Citizen Alterna Watch

What these Alterna watches from Citizen lack in understated class they make up for with loads of gee-wizardry, including time (I know!), calendar, stopwatch, temperature, and chronograph functions. Wait, that's time, too. Basically, you don't care; they have lots of dials and you love them, so quit yelping. If I'm reading the pricing correctly, they seem to be about $225 apiece, which actually seems extraordinarily reasonable considering how much is packed in there.

Read - Product Page (Babelfished) [CitizenJP via BoingBoing via TRFJ]

US citizen 'kidnapped in Riyadh'

Citizen Journalism: A Newspaper Goes for
It

OpinionJournal - Citizen of the World

opinionjournal.com/columnists/tvaradarajan/?id=110006858
track this site | 3 links

PR Plan to Boost Citizen Use of E-Gov
Sources

Humanist transhumanism: Citizen Cyborg

But Hughes's work is much subtler and more nuanced than that, and was genuinely surprising, engaging and engrossing.

A couple years ago, my friend John Gilmore -- who advocates for marijuana law reform -- introduced me to the idea of "cognitive liberty," the freedom to choose your state of mind. The cognitive liberty cause encompasses the movements to legalize "recreational" drugs and to limit the power of the state to subject "mentally ill" people to involuntary pharmaceutical therapy (and, when it is still practiced, involuntary physical therapies such as lobotomies and electroshock).

Cognitive liberty resonates strongly for me. Like other forms of personal liberty, it is not without its perils -- when friends of mine were involuntarily medicated during acute incidents of schizophrenia, mania or depression, the interventions seemed like a good trade-off at the time (rampaging, irrational, out of control friends who are treated with meds that make them capable of reasoning with those around them are good poster children for "cognitive coercion"), and friends who've fallen down the well of addiction and ended up with ruined lives or even lives cut short are a strong warning against unbridled cognitive liberty.

But then there are friends whose touch of madness sends them on flights of brilliance, friends whose casual glass of wine, joint or hallucinogen use have made them happier, better adjusted, and more creative and fulfilled. What's more, my friends who've ODed, been committed, or who live with addiction haven't been helped by prohibition -- far from it. Some are in jail, some are medicated insensible, some are living lives of dangerous poverty.

The idea of cognitive liberty is very tempting, but I have an instinct that there's an approach to it that is grounded not in libertarianism, but in Canadian/European-style social democracy.

"Citizen Cyborg" takes the social democratic approach not just to cognitive liberty, but to the parcel of questions that follow on from it as technology allows us to charge our minds and bodies. When we can choose our children's' sex, modify our genomes to eliminate some forms of mental and physical disability, when we can modify our bodies and minds to improve them beyond the normal human baseline , when we can even use technology to make dolphins and great apes as smart as precocious children, what then?

Surely the ability to determine your own genome, the ability to choose to modify your physical self and to make the choices for your children are as fundamental civil liberties as the right to speak and assemble and otherwise author your own destiny.

But the traditional "transhumanist" movement has come out of the libertarian right, advocates of an unbridled market without government intervention. And much of the opposition to transhumanism hasn't just come from the religious right, but from the left, too -- lefties who see transhumanism as likely to produce a troubling, divisive caste system, or to make us all beholden to corporate interests like Monsanto who bind us to subscribing to patented GM lifeforms that we require to sustain our lifestyles.

Hughes's remarkable achievement in "Citizen Cyborg" is the fusion of social democratic ideals of tempered, reasoned state intervention to promote equality of opportunity with the ideal of self-determination inherent in transhumanism. Transhumanism, Hughes convincingly argues, is the sequel to humanism, and to feminism, to the movements for racial and gender equality, for the fight for queer and transgender rights -- if you support the right to determine what consenting adults can do with their bodies in the bedroom, why not in the operating theatre?

Much of this book is taken up with scathing rebuttal to the enemies of transhumanism -- Christian lifestyle conservatives who've fought against abortion, stem-cell research and gay marriage; as well as deep ecologist/secular lefty intelligentsia who fear the commodification of human life. He dismisses the former as superstitious religious thugs who, a few generations back, would happily decry the "unnatural" sin of miscegenation; to the latter, he says, "You are willing to solve the problems of labor-automation with laws that ensure a fair shake for working people -- why not afford the same chance to life-improving techno-medicine?"

The humanist transhuman is a political stance I'd never imagined, but having read "Citizen Cyborg," it seems obvious and natural. Like a lot of basically lefty geeks, I've often felt like many of my ideals were at odds with both the traditional left and the largely right-wing libertarians. "Citizen Cyborg" squares the circle, suggest a middle-path between them that stands foursquare for the improvement of the human condition through technology but is likewise not squeamish about advocating for rules, laws and systems that extend a fair opportunity to those less fortunate (say, by offering special patent rules to the developing world allowing poor nations' scientists to freely reuse the patented pharmaceutical inventions of the rich north to solve local needs.)

Hughes is a Buddhist whose children struggle with genetically-influenced disorders like ADD and Tourette's, and his life seems much taken-up with the cause of transhumanist humanism. He is the executive director of the World Transumanist Association, and he teaches health policy at Hartford, CT's Trinity College. The work is sprinkled with references to science fiction and is very concerned with the way that transhumanist ideas were prefigured in the genre and have leaked back into modern sf. I don't know that he's convinced me to become a transhumanist activist -- I feel like the work I do with EFF works to safeguard a lot of rights dear to the transhumanist heart anyway -- but the analytical tools this book has provided me with have made me re-examine my own political identity. Book Link, References Link

"Citizen journalists"? Try partisan
hacks

Citizen-soldier demoted for bl0gging

What's in PressThink's Pocket? Citizen
Journalism!

CITIZEN MEDIA INITIATIVE LIST

Judith Meskill may have her famous "Soc ial Networking Services meta" list - but we (ourmedia.org) made it onto the new CITIZEN MEDIA INITIATIVE LIST. Along with our Bryght/sister org - NowPublic.com.

Keep by the CyberJounralist.net.

Now this does not condone in any way or admit that I call myself a journalist. But I'm proud of the job that JD has done - and now we just need ot fix all the bugs.

In case some of you are wondering as to "what happened this weekend" - the Internet Archives database was down, thereby knocking us out of the box.

But we'll have better reporting features coming up AND we're talking to several big players about joining our 'registry' of media - so we'll have other repositories that are part of the party.

The Internet Archives is mirrored in Amsterdam and Alexandria, Egypt - but no amount of redendancy, mirroring and all that good stuff will save yah from Murphy.

:-)

How to succeed as a citizen media editor

ojr.org/ojr/stories/050322glaser
track this site | 4 links

Citizen Rolls Out Pair of Printers

Spam, the Nazi hunter and Citizen Joe

Shoshana Zuboff: From Subject to Citizen

Bayosphere Citizen Journalism Pledge

Dan Gillmor has created a Citizen Journalist Pledge for contributors to Bayosphere.

Citizen Journalist Pledge

By submitting this form, I agree to be accurate, complete, fair and transparent in my postings on Bayosphere. I will operate with integrity.

I work in the community interest.

I report and produce news explaining the facts as fairly, thoroughly, accurately and openly as I can.

• Fair: I'm always listening to and taking account of other viewpoints;
• Thorough: I learn as much as I can in the time I have, and point to original sources when possible;
• Accurate: I get it right, checking my facts, correcting errors promptly and incorporating new information I learn from the community;
• Open: I explain my biases and conflicts, where appropriate.

I may also provide reviews (such as a critique of a movie or book) and commentary with a point of view based on facts, but I will have no significant financial or otherwise direct connection (membership, affiliation, close relationship, etc.) with an interested party.

If I do have such connections, I'll disclose them prominently, and my work may be labeled and/or categorized appropriately.

I agree, as an active member of this community, to help uphold the integrity of this pledge by challenging and reporting inappropriate postings or abuse.

One modification that I would have to make is conflict of interest disclosures. We've talked about this quite a bit on this blog. At one time, I started disclosing conflicts on every post, but people thought it sounded boastful. Lately, I try to make it clear by saying "we" or "I" when it is an organization that I am involved in, but assume that most people who read my blog understand my primary affiliations. Most of them are disclosed on my wiki page. Any new affiliation or minor affiliation to something I am writing about will be prominently disclosed.

The only other type of article that may not fit "citizen journalism" are posts where irony or some joke is the point of the post. I used to think that such material would be obvious, but I find that irony is often missed an taken seriously. I don't have a good solution for this.

CREDIT: Citizen News Services

"Rodney-King-like" citizen phonecam
episode

A blatant act of racism by the Portland police was snapped by a "citizen reporter" armed with a camera phone. The story and the photos were published in the Portland Tribune and broadcasted on television: "Police offers parked their car outside Ringlers restaurant with a stuffed gorilla attached to the car's grill last Tuesday night, - where a largely black crowd had gathered for a weekly hip-hop show hosted by disc jockey Mello Cee. This is the kind of thing you expect to see in the South, like a Confederate flag. They might as well paint their faces black with white lips," said Mello Cee.

"Resident Calvin Washington who said he took the photos around 1 a.m. last Tuesday morning outside Ringlers restaurant at 1332 W. Burnside St. Washington said when he realized what was happening, he grabbed his cell phone camera and walked outside to take pictures. 'I went out and flicked a few pics. The police couldn't tell what I was doing because I had the phone in my hand. They couldn't tell what it was,' he said."

The Portland Tribune published a follow-up article on Friday, questioning whether the "incident may have launched the age of technological vigilantism in Portland".

Mexico City mayor awaits arrest