consulting from 2012-2014. Epic Consulting 2014 © KLAS Enterprises, LLC. Today our scores are even better than when we started.
If you're evaluating a new partner, or a new employer, you may be interested to see some of the awards we've picked up related to our growth. Here are just a few.
|For the third consecutive year, Nordic has been recognized as one of the fastest-growing privately held companies in the nation on the annual Inc. 5000 list, America's most prestigious ranking of fastest-growing private companies. The ranking is based on revenue growth over the previous three years through the end of 2015. Nordic's revenue grew 263 percent during that stretch.
|In 2014 Nordic made its first appearance on the Inc. 500 as the 46th fastest-growing privately held company in the nation. The ranking measured revenue growth over the previous three years through the end of 2013. Nordic's revenue grew 5,593 percent during that stretch. Nordic ranked eighth out of 38 health companies on the list.
In each of the past four years, Nordic has been recognized on Healthcare Informatics' HCI 100. The list is a ranking of the 100 companies with the highest revenues derived from healthcare IT products and services earned in the U.S. over the previous year.
In each of the last two years, Nordic has been one of three companies honored with RightSourcing's National Supplier Award out of the more than a thousand companies that serve RightSourcing's healthcare clients that were eligible for the honor. The award recipients were selected based on customer service rankings. Nordic won the Gold Supplier Award in 2015 and the Silver Supplier Award in 2014.
We think Nordic is a great place to work. But don't take our word. Our employees have consistently rated Nordic one of the best places to work. Here are just a few proof points.
|Nordic was one of only 11 consulting companies to make the 2017 list, which features a wide array of organizations including healthcare providers and vendors from across the nation. Becker's judged companies based on benefits offerings, wellness initiatives, and efforts to improve professional development, diversity and inclusion, work-life balance, and a sense of community among employees.
|Nordic was one of the winners of the 2017 Bubbler Awards, recognizing the top 10 best places to work for young professionals in Wisconsin, presented by NEWaukee. Winners were selected by a group of young professional leaders from across the state of Wisconsin. Nordic was the only company in Dane County to be recognized.
|Nordic was ranked No. 3 in Madison Magazine's list of the 10 best places to work in the Madison area in the large size workplace category, which includes all businesses with more than 100 employees. Businesses were ranked across six engagement categories based on a 60-question survey submitted to employees.
|Nordic was named to the annual list of the Top Workplaces in southeastern Wisconsin. The list was determined by feedback from a survey of Nordic's Madison-area employees. Nordic is ranked 10th on the list among companies of similar size. In addition, Nordic received the Communication Award for scoring highest on keeping employees well-informed about important decisions.
|In each of the past four years, Nordic has been named one of the 100 companies and organizations included in the Best Places to Work in Healthcare. The recognition program honors workplaces throughout the healthcare industry that empower their employees to provide patients and customers with the best possible care, products and services.
Our staff of senior consultants has an average of ten years of EHR implementation experience and five certifications.
Here, the grass is always greener. See why more consultants choose to work with us.
Nordic has enjoyed consistently elite KLAS rankings since its inception, which is the greatest testament to its quality.


text:
Unisonwirralhealth.com is a 1 year old domain, situated in Germany. The domain is linked to the IP address 18.104.22.168.
It was registered by Carol Skillen , who can be reached at . Registration details show that it was registered on 08 Jan 2016 through 1 and 1 and will expire on 08 Jan 2017.
The site returns a status code of 404. The site is being served through Pepyaka/1.11.3.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Pheasant Meadow Bed & Breakfast
No prices found through our partners. Please contact the business directly or check some of our recommended alternatives.
TripAdvisor Reviews Pheasant Meadow Bed & Breakfast Waldport
Travel Blogs from Waldport
I saw a whale - for free!!!
... to shore on their migration route to California. From the same lookout we saw these sea lions frolicking in the surf below us. There was fog off and on during the day.
On Sa**************ed north to Newport. It was a glorious day with no fog, but slightly cooler! We had a leisurely breakfast overlooking a glorious beach and then headed down to the old port. We had been told this ...
There She Blows
... can. Alas, the camera on my iPhone 4 was not quite up to the task of capturing the depth of the scenescapes we traveled through. We decided to stay two nights at Beachside State Park to enjoy the scenery, do laundry, restock our food, and rest our knees. We had so much fun hanging out with the other bicycle tourists our second night, that I forgot to take a picture of the sunset on the Wakonda Beach. Fortunately, there will be plenty more to ...
Night 18: Yaquina Tide
... dinner we explored the area until we were convinced by several inebriated seagulls turned into men to rethink that plan. We went south on US-101, exploring our options for lodging. There were some vacancies still and several options, especially around Waldport. We ended up here at this small wayside park with the great sunset. We have a very cozy and compact campsite. We watched the sunset, played in the softest sand on the West Coast, and came back for a fire and ...
From Hot Springs to Springing a leak - or three!
... do with the way that the river is swallowed by an underground maze of lava tubes. A fraction of the flow is released into a small pool directly below the bridge, the remainder of the diverted water surges back to the surface, the largest volume emerging from under the east bank into the main channel, returning the river to its full strength
Late night arrival
... overlooking the Alsea Bay and is very nice. We've decided to book another night tomorrow as well. Tomorrow will be a day or exploring, sand duning and tide pooling. We sure enjoy traveling this way and are looking forward to a bunch of new adventures on this ...
Other places to stay in Waldport
Cliff House Bed & Breakfast1450 SW Adahi Rd., 1 Block West of Hwy 101 (, Waldport | B&Bfrom $125


text:
The Delfield 6025XL-S Refrigeration System
All components of the Delfield 6025XL-S are mounted to the exterior cabinet ceiling, outside the food zone, and are assembled as one piece and can be removed as one piece.
Environmentally friendly R404A refrigerant is used for this Delfield single door refrigerator. The Delfield 1 door reach in refrigerator's system has the capability of maintaining between 27˚F and 40˚F in heavy use food service operations. In addition, and perhaps more importantly. The refrigeration system of the Delfield 6025XL-S is controlled using an Advanced Control Technology electronic temperature control, which provides improved pull down times, reducing compressor cycling and longer compressor life with lower energy consumption. Also, the control system of the Delfield 6025XL-S uses adaptive defrost to assure that the evaporator coil is free of ice and operating at optimum efficiency. Evaporator condensate of this Delfield single door refrigerator is eliminated using an energy efficient hot gas system. With this Delfield single door refrigerator, temperature is displayed with digital display using a blue LED.
Here at Rapids Wholesale, we also have refrigeration units from another reputable brand, Beverage Air. Check out their bar-back coolers, available in black vinyl or stainless steel and top-lid coolers available in one, two, three, and four top lids.
This Delfield Single Door Refrigerator Details and Features
- Crated weight of the Delfield 6025XL-S: 274 pounds
- Amps: 6
- Cubic feet: 20
- Horsepower: 1/4
- Dimensions of this Delfield single door refrigerator: 25.5" long, 32.8" deep, and 79.5" tall
- 1 solid swing door, 3 shelves
- Voltage: 115
- UL, NSF standard
- Warranty: 1 year parts and labor, 5 year compressor, limited lifetime liner
Additional Information
|Refrigerator / Freezer
|Door Type
|Door Material
|Number of Doors
|Number of Half Doors
|Stainless Steel
|Compressor Mount
|Energy Star


text:
Dell EMC Takes Aim At Cisco With New Open Networking Push
Dell EMC is putting the pressure on Cisco and other networking market leaders, unveiling a slew of new open networking products at this week's Dell EMC World.
Dell EMC is putting the pressure on Cisco and other networking market leaders, unveiling a slew of new open networking products at this week's Dell EMC World.
VMware has ended its OEM relationship with Tanium, CRN has learned, the latest in a series of challenges the cybersecurity company has faced in recent weeks.
CNBC and Reuters are reporting the unnamed telecom company that is competing for wireless spectrum holder Straight Path Communications against AT&T is Verizon. The secondary bidder submitted a new offer on Monday morning, nearly doubling AT&T's original offer.
HP has selected 13 North America partners for the launch of its high-margin 3-D Multi Jet Fusion printer channel program.
These 10 U.S. metro areas offer the best mix of salary and cost of living, according to careers website Paysa. (From ITBestOfBreed.com)
Also in the news this week: Solution provider PCM claimed in court filings last month that it wouldn't have carried out its April 2015 acquisition of En Pointe if it had known the solution provider's true financial situation.
Popular consumer wireless provider T-Mobile is winning over business customers too, according to the carrier, which announced that its business services segment just had its most successful first quarter with growing revenues and business subscriber wins.
GE and Siemens are battling each other with vastly different software strategies in a high-stakes land grab as factories quickly move their operations onto cloud-based IoT platforms.
Symantec has cut North American ties with Tech Data around Symantec enterprise and Arrow around Blue Coat while unlocking a broader portfolio for Ingram Micro, Synnex and Westcon-Comstor.
The new Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack combines Dell EMC's hyper-converged infrastructure technology with Microsoft's Azure Stack to create an on-premises private cloud with the look and feel of the Azure public cloud.
CRNtv spoke with Red Hat's Monty Taylor about the reach and maturity of OpenStack and why getting started in the cloud shouldn't at all be scary.
Verizon introduced a cloud-based managed security service, Software-Defined Perimeter. The latest service, which lets enterprises ID and block breaches at the network border, is not immediately available through channel partners.
The distributor aims to enable partners around its extended line card, as TS partners now have access to Microsoft's cloud offerings and traditional Tech Data partners have access to Amazon and IBM's.
Americas President Joe Quaglia said Tech Data now has the line card and expertise needed to drive big data and analytics deals after buying Avnet Technology Solutions.
PCM claimed in court filings last month that it wouldn't have carried out its April 2015 acquisition of En Pointe if it had known the solution provider's true financial situation.
Did You Know? - 7 Fun Facts About Intel
Here are seven interesting facts you may or may not know about technology giant Intel.
CRN Exclusive: Brocade Channel Chief On Channel 'Disruption,' Ripping Off The 'Band Aid' And Aligning For 'Success'
Brocade Communications Channel Chief Sandra Glaser Cheek spoke with CRN about the May restructuring that she conceded has caused "confusion" in the sales trenches and the steps the company is taking to resolve problems in the field.
25 Hot Certifications For Cloud Professionals
Cloud-focused partners are increasing looking for employees that stand out from the pack. Here are 25 certifications that help cloud professionals do just that.
Intel Solutions Summit 2017
CRN is live at Intel Solutions Summit in Dallas. Get all of our coverage of the event, as well content from the ISS special issue of CRN, here.


text:
Alice, which premiered last night and continues tonight, is a four-hour movie event starring Academy Award-winner Kathy Bates as the Queen of Hearts and Caterina Scorsone as Alice. To promote the show SyFy (a unit of NBC) turned to Fallon for a multimedia marketing campaign, which includes the following twist on out-of-home: [via Brand Flakes […]
Rabbit Holes Discovered In Philadelphia
Boing Boing Bringin' It
Montreal-based Fluorescent Hill throws down the animation gauntlet in the following video from N.A.S.A., featuring Tom Waits and Kool Keith. [via Boing Boing]
Sports Heroes Are The Embodiment of Story
According to Creative Social, 180/Amsterdam and 180's offspring agencies Riot & Detail are making graphic novels the content centerpiece of the new Adidas Football campaign. Fans can pick up a graphic novel in store and an i-Phone app is on the way. To bring these stories to life 180 enlisted the help of three of […]
Spotlight on NW Creative: Portland's Answer to South By
MusicFestNW is happening later this week in Portland, which as you may know, is a magnet for indie bands. Last year, we saw M. Ward, Britt Daniel, Blue Skies for Black Hearts and Anders Parker care of MFNW. This year, we hope to see Helio Sequence, Arctic Monkeys, Viva Voce and The Long Winters, among […]
Animated Gourds Tell Seasonal Story
Colle+McVoy is out with new work for Caribou Coffee today. The campaign stars a wisecracking pumpkin and dimwitted gourd in "The Autumn Adventures of Jack & Gourdo." The spots, five in all, are playing on Caribou Coffee's YouTube channel. Colle+McVoy collaborated with Minneapolis-based Puny Entertainment, the animation team behind the hit Nickelodeon show Yo Gabba […]
Canadian Kids Put Milk Goggles On
Toronto's Head Gear Animation and Due North Communications have completed three 3D cinema spots for Dairy Farmers of Canada. Here's one: The spots are currently playing in Cineplex theatres throughout Ontario and the Maritime Provinces along with the trailers before screenings of Ice Age 3D.
Purity In The Milk Aisle
WK/London is breaking new work for Cravendale dairy. Sam Heath, creative director at W&K says, "People don't really think when buying milk. They just reach for the blue, green or red top. With these spots we wanted to challenge this, to engage people a little more and get them to consider Cravendale."


text: Annan Landscape27.Feb 2016 Employee worked there twice, eight years total, fired both times, blood pressure dropped 20 points both times 2.89 2.89 Suggestions for improvementdon't believe they would be acted upon. Company Annan Landscape City Altamonte Springs Are you a Current or Former Employee? Former job since 2015 Position Others Department Marketing/product management


text:
|Type of business
Type of site
|Social networking
|Available in
|Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese
|China, March 2008
|Beijing, China
|Area served
|Calvin Pak, David Yan, Sheryl Liu
|March 2008
Facekoo was a social networking service created and designed by the Facekoo,Inc. which targets the Chinese-Language market. It offers a unique way of face recognition system to connect each member in order to create a social circle. According to Alexa ranking, its page views went beyond MySpace China for a while in November 2008 and December 2008.[1]
Facekoo (simplified Chinese: 飞思酷; traditional Chinese: 飛思酷; pinyin: fēi'sī'kù) is a social networking branch created by a private proprietorship, the Facekoo, Inc.,based in Beijing, China.[2] Facekoo, its name is derived from face and koo (a homonym for cool in Chinese). In the Chinese-language based market, this innovative social networking target on teenagers and the adolescents.
FaceKoo was created by co-founders Calvin Pak, CEO, David Yan, Chief technical officer, and Sheryl Liu, CMO, which are all well-educated Chinese Americans with extensive business track records in the Silicon Valley.[3] Facekoo offers numerous features, such as one of the most representative capability, Mojing, a magic mirror that can link users to another Facekoo member by systematically of facial analysis.[4] Facial features can be opted by users in which they can find their ideal "koo-friend". Online games and other interactive applications are also fascinating features available on Facekoo.
Facekoo has rapidly grown since the initial in March, 2008 in China. The Facebook sound alike website, Facekoo, is considered as one of the major Chinese social networking site that can fit into the Eastern culture, said Facekoo's founder.[5] According to San Francisco Chronicle, Facekoo has 350000 users since its introduction in 2004.[6] Another database, CrunchBase, stated that Facekoo already possess more than 1.2 million members since they launched this social media networking in March, 2008.[7]
Facekoo has earned profits from online advertising, sale of digital goods and their special e-commerce operation.[7] Koo-dollar, a virtual currency used in Facekoo, allows you to purchase any additional digital goods. Although Facekoo has earned over 7 million koo-dollar, Facekoo's leading income sources are still sourcing from online advertising.[7]
Pengyou is another popular social network that has million of users and growing. 360quan is a major rival of Facekoo that has received more than $20 million USD in funding but is still behind Facekoo in daily ranking. While Facekoo is ahead of 360quan, its page views have also exceeded Cyworld China, which is the most popular site in Korea, and iPart China, the most visited site in Taiwan.[8]
See also[edit]
- ^ "UPDATE: SNS FaceKoo Overtakes MySpace China in Page Views for First Time in Exploding Chinese Internet Youth Market.". PR Newswire Association LLC. Retrieved 2008.
|last1=in Authors list (help); Check date values in:
- ^ "Facekoo". CrunchBase. Retrieved 29 July 2009.
|last1=in Authors list (help)
- ^ "UPDATE: SNS FaceKoo Overtakes MySpace China in Page Views for First Time in Exploding Chinese Internet Youth Market.". PR Newswire Association LLC. Retrieved 26 Nov 2008.
|last1=in Authors list (help)
- ^ Wee, Willis. "Mojing: An App To Look For Flings in China". TechInAsia. Retrieved November 28, 2011.
- ^ Floethe, Victoria. "Chinese Web Surfers Embrace Facebook Clone". newser. Retrieved Jan 14, 2009.
- ^ Gage, Deborah (12 January 2009). "Cal alum designs social network for China youth". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved January 12, 2009.
- ^ a b c "Facekoo". CrunchBase. Retrieved 2009-07-29.
|last1=in Authors list (help)
- ^ "UPDATE: SNS FaceKoo Overtakes MySpace China in Page Views for First Time in Exploding Chinese Internet Youth Market.". PR Newswire Association LLC. Retrieved Nov 26, 2008.
|last1=in Authors list (help)
External links[edit]
|This World Wide Web-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.


text:
CANADA STOCKS-TSX set to rise on higher oil, strong U.S. data
April 1 (Reuters) - Toronto's resource-heavy main stock index looked set to open higher on Friday, extending gains from previous session, led by rising oil prices and U.S. data showing a second straight month of solid job gains.
* Canadian equity futures <0#SXF:> pointed to a higher open.
* U.S. stock index futures rose as U.S. employment recorded a second straight month of solid gains and the jobless rate fell to a two-year low. [.N]
* European shares bounced back on hopes strong U.S. jobs data will signal a recovery in the labor market and show the economic recovery was gathering pace, though equities faced some technical resistance levels. [.EU]
* Asian shares outside Japan rose to their highest in nearly three years, looking to extend a three-quarter winning streak, while the yen slipped on the view Japanese interest rates will stay near zero for a long time to help the quake-ravaged economy.
* The Thomson Reuters-Jefferies CRB index .CRB, a global commodities benchmark, fell 0.4 percent in early trade.
* U.S. and Brent crude futures prices initially pared gains on Friday in choppy trading after a report showed more nonfarm payrolls jobs and more private sector jobs were added in March than had been expected. [O/R] Continued...


text:
Get HH posts in your email!
If you're ready to save time, stress, money AND eat YUMMINESS, this week's meal plan is for you!
Not only do we have a super easy Vegan Pho (NEW!), there's also an incredibly delicious Italian Deli Panini (NEW!).
Also new this week: Mexican Polenta Bowl (NEW!), Slow Cooker Thai Curry (NEW!), Red Velvet Cake Oatmeal (NEW!) and Breakfast McMuffin (NEW!).
The BEST PART: It's one of our fastest meal plans and shortest shopping lists!
Vegan Pho ...
See how good healthy can really feel with this week's fresh and fabulous meal plan!
Load up on all types of salad with the Garden Salad Pizza (NEW!), Chickpea Caesar Salad (NEW!), Szechuan Soba Salad (NEW!), and Pizza Pasta Salad (NEW!).
You'll also LOVE taking a bite out of the Portobello "Bacon" Sandwich (NEW!), Mediterranean Stuffed Sweet Potato and so much more!
Szechuan Soba Salad
Individual Highlights
This week's meal plan is a one-way ticket to Flavor Town!
The 2-Potato Tostadas (NEW!), Eggplant Involtini (NEW!), Cheezy Hash Browns (NEW!), Lemony Kale & Quinoa Salad (NEW!) and Singaporean Noodles (NEW!) will all bring the party to your mouth!!
We're also bringing back classic dishes like the Green Bean Salad, Chickpea & Cabbage Soup and Mexican Lasagna (fam).
2-Potato Tostadas
Individual Highlights
Singaporean Noodles
Family Highlights
This week's meal plan is bursting at the seams with tons (TONS!) of healthy & delicious recipes for you to try!
Delight your tastebuds (and your tummy) with Baked Bolognese (NEW!), Pineapple & Vegetable Rice (NEW!), Chili Quinoa Tacos (NEW!, fam.), Samosa Burritos (NEW!) and Ginger Scallion Chickpea Wraps (NEW!).
Also making an encore appearance this week are meal plan member favorites like Mango BBQ Sliders, Black Beans & "Plantains" and Vegetable Spring Rolls!
Chili Quinoa Tacos
Individual Highlights
Mango BBQ Sliders
Family Highlights
Pineapple & Vegetable Rice
"I just want to say your meal plans are AWESOME!! I love not fumbling through cookbooks or searching online. You pick out the best meals for me, and they're always changing!! The shopping lists are a huge a time saver!! Thank you!"- Linda A
"I've been veg for a long time, but my hubby and I still struggle ...
It's another week of new and exciting meals on this week's meal plan!
Enjoy healthy and guilt-free eats like the Spaghetti & "Meatballs" (NEW!), Pot Pie Soup (NEW!), Smoky Zucchini Cakes (NEW!), and Vegetable Lasagna Wheels (NEW!).
There's also a super awesome Cherry Almond Baked Oatmeal (NEW!) for breakfast and meal plan classics including the Smashed White Bean & Roasted Red Pepper Wrap and Philly Cheeze "Steak" Bowl.
Spaghetti & "Meatballs"
Individual Highlights


text:
Tom SykesLos Angeles, California, US
Tom is an experienced, professional voice talent with years of experience
and has a private studio in the Southern California area with capabilities
to handle directed sessions thru Source Connect, Google Voice, and Skype.
His voice has been described by other professionals as a
"clear, mid range, engaging voice, with a relaxing, warm tone".
"A natural at reading copy",
Experience includes
Radio/Television Spots
Financial Products
Internet videos/presentations
How to videos
Corporate training videos
English, English (North American)
US General American (GenAm), US New York (New Jersey, Bronx, Brooklyn)
Middle Aged, Senior
Special Skills
Business, Documentaries, Educational, Internet, Podcasting, Radio, Telephone, Television
Video Narrations
Radio Spots
Financial Products
Internet videos/presentations
Instructional videos
Business training narrations
Educational narrations
Explainer videos
Real Estate finance,
Reverse mortgage expert
Debt & Credit expert
Family Budget Coach
Retail Management
Sales management
Business owner
Del Mar Media Arts, Irvine, CA
Animation Voice Acting
Robert Gunton, Animation Voice Actor
ADR/ Infomercial Workshop
Bill Trousdale, Producer, Audio Vision Studios
Direct Response V.O. Workshop
Bill Fawcett, Fawcett Productions
Advanced VO Workshop
Allan Gibby, Zone 57 Productions
Advanced VO Workshop
John Denlinger, Blackstone Media Group
Radio/TV VO Workshop
Mike Smith, Casting Director, Beard Boy Productions
Basic Narration Workshop
Allison Moffett, Voice Actor
Radio/TV Commercials Workshop
Mike Villani, Voice, Television Actor, Sports Announcer
Advanced Voice Over Workshop
Greg King, Primal Focus Productions
Animation Character Showcase
David Wright, Casting Director
Disney Television Animation
Narration Showcase
Naomi Killian, Lyon Studios
Radio & TV Commercial Showcase
Lena Morgan, Agent, Rockstar Entertainment
Animation Voices Showcase
Ginny McSwain, Producer/Director
At Edge Studios, Studio City, CA
DEL MAR MEDIA ARTS, Irvine, CA
B.S. Degree, Business
Graduate study in Philosophy and Ethics
Auto Racing/Car building/Mechanics/Technician
Computer & Software
Adobe Audition & Sound Forge Pro 11 workstations
Special Equipment
Prosonus pre-amp & interface
Delivery Methods
Source Connect, Skype, email, Dropbox on request
Turnaround Time
24 Hours
Service Description
Fast Turn around
Quality Work
Professional Reviews:Professional Reviews & Recent Clients
"Tom has a wonderful, charismatic, warm voice that is trusting, captivating and has a beautiful tone. He is definitely a natural at reading copy...He has a great sound for this industry...." H.C.
"A relaxing and warm voice. You read with a slightly subdued, laid back style which worked for your clear, mid-range voice. Able to effectively engage the listener." J.S.
"Tom has a rich, warm and comfortable voice with enough edge to get important information to hit. Great communication and excellent delivery, a top talent". A.R.Customer Reviews:
"Absolutely fabulous and hilarious Tom - thank you for an amazing job!", W.L.
"Excellent work, fast turnaround, high quality. Just as ordered. Will use again". D.S.
"Quality is too good.And he listens attentively and does his job with proper care.And also he knows how to satisfy...Highly recommended :)". S.F.
"Best experience ever... He's cool and calm. Very easy to talk to. I wish I could rate him 10 stars". M.P.
"Couldn't be more pleased, happier and satisfied than using Tom. He's there in a pinch, got back to me a Friday night when the other VO folks were out doing hanky panky, his voice oozes soothing tones as he reads copy in the style and manner that you ask of him. 7-stars for Tom!" E.S.
"Great Service! It was super easy to work with you. You are a real pro!" T.T.
"Very impressed with his talent! Defiantly worth hiring and fast delivery time. Thank you so much ! Great job again! :) Happy client! " A.N.
"Wow! Couldn't be happier with this! Tom has got an excellent voice and is a true talent at what he does. On top of that really fast delivery. And I mean fast! I'll be a returning customer for sure. Thank you Tom!" M.C.
-"Great job. More to follow". R.S.
-"Very helpful. He delivered it extra fast. i was impressed". S.D.
-"Outstanding service, would highly recommend! Thanks very much! L.F.
-"I love it, 1st take is great, you sound a little like Donald Trump (or Darryl Hammond's impression of the Donald)" M.N.
-"Absolutely unbelievable! Received my order in 6 hours! Truly professional. Wanted to make sure everything was just right and could not be happier! Quit looking for anyone else and hire Tom. Thanks for your incredibly fast service". M.D.
-"I needed my business to have a professional quality sounding recording for our phones. [Tom] filled the bill! Thanks and looking forward to working with you again in the near future. I will surely recommend you to all of my business associates. Thank you again. D.B.
Voice Over Clients
Aaron Robbins
Best Quiz Ever! Fun Quiz for Kids
Payment Terms
Hire Tom as a voice actor. Payment is made through Voices.com SurePay, an escrow service that guarantees your work is done to your satisfaction. Send payment securely by Visa, Mastercard or PayPal through Voices.com then download your files from the website.
Watch a video to see how to make a payment
Next Steps
To contact Tom Sykes about your project, request a quote today. We'll walk you through the process step-by-step. It's fast and easy.
Hire Tom Sykes as a voice actor. Working with Tom Sykes is fast and easy. We'll walk you through the process step-by-step.
Request a quote for your project today.


text:
100% Younggyul juice is made of the whole organic Younggyul fruit including rind in which more vitamin C and flavonoid eriocitrin are abundant.It can be served as sauce for salad dressing or natural vinegar for soba, udon, sushi or meat dishes. It can also be enjoyed with alcoholic beverages.This 5ml portable package is easy to be carried for any place and any time while in travel, work out at gym, at office, or at restaurant. It can be served with water or without water depending on preferences.
Sudachi Younggyul is a small, round, green, Japanese citrus fruit that is a specialty of Tokushima Prefecture in Japan. It is a sour citrus, not eaten as fruit, but used as food flavoring in place of vinegar, juice, tea or others. It is considered to have a zestier flavor and aroma than lemons or limes. It also boasts a higher calcium and ascorbic acid (vitamin C) content than lemons. Sudachi flavored products (such as ice cream, vodka coolers, ice pops, and soft drinks) can also be found in Japan, particularly in Tokushima Prefecture. The ability of the sudachi to promote the body's calcium absorption has been studied as well. In 2006, a Tokushima University research team published a report which suggests that the fruit may be effective in lowering glucose levels in diabetic patients.[citation needed] The team gave rats sudachi zest over a one year period and found the glucose levels fell and the health of the rats to improve.
The flavonoid eriocitrin abundant in lemon and lime juices is present in comparable concentrations in sudachi juice, but is lacking in yuzu. Also, neoeriocitrin is found in sudachi juice and rind. Eriocitrin is an antioxidant reported to combat lipid peroxidation and like neoeriocitrin is said to block the formation of lipoxygenases involved in allergies and atherosclerosis. Also, the flavonoid narirutin is said to be the active chemical in the Wakayama Prefecture specialty citrus jabara (ja:ジャバラ) that is said to diminish the effects of pollen allergies. The jabara advertises that it contains 6 times the narirutin in yuzu, but sudachi juice also contains about 3 times as much as yuzu juice (20.1 mg per 100 ml, vs. 6.6 mg).


text:
Discussion in 'How To' started by watkins1952, Jan 2, 2012.
well I think that answer is a load of....................................:Rofl1:
help the man
... invisible ink ... ?
Could you re- ?
There are two posts with the same title. Please use other one.
We are now recieving phsycic messages
, . : > :Rofl1:


text:
Analysis of the temperature distribution in the explosion of a methane/air mixture in a tunnel
- First Online:
- Received:
DOI: 10.1007/s10891-012-0790-y
- Cite this article as:
- Zhang, Q. & Pang, L. J Eng Phys Thermophy (2012) 85: 1413. doi:10.1007/s10891-012-0790-y
The aim of this work is to investigate temperature distribution in methane/air mixture explosion near a wall of a tunnel by numerical simulation. The results obtained on the basis of the hypothesis of an adiabatic wall are compared with those for a nonadiabatic wall. It is shown that the temperature near the wall in explosion of methane/air mixtures in tunnels changes abruptly. The hypothesis of an adiabatic wall leads to a great error in the calculated temperature near the wall. If heat conduction in the wall is ignored, the temperatures at various locations of a section are almost equal, whereas the measured temperatures on the vessel wall are always lower than those calculated on the basis of the hypothesis mentioned. However, when it is necessary to find the temperatures in the field outside the range near the wall, heat conduction in it can be ignored.


text:
Agents O (ostriches)
2,828pages onAdd New Page
this wiki
this wiki
"Agents O (ostriches)" are a pair of ostriches who joined the O.W.C.A. during the events of "Where's Perry? (Part Two)".
They joined the other recently recruited agents and Perry the Platypus in fighting against the evil Carl Karl and his robot army.


text:
Tagged: Football
What's Washington Doing?
One of my biggest regrets as a writer is the two years or so I took off from writing about sports on the Internet from the spring of 2011 to the spring of 2013. On the one hand, I absolutely needed to reset and refocus as a writer, and I had other things going on and some perspective would have done me a lot of good. If I continued writing the way I had been, in the style I had been, on the blog I had been, I would have burnt out sooner or later, and I would not be writing here for you today in 2017. On the other hand, there is no written evidence, no previous article I wrote that I can link to, that can prove how right I was about Kirk Cousins.
We sports writers, amateur and professional alike, we sports enthusiasts who call and email talk radio shows and fill Reddit threads with opinions and analysis, we love making predictions, and we love being able to go back and prove we were right when our opinion in the moment was not the consensus or the prevailing opinion. Now that Washington Redskins quarterback Kirk Cousins has been franchised for the second straight year, and now that he is set to be one of the most interesting and in-demand assets in the NFL, I wish I had been maintaining a blog in the spring of 2012, when the Redskins took two quarterbacks, so I could have written that Cousins was a real NFL QB, that having a guy like Cousins drafted alongside Robert Griffin III would not end well for Washington, and the overlooked Cousins would be itching to prove himself. Five years later, the Washington football team that had two rookie quarterbacks may very well lose them both, with nothing but a couple of one-and-done playoff appearances to show for it.
Last offseason, the Redskins placed the franchise tag on Kirk Cousins, rather than signing him to a contract extension, after a 2015 season in which he won the starting job away from Griffin for good and led Washington to an NFC East division title. The Skins cut RGIII (who signed with the Cleveland Browns and subsequently got injured in the first game of the regular season), but were not ready to commit to Cousins long-term. That line of thinking is entirely defensible on its own. Cousins had one good season as a starter under his belt, and it would be reasonable for a team to want to see more before committing top dollar and many years to a relatively unproven player, but then Cousins had another good season in 2016. Sure, the Redskins struggled down the stretch and missed the playoffs, but they had also not put in place a backup plan.
The only quarterback to play on the franchise tag twice was Drew Brees with the San Diego Chargers, who eventually walked in free agency and signed with the New Orleans Saints, where he has been such a great face of the franchise that I often forget he was in San Diego and get caught off guard when scrolling through Google Images for pictures for articles I am writing. The difference between what the Chargers were doing a decade ago with Brees and what the Redskins are doing now with Cousins is that San Diego drafted Philip Rivers during that time (well, actually they drafted Eli Manning, but traded him for Rivers when the Mannings made it clear Eli did not want to be in San Diego), and gave Rivers a couple years in the system to develop before Brees left to go get paid by the Saints. I thought back in 2012 that Cousins, like Brees, would leave Washington to go get paid by another franchise, and eventually be synonymous with that second franchise the way Brees is with New Orleans, but I thought that would be because of the flashes he showed backing up RGIII, not because he proved himself as the starter in Washington like he ended up doing.
Rather than sign him to an extension, the Redskins placed a second franchise tag on Cousins. If they do not sign him to an extension, Cousins will most certainly leave Washington. Why would he stay with an organization that has been so hesitant to believe in him? That has forced him to bet on himself season after season? Cousins has been well compensated by the Redskins, thanks to the franchise tag, yet they are still finding ways to alienate their franchise QB. Why would he stay in Washington when there are two NFL franchises now coached by former offensive coordinators of his (Kyle Shanahan in San Francisco, and Sean McVay in Los Angeles), who would take him over their current quarterback situations, even if it means waiting another year.
The Rams and 49ers should not be the only teams interested in Cousins' services. He has a lot going for him, even compared to the other highly regarded NFL quarterbacks being talked about as trade chips right now. Cousins is eight years younger, and far less injury-prone, than Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo, and has a far greater sample size for teams to look at than New England Patriots backup QB Jimmy Garoppolo (who started five quarters during Tom Brady's suspension before getting hurt), but no matter what happens, I cannot shake the feeling that the Redskins will mess this up. That's what they are known for in the Dan Snyder Era.
Since Snyder bought the team in 1999, the Redskins have had a high amount of turnover at the head coach and quarterback positions, not as high as the Cleveland Browns, but certainly not a model for consistency and continuity in professional sports, either. Head coach Jay Gruden is going into his fourth year of a five year contract the same year that Kirk Cousins is poised to play on a second straight franchise season. Why would Cousins want to sign an extension with a team that might be on the verge of turning over its coaching staff yet again? By Snyder's own reputation, they are due.
When they quarterback draft class of 2012 was in college, Cousins was the one I saw the most on TV. I knew about Andrew Luck at Stanford and Robert Griffin III at Baylor, as they were the Heisman favorites all season, but for whatever reason, Cousins' Michigan State team was on TV all the time in Massachusetts, it seemed, and I was in the habit of watching a lot more college football than I have in the years since (spoiler alert: I was in college, living in the dorms), so I was impressed with Cousins' play at the time, and was particularly baffled when Washington decided to trade up in the draft to #2 overall to take Griffin, and then also take Cousins in the 4th round. How could that possibly end well?
While I prided myself on picking up on Cousins getting overlooked, and that driving him to improve the way he did, I was, of course, also guilty of overlooking Wisconsin's Russell Wilson, who was taken by the Seattle Seahawks the round before Cousins, and who has played in two Super Bowls and has had the best career of the four quarterbacks to this point. As disappointed as I am in not having proof that I was bullish on Cousins in 2012, I am also thankful I don't have written proof like that about how wrong I was about Russell Wilson. I guess it was all for the best I took those two years off and I am here now to write about it.
Keeping the Band Together
Good football teams lose their coaching talent as the seasons go on. It's a part of life. But the New England Patriots are able to hold things together remarkably well despite winning two of the last three Super Bowls. And even when they do lose their assistants to greener pastures of head coaching jobs elsewhere, the infrastructure with Bill Belichick at the top of the football operation must be trusted until further notice.
Before the Super Bowl was even played and regardless of the big game's outcome Atlanta Falcons offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan was going to be the next head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, and even though the hire was not officially announced, everybody knew it. Kyle is Mike Shanahan's son, he is 39 years old, and he has been one of the rising coaching stars on the offensive side of the ball. In his various stops, he has gotten quarterbacks of varying talent levels to realize their potential. Working under his dad in Washington, Robert Griffin III was the rookie of the year ahead of Andrew Luck and Russell Wilson, in Cleveland, former Tom Brady backup Brian Hoyer looked like a competent NFL starter before getting hurt, and in Atlanta, Pro Bowl QB Matt Ryan won the MVP and did not trail in the Super Bowl until the moment the game ended. Given his reputation, it is fair to assume that San Francisco's next starting QB whether they stick with Colin Kaepernick, or they trade for Jimmy Garoppolo, Kirk Cousins, or they make a less exciting stopgap signing like Matt Schaub or Brian Hoyer, or start from scratch with a kid from the draft, that QB will enjoy an uptick in production from this past year.
Regardless of the second guessing of Shanahan's overly aggressive play calling in the second half that gave the Patriots enough clock to work with to make their historic comeback, there is a lot of hope surrounding the downtrodden 49ers and also a lot of uncertainty for the Falcons because of Shanahan. Before Kyle Shanahan, the Falcons were a good offense and Matt Ryan was a good quarterback, but with him they were a great offense with an MVP quarterback. When the Patriots experienced a period of significant turnover after their Super Bowl XXXIX win over the Philadelphia Eagles, when offensive coordinator Charlie Weis took the head coaching job at Notre Dame and defensive coordinator Romeo Crennel left New England to be the head coach of the Cleveland Browns, Belichick promoted from within, making Eric Mangini the defensive coordinator and assuming the offensive coordinator duties himself, even though he is best known as a defensive mastermind, before eventually handing over the keys to Brady's offense to Josh McDaniels when McDaniels was ready for the responsibility. Years later, when Dean Pees left the Patriots, Belichick assumed defensive coordinator duties until he felt Matt Patricia was ready for it.
Most coaches are not Bill Belichick, however, and Falcons head coach Dan Quinn, a defensive coach, did not go this way. Instead the Falcons hired former Washington and USC head coach Steve Sarkisian to run their offense in 2017. Sarkisian was most recently the offensive coordinator at the University of Alabama for one game, replacing Lane Kiffin for the National Championship Game against Clemson, which Alabama lost. Sark may not be the best college head coach ever, but he does have a good reputation as an offensive play caller. The problem for Atlanta is that they are bringing in a new voice with a new philosophy when they thing they were doing was working perfectly fine. It is hard to come back from losing the Super Bowl. Most teams struggle in the following year, and the 2016 Carolina Panthers are a perfect example, and changing more than you have to certainly cannot help.
The Patriots could have just as easily been the team that lost the Super Bowl instead of the Falcons, and the last two years both offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels and defensive coordinator Matt Patricia have gotten head coaching interviews. McDaniels, in fact, was in direct competition with Shanahan for the Niners job. McDaniels, who first joined the Patriots as a personnel assistant in 2001, left to become head coach of the Denver Broncos in 2009, got fired, worked for the St. Louis Rams for a season before getting his old job back in New England when offensive coordinator Bill O'Brien left to take the head coaching job at Penn State in 2012, has been careful in his pursuit for his second head coaching job to say the least. Many coaches get a second chance if they fail as a head coach once, but if you fail twice, the odds of a third head coaching job are very slim.
Two years ago, Chip Kelly was still believed to be a football genius, but a bad third season in Philadelphia followed by the awful football situation he inherited in San Francisco leaves his future as an NFL head coach very much in doubt. McDaniels wants both a good quarterback situation and a good ownership situation, as those are the two factors the best determine head coaching success. If the Colts job opened up, Andrew Luck is a very good quarterback, but Jim Irsay is not a great owner to work for. Bill Belichick even failed on the first try in Cleveland, and when he was given a second chance with the New York Jets, he famously resigned as "HC of the NYJ" after a day when the more appealing offer came from the New England Patriots. McDaniels has the luxury of waiting, as he is still only 40, and being Tom Brady's offensive coordinator and working for Bill Belichick is by no means a bad gig.
The Patriots did lose a key member of the coaching staff, as tight ends coach Brian Daboll was hired by Nick Saban to replace Sarkisian as offensive coordinator at Alabama, of all things. Daboll, like McDaniels, left New England before, but they were the only two prominent assistants to come back for a second stint, unlike Weis, Crennel, Pees, O'Brien, or Rob Ryan. With McDaniels staying put in New England, Bama was Daboll's best opportunity to be an offensive coordinator again, and it's a winning program. The more head coaching jobs McDaniels turns down, the more likely it seems that he sees himself as Belichick's eventual successor as HC of NE.
When McDaniels first came back to the Patriots, I wanted nothing to do with him as a candidate to be the Pats' next head coach. His terrible two seasons in Denver that included the (even then) head-scratching decision to draft Tim Tebow in the 1st round was still fresh in my memory, and I thought he was just another Belichick assistant who was doomed to be a bad head coach. But as the years go by, and it becomes more and more apparent that the operation Bill Belichick has built is superior to every other in the game of football (I mean, seriously, the Pittsburgh Steelers are a model of consistency and continuity and have had the same number of head coaches since Watergate as the 49ers had in Barack Obama's second term, and even they are nothing more than the Generals to New England's Globetrotters, going 0-3 in AFC Championship Games against Belichick and Brady with none of those games being particularly competitive.), and the list of coaches I would rather have than Josh McDaniels to come in and try to tinker with it dwindles every year. At this point, I would have to think about Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh, and that's about it. I would rather have McDaniels than just about anyone else.
For now, the Patriots are going about their business, doing their jobs, but Brady will be 40 next season, and Belichick is probably closer to his last game as a head coach than his first, so as effective Belichick and Brady still are, a little continuity on the coaching staff certainly goes a long way.
A Comeback for the Ages
I was prepared to write about the New England Patriots' disappointing seventh trip to the Super Bowl in the Belichick and Brady Era. I was prepared to apologize to Patriots fans for the blog post I wrote about Matt Ryan a few weeks ago, when the not yet crowned MVP was going to face off against Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers in the NFC Championship game, and I used this opportunity to take some less than subtle jabs against Boston College football, New England's most prominent college football program that nobody cares about unless they went there. I was prepared to write about how the Atlanta Falcons not only deserved to win because they played against the Patriots the way the Patriots normally play against everyone else, not making mistakes and making their opponent pay for any mistake they might make, but also because it was the will of the country, as comedians and fans all across social media framed this games as "Trump's America vs. Black America." The angle in which I was mentally approaching writing about Super Bowl LI changed more dramatically and more times than any other game I have ever written about including the Bruins thrilling Game 7 comeback against the Maple Leafs in 2013. The second half of this game threw superstition out the window, and it took a few days to fully process what happened.
I watched the game with my dad and my brother, and by the middle of the third quarter, the hope was that they could just make the score respectable, as it was 28-3 with the Patriots slowly driving down the field. This part of the game was not even tense anymore. That's how far out of it the Patriots seemed to be. We instead turned to the 2017 season, talking about key free agents: Dont'a Hightower, Martellus Bennett, Logan Ryan, and Malcolm Butler topping that list. We talked about the possibility of trading backup quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo, to load up on draft picks for Brady's final years and focus on coaching up Jacoby Brissett.
I floated out the idea that Bill Simmons mentioned in a column a couple weeks ago about the possibility of Belichick trading Rob Gronkowski before Gronk's body breaks down for good, and about the Belichick dream scenario of sending Gronk and Jimmy G both to the Cleveland Browns for the 2017 #1, #2, and a boatload of 3rd and 4th round picks. My dad had not heard that theory before, and said throughout the rest of the game and (spoiler alert) trophy presentation that he really hopes they keep Gronk. As someone who has spent money on exactly one athlete's jersey for himself, and that athlete is Rob Gronkowski, I agreed, but am also well aware of Belichick's history or trading or cutting star players a year too early rather than a year too late from Drew Bledsoe to Lawyer Milloy to Willie McGinest to Mike Vrablel to Richard Seymour to Randy Moss to Logan Mankins to Vince Wilfork. That strategy, while painful in the short term for sentimental fans like us, is undeniably a key part of why the Patriots have been so consistently competitive this century, so you take the good with the bad.
Next thing we knew, the Patriots were right back in it. Hightower had a key strip sack, the Patriots made up for a missed extra point and a botched onside kick by scoring two more touchdowns and making two straight two-point conversions. The Falcons defense was gassed, and their offense was cold, with the exception of Julio Jones, who was inexplicably only targeted four times in the games, catching it all four times, each time more impressive than the one before. Atlanta's aggressive offensive strategy, allowing Ryan to get sacked for big losses without eating away enough at the play clock or the game clock certainly played into their demise, but when the narrative becomes solely that the Falcons choked, the level at which the Patriots executed gets lost.
On Hightower's strip sack, for instance, he was able to get to Ryan because Atlanta running back Devonta Freeman blew his blocking assignment. On any given play in a football game there are 22 players with an assignment, and success or failure is determined not only by the obvious variables like the quality of the quarterback's throw or the hand and footwork of the intended receiver, but also the defensive coverage assignments and offensive blocking assignments. In the second half down by a lot, the Patriots were still playing like they thought they could win, and Hightower, who is older than me by a month and has two BCS National Championship rings with Alabama and two Super Bowl rings with New England to show off as he heads into free agency, executed on every play waiting for someone on Atlanta to slip up, and capitalized when Freeman did.
It really was a tale of two halves, because in the first half, the Falcons were the ones taking advantage when the Patriots slipped up. The first quarter ended scoreless, but New England's offense seemed to be moving the ball better than Atlanta's, and were marching toward what looked like the first score of the game early in the second quarter when LeGarrette Blount fumbled the football, and the Falcons recovered, and quickly marched the other way to score. It was Atlanta that recorded a pick-six on Brady, and went up 21-3 at the half. The Falcons had adopted the DNA of the Patriots, which made sense considering the presence of longtime Belichick underlings Thomas Dimitroff and Scott Pioli in their front office. This was a new kind of Super Bowl experience for a Patriots fan who has seen his team play in the Super Bowl eight times since first grade. I had seen thrilling victories and devastating defeats, but never a blowout. I was not born yet when the Pats got destroyed by the iconic 1985 Chicago Bears team in Super Bowl XX, and every Patriots Super Bowl since had been at least competitive at the half, regardless of the eventual outcome. I honestly had not even considered the possibility of getting blown out by Atlanta, but could not help but respect the way they were doing it, as I would have been rooting for the Falcons in the Super Bowl against any other AFC team this year.
After trading possessions to start the third quarter, the Falcons scored another TD, making it 28-3, and I Facebook messaged my friend "At least Gaga was good" as if Lady Gaga's halftime performance would be the only redeeming thing about this Super Bowl. It would be a solid hour before Hightower's strip sack, and a little longer before it really felt like the Patriots were actually back in it, but that whole time, the Patriots were still executing like they had a chance to win, which is a credit to the players and the coaching staff. Peyton Manning would not have orchestrated a comeback like this, and I can say that with confidence because of the way he folded in 2014 in the Super Bowl against the Seahawks. Moments like this are what have always separated Tom Brady from his peers, and put him alone with Joe Montana in the GOAT discussion.
By the time the game made it to overtime, there was no way the Patriots would lose. Special teams captain called "heads" for the coin toss, as he always does, but unless Falcons offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan (who has since been hired as the new head coach of the San Francisco 49ers) finally figured out to just feed the ball to Julio Jones like he's LeBron in crunch time, which he did not do all game, the Patriots would have stopped a cold, suddenly not ready for the moment offense and gotten the ball back and scored. Even if the Falcons managed to stop the Pats on 4th and Goal, they would have had to take the ball out from the one, and the Pats defense would have gotten the ball back and only needed a field goal to win.
For years, I have been saying that I would love to see a Super Bowl go into overtime, just not in a year when the Patriots are in it for stress management purposes. But when it got to the point that my team was in the first ever overtime Super Bowl, all the stress was gone. They had all the momentum, and they were the team that had been there before. Instead it became a question of who would be the one to make the Super Bowl ending score. It was almost Martellus Bennett, who got interfered with near the goal line on one play and was targeted with a end zone throw that could have been Atlanta's version of the Malcolm Butler interception at the end of Super Bowl XLIX. Instead it was James White, who did not have a rushing touchdown in the regular season, and who was inactive for the Super Bowl against Seattle two years ago who punched it in, breaking the plane of the end zone just enough to end the game, putting the Patriots ahead in a game they never led.
This game also proved the validity of some of the other football philosophies Bill Belichick & Co. have employed for years. The Falcons had greater elite, high-end talent, while the Patriots place a greater value on depth. While both teams have elite QBs, Matt Ryan has more elite weapons at his disposal in Jones, Freeman, Taylor Gabriel and Mohamed Sanu. Brady has Rob Gronkowski, the greatest player in the history of the tight end position, but did not have him most of the season, including the playoffs, and the Patriots went undefeated without him because Brady makes guys like Julian Edelman (whose insane late-game catch was indefensibly not mentioned until now), Danny Amendola, Chris Hogan, and Martellus Bennett. Patriots players are notoriously frustrating to use in fantasy football because you never know, for example, which running back will be getting the bulk of the carries. If LeGarrette Blount struggles early (as he did), then Dion Lewis or James White could have a big game, and game to game, that is tough to predict. The same is true on defense, where Belichick traded Chandler Jones to the Cardinals in the offseason and Jamie Collins to the Browns during the season, and got better. Belichick and defensive coordinator Matt Patricia would rather have a deep rotation of guys who can play than a small handful of elite players, who could just as easily get hurt or get tired (the way Atlanta's defense had to play twice as many snaps as their offense did in the Super Bowl) and not be there for them when they are needed most. It's frustrating to watch your team consistently trade down at the draft, going for quantity over quality, but it is hard to argue with that method when they are in seven of the last 16 Super Bowls.
Ultimately, coming back from 28-3, and winning the first OT Super Bowl was the perfect way to end the nonsense of the last two years with Deflategate. The thing I am most excited about is that the Patriots were accused of a stupid thing that should not have been a big deal at all, and they reacted by winning two of the last three Super Bowls, the commissioner tried to bury them like he did the New Orleans Saints by fining the team, taking away draft picks, and suspending the greatest player of this generation for twice as many games as he suspended a guy who knocked his fiance unconscious on camera, and the team responded by winning everything anyway. There is nothing better than that. Nothing.
The Curious Case of Matt Ryan
In the post I wrote recapping the weekend's NFL playoff games, I focused heavily on the New England Patriots and the Green Bay Packers, incorporated their opponents, the Houston Texans and Dallas Cowboys, and also felt the need to talk about the Pittsburgh Steelers, as they are the ones who will be coming into Foxboro to play against my Patriots next weekend. I mentioned the Atlanta Falcons, but did not even mention their quarterback, Matt Ryan, by name as I gushed over how good Tom Brady (who had an uncharacteristically bad game) and Aaron Rodgers (who has replaced Donald Trump, at least temporarily, as the protagonist of my nightmares). It was as I was writing that post that I realized how many thoughts I had about Matt Ryan, and how that deserved to be its own post, separate from the weekend that was for Brady and Rodgers.
There are four teams left in the NFL, and all four have quality quarterbacks, but Matt Ryan is not thought of the way the other three are. If Tom Brady, Ben Roethlisburger, and Aaron Rodgers never play in another football game, they are guaranteed to be enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio one day, and that is definitely not true of Matt Ryan. Ryan has the most to gain of the four by winning next Sunday.
In 2008, the same year that the Packers decided to make a backup QB named Aaron Rodgers their starter and trade away veteran superstar Brett Favre to the New York Jets, the Falcons drafted Matt Ryan out of Boston College with the third overall pick, and gave him an equally unenviable task of being the franchise QB for a team that had lost direction when Michael Vick went to prison, just as Vick was getting out of jail and getting his second chance in Philadelphia. For those who only remember the washed-up journeyman backup version of Vick we saw in recent years, pre-prison Michael Vick was must-watch television, even when the Falcons were bad, and a player so skilled that video game versions of him were borderline unfair to play against. Making Atlanta move on from Vick was no easy task, but Ryan came out of college with a decent amount of hype in his own right.
In his rookie year, Atlanta made the playoffs, but lost in the first round to the eventual NFC Champion Arizona Cardinals. In the years since, Ryan was one of a crop of QBs like Joe Flacco, Matthew Stafford, Andy Dalton, and Sam Bradford who were pretty good, but not great, and with the exception of Flacco winning the Super Bowl for the Baltimore Ravens in 2013, experienced minimal playoff success, if any.
Personally, I never really got the hype of Matt Ryan. He had a good career at Boston College, but I often find myself forgetting that he played college football in Boston, and I saw it. His final year at BC was my senior year of high school, the same year the Patriots went undefeated in the regular season. You would think BC would have a bigger fan base than it does, being one of only two big-time college football programs in Massachusetts, but Boston is a pro sports town, and there are so many other colleges in the area, nobody has a major incentive to root for BC unless they went there. Last year, BC played Notre Dame at Fenway Park, and Notre Dame was the home team. Boston College dominated the ACC for much of the 2007 season, but they were very much an afterthought with the Patriots reaching the Super Bowl, the Red Sox winning the World Series, and the Celtics winning their 17th NBA Title in the spring of 2008. The same thing happened a couple years later with current Carolina Panthers linebacker Luke Kuechly. He was one of the most sought after draft prospects in the entire country, but his college career was largely ignored by the local football fans.
Ryan was nicknamed "Matty Ice" while he was at BC, and the nickname never quite fit his game. He never had a moment in his career where he marched the Falcons down the field for a tying or go-ahead score at the end of a playoff game, like Tom Brady did in two of his first three career playoff games, as if to suggest he had ice water rather than blood running through his veins. In his NFL career, he gets called Matty Ice ironically, but that can change if he out-duels Aaron Rodgers on Sunday. Rodgers also has a lot to gain by winning this weekend. He has only made one Super Bowl, and that was six years ago, despite being the most talented quarterback in the NFL during that stretch. But people also recognize what Rodgers has to work with, and how incredible he was the last six weeks of the regular season, not to mention through the first two rounds of the playoffs. If the Packers were to lose, the brilliance of Rodgers against the Giants and Cowboys will not be forgotten, and the loss would be chalked up to being on the road against another talented team with another QB having an MVP-type season.
On the other hand, Matt Ryan has a chance to finally show us that he belongs in the discussion with Brady, Rodgers, and Roethlisburger. Right now, it is not enough that he convincingly won a division that also contains Drew Brees, Cam Newton, and Jameis Winston. Matt Ryan has had good regular seasons before. As long as he has been in the NFL, I have been waiting for him to get it done in January in order to take him seriously. We are almost a decade removed from that (over)hyped Boston College season, and I still have not seen it, but if he proves me wrong, I will admit it. LeBron won me over last summer, and I admitted it. Show me what you got, Matty Ice.
Two Kinds of Greatness
My readers may have noticed over the years that even though the NFL is a juggernaut of a league, and even though my favorite team in said league is the most consistently competitive, I write about the Patriots less than I do the Red Sox, Bruins, or Celtics. This is partly due to my disillusionment with the NFL. Since Roger Goodell took over a decade ago, football, which was my favorite sport as a kid and the mechanism with which I impressed a bunch of strangers in my college dorm suite as a freshman at UMass Dartmouth with my knowledge of every NFL roster in 2008, has fallen out of favor with me due to their disregard for player safety and livelihood, and bad priorities when it comes to real world issues like domestic violence.
It is also partly due to my inherent superstition. As an aspiring sports writer, I want to be objective. I want to be able to be critical, to see the bigger picture, with regard to the team and the rest of the league. It's much easier to be critical of the Bruins or the Celtics because in the years I have been following them, they have never had the best player in the league, let alone all time, nor the best coach in the league, let alone of all time. Ever since this run began for the New England Patriots in 2002–with the Tuck Rule, and the Steelers booking their flight to New Orleans for the Super Bowl before they played the AFC Championship Game, and Ty Law's momentum-swinging pick-six, and Tom Brady's drive down the field to set up one more game-winning kick for Adam Vinatieri (seriously, I watch the America's Game documentary on the Super Bowl XXXVI team at least once a year and it never gets old)–the Patriots have been the standard bearers of the NFL, and Brady and Bill Belichick have been consistently making their case for greatest QB and greatest coach of all time, and as someone with a rooting interest in that happening, I do not want that to end.
Now it's 2017, and before the start of next season, Brady will turn 40, and Belichick will turn 65. Any rational, reasonable Patriots fan has to think there are fewer of these days ahead of them than behind them, or if this run does continue, it would eventually be with someone like Jacoby Brissett at quarterback and someone like Matt Patricia as head coach. If this year is then end, it's been an incredible run.
The numbers are staggering. With their upcoming game next week against the Pittsburgh Steelers, Brady and Belichick have been to 11 AFC Championship Games in 16 seasons, including each of the last six. Brady and Belichick have more 10 win seasons together than the Detroit Lions have in their 80 plus year history. Bill Belichick has not had a losing season since Bill Clinton was president.
The Pats' divisional round game against the Houston Texans was not pretty, but they still won by a larger margin than the historically high spread Vegas set for this playoff game. In some respects, the game was only tight, and only had Patriots fans worried because of the standard of excellence we have set for the team. This Houston team is littered with ex-Patriots from Bill O'Brien to Romeo Crennel to Mike Vrabel to Larry Izzo to Vince Wilfork, but with a quarterback as not-ready-for-primetime as Brock Osweiler, none of that institutional knowledge could make a difference. Sure, they fared better than they did in the regular season, when they were shut out 27-0 without even having to deal with New England's first or second choice QB, but even with Brady throwing as many interceptions in that game as he did the whole season, and Dion Lewis putting the ball on the ground twice (Houston recovered one, New England kept the other), it was still a two-score game at the end. Even when they are bad, they are better than most, and that is special.
Next week, the Patriots will have their hands full with a better Steelers team, but the Steelers seem to find new and creative ways to generate bulletin board material for Belichick. In 2002, it was the confidence and the audacity to book a flight to New Orleans before even playing the game, but now they're broadcasting their true feelings about the NFL's scheduling policy, albeit inadvertently, on Facebook Live, complete with Mike Tomlin simultaneously warning the players to not do anything stupid on social media. The Steelers, like the Patriots, are one of the NFL's model franchises, and have been since the 1970s. When the San Francisco 49ers hire their next coach, they will have had more head coaches in four years than the Steelers have had since Watergate. But things like this, broadcasting their own trivial locker room talk to the world through Antonio Brown's phone, is what keeps them a notch below the Patriots in the Belichick Era.
My biggest takeaway from the Divisional Round Weekend is just how scary good Aaron Rodgers is right now. I already knew that, but the end of yesterday's game in Dallas reinforced that. This is a quarterback who has not been afforded the luxury of playing for a coach of Bill Belichick's caliber. Mike McCarthy is a solid NFL coach, but had the Green Bay Packers not run the table, as Rodgers declared they would after starting the season 4-6, the Packers may very well be waiting for the Patriots' season to end to introduce Josh McDaniels as their new head coach. Rodgers is the most talented person to play the QB position ever, and has not had the kind of running game Elway, Aikman, or Peyton Manning had in their best years, nor the superstar receivers of any other superstar QB. He is doing it all himself and making the players and coaches around him better in a way I have never seen, and oh, by the way, he regularly completes Hail Mary passes.
All of that I knew going into the Packers' Divisional Round match up against the Dallas Cowboys, but then after rookie QB Dak Prescott rallied back to tie the game for Dallas, Rodgers had just enough time to get Green Bay into field goal range, with an incredible throw downfield to Jared Cook, who made a great dance move to keep his toes in bounds. Just like that, the Packers were kicking a field goal and getting ready to face the Atlanta Falcons in the Georgia Dome next week in the NFC Championship Game.
Some may say Brady has nothing left to prove to anyone. He won more games than Peyton Manning in 30 fewer games, he played in more Super Bowls than any other QB and won as many as Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw. But the NFL dragged his name through the mud over air pressure in a football and suspended him for as many games as they suspended Greg Hardy for something that should have put him in prison. And already, despite only playing in one Super Bowl, talk of Aaron Rodgers being the greatest ever is picking up steam. The thing that makes Tom Brady great is that at age 39, when he should not have to prove anything to anyone in the game of football, he is burning to prove the haters wrong just as intensely as he was when he was picked 199th overall. Brady is at his best when he is overlooked, and that is what makes him the best.
What's Next for Denver?
The Denver Broncos are not going back to the playoffs this January after they kicked off 2016 by winning Super Bowl 50. Looking back on the Golden Anniversary Super Bowl not even a full year later, the Big Game of 2016, much like everything about that year, already feels really weird and out of character with the rest of reality. That Super Bowl was the Super Weird Bowl. The Carolina Panthers got there after going 15-1 in the regular season, and Cam Newton was the league's MVP, and they lost. I would say Peyton Manning was a shell of his former self, but that would be unfair to other shells of former selves. In an era when offense reigns supreme and scoring records are broken they way every meaningful baseball was getting broken in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was a stifling defense that ruled the day, in spite of Manning's poor play. Perhaps the weirdest about this Super Bowl is the fact that neither the Carolina Panthers nor the Denver Broncos made the playoffs the following year.
Carolina's struggles can be explained a little more easily. The defense took some steps backward with Jared Allen retiring, Josh Norman signing with Washington, and Luke Kuechly missing time due to injury. Also, Cam Newton gets hit like no other quarterback does. People seem to think that since he is so big and so strong that he can get wrecked like QBs did before the NFL cared about player safety. Repeating the kind of results the Panthers got in 2015 was never going to be easy, but I am not ready to write them off for the rest of the decade.
The Broncos' struggles in 2016 can also be easily identified, but are harder to justify when you realize that they could have been avoided. Denver was lucky to get as far as they did–not just lucky to win the Super Bowl, but lucky to beat the Patriots in the AFC Championship Game, and lucky to beat the Steelers in the Divisional Round–with a so-far-past-his-prime-he-should-have-changed-his-name-to-not-confuse-people-Peyton Manning under center and shouting "Omaha," but incapable of throwing the ball downfield at all. Attempting to do the same thing a second straight year, not measurably upgrading a quarterback position that could not get much worse, and expecting to get the same kind of game in and game out dominating defensive performance in an offense-driven modern NFL is playing with some serious fire. But that's exactly what the Broncos did.
Broncos president John Elway has earned a significant amount of trust with Broncos fans, having led the team to seven Super Bowls (five as a quarterback, two as an executive), and winning a championship can buy you goodwill for at least a year or two, no matter how badly the year that follow go (the only time I know of when a fan base turned on a team's management less than a year after winning a title was the Red Sox in 2014, and some of my posts on this blog are reflective of that), but he is pushing it with the way the Broncos went into the 2016 season. By replacing the retired Manning not with Brock Osweiler (who signed a free agent contract with the Houston Texans), but with Trevor Siemian, a 2015 7th round draft pick out of Northwestern, Elway placed lofty expectations on a Denver defense. The 2016 NFL Draft produced multiple quarterbacks that won games as rookies despite being picked outside the top two. I cannot help but wonder what Denver's record would have been had Elway taken a chance on Dak Prescott or Jacoby Brissett, who appear poised to be the replacements to Tony Romo in Dallas and Tom Brady in New England, respectively.
While able to throw out incredible talent in pass rushers DeMarcus Ware and Von Miller, as well as with Chris Harris Jr. and Aqib Talib in the defensive backfield, that defense deserves a better offense. The Broncos have been irresponsible in the way they built their offense, particularly the quarterback position, the same way the New Orleans Saints have squandered Drew Brees' offensive brilliance for most of his prime by not building a good defense for him. That said, if for some stupid reason, the NFL decided to cut down to 31 franchises and merge two existing teams for the 2017 season, if the Saints' offense merged with the Broncos' defense, they would be the prohibitive favorites to win Super Bowl LII in Minneapolis.
The Broncos need to do something about the QB position, but right now, that is not even their most pressing matter. This week, head coach Gary Kubiak resigned due to health concerns after just two years on the job. Kubiak played his entire NFL career for the Broncos, as Elway's backup, and served as quarterbacks coach and offensive coordinator for Denver when they won those two Super Bowls in the late 1990s. In his first year back in Denver, he led the Broncos to their third Super Bowl victory, and less than a year later he is retiring. Denver should, in theory, have no trouble finding a replacement, given how good their defense is and the fact that there should be more NFL quarterbacks available this offseason than most years, from Romo to Jimmy Garoppolo to Tyrod Taylor to Sam Bradford to Kirk Cousins.
The issue with Denver as a coaching spot may very well be John Elway's ego. He is a top five or top ten quarterback in the Super Bowl Era and has enjoyed a good deal of success as an executive, but he is also the guy who ran Tim Tebow out of Denver when after getting the Broncos to the playoffs, and clashed with John Fox, who like Kubiak, left the Broncos a year after getting them to the Super Bowl, but not for health reasons. Sure, he brought in Peyton Manning, one of the handful of quarterbacks higher up than him on the all time list, but when Manning was at a point of desperation in his career, coming off a potentially career ending neck injury, and the coach he brought in to replace Fox was literally his former backup. I would not be surprised if Elway went with either defensive coordinator Wade Phillips, who was previously Denver's head coach in 1993 and 1994, or one of the Shanahans, whom Elway has a working relationship with from his playing days, but I do not know how many coaching prospects from outside Elway's past work history would want to take this job. One person who will not be considered is New England offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels, this year's most sought after offensive-minded coach, whose only head coaching job was in Denver, and who was run out of town in his second season.
Regardless of what happens with the coaching vacancy, the Broncos need a quarterback, and if they do not get one, John Elway could be torn down as a fool just as quickly as he was built up as a genius.
Chip Kelly Failed in San Francisco, But Did Not Cause the 49ers' Failures
The first piece of writing I published in 2016 was about the San Francisco 49ers, their decision to hire Chip Kelly, and Colin Kaepernick's future. One day into 2017, Chip Kelly is out in San Francisco, the Niners rank high among the most incompetent franchises in all of sports, and Kaepernick is better known for leading a polarizing peaceful protest than he is for his play on the field. Looking back, it's amazing how far Chip Kelly and the Niners fell together, but also amazing that I did not see it coming.
ESPN's Adam Schefter reported early this morning that the 49ers have relieved head coach Kelly and general manager Trent Baalke of their duties. For Baalke, who has worked in San Francisco's front office in various capacities since 2005 and has been their GM since 2011, much more of what has gone wrong with the Niners, while Kelly's firing is more a part of the hard reset the team is poised to hit, and the next GM will want to bring in his own coach. Baalke was an instrumental part of making the 49ers respectable for the first time since the Jeff Garcia Era, helped draft and develop a very good defense, and was GM of a team that was a play away from winning the Super Bowl. Baalke was also the one who clashed with head coach Jim Harbaugh, who took the 49ers to three straight NFC Championship games in his first three years, and who has reinvigorated his alma mater Michigan's football program since leaving San Francisco. Baalke was the one who hired Jim Tomsula to replace Harbaugh, and when that one season experiment failed, hired Chip Kelly. All while San Francisco's record was getting steadily worse, while the 49ers opened a new stadium in Santa Clara, while San Francisco/San Jose/Santa Clara was the host city for Super Bowl 50, and a franchise that won five Super Bowls was becoming a laughingstock. Things definitely needed to change.
This may very well be the end of Chip Kelly as an NFL head coach, with his demise almost as meteoric as his rise. Two years into the Chip Kelly experience, when he was still the offensive mastermind from the University of Oregon, it looked like Kelly's Philadelphia Eagles were the future of professional football. There were regular discussions on sports talk radio in Boston, both when Chip was at Oregon and in Philly, debating whether the Patriots should have Josh McDaniels be the head coach of the future when Bill Belichick eventually retires, or they should go after Kelly to be the coach in waiting. Kelly's teams were exciting to watch, and Kelly himself was a fascinating figure to me. He was the guy from New Hampshire who developed this super-hurry-up offense and brought it to Oregon, putting up insane offensive numbers and employing a game-changing system of calling plays by flashing signs from the sideline to cut back on the time between offensive snaps, took the Ducks to a National Championship Game, appeared to be taking that system to the NFL by storm, all with Nick Foles as his quarterback.
After the 2014 season, when the Eagles had a winning record but missed the playoffs, Kelly gained more power over personnel decisions within the organization, and made a series of moves that I covered in more detail this time last year, but overall, while each move was individually defensible, it was too much change and too much turnover, and the 2015 Eagles fell on their collective face. The biggest impact move of the offseason was Kelly's attempt to move up in the draft to acquire Marcus Mariota, and when he could not, trading Foles to the St. Louis Rams for Sam Bradford, while also bringing in Mark Sanchez and Tim Tebow as QB options, and none of them being measurably better than Foles by all that much. Philadelphia fired Kelly, hired former Eagles QB and longtime Andy Reid assistant Doug Pederson, and then drafted Carson Wentz with the #2 overall pick, and even though they missed the playoffs in 2016, have to feel good about the way they bounced back from Kelly's final year.
Kelly, on the other hand, landed not in Tennessee, where he could have coached his former Oregon standout Marcus Mariota, but in San Francisco with a highly flawed roster and two flawed quarterbacks. I got the sense Kelly did not want want Colin Kaepernick or Blaine Gabbert, but that was the hand he was dealt. Kelly and Kaepernick, to me, seemed like a good match, an athletic, mobile quarterback paired with an innovative, up-tempo offensive coach, but the pairing came a couple years too late, when Kaepernick maybe had been hit too many times and Kelly may have failed too many times to make it work, as neither was operating with the kind of confidence they had in 2012 and 2013.
One angle to Chip Kelly getting fired for a second time in as many seasons is the fact that New England Patriots and former Oregon running back LeGarrette Blount had a career year, and is running the ball as well as he ever has. One of my first football posts on this blog, back in 2013, was about Kelly and Blount, as Kelly was acclimating to the NFL and Blount was in his first training camp with the Patriots, and their shared history, when Blount ruined Kelly's first game as head coach of Oregon by sucker punching an opposing player on the road in the Ducks' season opener at Boise State. Given how short running back careers are, and how head coaches can last decades in the NFL, it's amazing that Blount's NFL career is now very likely to outlast Chip Kelly's. The NFL is weird that way.
I have no idea what comes next for Kelly. As I alluded to in my Rex Ryan column last week (spoiler alert: the Bills fired Ryan after I wrote it, but before he had the opportunity to coach the Week 17 finale against the Jets), Kelly put himself in a no-win situation in San Francisco, and while the Oregon football program he was instrumental in building crumbled this season, culminating with the firing of Kelly's former assistant Mark Helfrich just two years removed from their National Championship Game loss to Ohio State, the university did not wait for Chip Kelly to get fired by San Francisco to try and bring him back, hiring Willie Taggart away from South Florida instead. Kelly's head coaching future appears to be at the collegiate level, unless he decides to bide his time and be an offensive coordinator for an NFL team for a few years, but the college and NFL hiring and firing cycles are different enough that he is getting onto the market at a time when the major desirable power conference jobs, Oregon, LSU, and Texas chief among them, have been filled already. Kelly bet on himself and his system, and I was rooting for it to work, but it did not, and now it may be a while before he is ever in such an important role again on the national stage, if it happens at all.


text:
Affiliations: University Hospital, Lausanne, Switzerland,
Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA
Correspondence to: Lucas Liaudet, MD, Assistant Professor, Division of Critical Care, Department of Internal Medicine, University Hospital, 1011 Lausanne, Switzerland; e-mail: email@example.com
We read with interest the article by Patel and colleagues (January 2004),1 who presented the results of a retrospective study evaluating open-lung biopsy (OLB) in a cohort of 57 patients with clinically diagnosed ARDS. The main observation of this study was that a pathologic diagnosis other than diffuse alveolar damage (the histologic hallmark of ARDS) was found in 60% of cases, resulting in a change in therapy in a majority of patients (ie, discontinuation of unneeded therapy, 37% of patients; addition of specific therapy, 60% of patients). Surprisingly, however, the therapeutic alterations guided by these precise histopathologic findings did not confer any survival benefit.,1 Such an observation is disappointing, as it contradicts the clinical principle that knowing the underlying pathology and instituting a specific therapy should positively affect outcome.
A plausible explanation for these negative results is that complications related to the surgical procedure may have cancelled out any potential benefit of obtaining a definitive diagnosis. Indeed, complications were noted in as much as 39% of patients, were defined as major (eg, death, myocardial infarction, stroke, institution of dialysis, or hemothorax within 48 h of surgery) in 7% of patients, and were defined as minor (eg, acute renal failure, 11% of patients; persistent air leak for > 1 week, 21% of patients) in 32% of patients.1We do not agree with the authors' statement that, due to its low rate of major complications, OLB is a safe procedure in ARDS patients. In contrast, we think that the impact of the so-called minor complications has been underestimated by the authors, especially when it comes to the problem of persistent air leak. Persistent air leak (in effect, a bronchopleural fistula) requires prolonged chest tube drainage, may pose important problems in achieving adequate ventilation, and is associated with a poor prognosis in mechanically ventilated patients with severe respiratory failure.2–4 As such, the occurrence of a bronchopleural fistula has to be regarded as an ominous complication of OLD, rather than a minor complication, in the series reported by Patel et al. It would be meaningful to know about the outcomes of patients who developed such a complication in this study.
In summary, although this study provides important information on a pathologic viewpoint, we think that it does not support the use of OLB in mechanically ventilated patients with ARDS. Rather, it suggests that complications related to the procedure may be severe enough to negate any potential benefit provided by a precise histopathologic diagnosis.
We thank Drs. Oddo and Liaudet for their interesting and insightful comments. We also were disappointed that therapeutic changes made in response to the etiologic diagnosis were not associated with an improved outcome.1 We do not, however, believe that this lack of improvement is due to an offset from morbidities related to the lung biopsy procedure, as the risk of surgical complications (including prolonged air leakage) was independent of the etiologic diagnosis or the institution of specific therapy. Rather, we think that the lack of improvement was a reflection of the lack of efficacious therapies that are currently available for many of the causes of ARDS that were discovered. These findings highlight the need for further research into better therapies for diffuse alveolar damage and other pathologies causing ARDS.
While we agree that the occurrence of bronchopleural fistula (BPF) in mechanically ventilated patients with emphysema has poor prognostic implications, we think that this is a reflection of the severity of the patient's underlying parenchymal lung disease rather than of the air leak itself.2Thus, we do not think that BPF secondary to lung biopsy in ARDS patients carries major deleterious consequences. In our study, the presence of BPF was not associated with the in-hospital mortality rate (mortality in patients with BPF, 46%; mortality in patients without BPF, 50%). In our experience, BPF rarely has important effects on gas exchange, and, in fact, a substantial quantity of ventilation has been reported3–4 to occur via the chest tube in patients with BPF. While BPF has limited ventilator liberation in the past, the current guidelines recommend continuing spontaneous breathing trials to liberate patients from mechanical ventilation regardless of chest tube status.5Finally, our experience has been that with the use of lower transpulmonary pressures in the ventilation of ARDS patients, the risk of BPF from lung biopsy has fallen considerably.6–7 Thus, we continue to believe that surgical lung biopsy can be safely performed in selected ARDS patients.
Become a CHEST member and receive a FREE subscription as a benefit of membership.
Individuals can purchase this article on ScienceDirect.
Individuals can purchase a subscription to the journal.
Individuals can purchase a subscription to the journal or buy individual articles.
Learn more about membership or Purchase a Full Subscription.
Institutional access is now available through ScienceDirect and can be purchased at myelsevier.com.
Some tools below are only available to our subscribers or users with an online account.
Download citation file:
Web of Science® Times Cited: 1
Customize your page view by dragging & repositioning the boxes below.
Enter your username and email address. We'll send you a reminder to the email address on record.
Athens and Shibboleth are access management services that provide single sign-on to protected resources. They replace the multiple user names and passwords necessary to access subscription-based content with a single user name and password that can be entered once per session. It operates independently of a user's location or IP address. If your institution uses Athens or Shibboleth authentication, please contact your site administrator to receive your user name and password.


text:
What survives and pretty much thrives in the worst drought? We're in Exceptional Drought, pretty much in some stage of drought since 2006. What I can think of offhand are plants like Esperanza, Cenizo, Mexican Firebush, Woolly Ironweed, Lace Cactus, Red Yucca, Desert Willow, Anacacho Orchid Tree, Four-nerve Daisy and gayfeather. But even some of my most reliable plants are going dormant in some form, some just not blooming or growing at all unless they get rain for a while, assuming they are not watered.
Drought Superstars
My new best friends are dragon fruit. A lot of the epis (see the Cactus Flower Forum) seem to survive with minimal water. I have two small plants I got at a plant depot place about a yeqr ago and they are hanging in with only occasional water.
Plumerias also hold up well with little water. My tulsi basil thrives and reseeds itself.
Do you have freezes where you are? That would make a difference.
Also, you might check out the self-contained box garden forum You can make an Earthbox-like container for less than $5.00
katiebear in the Baja desert
Yes, it does freeze here...we live in the hills, so winter can be pretty cold. The last couple of years we haven't had anything below 20�, but some years it gets lower. I've heard of earth-boxes, but don't know anything about them really. How are they used in drought areas? Some of the local native plants are pretty tough, and I do like the natives.
You can read about the earthboxxes at www.earthbox.com and also on the self-contained box garden forum.
They can be very good for growiing vegetables in a drougt area as they conserve water.
There are several people from Texas on the box garden forum.
Thanks for the info!
Post a Reply to this Thread
More Specialty Gardening Threads
Anyone use this product?started by flowermaiden2
last post by flowermaiden2Jun 17, 20163Jun 17, 2016
Gutters defeat chipmunks!started by DonShirer
last post by DonShirerNov 11, 20163Nov 11, 2016
Schefflera plant care takingstarted by danhash
last post by danhashJul 29, 20161Jul 29, 2016
Composting Citrus Peelsstarted by Ruth
last post by RuthFeb 11, 20170Feb 11, 2017
Seeking recommendations for plants around a pool in zone 7a.started by BirchBarkSmith
last post by BirchBarkSmithApr 05, 20172Apr 05, 2017