Member, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia Bar, and the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.
• Conduct complex litigation in Common Pleas and Municipal Courts.
• Clients included both adults and juveniles, with a background in handling delinquent/dependency, mental health and elderly cases.
• Involvement in all aspects of litigation including preliminary hearings, pre-trial motions, trials, post-trial motions, and sentencing.
• Extensively researched and reviewed both statutory and case law, and utilized strategic planning to formulate defense.
• Counseled and prepared clients and witnesses for court, including interviewing and trial investigation.
• Established priorities and expedited workflow of over 90 cases weekly.
• Met all court deadlines timely and accurately.
• Remained calm in crisis situations and made logical decisions under immense pressure.
• Interrelated with people of all ages and backgrounds, including extensive interaction with prosecutors, courtroom staff, judges, and judge's staff.
• Assisted in preparing criminal judicial opinions.
• Wrote memoranda related to PCRA petitions, omnibus pre-trial motions and post-sentence motions, and other orders of the court.
• Conducted legal research and analysis on state and federal statutory and case law.
• Managed outstanding motions list. Filed court reports -- First-Degree Murder forms and Pa.R.J.A. 703 reports with the Administrative Office of the Pennsylvania Courts (AOPC).
• Monitored and minimized courtroom downtime. Assisted in preparing civil judicial opinions and disposed of outstanding civil cases remaining on the docket, including civil settlement conferences.
• Oversaw three misdemeanor cases in conjunction with law school clinical program.
• Contacted and interviewed bailed and incarcerated clients.
• Conducted preliminary field investigations.
• Researched and prepared for preliminary hearings and summary trials, and negotiating pleas.
Performed research on various legal issues pertaining to family law (civil and criminal). Prepared legal briefs and other paperwork. Observed and assisted in the courtroom.
Close interaction with this solo practitioner. Performed research on employment law which entailed sexual, racial, and national origin discrimination, and sexual harassment. Prepared complaints for federal district court suits. Wrote legal memoranda.
If your cover letter and resume are ready, you may email your Personal Defense Attorney resume through international job search to job recruiters worldwide.
Good luck with the Personal Defense Attorney resume sample.


text:
During the 1926–27 English football season, Brentford competed in the Football League Third Division South. In Harry Curtis' first season as manager, the club finished 11th and advanced to the fifth round of the FA Cup for the first time.

Season summary

After just one top-half finish in the Third Division South since entering the Football League in 1920, Brentford appointed former Gillingham manager Harry Curtis to the position on a one-year contract in May 1926. The club was still seeking a winning formula, after generally poor league placings from previous managers Fred Halliday and Archie Mitchell. The directors of the club cleared the decks and retained just 9 of the previous season's squad. Curtis brought with him assistant trainer Jack Cartmell (an ex-Brentford player) and five Gillingham players – full backs Wally Barnard and Charlie Butler, half back Charlie Reddock and forwards Bill Berry and Joe Craddock. Former Gillingham half back Frank Marshall later signed in January 1927. Jim Ferguson replaced the departed John Thomson in goal and defenders John Hodgson, Ted Winship, half backs Bert Bellamy, Joe Hodnett and forwards George Anderson and Stephen Dearn were also signed.

A 4–0 victory over Brighton & Hove Albion on the opening day put Brentford at the top of the Third Division South table, which was the first time since joining the Football League that the club had occupied the top spot in the division. Defeat in the following match to Luton Town dropped the Bees back to 6th, but three successive wins in the following matches saw the club rise back to the top and they stayed there until 15 September. 10 goals in the first 9 matches from Ernie Watkins was a factor in the bright start. By early December, the team's league form was affected by a fixture pile-up, caused by a run to the fifth round of the FA Cup. The 8 FA Cup matches played in a single season is the most ever by the club. The run was a financial success and generated enough money for the club to build a new grandstand on the Braemar Road side of Griffin Park.

A goal drought suffered by forwards Ernie Watkins, Jack Lane, Stephen Dearn and the departure of Jack Allen to The Wednesday in March 1927 saw Brentford limp through the final three months of the season. The Bees finished the season in 11th place and had been rooted in mid-table since 5 February 1927. Ernie Watkins top-scored with 24 goals, then the highest tally for a Brentford player since the club joined the Football League. Four consecutive home league draws between 2 and 30 April 1927 equalled the club record.

A notable departure after the season was that of 38-year old cricketer Patsy Hendren, who had played intermittently as an outside forward for Brentford since 1907. During the season he had become the first Bees player since the club joined the Football League to score four goals in a match (during a 7–3 rout of Coventry City on 23 October 1926) and an 11,000 crowd turned up to see his final match against Newport County on Easter Saturday 1927. Upon his departure, Hendren's 400-plus Brentford appearances was then the club record and he was posthumously inducted into the club's Hall of Fame in May 2015.

League table

Results
Brentford's goal tally listed first.

Legend

Football League Third Division South

FA Cup

 Sources: Statto, 11v11, 100 Years of Brentford

Playing squad
Players' ages are as of the opening day of the 1926–27 season.

 Sources: 100 Years of Brentford, Timeless Bees, Football League Players' Records 1888 to 1939

Coaching staff

Statistics

Appearances and goals

Players listed in italics left the club mid-season.
Source: 100 Years of Brentford

Goalscorers

Players listed in italics left the club mid-season.
Source: 100 Years of Brentford

Management

Summary

Transfers & loans
Cricketers are not included in this list.

References

Brentford F.C. seasons
Brentford

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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Amy Larsen has over 15 years of experience in enterprise marketing. Amy is the Director of Demand Generation at Siemens— where she acts as a change agent for driving campaign alignment around strategic markets.
On the B2B Growth Podcast, Amy talks about how her team understands content performance on their website. Amy's team segments and serves content to their target audiences based on the industry. They are not only able to see who is engaging with their content, but also share results of their personalization efforts internally.
James Carbary:	Welcome back to the B to B Growth Show. We are here today with Amy Larsen. She's the Director of Demand Generation at Siemens. Amy, how you doing today?
Amy Larsen: Doing great, James. How are you?
James Carbary: I am wonderful. Amy, we're going to be talking about personalization today, and really wanting to dive into the Siemens story and your experience with personalization at Siemens. Before we do that, just give our listeners a little bit of context. What are you and your team up to at Siemens? What is Siemens? What are you and your team doing over there?
Amy Larsen: That's a very broad question. Siemens is a German-based company. We focus primarily on the industrial market — manufacturing, energy, healthcare, that kind of space. For us, our Demand Generation team, we provide Demand Generation support for all of our divisions here that are US-based.
Amy Larsen: We are focusing on helping them to activate at scale Demand Generation programs across a multitude of divisions and business units, so a lot of internal customers being that broad and that many markets.
James Carbary:	Got it, wonderful. All right, Amy. Now that our listeners have a little bit of context where you're coming from, let's start talking about when did this idea of personalization … Has this been something you guys have been doing for several years now? Go back to the beginning of the personalization journey and we'll start there. Could you walk us through when the conversation started happening?
Amy Larsen: Sure. I think personalization came up for us around 2013, 2014. We were building a new team focused around Demand Generation, which was kind of a new concept for Siemens. We had a grouping of like-minded individuals across all of our organizations who were working on technology. How do we move our technology space forward? Bring our businesses forward to make use of more of the digital space. Serving manufacturers, we tend to be in a lagging market. The new shiny object isn't always the key on how you reach them, but their buyers journey had definitely evolved to be more and more in the digital space. We have young engineers that are coming in that are part of the purchase decisions.
The biggest thing for us was to be able to take what was a very small group of people who were digitally focused and enable our businesses to operate at scale. All of these divisions, we just have a handful of people. How do we make it so that we can launch these types of programs without having large departments of people?
Amy Larsen: The idea came in from one of our team members to start looking at using personalization as a way to not have to build large, complex programs but take programs that were existing and make them more personalized.
Amy Larsen: We've certainly heard all the stats about conversation rates and we were trying to drive those up; so that was how we started in that path.
James Carbary:	Got it, and then so someone brings up the idea, 'Hey, we should start looking into this.' What were some of the solutions you guys looked at? What were some of the things that stood out that ultimately made you guys end up deciding to go with the vendor that you chose?
Amy Larsen: That's a really good question. For us, it was two-fold. One, being able to look for technology partners who could operate within the Siemens space, which isn't always easy. Two, having some younger team members where we wanted to excite them with something that was new and technology-based.
We've been customers of SiriusDecisions for a while, so we turned to them for some help to evaluate a couple of vendors. We went through several scenarios. The biggest thing for us was something that could implement with our current analytics, web analytics program, our current marketing automation system, and that would allow us to integrate without any IT involvement. Going through IT with us can be challenging at times.
We had a couple of interviews and we landed on working with Bound. It was Get Smart Content at the time. They had the capabilities of being able to do that, but the other area that was very helpful for us was being a small team, we didn't really have execution resources in-house. We weren't going to have a lot of people that we could devote to it, and so our concern was we're going to get this new tool and we won't have the resources to be able to implement it.
They offered a consulting package where they helped us with actually executing the program. The one thing we told them when we decided to go on board was we really need a partner, somebody who can help us make sure that these things get done; because it may not happen if it's relying on our own internal resources and workflows.
James Carbary: I would imagine there was probably a lot of collaboration, as far as developing the overarching strategy, what you guys … What results you guys wanted to drive with it. Then, Bound came along and really helped you guys execute on the strategy that you guys collaboratively came up with together. Is that how it worked?
Amy Larsen: It did. We learned a lot about ourselves going through this journey. I think every marketer experiences that when you get a new tool, and then you start trying to execute it. You start to identify … You thought you had a work flow, or a process, or a resource allocated to do this, but they have another job.
Amy Larsen: Budget is allocated elsewhere and so kind of going forward with that. They helped us with filling that resource piece, and then we had to look at our workflows internally; which there was a little bit of stumbling blocks on our end getting used to that. What Bound did was they really helped us to analyze some of the gaps we might have had in our strategy. By that, I mean looking at how are we defining our audience, and how are we defining our targeting? How are we defining our go-to-market strategy?
The one thing that came out of that was becoming very clear on what we defined as an audience, and how were we going to internally target that audience. Then, personalization is something that helps you activate that, along with everything else that's in your plan.
Amy Larsen: It made it kind of a funnel to push everything through, and that was a big learning step for us. That's been extremely valuable. We've used that ability to define audiences since then.
James Carbary:	Are you able to share, Amy, and it's totally okay if you're not. Are you able to share what … how you guys thought about your audience before and then what that ended up shifting into as you guys started working with Bound?
Amy Larsen: Yeah, absolutely. The biggest thing for us was we would talk about our audiences being CFOs, engineers, … marketing or the manufacturing operations, plant managers, things like that. What we learned was that, that's too broad to create personalization that's effective and that actually highlighted that it caused us issues in other areas, … not just in our targeting on our website but when we're writing content specifically.
We started to learn to look at what is the go-to-market strategy that's common within Siemens. For us, it's industry. You're talking to somebody that's in automotive. Well, a food and beverage engineer can have different needs and pain points than an automotive engineer. They may be looking at similar solutions, but they're solving different problems.
It allowed us to look at taking our audiences and segmenting it by the market that they were in, the industry that they were in. Then, that's how we started to bucket our personalization. Leaving it simple was very helpful, not going much beyond the industry because it allows you to make sure you're producing and getting something out the door versus if you're really going into finite persona segments and getting into something more complicated. Our other big learning was keep it simple.
James Carbary:	I love it. I love it. Amy, so once … Bound came alongside you guys, they helped expose some parts of your process that needed to be worked on, gave you this new mindset around the importance of segmenting your audiences, probably a little bit more granularly than you were doing it before. I'd love to talk about some of the results that you guys have seen since then, since Bound came alongside. They helped you implement it. What has been the story since then?
Amy Larsen: Sure, absolutely. The one thing that came out of working with Bound and personalization was the idea of creating a goal. When we first started working with them, they would ask us, 'What's the goal of what you want this person to achieve on the website?' We realized we didn't have a really good answer for that. Talking about a very large website and a lot of businesses.
We started to look at making sure we were clearly defining the goal. When we have any type of event, or initiative, or campaign, what is it that we're looking for them to achieve? We start off with that question now. We start looking at that definition. The more we have clearly defined the goals of what we want them to achieve, the more we're seeing that the results are driving up for us.
We had a big automotive event, so we clearly defined a goal that registration was what we needed to accomplish. We set personalization to the task to help us do that. We were targeting specific companies that we wanted to be at the event and overall, the industry, making sure that they were showing up. We saw a tremendous lift in results from that one from the previous year. 75% of the registrations came from the website from viewing personalization.
We saw more than a 50% lift for the company that we were targeting to get to that event. It was something that was so simple and easy to execute, clearly defining we wanted an event. We wanted them to register with that; but just having that in mind and having Bound help us to put that package together and get it executed across all of our websites, getting that list that came in was tremendous.
The other thing it's helped us to do is to understand when we do have an industry and a goal in mind, what's really working with each of those? For example, aerospace and automotive, they tend to go to a certain section of our site, which is more in the general area, not the industry-specific area. Now we're able to target them to areas that we designed specifically for them.
Amy Larsen: Whereas manufacturing prospects, they tend to go straight into the industry site. Now we can look at making sure we're getting them to the manufacturing solutions, those areas. Those types of analytics and the insights they've given us over our existing website visitors, that gives us the low hanging fruit of what goals to define.
Amy Larsen: And then to help us to execute those. They're not overwhelming, which is the hard part. In our area, things can feel so daunting; but these are pretty simple things to put in place.
James Carbary: Yeah. You already mentioned it. You said it was relatively simple question to ask, but I totally agree. It just can be so powerful. You just ask, 'Okay, what do we want the person visiting this site to achieve?' By asking this question, it allows you to then reverse engineer that result. Do you feel like by asking that question first, it is … Is it shaping I guess all elements of what the … Is it where you guys are putting the registration buttons? What the copy looks like for each different audience? What were some of the questions that you guys started asking yourself when you started asking that first question of what do we want the user on this page to achieve?
Amy Larsen: Yeah, absolutely. I mean it's almost embarrassing to think about now when we look at our process and what we would go through for designing. It's a pretty simple question: what do you want this person to do? It wasn't where we started when we were doing our design process. The more that we've asked ourselves that question, the more it has lent itself into becoming more customer-centric, designing the experience from the perspective of the user, rather than from the perspective of the business.
That gets us to think about it in very simple terms, what is this person going to see? What do we want them to do? How do we want it to feel for them when they do that? Our message has become customer-centric. What is their question, their pain point, the problem they're trying to solve? How do we get them to that information quickly and efficiently? How do we allow them to then self-serve getting that information? We have started to design all the elements that way, including where does the button go on an email that we send; versus where does the button go on the website that we send them to.
The other thing that's great is it allows us to compensate for what can be an overwhelming navigation system. A company like Siemens in an enterprise environment, you're talking about thousands of products that they might be going through. This allows us for whatever location they get into, to say, 'Hey, we see that you're in food in beverage. You might be interested in seeing this.' Or, 'You might be interested in this content,' and getting them straight there rather than hoping that they find it in what is a massive Siemens website.
James Carbary: The other thing that you mentioned, Amy, that I want to go back to is you said that there was a particular segment of your audience that … One segment went directly to the part of the website that was specifically for them; but another segment of your audience was going to the more general landing pages that weren't necessarily specific for them. If I'm understanding this right, you were able to … Was that something you didn't know before, but after you guys started using Bound, you started to be able to tell. 'Hey, people … are coming to us from these companies, and they're landing on these more generic landing pages,' and with that data, that you were then able to say, 'Okay, so we're going to start putting calls-to-action. If they come from a particular IP address to point them to resources that we know are relevant to them.
Amy Larsen: Yeah, absolutely. Again, it's that low hanging fruit aspect. Data can be overwhelming, the mass amounts that's there. If you're trying to make sense of, 'What is all this information and data that I'm seeing?' There's sometimes so many numbers you don't know which one to look at.
Amy Larsen: Then, ways that we can then change that experience, if that's not what we were looking for them to accomplish, to get them to the area that is the goal. I'm not having to solve all the world's problems across all of our data sites or websites. I can start to look at it's this audience that I need to focus on right now. Here's what we're already seeing that they're going after. Then, creating a specific goal and changing what they might have been experiencing.
Amy Larsen: We didn't know that before. We knew what companies were coming. We have IT targeting, but knowing where those companies are going from there. There's clickstream analysis, and it just makes my head hurt. It makes a better story for me to be able to rationalize and internalize just by looking at it quickly and by having them give that data quickly; rather than hoping that I find that in all of those numbers that I have in front of me.
James Carbary: That makes perfect sense. Amy, if there's somebody listening to this and maybe they're at the very beginning of their personalization journey, they're starting to look to bring it into their organization. Is there any advice you would give to that person who's on the front end of the journey with you having been on yours for the last few years now? What is that advice that you would give to that person?
Amy Larsen: That's a good question. I guess it would be two fold. The first is to don't underestimate asking yourself what resources do you have that will be allocated towards this; because remember, everybody already has a full time job. If you're going to bring a tool in, you need to be prepared for someone to take up the work that's going to go along with that. It's not a lot, but the workflow question still has to be answered to make sure there's a process in place that can utilize the tool.
I think we were probably slow going at adopting personalization for that reason, having to work out our internal efforts. Bound helped us to answer that question as we worked with them to get us on board and moving those through. Think about that internally to have that in place.
James Carbary: I love it.
Amy Larsen: Then, the second thing would be … I guess it's three fold. The second thing would be start asking yourself what audience, what goal. Get used to that very simple question. What goal do I want them to achieve? When it's goal-oriented, you'll have better use cases upfront. You can hit the ground running with some test variables or pilots that you can implement in short term so that you can start to see results. Then, you can pivot once you get the results in place.
That lends us to the third is keep it simple. That idea of what goal and have it be an audience and a thing, and moving towards that goal so that you can see quick iterations. It helps for adoption when people see quick wins. The more you can simplify that statement and focus on that piece, the more you'll be able to create a bit more groundswell internally and people start to jump on and want to use it. That's kind of what we're seeing now is everybody's clamoring, 'I want to use personalization,' now that they've seen the results; that gains that adoption. Think about internal work processes.
Think about the simple who and what goal, and then third, keep it simple.
James Carbary: I love it. Amy, this has been incredibly helpful. If there's somebody listening to this. They want to stay connected with you. They want to learn more about Siemens. What's the best way for them to go about doing both of those things?
Amy Larsen: Absolutely, would love to be able to keep in touch. The best way is to reach me is going to be either on LinkedIn. I'm under Amy Larsen, working for Siemens. You'll see me there. Or, via email, amy.larsen@siemens.com; and happy to answer any questions.
James Carbary: Love it. Amy, thank you so much for your time today. Again, this has been incredibly helpful, so I really appreciate you chatting with me today.
Amy Larsen: Thanks, James. Great chatting with you and best of luck to anybody out there who's going down that personalization path.


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HomeFordFusion EnergiNews
Ford To Launch Mondeo Energi PHEV In China In 2018, Full Electric SUV In 5 Years
Ford To Launch Mondeo Energi PHEV In China In 2018, Full Electric SUV In 5 Years product 2017-04-07 12:06:32 https://insideevs.com/news/333682/ford-to-launch-mondeo-energi-phev-in-china-in-2018-full-electric-suv-in-5-years/ Ford Fusion Energi Ford C-Max Energi Ford Mondeo Energi
Ford has announced its electrification strategy for China.
After introducing the C-MAX Energi plug-in hybrid for fleet customers, Ford intends to add new plug-ins starting next year.
Ford Mondeo Energi
In 2018 Ford will launch Mondeo Energi (aka Fusion Energi) locally manufactured under Ford's Changan Ford joint venture. Ford already partners with Changan, offering Mondeo hybrid. The Plug-in hybrid will be capable of covering up to 50 km (31 miles) in all-electric mode.
Within five years all-new small pure electric SUV is planned with up to 450 km (280 miles) of range
By 2020 Ford will begin locally manufacturing electrified powertrains
By 2025 around 70% of Ford's models on sale in China to be hybrids, plug-in hybrids or all-electric
Ford based its strategy on the Society of Automotive Engineers of China forecast that by 2025 new energy vehicles will expand to over 15 percent of total passenger vehicle sales in China, which actually seems kind of low considering the country has a goal of 800,000 New Energy Vehicles (plug-in vehicles) on the road for just this year.
Mark Fields, president and chief executive officer, Ford Motor Company said:
"The time is right for Ford to expand our EV lineup and investments in China. We are prioritizing our electrification efforts on China to reflect its importance as a global electrified vehicle market and to make lives better, simpler and more cost effective for Chinese consumers."
China Electrification Infographic
Press blast:
China Plug-in Hybrid
"To address the diverse needs of consumers in China, including the growing demand for EVs, Ford will offer a comprehensive range of electrified solutions by 2025 -- hybrids, plug-in hybrids and fully battery-powered electric vehicles. By then, 70 percent of all Ford nameplates will have electrified powertrain options, including the full range of nameplates produced by Changan Ford.
In addition, by 2020 Ford will start manufacturing electrified powertrains in China. It also plans to expand its new energy vehicle engineering capabilities at its Nanjing Research and Engineering Centre, with a focus on incorporating Chinese customer needs into Ford's next generation EV technologies.
Leading in electrification is fundamental to Ford's transformation into an auto and a mobility company. Globally, the company is investing $4.5 billion to electrify its most-popular, highest-volume vehicles for customers, offering more capability, productivity and performance -- together with better fuel economy. In January, Ford confirmed seven of the 13 new global EVs it will launch in the next five years, including the all-new fully electric small SUV that will be sold in China, and a hybrid autonomous vehicle designed for commercial operations in mobility services, starting in North America.
Locally Produced Mondeo Energi Coming in 2018 Expanding its EV portfolio in China, Changan Ford will start manufacturing the Mondeo Energi plug-in hybrid in Chongqing in early 2018. The Mondeo Energi brings the benefits of electrification without range limitations, easily adapting to customers' lifestyles while saving fuel and reducing emissions. It will feature an electric drive range of up to 50 kilometers, fast torque on demand, smooth acceleration and a quiet operation.
The Mondeo Energi will allow drivers to use battery power around town and gas for longer trips, reducing the inconvenience and costs of frequent stops at the gas station during their daily commute. If the battery of the Mondeo Energi is running low, it can easily be charged at home or the office.
A Growing EV Portfolio in China Ford will also bring to market an all-new fully electric small SUV to China within five years. The SUV will be engineered to deliver an estimated range of more than 450 kilometers and will be sold in North America and Europe, as well as China.
In November 2016, Ford China launched the Mondeo Hybrid, which is built in Chongqing by Changan Ford. With attractive exterior styling, LED headlights and packed with technology, the Mondeo Hybrid delivers comfort, smooth handling and excellent fuel economy. It comes equipped with a high-performance Lithium-ion 1.4-kilowatt-hour battery, which is smaller and lighter than previous batteries.
Paired with improved regenerative braking -- which captures up to 95 percent of the energy lost during braking and recharges the vehicle's battery pack -- the Mondeo Hybrid offers drivers an efficient driving and ownership experience.
Ford's C-MAX Energi plug-in hybrid is already on the road in China as a fleet vehicle.
Bringing Next-Generation EV Technologies to China
Ford C-MAX Energi
Ford is expanding its China-based electrified powertrain development capabilities to support its growing EV lineup and manufacturing capability. The new energy vehicle team in Nanjing will also assist the global team to develop next generation EV technologies that can provide consumers with superior performance and greater fuel efficiency, as well as a smoother drive experience in all drive modes and integrated battery system design offering best-in-class interior space.
On top of global projects, Ford's new energy vehicle team in China leads the development of unique components of new energy vehicles launched in China, such as charge cord and port. It is also responsible for the localization of key EV technologies and systems, including battery, battery pack assembly and powertrain controls validation and calibration, as well as homologation certification.
"Ford is committed to developing smarter, greener mobility solutions for the future, and our team in China will be at the forefront of this innovation," said Trevor Worthington, vice president, product development, Ford Asia Pacific.
Ford will be showcasing the Mondeo Hybrid, C-MAX Energi and Mondeo Energi at a special event in Shanghai on April 8 and at Auto China 2017 from April 19-28."
Ford Fusion Energi Ford C-Max Energi
Sedan Minivan

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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World News | Europe
Theresa May Heads to Buckingham Palace in Bid to Form Government
Jeremy Corbyn says prime minister should step down and that he wants to form a minority government
Britain's Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party Theresa May arrives at Buckingham Palace to meet Queen Elizabeth II.Credit: PAUL ELLIS/AFP
British Prime Minister Theresa May will ask Queen Elizabeth for permission to form a government on Friday after an election debacle that saw her Conservative Party lose its parliamentary majority days before talks on Britain's EU departure are due to begin.
Theresa May to seek permission to form government after losing majority
Theresa May suffers major blow in vote, leaving Britain more divided than ever
British young people take revenge for the Brexit sin
Confident of securing a sweeping victory, May had called the snap election to strengthen her hand in the European Union divorce talks. But in one of the most sensational nights in British electoral history, a resurgent Labour Party denied her an outright win, throwing the country into political turmoil as no clear winner emerged.
European Union leaders expressed fears that May's shock loss of her majority would delay the Brexit talks, due to begin on June 19, and so raise the risk of negotiations failing.
May's Labour rival Jeremy Corbyn, once written off by his opponents as a no-hoper, said May should step down and he wanted to form a minority government.
But May, facing scorn for running a lackluster campaign, was determined to hang on. A spokesman for her office said she would go to Buckingham Palace to ask Queen Elizabeth for permission to form a government – a formality under the British system.
Sky News reported that Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party would back her, allowing the Conservatives to reach the 326 seats needed for a parliamentary majority. The DUP declined to comment.
With 649 of 650 seats declared, the Conservatives had won 318 seats and Labour 261.
The DUP, which took 10 seats, was considering an arrangement which would involve it supporting a Conservative minority government on key votes in parliament but not forming a formal coalition, Sky said.
"If ... the Conservative Party has won the most seats and probably the most votes then it will be incumbent on us to ensure that we have that period of stability and that is exactly what we will do," a grim-faced May said after winning her own parliamentary seat of Maidenhead, near London.
But with complex talks on Britain's divorce from the EU due to start in 10 days, it was unclear what their direction would now be and if the so-called "Hard Brexit" taking Britain out of a single market could still be pursued.
After winning his own seat in north London, Corbyn said May's attempt to win a bigger mandate had backfired.
"The mandate she's got is lost Conservative seats, lost votes, lost support and lost confidence," he said. "I would have thought that's enough to go, actually, and make way for a government that will be truly representative of all of the people of this country."
Chief among Labour's potential allies would be the Scottish National Party, which suffered major setbacks but still won a majority of Scottish seats.


Mixpanel is one of the first and probably the leading event analytics solution in the SaaS market. They collect data with their SDKs from your clients and allow you analyse your data with a simple user interface. We also have the similar flow for data ingestion, you can use our SDKs or API directly in order the send the event data and similar to Mixpanel, we provide segmentation (event explorer), funnel, retention, explore (user attribution) and insight (user drill down) features. The main difference between Rakam and Mixpanel is we provide PaaS instead or SaaS.Feature DifferencesMixpanel stores the data as you sent in their data warehouse and provides you a set of features to analye your data but we enrich your data, sanitize it depending on what you need and store it in your data warehouse for you and allow you to run both high level features similar to Mixpanel and also any kind of complex analytic queries on your event dataset.You have the full control over how the data is stored, enriched and transformed, you can even write custom modules and add them to Rakam.Rakam is also designed to handle any kind of event data and provide many more features such as web hooks and scheduled tasks so it's more like a data hub for your company. For example, we have customers that uses both Mixpanel and Rakam, they export metrics to Rakam periodically with scheduled tasks and integrate Facebook Ads and other third party services such as Intercom.io with web hooks and be able to see the big picture of their customer data.
Price and data ownershipMixpanel uses their in-house database to store the event data. AFAIK, it's JSON based and in-memory. Since JSON occupies much more space than columnar storage types and memory is expensive, their price is expensive even for other SaaS services. We try to optimize the way we store the data, infer the schema from the data you sent, use columnar storage formats for better compression and efficiency. The data is on disk and will be loaded in memory only when you need it, you can scale the Rakam cluster when you need to run complex queries on billions of events and scale down when you're done. You can also use materialized views and continuous queries for incremental calculation so that you don't need processing billions of data every time you execute a query. Our pricing model is different than Mixpanel since we're a PaaS company but it's way cheaper than it if you have >500k events monthly.You can install Rakam on your AWS account and own the data you have, even install it on your on-premise servers in your local datacenter. Mixpanel is a third-party service, you give the data you have and let it to process for you. However, luckily Mixpanel allows you to export your raw events to other services such as Rakam.
BI (Business intelligence)Mixpanel doesn't let you to visualize the data returned from your custom query in a chart that you want, it has pre-defined reports, allow you to change the parameters and it automatically updates the charts depending on the parameters you selected. Rakam UI is designed to create custom reports and custom dashboards similar to other BI tools. You can write SQL queries, parametrize and save them as reports. The analysts don't need to see the underlying SQL query, they will use Rakam as if they're using Google Analytics. From this perspective, Mixpanel is a generic event analytics solution whereas Rakam can be specialised just for you.
When to use Mixpanel or RakamWe do not have the ability to send push notifications and predication feature of Mixpanel yet but these features can be implemented as user action and service in Rakam in the future if needed. On the other hand, you have the full control over your data with Rakam, you can run ad-hoc queries and visualize them as you wish. If your data volume is not big, the price is affordable and the features provided by Mixpanel is enough for you, Mixpanel might be good alternative. However; if you want to look out an advanced solution that is affordable for larger data volumes, flexible enough to create custom reports and dashboards, able to collect data from multiple sources and integrate it with your third party services and databases you may want to try Rakam.Wemake a product that help you to understand and collect the data in one place. Integrate in seconds.
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text:
Mesocosm
"Segne den Becher, welcher überfließen will, daß das Wasser golden aus ihm fließe und überallhin den Abglanz deiner Wonne trage!" – Nietzsche
Archive for March 2013
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Arnold Schoenberg
My first exposure to Schoenberg's music was Glenn Gould's performance of the gigue from opus 25 "Suite for Piano" – you can hear it for yourself in the YouTube link to the right. I hope that you will – I'll wait until you have a chance.
A lot of complete nonsense has been written about Schoenberg's music, often implying that it embodies an anarchic spirit of modernist rebellion. Some even accuse Schoenberg and his followers of rejecting the very foundations of western music in favor of novel patterns of sound that are not even properly called "musical."
In truth, Schoenberg was concerned with the history of European composition and theory to a degree seldom found in composers. The care that he took to organize musical ideas is easily discernible in the Gould performances, thanks to the pianist's miraculous capacity to differentiate and clarify independent voices within compositions.
Certainly, Schoenberg formal interests have little to do with the dramatic principles of tension and release that dominated the western idiom since Haydn. Instead, he is concerned with the melodic and harmonic development of motifs, and in this sense, his work constitutes not a rejection of traditional forms, but a return to the strategies that preoccupied composers from the birth of polyphony in the High Middle Ages all the way down to the classical period. Indeed, Schoenberg reminds me of no composer so much as Bach, with his keen architectonic attention and melodic inventiveness.
Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique is based on constructing a fixed melodic sequence called a "row" out of all twelve notes of the chromatic series. He then uses the row as the basis for a piece of music, perhaps deploying it as the principle theme, or varying it in countless ways.
This approach resembles the strategies used by all Renaissance polyphonic composers to construct melodic lines based on variations of principle themes, with their inversions, crab or puzzle canons, and fugues. One is particularly reminded of "parody masses," a common form of composition based on melodies lifted from popular songs. The secular song "L'homme armé" alone was used as the basis for hundreds of masses.
The groundwork for Schoenberg's compositional theory was laid decades before he began his work. Wagner's Ring was far too long to be persuasively organized by alternations of dissonance and resolution, so it was stitched together by melodic motives, or recurring melodic figures that he associated with ideas from the libretto. Brahms relied on motives as a framework for instrumental writing in some of his symphonies, and Mahler experimented with progressive tonality, by which his symphonies might conclude in a key unrelated to the tonic.
Schoenberg was precisely the opposite of an anarchist – he was an architect of a very high order, and knew exactly what he was doing, and how he stood in relationship to musical history. He once wrote:
I used to say, 'Bach is the first composer with twelve tones.' This was a joke, of course. I did not even know whether somebody before him might have deserved this title. But the truth on which this statement is based is that the Fugue No. 24 of the first volume of the Well-Tempered Clavier, in B minor, begins with a Dux in which all twelve tones appear. (1)
Have a listen to that fugue (again played by Glenn Gould) in the YouTube player to the right, and see if you can note the deep similarities to the gigue we heard before. Both of them are principally organized by parallel melodic progressions that are organized in harmonic relationships such that their simultaneous occurrence with other melodic lines contributes to the overall effect. Both of them are highly chromatic. What, then, is the difference between them?
Schoenberg's work abound with more dissonant intervals, perhaps, but then, he argued that our perception of dissonance is largely a matter of familiarity.
Now, there will always be those who respond to this argument by maintaining that there is a natural basis for our perception of consonant musical intervals based on simple integer ratios between string length. You can expect to hear the names of Pythagoras, Boethius, and Jean-Philippe Rameau.
This argument is persuasive at a glance, but the diabolus in musica is in the details. It turns out that constructing a musical scale requires substantial modifications of the great Platonic order simply to produce an instrument capable of playing in multiple keys.
And can anyone really argue that dissonant relationships are intrinsically disturbing at this late date? The most dissonant interval playable on a piano is the augmented fourth, and this interval occurs in dominant seventh chords. A malignant dominant seventh might have sent a medieval chorister fleeing from the room in terror, but the Beatles use it in "I Saw Her Standing There," for heaven's sake, which is not exactly the stuff of modernism.
Charles Rosen argued in his study of Schoenberg that people are not really disturbed by the nominally dissonant intervals in serialist music, but by the lack of cadence (2). Listeners lack familiar cues that help them predict the flow of a musical passage, and they find it disturbing.
For my own tastes, I find serialism to be most disturbing when orchestral works leap repeatedly from whisper-quiet string segments to sudden explosions of honking brass. I don't go in for these shenanigans, myself – I regard it as a cheap tactic. Yes, it produces an effect, much as shouting at someone all of a sudden gets their attention.
But anyone who believes that serialist music must be unlovely should really spend some time with Berg's violin concerto, which may well be the finest concerto written in the entire twentieth century.
I hope to return to this topic at a later date to explore some interesting related issues, including the biography of Arnold Schoenberg, which, if it were presented as a work of fiction, would be rejected as too fantastic to be believed. It's also worth exploring other techniques for composing outside of classical tonality, such as those employed by Charles Ives and Olivier Messiaen, two of the greatest composers of the last century.
Thanks to DJ for pointing out that the augmented fourth is found in the dominant seven, not the major seven chord.
1) Schoenberg A. "Bach (1950)." from Style and Idea; Selected Writings. University of California Press. 1975. pg. 393.
2) Rosen C. Arnold Schoenberg. Princeton University Press. 1975.
Written by Mesocosm
Posted in Articles, Music
Tagged with berg, schoenberg, serialism
The Life and Times of Saint Patrick
If the traditional accounts are to be believed, Saint Patrick was born at the end of the fourth century CE, when the Roman Emperor Theodosius I was busy consecrating the empire to the sign of the Cross, by which Constantine had conquered at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge two generations earlier.
After establishing Christianity as the official religion of Rome in 380 CE, Theodosius set about uprooting the old order, putting an end to the ancient traditions within the empire. He destroyed the temples of Apollo at Delphi, of the Vestal Virgins at the Roman Forum, and of Demeter at Eleusis, where the mystery rites of Greece had been celebrated annually for a thousand years.
Vestal Temple, Roman Forum
(c) Barnaby Thieme
These changes thundered through the empire, but even greater forces were at work in Eurasia. Turmoil in northwestern China displaced hordes of nomadic warriors, and under the banner of Attila, the Huns surged westward in the fifth century, driving Germanic and Gothic tribes before them. The refugees of Central Europe poured over the Danube and into the Roman empire, overwhelming its beleaguered armies and exhausted cities.
As Augustine would lament in his City of God, just as Christianity triumphed within the Imperium, the City of Man fell under the barbarian sword. The Vandals, Visigoths, and Ostrogoths flooded into the empire, and in 486, King Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustus, the last Roman emperor. Warring German tribes would spend the next century picking the bones of the Western Empire clean, until the Merovingian dynasty brought some semblance of order to the lands that would become France and Germany.
As far as the Western Roman Empire had reached, all the way to Britannia in the north, the collapse were felt. Beginning around 58 BCE, Julius Caesar led Roman armies to victory against Transalpine Gaul, and three years later, he launched the first Roman invasion of the southern shores of England. Claudius subdued the Celtic Britons a few generations later, and Rome would weave a network of towns and roads with webs of commerce and civilization, leading all the way to Rome.
But they never took Ireland.
This distant isle known to the Romans as Hibernia was one of the last refuges of the Celts. By all accounts a tall, beautiful, ferocious people, the Celts swept through Western Europe in 1000 BCE, bringing with them their chariots, dazzling metalwork, and Druidic religion.
Most of the Celtic territory, including Spain, France, and England, was eventually conquered by Rome, and everywhere the empire grew, it left towns, roads and trade. When the empire fell, the social and economic infrastructure that sustained these lands fell with it, with predictable consequences.
When the Germans poured into the heart of the empire, the Roman legions withdrew from Britannia, leaving the bewildered Britons a generation or two of peace before new armies of invaders moved in from the east, and the island was overrun by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.
Wherever Roman high civilization had flourished in Europe, the people plunged deep into the Dark Ages. The great knowledge of classical civilization all but vanished from the mainland, where the Germanic values of force of arms and tribal kinship were the order of the day for centuries to come. Now, in a curious historical inversion, while the Roman lands fell into darkness, Celtic Ireland became the great center of learning in Western Europe.
Unlike Britannia with its towns and roads, Ireland had no great economic or population centers. When Christianity first took hold, the church had to create its own infrastructure to support the clergy. The form this generally took was the monastery, which functioned, in a manner of speaking, as a micro-town – self-enclosed polities that served as organized centers of learning.
A series of Irish monasteries was built by industrious missionaries throughout Ireland and the British Isles, providing a home for many of the great works of medieval literature and art, including The Book of Kells and the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of Britain. The Irish monk Duns Scotus Eriugena translated the writings of the Christian mystic Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite into Latin, whose writings were to have a profound influence on everything from the Gothic cathedral to the writings of Thomas Aquinas.
In the early ninth century, when Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor, sought to improve the scholarship and literacy of the European clergy, he turned to the Irish monks, knowing full well that their knowledge of Latin and their erudition far surpassed anything that could be found on the mainland.
And this whole process, by which Irish monasteries preserved and enriched European culture for centuries, began with the missionary work of Saint Patrick.
We know nothing about Patrick's life with certainty, but early biographical sources agree on the basic facts. At the age of 15, Patrick was brought to Ireland as a slave by marauding British pirates. He escaped six years later, but was led by a vision he had in a dream to return to the isle and establish the Christian church. He founded ascetic communities, laying deep roots for the monasteries that would flourish in the sixth century.
Needless to say, the life of Patrick has taken on a mythological and hagiographical dimension, with many of the biographies describing him as a healer and a miracle worker. I'd like to take a brief look at one of these interesting biographies of Patrick, The Life and Acts of Saint Patrick, written by Jocelyn of Furness sometime around 1200. Note that this biography is only slightly later than some of our primary sources for early Irish mythological literature, such as The Cattle Raid of Cooley and the Book of Invasions. I find it evocative for its free blending of Celtic mythological and Christian themes.
Here is one event from Patrick's early childhood:
And Patrick, the child of the Lord, was then nursed in the town of Empthor, in the house of his mother's sister, with his own sister Lupita. And it came to pass in the winter season, the ice being thawed, that a well overflowed and threatened to overturn many houses in the town; and the rising of the waters filled the mansion wherein Patrick abided, and overturned all the household stuff, and caused all the vessels to swim. And the little boy, being an hungered, asked in his infantine manner for bread; yet found he not any who would break bread for him, but jeeringly was he answered that he was nearer to being drowned than fed. When the boy dipped three of his fingers into the swelling water, and, standing on a dry place, he thrice sprinkled the water in the form of a cross, and in the name of the Holy Trinity commanded the well that forthwith it should subside. And behold a miracle! Immediately all the flood retired with a refluent course, and the dryness returned, nor was there hurt or damage seen in the vessels or in the furniture of his dwelling. And they who looked on saw that sparks of fire instead of drops of water were sprinkled from the fingers of the holy child, and that the waters were licked up and absorbed thereby; and the Lord, "who collects the waters as in a heap, and lays up the depths in his treasury," who had worked such great works through his beloved child Patrick, is praised of all; and the child also is magnified who was so powerful in Him, great and worthy of all praise. (ch. IV, trans. Rev. James O'Leary, 1880).
The image that I find especially fascinating here is the emergence of the water up from under the ground. Subterranean water is a primary mythological motif in many cultures – the Qu'ran, for example, makes frequent references to Paradise as a place "where rivers flow underground."
In psychodynamic terms, water under the ground can be taken as a common symbol the forces of the unconscious. In this story, the forces of the unconscious are uncontrolled and threaten waking life, until they are mastered by Patrick, bringer of Christianity. He is able to drive them back by the sign of the cross – the same sign that appeared to Constantine in his vision.
In other words, from the perspective of Patrick's biographer, the powers of the unconscious as they were expressed by Celtic mythology were perceived as overwhelming and threatening, unless they were held at bay by the bulwark of Christian doctrine, which subdued and transformed these tidal forces into a sublimated form. Water becomes fire, an element of light and illumination. I'm rather reminded of the Tibetan stories of the Indian master Padmasambhava, who brought Buddhism to Tibet and tamed the demonic supernatural forces that threatened the country.
Two other elements of this story worth noting are the obvious baptismal resonance here, particularly in the light of John the Baptist's words that Christ "shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire" (Matthew 3:11). Also, note that the well is a primary locus of the Celtic magical arts. We can see this illustrated in Gottfried von Strasbourg Tristan, which was written within a decade of Jocelyn's Life and Acts. In one important episode, the gravely-wounded Tristan is healed by the Irish princess Isolde in a magic pool.
So what happened to the Irish monastery as one of the primary centers of European culture? This bright light of civilization was extinguished by yet another invasion by the northern barbarians. The Vikings put an end to the Irish monastery in a wave of brutal attacks beginning in the mid-ninth century. The great seats of Irish learning were cast down into ruin, one after another, and their riches borne back to Scandinavia on Danish and Norwegian longboats.
Posted in Articles, Comparative Religion and Mythology
Tagged with christianity, Ireland, paganism, Saint Patrick
Continuity of Images
One of the primary themes of this blog is the astonishing continuity of certain primary cultural forms, which Adolf Bastian referred to as Elementargendanke, or elementary ideas, and which Carl Jung later termed archetypes of the collective unconscious.
In my reading this morning, I came across a marvelous Elamite alabaster statue depicting a regal male subject bearing a sacrificial goat. Currently housed at the Louvre, it comes to us from Susa (in present-day Iran) from the Early Dynastic, circa 2450 BCE.
Jump ahead nearly 2,000 years, and we find an exceptional Attic marble sculpture of a bearded man carrying a calf offering to the goddess Athena, from the Archaic period circa 570 BCE. It is housed at the splendid Acroplois Museum in Athens, which is one of the great museums.
And, nearly 2,000 years after that masterpiece was carved, we find a beautiful statue of John the Baptist carrying Christ in the form of a sacrificial lamb, which decorates the North Transept Portal of the Cathedral of Notre Dame at Chartres, completed in the mid-thirteenth century CE.
Elamite, c. 2450 BCE
Attic Greek, c. 570 BCE
French Gothic, c. 1250 CE
Posted in Ephemera, Religion and Mythology
Tagged with archetypes, sacrifice
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