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When biographies are written, in that rocky ground between hero worship and dry scholarship, who is seen as notable - and who decides?

Wikipedia, with its crowd-sourced encyclopedic entries, makes arbiters of us all. Yet when a group of Australian editors tried to write an influential architect into history, anonymous doubters lurked.

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One architect decided to make his home inside a concrete factory.

In 2015, a Wikipedia entry for Jennifer Taylor, an architect, writer and academic,was written by Monash University architecture lecturer Charity Edwards. Taylor's legacy - from her strong interest in Japanese architecture to her global teaching - was hugely influential in NSWand Queensland in particular.

The entry was deleted straight away. "She wasn't deemed notable enough," says Justine Clark, founder of Parlour, a lively advocacy organisation for equity in architecture.

"At Parlour, we were all totally pissed off. It seemed inconceivable to us that she wouldn't be included, and that's when we started to work out what you have to do to prove notability."

In the past two years, Parlour's team has assiduously added, updated and checked the profiles of Australian women architects to increase their numbers on Wikipedia.

They might seem unlikely, inoffensive combatants - editors hauling style guides into the trenches - but their impact on younger women, and Australian history, is magnifying every year.

On Saturday the laptops will again be humming as Parlour hosts an edit-a-thon at the National Gallery of Victoria, as part of the Melbourne Art Book Fair. Participants will be taught guidelines to shore up their proposed Wikipedia articles.

They come with an idea - a woman overlooked through time - and the Parlour team run them through a comprehensive guide to Wikipedia editing. Scholarly papers and encyclopaedias are referencedto ensure each new listing meets the required three reliable citations.

In a kind of vertical integration benefit, a new entry also helps raise the profile of scholars and historians who first documented the figurewhen their work is cited on Wikipedia. Even though some women may seem lost tohistory, "material does exist but it may not be well known," says Clark. "Wikipedia does not accept new primary research or oral history as evidence, so any new work must first be published elsewhere."

While Parlour has spearheaded the Australianwomen architects project, other edit-a-thons around the world have sought to tackle a similar erasure of women's achievements. The BBC hosted a 12-hour entries marathonlast year. A University of Sydney event on March 28 aims to beef up the numbers of female writers and researchers listed in Wikipedia.

Clark says Wikipedia itself recognises the imbalance. With Parlour, like-minded colleagues in New York and Berlin applied for and received seed funding from the Wikimedia Foundation,the non-profit organisation that sits above Wikipedia. They dubbed their international project "WikiD", and it would go on to host workshops to educate others in boosting women architect'sentries.

"Jennifer Taylor was not the only one," Clark says."[T]hat's why we went for funding, to work out how to work within the system and to challenge it."

Are entries about women beingjunked out of spite or envy? Clark sees it more as "a cult mentality from Wikipedians who think 'we control the entries, you guys are interlopers, you're not doing it properly'.

"The challenging of entries comes from other voluntary Wikipedia"editors" not from the Wikimedia organisation," Clark says. "We got the international funding because Wikimedia realised there were gender equity problems."

Historians and feminists have for decades fought to restore notable women to the public record on many fronts - from war service recognition to nationalhonours awards. However women architects face a specific hurdle - the collaboration test. No one designs or constructs a building alone, and in many cases a female partner's role has been minimised.

When renowned American architect Robert Venturi won architecture's leading prize, the Pritzker, in 1991, Denise Scott Brown, his collaborator, was overlooked. A petition to include her in the prize received thousands of signatures, and she went on to receive many other awards including the 2017 Jane Drew prize; but the rebuff stung female architects worldwide. The fury simmers to this day.

In Australia, despite cases such as Jennifer Taylor versus the sceptics, many more women could potentially be household names on par with Sydney's GlennMurcuttand Melbourne's PeterCorrigan.

MaryTurner Shawis one who should be more well-known in modernist architecture, Clark says, for her influential flats - in terms of design and use of concrete - her workon munitions factories and kitchen designs as a government architect, and her prefabricated country hospitals while atBates Smart McCutcheon.

"So a long, complex and diverse career - not the focus on houses sometimes expected of women earlier this century," Clark says. "It is really important that new generations of architects know about predecessors like Turner Shaw."

Probably the most famous is Marion Mahony,who graduated in architecture in the United States in 1894 and was the practice partner as well as wife of Walter Burley Griffin. The duo designed Canberra as well as cinemas, incinerators and houses, but only he is a household name with her contribution rarely acknowledged until recently.

Parlour editorVirginia Manneringhas been going through all theentries on Burley Griffin as well as finding documented projects thatshe might have led, Clark says. "She is doing the fine delicate surgery to write Marion back into Wikipedia - so it's not just adding new people, it's editing what's there as well.

"Wikipedia is terribly patchy, it responds to people's enthusiasm," Clark says."Australian architecture on the whole hasn't had a great presence. When we started, there were 10 women listed as being Australian architects. By last year there were 60."

Parlour was behind the addition of Eileen Good, the University of Melbourne's first female graduate of architecture in 1920.

It also added Shelley Penn, who hassat on numerous design review panels, including Barangaroo. Kerstin Thompson now has an entry - hermany significant projectsinclude the Monash University Museum of Art, and the expansion of Arthur Boyd's Bundanon trust property in New South wales. Also recently arrived on Wikipedia was Maggie Edmond, part of the celebrated Edmond and Corrigan partnership that designed numerous Melbourne houses and the striking Building 8 at RMIT University.

Yet to be acknowledged is Debbie Ryan of McBride Charles Ryan, whose highly visible buildings include the elegant new Cancer Centre which sweeps around Melbourne's inner north with a flourish.

This weekend, the edit-a-thon will explore landscape architects for the first time. If female architects in general are often overlooked, landscape architects are even less visible - partly due to the misunderstanding of their profession.

"We're still perceived as just gardeners," sighs Lisa Howard, Melbourne Studio Principal at Taylor Cullity Lethlean. TCL is the urban design firm behind the Royal Botanic Gardensin Cranbournein Melbourne, the Manly Corso in Sydneyand the Canberra Arboretum. As well as horticulture, urban design work involves disciplines ranging from engineering and environmental sustainability to energy efficiency and urban renewal,all highly prized as demand for green infrastructure grows.

Proposals already pitched to be written into Wikipedia this weekend include pioneering mid-century landscape architects such as Beryl Mann and Grace Fraser. Mann was renowned for introducing gardens and courtyards in the design of schools in Canberra and Monash universities'grounds. Other illustrious names in landscape architecture will no doubt be thrown into the ring: Queensland-based academic Catherine Bull perhaps, and contemporary practitioners such as Aspect Studio's Kirsten Bauer, or Jane Irwin, an influential public domain planner whose projects, including Katoomba Civic Centre, are scattered across NSW.

One challenge for Parlour's Wikipedia project is that beyond the great forgetting of women's contribution, there are relatively few women at senior levels, even today.

Just over 20 per cent of registered architects in Australia are women - despite women graduating in equal numbers as men inthe past 30 years -according to research by Gill Matthewson, a Parlour co-founder. And the number of registered female architects falls steeply after the age of 30.

The picture is similar in landscape architecture, says Shahana McKenzie, chief executive of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects. More women study the discipline at university, andthe peak body's membership is evenly split, she says.Yetthere appears to be a point whenwomen, approaching senior levels, leave to care for families and male directors become the norm.

"If you look at the hours some graduates are doing, that's the cultural expectation in architectural practices," McKenzie says. "It's remarkable. You just can't do that once you've had kids."

At 35, TCL's Lisa Howard has reached a senior level and herrole models include Kate Cullity, one ofthe firm'sthree directors. "Kate obviously should be on the Wikipedia register and much more of a household name."

But Howard acknowledges themale-dominated industry shows little sign of changing. "There's still a perception [women] can't do a full design service on a part-time basis."

Read the rest here:
Project to increase listing of women architects in Wikipedia - The Sydney Morning Herald

Privilege and Politics

January 27, 2017 |7:30 p.m. Kane Hall, room130

Racism not only burdens people of color, but also benefits white Americans in every realm. Tim Wise shares how racial privilege impedes progressive social change for all and ways to challenge this paradigm.

Tim Wise is among the most prominent anti-racist writers and educators in the United States. He has spent the past 20 years speaking to audiences in all 50 states, on over 1,000 college and high school campuses, at hundreds of professional and academic conferences, and to community groups across the country.

He has also lectured internationally, in Canada and Bermuda, and has trained corporate, government, entertainment, media, law enforcement, military, and medical industry professionals on methods for dismantling racism in their institutions. Wise has provided anti-racism training to educators and administrators nationwide.

Wise is the author of seven books, including his latest, Under the Affluence: Shaming the Poor, Praising the Rich and Sacrificing the Future of America(City Lights Books).Other books includeDear White America: Letter to a New Minority(City Lights Books); his highly acclaimed memoir,White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (recently updated and re-released by Soft Skull Press);Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White; Speaking Treason Fluently: Anti-Racist Reflections From an Angry White Male; Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama; andColorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equity.

Named one of 25 Visionaries Who are Changing Your World, byUtne Reader, Wise has contributed chapters or essays to over 25 additional books and his writings are taught in colleges and universities across the nation. His essays have appeared on Alternet, Salon, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, The Root, Black Commentator, BK Nation and Z Magazine among other popular, professional and scholarly journals.

From 1999 to 2003, Wise was an advisor to the Fisk University Race Relations Institute, in Nashville, and in the early 90s he was Youth Coordinator and Associate Director of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, the largest of the many groups organized for the purpose of defeating neo-Nazi political candidate David Duke.

Wise has been featured in several documentaries, including the 2013 Media Education Foundation release, White Like Me: Race, Racism and White Privilege in America. The film, which he co-wrote and co-produced, has been called A phenomenal educational tool in the struggle against racism, and One of the best films made on the unfinished quest for racial justice, by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva of Duke University, and Robert Jensen of the University of Texas, respectively. He also appeared alongside legendary scholar and activist, Angela Davis, in the 2011 documentary, Vocabulary of Change. In this public dialogue between the two activists, Davis and Wise discussed the connections between issues of race, class, gender, sexuality and militarism, as well as inter-generational movement building and the prospects for social change.

Wise appears regularly on CNN and MSNBC to discuss race issues and was featured in a 2007 segment on 20/20. He graduated from Tulane University in 1990 and received antiracism training from the Peoples Institute for Survival and Beyond, in New Orleans.

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Tim Wise | UW Graduate School

Virginia Vertetis looks over the shoulder of defense attorney Edward Bilinkas at evidence photos as Howard Ryan, Co-owner of Highlands Forensic Investigations and Consulting testifies as an expert witness during Vertetis' murder trial in Morris County Superior Court. Vertetis is accused of murdering her ex-boyfriend at her home in Mount Olive in March 2014. March 16, 2017, Morristown, NJ(Photo: Bob Karp/Staff Photographer)Buy Photo

MORRISTOWN - A Long Island man who employed homicide victim Patrick Gilhuley at his private security firm told a Morris County jury Thursday that the victim had a "rocky" romantic relationship with Virginia Vertetis and often joked, even the day of his shooting, "She's gonna kill me some day."

Jurors heard from Gilhuley's friend and employer John Luongo, as well as hours of crime scene reconstruction testimony from retired State Police Lt. Howard Ryan, who now is a forensic operations specialist and consultant but oversaw the criminal investigation section of the Morris County Sheriff's Office when Gilhuley was shot to death on March 3, 2014.

Homicide victim Patrick Gilhuley, who was shot to death in Mount Olive on March 3, 2014.(Photo: Photo: Photo courtesy of Gilhuley family)

Called by Morris County Chief Assistant Prosecutor Matthew Troiano, Ryan led the jury through the crime scene at Vertetis's home on Apollo Way in Mount Olive. Ryan described"flight paths" and "impact points" of the bullets that Vertetis admittedly fired from a .38 Special Smith & Wesson revolver at her lover, a 51-year-old retired New York City Police officer. But Ryansaid he could not identify the sequence of the shots, four of which struck Gilhuley, including the fatal shot to the midline of his back.

Calling a shooting a dynamic event, Ryan said "It's human nature to move around" - both for the shooter and victim.

Vertetis, 54, and a former Wharton Elementary School teacher, is expected to testify in the defense portion of the case that she endured years of abuse from Gilhuley and shot him in self-defense after he allegedly beat, choked and vowed to kill her the night of March 3, 2014. The prosecution's theory is that Vertetis was obsessed with Gilhuley and murdered him when he tried to break up.

Howard Ryan, Co-owner of Highlands Forensic Investigations and Consulting testifies as an expert witness during the Virginia Vertetis murder trial in Morris County Superior Court. Vertetis is accused of murdering her ex-boyfriend at her home in Mount Olive in March 2014. March 16, 2017, Morristown, NJ(Photo: Bob Karp/Staff Photographer)

Ryan testified that all the shots were fired at Gilhuley by the shooter standing at the top or near the top of a staircase from the house foyer to the second floor and pointing the weapon downward. Ryan said he also believes that Gilhuley was standing on the stairs for a part or most of the length of the shooting but was headedtoward the front door of the house, not upstairs, when he was struck.

Howard Ryan, Co-owner of Highlands Forensic Investigations and Consulting testifies as an expert witness during the Virginia Vertetis murder trial in Morris County Superior Court. Vertetis is accused of murdering her ex-boyfriend at her home in Mount Olive in March 2014. March 16, 2017, Morristown, NJ(Photo: Bob Karp/Staff Photographer)

Bilinkas has contended that Gilhuley was chasing Vertetis up the stairs and trying to catch her when she managed to retrieve the gun and fire at him from a position at or near the top of the stairs.

There was a shallow mark on the thumb pad of Gilhuley's right hand that the assistant prosecutor believes is more likely an abrasion while the defense believes it's the mark from a bullet graze, received as Gilhuley extended his hand to grab at Vertetis. Ryan on Thursday said the thumb pad mark, in his opinion, is consistent with Gilhuley being struck as he held his cell phone to his ear with his right hand.

The victim's oldest daughter, Jennifer Gilhuley, had testified last week that she received three short calls from her father between 9:38 p.m. and 9:42 p.m., when the last words she heard from her Dad were: "Holy (expletive), she's shooting!" before the line went dead.

Bilinkas was critical of the crime scene investigation, including questioning why all the bullet shell casings weren't found. Ryan had explained that one bullet went through the front door and glass winter storm door and the casing wasn't found outdoors. He said no one denied the shell casing wasn't found.

"The area outside was very large and very snow-covered," Ryan said. "I did not dig through the snow."

Bilinkas has hired celebrity forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht, now 86, who was used as a consultant on the deaths of President John F. Kennedy, Elvis Presley, Sharon Tate, JonBenet Ramsey and others. Wecht is expected to testify about 60 marks on Vertetis's body - alleged signs of abuse by Gilhuley - and about his conclusions of the crime scene.

Under questioning by Troiano, Ryan agreed that he read Wecht's report, including the opinion rendered by Wecht about the sequence of shots.

"It's my opinion that Dr. Wecht's report is reckless," Ryan said. He noted that Wecht is a trained medical examiner, not a crime scene reconstruction expert, and he made conclusions that are not supported by the evidence.

Howard Ryan, Co-owner of Highlands Forensic Investigations and Consulting testifies as an expert witness during the Virginia Vertetis murder trial in Morris County Superior Court. Vertetis is accused of murdering her ex-boyfriend at her home in Mount Olive in March 2014. March 16, 2017, Morristown, NJ(Photo: Bob Karp/Staff Photographer)

John Luongo, the friend and employer of the victim, told the jury that Gilhuley frequently confided about a rocky relationship with Vertetis. Luongo said he always advised Gilhuley to break up with her.

"The relationship was a problem and he wanted to break up with her," Luongo said. "I gave him the same advice I always gave him. I said 'End it.'" Luongo said that Gilhuley sometimes would stay at a motel instead of returning to his home in Staten Island because he feared Vertetis would show up at his house.

Luongo said he last saw Gilhuley alive on March 3, 2014 - the day of his death - around lunchtime at a construction site in Manhattan where Gilhuley was supervising security measures. Luongo said he sat in a site trailer with Gilhuley and other workers, who were teasing Gilhuley about texts he claimed to be receiving that day from Vertetis.

"I recall him mentioning text messages coming in and he said 'She's gonna kill me some day,'" Luongo said. But he said Gilhuley said it in a joking way.

"He was laughing. Patrick always laughed," Luongo said.

He said that he realized around 4 a.m. on March 4, 2014 that Gilhuley had called him at 9:38 p.m. the previous night. But the message was garbled and, Luongo said, he couldn't decipher the words so he figured he would talk later to Gilhuley. But then he learned an hour later that Gilhuley had been killed.

Bilinkas, the defense lawyer, showed Luongo records of text messages and calls exchanged on March 3, 2014 between Vertetis and Gilhuley that show Vertetis never texted him on that day until 6 p.m. Luongo looked briefly dismayed and then said he doubts the records and believed that Gilhuley must have used a different phone.

Luongo said he recalled Gilhuley on March 3, 2014, staring at his cell phone, putting it down,shaking his head, laughing and saying: "She's gonna kill me some day."

"He was referring to Virginia," Luongo said.

The trial resumes Monday before Superior Court Judge Stephen Taylor in Morristown.

Staff Writer Peggy Wright: 973-267-1142; pwright@GannettNJ.com.

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Slay victim joked: 'She's gonna kill me some day' - Daily Record

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Their selective misgivings with Russia are just like their selective alarm with (our ally) Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the nationalist Chinese government, and (our ally) Ngo Dinh Diem, president of South Vietnam.

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As explained in lavish detail in Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, liberals instinctively lunge toward treason.

They say Putin is a thug and a bully who kills journalists. Liberals never used to mind Russian leaders killing journalists. Nor millions of scientists, writers, Christians, Jews, kulaks, Ukrainians and the entire 1980 Soviet Olympic hockey team.

Have you guys heard of the Evil Empire? Now Democrats are hypersensitive to a Russian leaders flaws?

Liberals were cool with the show trials, the alliance with Hitler, the gulags, the forced starvations, the shooting down of American planes and goose-stepping through Eastern Europe.

But that was when the Russian leader was Joseph Stalin or Nikita Khrushchev not the beast Putin!

Back then, liberals were spying for Stalin (Julius Rosenbergs code name: Liberal), the U.S. president was calling the bloodthirsty dictator Uncle Joe, and The New York Times was covering up Stalins infamous crimes. In the storied history of fake news, the Times Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for his false reports denying the Ukrainian famine, in which more than 7 million people were deliberately starved to death.

As far as the Times is concerned, those were Russias halcyon days!

Back when Russia was actually threatening America with nuclear annihilation, Jimmy Carter warned Americans about their inordinate fear of communism. Sting sang that the Russians love their children, too.

But now liberals are hopping mad with Putin. They could never forgive Russia for giving up communism.

To add insult to injury, Putin embraced the Russian Orthodox Church! This was deeply offensive to fiercely Christophobic liberals.

Russias descent into insanity and madness was clear when Putin refused to allow LGBTQ marches through Red Square. For having the same position on gays as Obama did, circa 2008, Russkies were walking on the fighting side of liberals!

Trumps election victory was the capstone of the lefts rage with Putin. To explain the inexplicable, Putin was made the center of liberals axis of evil, the mastermind of a malevolent plot to steal the election from Hillary Clinton.

Thats how liberals became born-again John Birchers, seeing Russians under every bed. Now, no fear of Russia is inordinate. The Russians do NOT love their children, too.

We really could have used some of this fighting spirit about 50 years ago when the Soviet Union sought total world domination and Stalins spies were crawling through the U.S. government. But back then, liberals were blackening the names of Whittaker Chambers, Richard Nixon and Sen. Joe McCarthy. (Later proved 100 percent correct by the top-secret Venona Project.)

Russias loss of the lefts esteem happened very quickly. In 2008, The New York Times editorial page demanded that Obama signal to the Russians that he wants better relations, and complained of the alarming deterioration of Russian-American relations under Bush.

It was considered the height of statesmanship when Obama was caught on a hot-mic in 2012, telling Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility. I understand you.

To hoots of laughter at the Democratic National Convention, Obama said: You dont call Russia our number one enemy not Al-Qaida, Russia unless youre still stuck in a Cold War mind warp.

MSNBCs Rachel Maddow couldnt contain her hilarity over the GOP offering an extra bonus of threatening Russia.

But today, Democrats (and two especially showboating Republicans) are horrified that Trump wants to get along with Russia. Tonight, the threatening evil of Vladimir Putin will be the top issue on Rachel Maddows show, assuming she still has a show. (Maybe she can get a copy of Putins tax returns!)

When the same people who hailed Stalin as a beloved American ally are happy to threaten Putin with thermonuclear war, we may deduce that the lefts newfound Russia-phobia has some seditious objective.

Historically, liberals show their manliness by demanding war with our friends and allies, while methodically undermining Americas ability to fight the wars its already in.

The No. 1 enemy of Western civilization today isnt non-communist Russia. Its Islam.

And who is a key ally in that fight? Russia has been dealing with these troublesome Muslims for centuries. It was Russian officials who tried in vain to warn our blind, incompetent government about the Boston Marathon bombers.

The lefts hysteria about Russia isnt just an attempt to delegitimize Trump. Its the usual Christophobic fifth column rooting for the Islamization of the West.

Read more from the original source:
Ann Coulter: Let's Make Russia Our Sister Country! - Breitbart News

Mike Killingsworth: Let's hear what Ann Coulter has to say Modesto Bee This letter should be Let's Hear what Coulter has to say for the umpteenth time. I am sure there would be no venom from conservatives if the local Democrats were to invite Louis Farrakan to speak before them. I'm sure they would be reminding everyone ...

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Mike Killingsworth: Let's hear what Ann Coulter has to say - Modesto Bee