#memmotts

[memmotts]

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[girlactionfigure]

ajedelman

Where is it located, then? Wrong answers only please in the comments... Mark Memmott, the senior director of standards and practices at CBS News: "Do not refer to it as being in Israel...Yes, the U.S. embassy is there and the Trump administration recognized it as being Israel's capital. But its status is disputed."

[eretzyisrael]

by Oliver Wiseman

In late August, Mark Memmott, the senior director of standards and practices at CBS News, sent an email to all CBS News employees reminding them to “be careful with some terms when we talk or write about the news” from Israel and Gaza. One of the words on Memmott’s list of terms was Jerusalem.

Of Jerusalem, Memmott wrote: “Do not refer to it as being in Israel.” 

He continued, in a note sent to thousands of journalists at the network: “Yes, the U.S. embassy is there and the Trump administration recognized it as being Israel’s capital. But its status is disputed. The status of Jerusalem goes to the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel regards Jerusalem as its ‘eternal and undivided’ capital, while the Palestinians claim East Jerusalem—occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war—as the capital of a future state.”

Jerusalem’s status is indeed contested. For instance, the United States’ embassy in Israel is in Jerusalem, and the Jordanian Islamic Waqf has custody of its holy sites. But acknowledging the competing claims on different parts of the city, or declining to refer to Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, are one thing. Denying that it is in Israel at all is quite another. 

In which country is the Israeli Knesset, the home of the Israeli prime minister and the home of the Israeli president, located? The answer to that question is self-evident. Except, it seems, at CBS. In the rest of the United States, the answer is clear: Since 1995, when Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act, the government has recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

This latest revelation comes after CBS Mornings host Tony Dokoupil was admonished by executives at the network for his interview of best-selling author Ta-Nahesi Coates about his new anti-Israel book, The Message. 

Memmott’s Jerusalem guidance is in keeping with our previous reporting on the turmoil at CBS—and what The Free Press has heard from multiple people inside CBS today: that a double standard exists for journalism at CBS when it relates to Israel and Jews.

As we reported earlier today, a fractious meeting of CBS Mornings’ editorial team Tuesday included a debate about whether it is “fair to talk about whether Israel should exist at all.” We also noted that while Dokoupil was admonished for his tough questioning of Coates, CBS executives appear intensely relaxed about the possibility that his co-host Gayle King told Coates what questions she planned on asking him before the interview. 

But the contrasts between the treatment of King and Dokoupil don’t end there. 

Several CBS sources told us they were baffled to learn how Dokoupil was treated by the network after the interview. As The New York Times reported Monday, Dokoupil was coached on his “tone of voice, phrasing and body language” in his interview with Coates in a meeting with members of the network’s standards and practices team as well as its Race and Culture Unit. 

Where, asked multiple CBS employees who spoke to The Free Press, was the policing of Gayle King’s tone after her questioning of a parent of an eight-year-old girl being held hostage by terrorists in Gaza? 

In an interview last November, Thomas Hand held back tears as he described to King and Dokoupil the agony of not knowing whether his daughter was alive as “hell on earth.” King asked about the “politics” that means you have “innocent children and Palestinians who are dying” and “innocent Israeli children who are dying.”

“No one seems to be able to say, ‘Enough. Stop that,’ ” said King. 

“I’m not interested in politics at all,” said Hand. 

One CBS employee said that the response to Tony Dokoupil has exposed a number of double standards at the network. “There is a huge difference between how all ethnic or minority groups are treated and how Jews and Jewish issues are treated. The rule of thumb is: If you are Jewish and you are interested in reporting on Jews or Jewish issues, that’s a ‘hold on’ or a ‘no,’ whereas for any other group it would be an enthusiastic ‘yes.’ ”

[tenth-sentence]

Generally speaking, every part of Country in Aboriginal Australia contains a set of travel paths crisscrossing the landscape, in which sacred places occur that were created by the ancestors.

"Design: Building on Country" - Alison Page and Paul Memmott

[whats-in-a-sentence]

He rendered the painting on bark with the standard crosshatched background but with an innovative image of the Rainbow Serpent wrapped around the hull of the ship and its three masts depicted as decorated poles of the type used in ceremonies (see Figure 13).

"Design: Building on Country" - Alison Page and Paul Memmott

[botanyone]

Garden Flowers Keep Farmland Bees Fed When Crops Stop Blooming

Garden Flowers Keep Farmland Bees Fed When Crops Stop Blooming https://ift.tt/mXfu95A What difference can a garden make? Research by Timberlake and colleagues has found it can be life-saving. Despite only making up 2% of local landscape, at critical times of the year gardens can provide between 50% to 95% of the nectar available to pollinators. The authors the seasonal provision of nectar in gardens, at times when the supply is diminished in farmland, highlights the importance of identifying gaps in floral resources in time as well as space. The team found that bees were found twice as often in gardens compared to farmland in early spring, and 4-12 times more often in late summer. The difference is important as 90% of British farmland is within reach of garden flowers for bees. The authors believe that if gardens were not available to bees, then colonies could decline by up to a sixth. The research comes from two directions. First they measured nectar production in three farms and 59 gardens throughout the growing season. Timberlake and colleagues also counted bee activity on walking surveys in gardens and farmland. This gave them an idea of where the bees were and what they were getting. Next, they took this information to build a computer model, BEE-STEWARD. This was an agent-based model to see how bees based on Bombus terrestris, the buff-tailed bumblebee,  reacted to changes. The biggest change they made was removing flowers from gardens. Doing this made survival for the virtual bumblebees a lot more difficult. Previous research shows bee populations are declining due to modern farming practices. Against this gardens are known to support pollinators but the reasons weren’t fully understood. It turns out that gardens aren’t microscale farms, but distinctive habitats that can help out bees when they most need it, and it’s their difference to natural surrounding that matters [T]he annual nectar production of gardens is actually similar to that of semi-natural farmland habitats such as hedgerows and field margins. Moreover, their low coverage of farmland landscapes means their total contribution to landscape nectar supply is relatively small. Therefore, we hypothesize that it is not the quantity of floral resources provided by gardens that makes them so important to pollinators, but instead the timing of their resource supply. Timberlake, T.P., Tew, N.E. & Memmott, J. 2024. Gardens reduce seasonal hunger gaps for farmland pollinators. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2024.1523 (OA) Cross-posted to Bluesky, Mastodon & Threads. The post Garden Flowers Keep Farmland Bees Fed When Crops Stop Blooming appeared first on Botany One. via Botany One https://botany.one/ October 25, 2024 at 02:20PM

[penniesblogs]

Critique and Creation: Fan Content

Fandom is the term used to describe a subculture of fans who are characterised by their shared common interest in a particular interest or activity. Whilst the subject of fan interest can encompass entire hobbies or media genres, it is often more narrowly defined, focusing on single celebrities or media franchises.

Typically, this media is associated with ‘low culture’ due to its association with disempowered members of the community. As such, it is often assumed by the broader culture that fandoms surrounding ‘low-culture’ media are inherently uncritical of the media they consume. In the case of fandoms which are comprised mainly of women, especially young girls, these assumptions are frequently intertwined with and influenced by patriarchal notions of gender, and the denigration of femininity. 

Female fans of media such as Twilight are often dismissed as a whole on the basis of their supposed ‘rabid’ nature, denoting a lack of rationality or ability to respond critically to the media being consumed. This reductively stigmatises female-dominated fandoms and female fans more broadly, in a manner reminiscent of historical, gender-based moral panics, such as late 18th century attitudes towards novel reading (IS 1798), or the ‘Beatlemania’ of the 1960s. In her 2009 article, Click references the media descriptions of Twilight fans from around the release of the movies, pulling from examples where media outlets utilised ‘Victorian era gendered words’. The New York Times described fans as “on the rabid side” (Rafferty 2008), USA Today portrayed fans as “in a frenzy” (Memmott 2009), and The Boston Globe suggested an “enthusiasm bordering on hysteria” (Gorov 2009).

However, the ability for fandom spaces to turn their semiotic productivity into textual production through the creation of fanfiction, fanart, and analytical media, disputes this notion. As Fiske (1992) argues, the circulation of such fan-generated content is what helps to define fan communities, and as Eate suggests, this is especially true for female fandom spaces, who frequently utilise the transformative nature of mediums such as fanfic to engage critically with the original texts (2015). As such, the typical image surrounding Twilight fans is both indicative of a cultural tendency to deride female pleasure and consumer power, and an inaccurate assessment (Eate 2015). Fanfic authorship provides evidence of how Twilight fans have resisted arguably anti-feminist sentiments present within the original works (Hendershot-Parkin 2010).

Eate’s essay in particular discusses how Twilight fanfic challenges the heteronormative conservatism of the original franchise. As the essay states, “throughout the Twilight Saga, sexual desire is strenuously policed via tropes of monogamy and compulsory heterosexuality” (Eate 2015, p. 47).

Despite vampire literature being used historically as a vessel to explore taboos regarding sexual deviance and fluidity, notably in texts such as Dracula and Carmilla, Twilight’s vampires instead function to allegorically elevate paternalistic, conservative messaging about sexual propriety and domesticity (Eate 2015). Feminist critics of the series have read the Twilight Saga’s themes as being indicative of cultural anxieties regarding the threat of women’s improved social standing and the normalisation of premarital sex.

Similarly, Twilight fanfic writers have responded to these gendered aspects of the franchise through the reconceptualisation of the relationship between Bella and Edward’s relationship. This tendency was uncovered within the mainstream when E.L. James’s Fifty Shades series was revealed to have originally been posted online as a Twilight fanfiction entitled ‘Master of the Universe.’ Another example outlined by Eate is that of the fanfic ‘More Than a One Night Stand’ by flutetenorsaxplayer, which although primarily being a vehicle for smut, devotes a large amount of its narrative to recounting the “drudgery of domestic life and motherhood” (Eate 2015, p. 49). The fanfic’s emphasis on the monotony of married life, however implicitly, criticises the tyrannical nature of patriarchal societal expectation which is so frequently pushed in Myers's original work.

Though these works may not be deemed of the highest quality, they still serve as important examples of how fandoms recontextualise the original works through semiotic means, and how this audience behaviour challenges the often gendered stereotypes concerning critical consumption in female fandom spaces.

References Click, M 2009, ‘“Rabid”, “Obsessed”, and “Frenzied”: Understanding Twilight Fangirls and the Gendered Politics of Fandom’, Flow, vol. 11, no. 4, viewed 2 June 2024, <https://www.flowjournal.org/2009/12/rabid-obsessed-and-frenzied-understanding-twilight-fangirls-and-the-gendered-politics-of-fandom-melissa-click-university-of-missouri/#footnote_13_4638>. Eate, P 2015, ‘A New Dawn Breaks: Rewriting Gender Wrongs through Twilight Fan Fiction’, in A Trier-Bieniek (ed.), Fan Girls and the Media: Creating Characters, Consuming Culture, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, United States, pp. 37-59. Fiske, J 1992, ‘The Cultural Economy of Fandom’, in LA Lewis (ed.), The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, Routledge, London, pp. 30-49. Gorov, L 2009, ‘As Jacob Black in the new ‘Twilight’ film, Taylor Lautner is ready for the attention and the hysteria’, The Boston Globe, 15 November.  Hendershot-Parkin, R 2010, ‘Breaking Faith: Disrupted Expectations and Ownership in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga’, Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 61-85. IS 1798, ‘On the Reading of Novels’, The Monthly Visitor, and Entertaining Pocket Companion, vol. 4, pp. 242-246. Memmott, C 2008, ‘Meyer unfazed as fame dawns’, USA Today, 31 July. Rafferty, T 2008, ‘Love and Pain and the Teenage Vampire Thing’, The New York Times, 31 October, viewed 2 June 2024, <https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/movies/moviesspecial/02raff.html>.

[stimpunks]

“The accommodations for natural human variation should be mutual.” (@laurenancona)

“Accessibility is a collective process!” (Riah Person)

“Society needs to re-enable dignity.” (Ann Memmott)

[enactivewebs]

12.1

Finished 'Design' in the first knowledges series by Alison Page and Paul Memmott

Connection of social justice focus on empowerment in IIDC and Alison Page's approach to design projects with indigenous communities and Escobar's pluriversal/autonomous design

Storytelling and creating mnemonic devices through design

"There is a new awakening fuelled by ecological necessity to redesign our future and the relationship that we as people have with nature and each other. We can design our built environments to be a part of the managed landscapes that formed the basis of First Nations ecology since time immemorial. Our objects, interiors and places can be an extension of the Songlines that crisscross this country in every direction and are a web of knowledge embedded in our everyday lives. This New Australian Design will improve the wellbeing of people and create places that ultimately mean more to all of us. It will extend Country, not abrogate it, and it should be created with that in because we are all connected to Country"

Annotation #6: Page, A., & Memmott, P. (2021). First Knowledges Design: Building on Country. Thames & Hudson Australia.

What are the meanings of the text? What’s the Author’s voice? Apply it to your own process and thinking. What’s its value to my practice? Unpacking it 200-400 words

First Knowledges Design: Building on Country is part of a series of books published by Thames and Hudson Australia, National Museum of Australia and edited by Margo Neale, senior Indigenous curator at the National Museum of Australia. The series focuses on Australian aboriginal knowledge in various areas such as design, architecture, land management, law, and more, and their relevance, importance, and application in the present, and for creating more equitable and sustainable futures. Each book features a collaboration between indigenous Australian and non-indigenous writers. In this book, Alison Page (Walbanga and Wadi Wadi designer, artist, and film producer) and Paul Memmott (architect, anthropologist and agent for change with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples across Australia) explore Aboriginal design thinking, principles, and applications, detailing the ancient history of indigenous Australian design, and how it is being utilised in contemporary practices. The text focuses on the underpinning ethos of Aboriginal design, which is centred in the land and environment, the concept of ‘Country’, and ‘Dreaming’. The book leans more heavily towards traditional and contemporary architectural and interior design examples, but the underlying aboriginal design principles are applicable and relevant to all design disciplines. The authors wrap up the work with a challenge to designers working in Australia to embrace these design approaches more in their practice, properly include and make space for Aboriginal designers in industry and their communities, and develop a truly new Australian design ethos centred in Country and its people, in order to create better, desirable futures. 

The two authors write in a relatively easily accessible voice, although Memmott’s writing tends to lean more heavily on academic protocols and style. Both weave personal experience (Page as an indigenous Aboriginal designer and her experiences working on Aboriginal projects, and Memmott as an architectural anthropologist and researcher working with first nation communities) with underpinning theoretical and contextual knowledge about Aboriginal cosmologies, epistemologies and design thinking. The main arguments made by both authors is the need to develop a unique design ethos for Australia based upon Aboriginal concepts of Country, holistic environmentally focused thinking and doing, Dreaming/Dreamtime, and co-design with Aboriginal experts and making space for Aboriginal designers to establish themselves in industry, and work for their communities. Between the two authors, Page writes more emotively and in a more first-hand way to convey her lived experiences as an indigenous woman, and tell of her experiences working on Aboriginal design projects, and with Aboriginal communities - distilling and providing concrete examples of the more theoretical and anthropological knowledge embedded in Memmott’s chapters. 

The relevance to my own practice is primarily in that this text extrapolates a community and environmentally focused form of design, which comes from a holistic, non-dualist and critical decolonial context. The ideas in this volume connect well with those spoken about by Escobar, 2018 in terms of autopoietic forms of community and social organisation (a thread to explore further) a critical, pluriversal, ecological form of socially just autonomous design, and the co-design principles detailed in regard to working with indigenous communities to foster sovereignty and self-determination for these communities. These co-design processes also link to Manzini, 2015 and his concepts of participatory design for social innovation, albeit from a non-western cultural background. There are strong connections between the holistic, animist Aboriginal worldviews, and Māori knowledge unpacked in Māori Philosophy by Stewart (2020), which further highlights well known grounds and theoretical underpinnings of non-western, global south philosophical connections.

This text has influenced me to further consider non-western and indigenous forms of design thinking, making and doing, as well as other indigenous world views and knowledge such as connection to ‘Country’, and communal and posthumanist ecological approaches of Aboriginal Australian communities as other ways in which I can challenge my cultural bias towards reductionist, dualist, human centred ways of thinking and being as a designer. These ancient knowledge bases and worldviews from Australia could be further explored and brought into a pluriversal conceptualisation of global south design.

Additionally, some of the case studies and examples of Aboriginal co-design projects that Page details, are informing and of interest for my investigations. These examples, such as how Page worked with communities on various social innovation and placemaking projects and emphasised working with these groups in ways outside of traditional teleological western design frameworks and project management flows, highlighted to me how a truly emancipatory and freeing form of co-design with communities needs to allow and account for the creation of relationships and trust, and how the process is as, and sometimes even more important than the outcome (the joys and laughter along the way while working with others). The deep connection to land, environment, and how the land and objects act as mnemonic devices for Aboriginal people to maintain and continue to retell their stories, also resonated. How these deeper, holistic and interconnected beliefs and ways of seeing the world as all alive, and a part of us, could inform how I look at using materials, challenging the instrumentalist ways of creating in my own practice, and encourage me to start to seeing raw materials and matter not as ‘resources’ which sit out of human culture to be simply used, but vital, living parts of Country, which in turn are a part of the people in their connection to Country.

[ruthypie100]

Fun in the sun kinda day! 😎🍗🇬🇧 #love #family #memmotts #bracknelltown (at The Lexicon Bracknell) https://www.instagram.com/p/ChgKEeWqkXd0036WDnLh5FrzobNezQQ4OyPzpw0/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[memmotts]

Comprehensive Vehicle Inspections in Brisbane

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[sebliminalproductions]

Rest in peace Maurice Memmott this is him smashing Beethoven's Sonata in F minor, Op2 No1, 4th Movement at my music's 2013 show in Whitstable! & He Nails it! Love you forever dad you’re high with the legends and stars now!

[f-identity]

There are many more yikes-inducing facts about Spectrum 10K all over Twitter.

I’m getting burned out trying to keep up with this, but here are some threads by people who have fact-checked the Spectrum 10K ““autism research”“, which already sounds ableist and eugenicist from the start.

Autistic Science Person going through the Participant Information Sheet: https://twitter.com/AutSciPerson/status/1430636797634261226 Spectrum 10K is very vague on storage of DNA data.

autistictic expressing valid concerns about the “”study”“: https://twitter.com/autistictic/status/1430101847956729856

Ann Memmott’s view of the project: https://twitter.com/AnnMemmott/status/1430106648064954369

For non-autistics to read on the cycle of autism misinformation: https://twitter.com/Sara_Rose_G/status/1430429176427945985

Ryan Hendry’s thread on the people behind Spectrum 10K: https://twitter.com/RyanHendry94/status/1430817870431367173

Katherine May on concerns regarding commercial viability of the ““study”“ and others it may create in the future: https://twitter.com/_katherine_may_/status/1430908657596649478

How academics or anyone who had been involved with Cambridge in the past can create tangible pushback on the organizers: https://twitter.com/ColinPubHealth/status/1430821702322294788

Things that stick out in my mind:

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, who will be involved in Spectrum 10K, is also associated closely with Autism Speaks, an organization known for overriding the needs and autonomy of autistic people. Well, there’s more reasons to distrust him as detailed by EmilyKaty’s blog post.

Alongside SBC above, a co-leader in this ““study”“ is Daniel Geschwind, who is associated with an oganisation called “Cure Autism Now”. As stated on the blog post: “Once this organisation was launched, Geschwind became very involved in studying genetics of autism.”

The Wellcome Sangar Institute is part of the @/Spectrum_10K project, & whistleblowers revealed Sangar used African DNA in a commercialised gene chip without proper legal agreements. https://twitter.com/LauraFMcConnell/status/1430563214023069698

some white male celebrity with a platform Chris Packham, one of the “”study””’s ambassadors is deriding people’s valid concerns about the research by comparing its critics to conspiracy theorists.

Another ambassador to the study is transphobe, antivaxxer, Gamergater Paula Wright, whose associates/followers have recently harassed Pete Wharmby, autistic educator.

Well, there you go. Nothing about us without us - and Spectrum 10K can easily be misused to eradicate us.

Beware of sketchy “studies” and “research”.

[tenth-sentence]

Many of the rules are encoded in songs and sacred histories concerning the activities of the Dreaming Heroes.

"Design: Building on Country" - Alison Page and Paul Memmott

[whats-in-a-sentence]

If necessity is the mother of invention, then it naturally flows that Indigenous people, who have survived in some of the harshest conditions over major climatic changes, must be inherently innovative and adaptable.

"Design: Building on Country" - Alison Page and Paul Memmott

[botanyone]

Europes Plants Face Crisis as Their Seed Dispersers Decline

Europe’s Plants Face Crisis as Their Seed Dispersers Decline https://ift.tt/81CYB6G Many plant species depend on animals to disperse their seeds and colonise new habitats. With the increasing loss of animal species, there is a huge concern about how this might affect seed dispersal. A recent study by Mendes and collaborators shows that there are indeed reasons to be concerned, as many of the seed dispersers are endangered to some extent.  By reviewing over 50,000 scientific papers in 26 languages, the team mapped out which animals spread the seeds of which plants across Europe. They discovered over 11,000 interactions between 1,902 plant and 455 animal species, from ants and other arthropods to birds and mammals.  The researchers found that about one in three interactions between plants and dispersers is at high risk. This trend was consistent for all European biomes, with at least one-third of their dispersers reporting declining populations. For instance, several of the animal species that exhibited the highest number of interactions and plant species that dependent on them for dispersal were classified as a high concern, including the garden warbler (Sylvia borin), the European bison (Bison bonasus) and the European red wood ant (Formica polytecna).  The work by Mendes and her colleagues provides a compelling case for the urgent need to take action to preserve European dispersers. Such initiatives will be fundamental for plant survival under changing climates, as plants depend on dispersers to help their seeds reach new suitable habitats.  Mendes, S.B., Olesen, J.M., Memmott, J., Costa, J.M., Timóteo, S., Dengucho, A.L., Craveiro, L., & Heleno, R. (2024). Evidence of a European seed dispersal crisis. Science, 386(6718), 206-211. http://doi.org/10.1126/science.ado1464 ($) Cross-posted to Bluesky, Mastodon & Threads. The post Europe’s Plants Face Crisis as Their Seed Dispersers Decline appeared first on Botany One. via Botany One https://botany.one/ December 07, 2024 at 12:30PM