While human cannibalism has attracted considerable notice and controversy, certain aspects of the practice have received scant attention. These include the connection between cannibalism and xenophobia: the capture and consumption of unwanted strangers. Likewise ignored is the connection to slavery: the fact that in some societies slaves and persons captured in slave raids could be, and were, killed and eaten. This book explores these largely forgotten practices and ignored connections while making explicit the links between cannibal acts, imperialist influences and the role of capitalist trading practices. These are highly important for the history of the slave trade and for understanding the colonialist history of Africa.

A new mode of production has emerged in the areas of software and content production. This mode, which is based on sharing and cooperation, has spawned whole mature operating systems such as GNU/Linux as well as innumerable other free software applications; giant knowledge bases such as the Wikipedia; a large free culture movement; and a new, wholly decentralized medium for spreading, analyzing and discussing news and knowledge, the so-called blogosphere. So far, this new mode of production-peer production-has been limited to certain niches of production, such as information goods. This book discusses whether this limitation is necessary or whether the potential of peer production extends farther. In other words: Is a society possible in which peer production is the primary mode of production? If so, how could such a society be organized? Is a society possible where production is driven by demand and not by profit? Where there is no need to sell anything and hence no unemployment? Where competition is more a game than a struggle for survival? Where there is no distinction between people with capital and those without? A society where it would be silly to keep your ideas and knowledge secret instead of sharing them; and where scarcity is no longer a precondition of economic success, but a problem to be worked around? It is, and this book describes how.

Most of the information stored in digital form is hidden in natural language texts. The purpose of Information Extraction (IE) is to find desired pieces of information in unstructured or weakly structured texts and store them in a form that is suitable for automatic querying and processing. This book presents a innovative approach to statistical information extraction. It introduces a new algorithm which supports functionality not available in previous IE systems, such as interactive incremental training to reduce the human training effort. The system also utilizes new sources of information, employing rich tree-based context representations to combine document structure (HTML or XML markup) with linguistic and semantic information. The resulting IE system is designed as a generic framework for statistical information extraction. All core components can be modified or exchanged independently of each other. This book is of interest for professionals who have to deal with large amounts of weakly structured information and seek ways to automate this process, as well as for researchers and practitioners active in the fields of text mining and text classification.