Liberus offers three models of Android tarot distribution. They vary in the technical skill required and in the amount of involvement on the part of the artist.

The first model requires very little technical skill or additional effort on the part of the artist. Simply provide Liberus with images and optionally text and we will publish your deck under the Liberus brand with a percentage of each sale going to you.

The second model also requires little technical skill but much more effort on the part of the artist. Here you essentially commission software which is then custom designed to your specifications and published either through Liberus or through your own brand.

The third model requires a lot of time and technical skill on the part of the artist. Here Liberus provides you with a tutorial to use the open source code to develop your own TarotBot customized however you like. You are then free to publish it as you see fit.

Here’s where to learn how to publish your own tarot deck: « Tarotbot | Tarot distribution | http://liber.us : Android tarot reader.

YouTube – Ghostbusters Recut Trailer.

Prof. Wahid attributes the failure to explain these phenomena in biology to the erroneous molecular gene and genome concepts. He argues that material genome is not the biological program, the cause of life. According to the Qur’an it is the invisible ghayb in Arabic non-molecular rooh also called nafs in the case of man, which is the divine biological program or the biosoftware. This is the so-called “soul”. In fact the non-physical gene originally proposed by Wilhelm Johannsen in 1909 agrees well with the Qur’anic revelation but not the molecular gene. In the computer model of the organism, all the visible parts chemical structures including genome constitute the hardware while the invisible biological program most likely stored on the chromosomes, the hard disk of the cell constitutes the divine biosoftware. The soul of a computer is its invisible software stored on the hard disk. Likewise the soul of a human being is the invisible biosoftware nafs. The phenomenon of life has been defined as the manifestation of execution of the divine biosoftware. The Qur’an further reveals Q. 6:93 that removal or to use the computer jargon, “deletion” of the biosoftware nafs results in death. This means a dead body is like a computer without software. It is because of the absence of biosoftware in the cells, the dead body is unable to show “life” although it carries the genome intact in every cell.

via Science journal publishes Quran-based theory on phenomena of life and death.

Each of our lives is a story, an album, a painting, in which we play the starring role, but only posthumously, in hindsight, or through the internal wrestling of the creative process which separate us, momentarily, from our day-to-day concerns. These stories weave together into an ever-changing tapestry which we call culture. Though it sounds a bit high-flung, we can become demigods for those who inherit the worlds we create. This mantle is both a boon and a curse that is often bestowed posthumously upon certain writers, artists, etc. This worthiness is far from egalitarian, and often strikes a harsh contrast to the living reality of that individuals life. Many of the individuals that our present cultures owe themselves to died impoverished, unfulfilled, or most famously, crucified. An ongoing mythical tradition is like a river that flows ever forward, sometimes branching off, or dying to drought or dam, yet nevertheless continually flowing, never reaching an ultimate destination.

via Memes, Myths, Birds, Bees, and Markets, by James Curcio | [ open myth source ].

Twitter is “censoring” discussion of Wikileaks by preventing it becoming a trending topic, writes blogger Bubbloy. As he points out with some neat research, the popularity of Wikileaks discussion far outstrips that of the pop culture ephemera that does trend. But is there a clue in the fact Twitter’s feature isn’t called ‘popular topics?’ Perhaps the #Wikileaks tag has already experienced so much chatter that it’s become algorithmically unlikely to retrend. If so, perhaps a page for trending topic ‘graduates’ — or at least a limit on the algorithmic relevance of last year’s spikes — would be nice.

via Why won’t Wikileaks trend on Twitter? – Boing Boing.

ABNER

ABNER is a statistical named entity recognizer “using linear-chain conditional random fields (CRFs) with a variety of orthographic and contextual features. Version 1.5 includes two models trained on the NLPBA and BioCreative corpora, for which performance is roughly state of the art. The new version also includes a Java API allowing users to incorporate ABNER into their systems, as well as train and use models for other data.” Written by Burr Settles out of University of Wisconsin-Madison. Released with source with the Commons Public License.

BALIE

The Baseline Information Extraction (BALIE) system is a Java natural language toolkit developed at the University of Ottawa and released under the GNU General Public License. BALIE provides language ID, sentence detection, tokenization and named-entity recognition. Here’s the BALIE javadoc.

BANNER

“BANNER is a named entity recognition system, primarily intended for biomedical text. It is a machine-learning system based on conditional random fields and contains a wide survey of the best features in recent literature on biomedical named entity recognition (NER). BANNER is portable and is designed to maximize domain independence by not employing semantic features or rule-based processing steps. It is therefore useful to developers as an extensible NER implementation, to researchers as a standard for comparing innovative techniques, and to biologists requiring the ability to find novel entities in large amounts of text. BANNER is released under the Common Public License.”

FreeLing

FreeLing is a set of C++ tools developed at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and released under the GNU Lesser General Public License. Freeling provides sentence detection, morphological analysis, named entities, POS tagging, shallow parsing, dependency parsing and word sense disambiguation. Here’s a link to their user manual.

The Dragon Toolkit

“The Dragon Toolkit is a Java-based development package for academic use in information retrieval (IR) and text mining (TM, including text classification, text clustering, text summarization, and topic modeling). It is tailored for researchers who work on large-scale IR and TM and prefer Java programming.”

GATE

GATE is a Java text mining toolkit developed at the University of Sheffield and released under the GNU Lesser General Public License. GATE provides a general offset-oriented development/deployment environment/framework and some rule-based tools to run within that framework. Many other GATE plugins have been contributed by Sheffield and third parties. Here is a link to their user guide and javadoc.

JULIE

“The JULIE Lab here offers a comprehensive NLP tool suite for the application purposes of semantic search, information extraction and text mining. Most of our continuously expanding tool suite is based on machine learning methods and thus is domain- and language independent.

One main feature is that we offer our tools both as stand-alone programs and wrapped within the UIMA framework. UIMA is an open-source , industrial-strength, scaleable and extensible platform for creating, integrating and deploying unstructured information management solutions from combinations of semantic analysis and search components. ”

Apache Lucene Mahout

Mahout’s goal is to build scalable, Apache licensed machine learning libraries. Initially, we are interested in building out the ten machine learning libraries detailed in [Chu et al.'s 2006 NIPS paper Map-Reduce for Machine Learning on Multicore] using [Apache] Hadoop.”

MALLET

MALLET is a Java natural language toolkit developed at the University of Massachussetts and released under the Common Public License. MALLET is most widely used for classification and sequence modeling. It also includes clustering. It provides maximum entropy training, including conditional random fields, general undirected graphical models, finite-state transducers, and some general numerical optimization classes. Here’s a link to their javadoc.

MaltParser

“MaltParser is a system for data-driven dependency parsing, which can be used to induce a parsing model from treebank data and to parse new data using an induced model. MaltParser is developed by Johan Hall, Jens Nilsson and Joakim Nivre at Vaxjo University and Uppsala University, Sweden.”

MINDSWAP

Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab Semantic Web Agents Project offers a generic Semantic Web anno toolkit, SMORE, “designed to enable users to markup HTML documents in OWL using Web Ontologies.”

Minor Third

Minor Third is a Java natural language toolkit developed at Carnegie Mellon University and released under the BSD License. Minor Third provides an extensive suite of general and sequence classifiers, including KNN, active learning, SVMs, decision trees, CRFs, CMMs, boosting, perceptrons, etc.

MontyLingua

“MontyLingua is a free for research use, commonsense-enriched, end-to-end natural language understander for English. Feed raw English text into MontyLingua, and the output will be a semantic interpretation of that text. Perfect for information retrieval and extraction, request processing, and question answering. From English sentences, it extracts subject/verb/object tuples, extracts adjectives, noun phrases and verb phrases, and extracts people’s names, places, events, dates and times, and other semantic information. MontyLingua makes traditionally difficult language processing tasks trivial!”

MorphAdorner

An extensive package developed at Northwestern for spelling, lemmatization, sentence detector, part-of-speech tagger, named entity detector, and phrase chunker. It rolls in many other projects into a coherent and well-documented package. Mainly aimed at historical forms of English, but retrainable. Very open license.

NaCTeM

The National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) is the first publicly-funded text mining centre in the world. We provide text mining services in response to the requirements of the UK academic community. NaCTeM is operated by the University of Manchester with close collaboration with the University of Tokyo.

On our website, you can find pointers to sources of information about text mining such as links to

• text mining services provided by NaCTeM
• software tools, both those developed by the NaCTeM team and by other text mining groups
• seminars, general events, conferences and workshops
• tutorials and demonstrations
• text mining publications

NLTK

The Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) is a general Python toolkit developed at the University of Melbourne for natural language processing released under the GNU General Public License. NLTK contains modules for heuristic and statistical tagging (including the Brill tagger) and chunking, full parsing (CFG), and clustering (including K-means and EM). The documentation page contains pointers to tutorials and API documentation. It’s also distributed with a range of interesting data.

OpenNLP

OpenNLP is a heterogeneous collection of projects distributed under a variety of open source licenses. The main projects being developed for OpenNLP itself include a general Java maximum entropy package released under the GNU Lesser General Public License. Here’s the maxent javadoc. There’s a tools API to go with it; here’s the tools javadoc. The tools include statistical tokenizers, sentence detection, name finders, part-of-speech taggers and full syntactic (PCFG) parsing. This is one of the few packages to do coreference resolution.

Proxem

Actually, it’s hard to tell if this is academic or commerical. They offer a suite of .NET tools for natural language processing called Antelope. It looks like much of the work is based on wrappers to other packages.

RASP

RASP is an NLP framework for “robust accurate statistical parsing”. It is trained using the British English corpora Susanne, LOB and BNC. RASP includes a tokenizer, part-of-speech tagger, hand-built FST-based morphological analyzer for English, grammar-based parser and parse reranking model.

RASP is distributed only as an executable and licensed under its own non-commercial license for education or research.

There is a RASP white paper describing the system, including dependency parser accuracy evaluation, and a longer technical report about the grammar formalism used.

Stanford NLP Software

This is many pieces of software with Java source licensed under the GNU General Public License. Tools include a part-of-speech tagger, text classifier, and PCFG parser. They no longer provide public access to their full JavaNLP toolkit.

SRI International

“SRILM is a toolkit for building and applying statistical language models (LMs), primarily for use in speech recognition, statistical tagging and segmentation, and machine translation. It has been under development in the SRI Speech Technology and Research Laboratory since 1995. The toolkit has also greatly benefitted from its use and enhancements during the Johns Hopkins University/CLSP summer workshops in 1995, 1996, 1997, and 2002.”

TreeTagger

TreeTagger is Helmud Schmid’s multilingual part-of-speech tagger. It has a research-only.

WEKA

WEKA is the University of Waikato’s data mining software released under the GNU General Public License. It’s not a natural language processing toolkit, but a very extensive general machine learning toolkit. It provides a nice graphical interface for evaluation and supports just about every machine learning algorithm known to research. It’s based on Ian Witten and Eibe Frank’s book Data Mining. Here’s a pointer to the WEKA documentation, which includes tutorials and pointers to the javadoc.

via LingPipe: Competition.

Michael A. Hoffman II is also a man who devotes a large portion of his life to questioning the historical veracity of the Nazi Holocaust. He’s a religious fundamentalist with weird hobbies, and much like myself, badly in need of an honest editor. I’m not discussing him because he’s important or correct on much of anything: he is not. He just happens to be the first source using this particular phrase.

As you might expect, he equates Masonry with Judaism and both with pure pagan Evil, which makes for some eloquent and exquisitely researched nonsense. The evidence boils down to drawing connections between violent crimes and violent media, with no actual chain of causality or conspiratorial links involved. Common themes and overlapping symbols are taken as sufficient proof.

via The Revelation of the Method // Skilluminati Research.

As viral marketing strategies have been exploited by corporate media to make profit connecting people all over the world, Seppukoo playfully attempts to subvert this mechanism disconnecting people from each other and transforming the individual suicide experience into an exciting”social” experience.With Seppukoo in fact it’s not important how many friends you have, but how much you may influence them. Induce your friends to commit suicide and rise up the Seppukoo Rank!

via Seppukoo » About.

As social media and technologies continue to disseminate and evolve, making it easier for everyone to connect with everyone else, to communicate and collaborate in ways we’ve only started to anticipate, swarm intelligence may become the norm rather than the exception. As that happens, the best leader may find themselves turning for advice to the true experts in self-organization–not the ones in the boardroom, but those in the grass, in the air, in the lakes, and in the woods.

via Guest Insights: Smart swarms: The power of self-organization – Peter Miller.

Although the reflex still exists to evoke fear of these positions in political campaigning, neither pro- nor anti-state positions are meaningful in themselves. We have seen the devastating social problems that resulted from the idea that there is no such thing as society, under Thatcher, and under Blair and Brown we have learned that no amount of money can guarantee improvements in outcomes on complex issues like child poverty, education and health if we stick to simplistic notions of public service provision based on targets, top-down control and process-over-people methods.We badly need new ideas and new approaches, especially since the gulf between rising demands on public services and available funding to meet them is growing ever wider. More than anything, we need approaches that go with the grain of human behaviour and motivation, and which understand that society is comprised of inter-related complex systems, rather than reductionist management control methods.

via Social networks and the connective tissue of a Big Society :: Blog :: Headshift.

Harnessing the power of the collective crowdsourcing for social change is a thread woven throughout Cognitive Surplus, and its viability requires two of Shirky’s assertions to be accurate.

First, that our default state as a species is to create and share and collaborate, and we are just now moving back toward normalcy, aided by the vast increase in content creation and sharing mechanisms. Second, that making collaboration more convenient will inexorably cause it to become more commonplace.

Shirky makes a great case for it to be so, citing LOLCats as an example of widespread human collaboration and creation – albeit devoid of the type of society-enhancing mission and outcomes he hopes is the eventual result of this movement.

via Cognitive Surplus – Use Social Connectivity to Change the World | Book Reviews | Social Media Consulting – Convince & Convert.

…the egregore is not in total control… as the action of the social or corporate body is determined through the action of its parts, the individuals. These are intelligences that are emergent properties of the complex system that compose their bodies, and the individual people within these social or corporate bodies are not in control because they are constrained by the system in which they are embedded. As we augment our biology with cyborg technologies, we will further adapt our behaviors to the larger networks in which we are embedded, while gaining more control over our own internal networks with comprise our physical presence.

via The Art of Memetics – Ownership and Self in Networked Spaces.

While First Wave Feminism focused on suffrage, and Second Wave Feminism focused on getting women ahead in the workplace, many of the more recent fractured feminist movements have continued to ignore the importance of play and leisure in everyday lives. This all-work-and-no-play focus has ricocheted to future feminisms: none have successfully reclaimed leisure and play.

How to Play a Feminist – by Shira Chess.

It’s the fast-growing social network and attracts far less attention than its far smaller rivals such as Twitter. And it is the users, not the site, who grab chunks of content to link to.

via Facebook: friend or foe? | Media | The Guardian.

The killing of Americans through anthrax letters isn’t itself a useful end to the terrorists. Instead, the terrorists perceive that the communication of horror — not disease — through the country, along with the polarization of overseas opinion accomplished through viral marketing, will eventually lead to the adoption of their policy goals.

To counter propaganda spread in this way, we should consider using viral marketing in response.

Sophisticated Infrastructure and Experience

Casual Western observers of the frequent Middle Eastern terrorist bombings might not be familiar with the normal procedures for terrorist groups exploiting terrorist acts. The standard protocol works in this order:

1. A specific threat is made, giving a policy desire and a target.
2. The terrorism act is committed, in America for example.
3. A fake or noninvolved terrorist organization temporarily takes credit for the act.
4. Careful assessments are made of the public’s reaction to the act, both in America and in terrorist constituent countries in the Middle East.
5. A grass-roots, viral propaganda campaign is launched to frame the issue behind the terrorism.
6. Once public opinion swings to blame America for the act — even if it was an act overtly against America — the real terrorist organization takes credit for the act. Often the first group taking credit will then withdraw its initial statement.

In this fashion, the terrorist group gets the most propaganda value out of its act. If the public reacts negatively to the act, the real terrorists stand aside. Only once the viral marketing campaign kicks in and reaction swings against the US, do the terrorists take explicit credit.

via Countering Viral Marketing – ClickZ.

Have you used an online persona to accomplish self-transformation? I’m doing research for my hypersigil project currently thinking it will take the form of a free e-book, and then be extended into something else from there, and I’m looking for personal stories from people who have attempted to use online personas to make changes in their lives. Whether that meant taking up another gender identity in IRC or Second Life before taking transgenderism in real life, or crafting a different professional identity to make a career change, or using social media to get out of a rut in life, I’m interested in talking to you.

I especially want to talk to you if you’ve tried and failed.

via Wanted: people who have used an online persona for self-transformation | Technoccult.

She gives 5 tips, here’s the first 3…

1. Don’t follow just for numbers – Twitter is your chance to really get to know real people. The numbers may be worthless if you cannot connect and inspire others.

2. They are not mere avatars – They are human beings that live and breath. Twitter is full of real people that you can communicate and share with 140 characters at a time.

3. Be Yourself – Don’t be pretentious. People will recognize that you are being that way. Just be who you are in real life. If they see that you are genuine, people will warm up to you.

via Can You Have Real Friends on Twitter? | Bit Rebels.