Playing around with Online Text Summarizer

This OTS thing is cool, whoever who invented it.

Original here: http://www.portlandoccupier.org/2011/12/15/justin-james/

OTS --ratio=33 (i.e. 1/3 of the article length):

Witnesses: Justin James Bridges W ent Unattended For Half an Hour Because the Police Cancelled the Emergency Call
I spent all yesterday preparing for a presentation to the City Council’s open hearing on police accountability that I was sure was supposed to be today only to find out that it had already happened. At the last open hearing on police accountability, Mayor Adams assured me that, if I could cut 21 minutes of raw audio into 3, he’d let me present it. After listening to the interviews over and over, it seemed to me that the most striking points were these: the professional EMTs were not allowed to approach Justin James Bridges as he lay on the ground in critical condition because the police cancelled their emergency call;
Before I begin I would like to remind all present that on November 24th, the General Assembly of Occupy Portland released a statement condemning police violence, and requested that, because Chief Mike Reese is no longer running for mayor, the funds collected by his fundraising committee, “Friends of Mike Reese”, be reallocated to organizations dedicated to helping the economically underserved, and that any officers who benefited from the glut of overtime pay as a result of Chief Reese’s unnecessary deployment of police forces create a fund for the benefit of these same organizations. In my presentation of these interviews, one of the things that you will hear is that the presence of the channel 8 camera was instrumental in the decision of police and medical professionals to act, and that the camera wasn’t present until concerned citizens ushered it over.

OTS --ratio=10 (1/10 of the article):

Witnesses: Justin James Bridges Went Unattended For Half an Hour Because the Police Cancelled the Emergency Call
I spent all yesterday preparing for a presentation to the City Council’s open hearing on police accountability that I was sure was supposed to be today only to find out that it had already happened. In my presentation of these interviews, one of the things that you will hear is that the presence of the channel 8 camera was instrumental in the decision of police and medical professionals to act, and that the camera wasn’t present until concerned citizens ushered it over.

OTS --ratio=5 (1/20 of the article)

W itnesses: Justin James Bridges W ent Unattended For Half an Hour Because the Police Cancelled the Emergency Call
I spent all yesterday preparing for a presentation to the City Council’s open hearing on police accountability that I was sure was supposed to be today only to find out that it had already happened.

OTS  --about

Article talks about "police,interviews,presentation,oversight,here"

Two cool Linux tricks for busy people

Image via Wikipedia

There are many undiscovered goodness that is Linux, and often those are hidden behind the graphical user interface, requiring (1) their existence; and (2) how to handle the command-line interface in the shell console.

These tools are standard part of Ubuntu and LinuxMint, the world's third- and fourth-most popular operating systems.

pdftotext
This extracts the textual contents of PDF files as plain-text files.  (It does not work with PDF generated by flat-bed optical scanners, however, so some of the old journal articles do not convert into text files.)


usage: 

> pdftotext source.pdf destination.txt

This also converts PDF into HTML:

> pdftotext -htmlmeta source.pdf destination.html

The manual is at http://linux.die.net/man/1/pdftotext.


ots
You need to read this paper, that article, and those before tomorrow!  Online Text Summarizer (OTS) is an acclaimed piece of software that automatically condenses long texts (from a plain text file).  This works the best with academic and journalistic writings, as well as simple narratives.

> ots --ratio=5 --out=article-summary.txt article.txt

This will generate a file "article-summary.txt" containing a summary of "article.txt" at the length of 5 percent of its original. The "--ratio=" can be anywhere between 1 and 100 (percent in article length).

The manual is at http://libots.sourceforge.net/

ots in action:
This article from The Telegraph was put through the Online Text Summarizer:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8954315/Inside-Wukan-the-Chinese-village-that-fought-back.html
(To turn this into a clean PDF, use the PrintFriendly extension for Chromium)

> pdftotext telegraph.co.uk-Inside_Wukan*.pdf wukan.txt
> ots --ratio=5 --out=wukan-sum.txt wukan.txt

And here's the output (now saved as file wukan-sum.txt):

telegraph.co.uk
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8954315/Inside-Wukan-the-Chinesevillage-that-fought-back.html

 Inside Wukan: the Chinese village that fought back

For the first time on record, the Chinese Communist party has lost all control, with the population of 20,000 in this southern fishing village now in open revolt. “They banged the warning drum and the entire village ran to block the police.”  After a tense two-hour standoff, during which the villagers were hit with tear gas and water cannons, the police retreated, instead setting up the ring of steel around Wukan that is in force today.

Not bad.  Here is another demo of this, now with an academic paper.

The original here is "Pentecostal hermeneutics and first-wave feminism" by Shane Clifton at Southern Cross College in Australia.

01 Pentecostal hermeneutics and first-wave
feminism: Mina Ross Brawner, MD
Shane Clifton
Southern Cross College 

A case study of Pentecostal hermeneutics and first-wave feminism in the life and writing of ‘God’s Gypsy’, Mina Ross Brawner M.D.

In America prominent women such as Aimee Semple McPherson were the exception rather than the rule, and yet in Australia, as Barry Chant notes: ‘the first Pentecostal church was pioneered and pastored by a women, Sarah Jane Lancaster, and over half of the assemblies established prior to 1930 were brought into being by women, and often led by women as well’. Such an experiential paradigm has led commentators to criticise Pentecostals for doing eisegesis (reading their experience into the text), and yet Pentecostals have responded that not only is it impossible to remove experience from the process of reading, but that the experience of the Spirit illuminating the text (or to use Pinnock’s phrase, ‘inspiring the reader’ [14] ) is an essential dimension of charismatic hermeneutics. Her response is noteworthy given Pentecostalism’s tendency to fundamentalist conceptions of the text: ‘Clearly because the translators (again influenced by tradition) could not entertain the thought of a women teaching a man … so they put Aquila’s name first.’ [30] She makes similar criticism of the tendency of Christian tradition to assume that the apostle Junia was male, when ‘Crysostom and Theophylact, who were Greeks, both say Junia was a women.’ [31] These textual comments lead Brawner to a critique of the Christian tradition as a whole, which she says became increasingly oppressive, reaching its low point ‘when it was ruled that women must not draw near to the altar in any ministerial capacity. Of 1 Timothy 2:8-12 she again questions the (male?) translators, suggesting that Paul’s concern was not with the status and role of women in general, and that Paul was not commanding all women to be silent nor preventing them from having authority, but instead critiquing some women for usurping authority from their husbands rather than learning in quietness (not silence). The grass roots, liberative and non-suspicious feminism of Brawner and others has meant that today’s Pentecostal women can challenge the cultural patriarchy that has developed in the movement with a liberative tradition, while enjoying legal rights that are not available to women in other church movements.

Related articles

• Linux Mint Agree Amazon Revenue Share (omgubuntu.co.uk)
• How to annotate PS or PDF from (Linux) command line without losing quality? (stackoverflow.com)

2011 Holiday season window painting update

I have been receiving a few inquiries about window painting recently. I have discontinued this service and I no longer have any inventory of paint and other supplies. However, if you do have your own paint, I will be offering this service for this season for $20/hour plus $10 booking fee, depending on time availability and location. Contact 503-427-8269 or email for details.

Recent chalkboard lettering art!

See also http://iriscat.weebly.com/hand-drawn-art-menu-boards.html

TaborSpace lunch room menu (Sept. 12, 2011)

The 100th Monkey Studio, Portland (Sept. 16, 2011)

The 100th Monkey Studio, Portland (Sept. 16, 2011)

Evolve Gallery at the 100th Monkey Studio (Sept. 16, 2011)

Art(s)cool PDX at the 100th Monkey Studio (Sept. 16, 2011)

See also http://iriscat.weebly.com/hand-drawn-art-menu-boards.html

Something I love about this...

Victoria, Beau Vallon, Seychelles!

Heraldry: The Jaguar Sisters

The motto "Rize and roar" (with that spelling, with a Z) was come up at this year's Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP) Congress in San Francisco.  The jaguars trace back their origin to a dream that one of the founders, Julie McCurdy, had when the group just started back in February 2011.

This coat-of-arms was created for the Jaguar Sisters, a community organization in Portland, Oregon.  Unlike most of my past work it is essentially an Iberian-style heraldry (i.e., Spanish, Portuguese, Latin American) rather than a more British or Irish style one.  The faces of the two sable jaguars rampant are taken from a Mayan jaguar mask design.

The crown is in fact a mural crown, which is common among the heraldry of cities and communes in the continental Europe as well as in Central and South America, which traces its history to a symbol of the Hellenic Goddess Tyche, Roman Goddess Fortuna, or of Cybele.  Rather than being a symbol of monarchy or empire, as such is the case with the crown in British heraldry, the mural crown would be a befitting symbol for this women's empowerment and solidarity community.  Additionally, the city walls historically symbolize both the communal nature of a city, as well as its common and mutual defence of its citizens.  The mural crown imagery subconsciously evokes the sense of protection, stability and safety in a community, something the Jaguar Sisters have set themselves to achieve through their organizing.

The gules, sable and or are the official colour scheme of the organization.

The division of the oval shield in the middle alludes to the forests of the Pacific Northwest.

a vexillological rendition

Oregon europlate (parody)

If the Oregon DMV began selling the European Union style license plate for the benefit of some local nonprofit (maybe a pool of organizations that promote the learning of languages) it might be able to raise quite a bit of good money.  Europlates look great on Volvo or Volkswagen, and they would most likely appeal to hipsters as well as to European car enthusiasts.

silly poetry

Image via Wikipedia



O, my Oreo!
Thou makest me delight in thee!
Pull, slide, glide, split open;
Unearthing the pearl'd treasure,
Hidden in brown round shells.

Cat

Cat.
Happy purrs in the sun.
Upside down under blue sky.
Cat.
Content beyond measure.
Oblivious of petty human games.
Cat.
Sleep when it wants.
Eat, only to go to sleep.
Cat.
Paradise on earth realized.
World peace in fur format.
Cat.
Does not care what you think.
Does not care if you make six figures.
Cat.
Meows and purrs.
Jumps up on your lap.
Cat.
Does not care if you are tired.
Jumps up on your bed to make biscuits.
Cat.
Does not care if it is 4 in the morning.
Sits on your face and meows loudly.
Cat.
Is everywhere on earth.
In Canada and South Africa.
Cat.
In Afghanistan and Palestine and China and North Korea.
In Australia and Greece and Italy and Kosovo.
Cat.
Does not need Berlitz or MBA in international trade.
Meow means meow here, there or elsewhere.
Cat.

Free clip art: Cat in a paper bag

Download SVG file
License term: Creative Commons Public License 3.0 by-nc-sa.


Cat out of the bag by Sarah Morrigan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Interesting...

The latest site stats.  Iran, 13.  Macau, 2.  Russia, 2.  Ukraine, 1.

Fire and Water

Field art at the frontline of struggle

Image via WikipediaIn Portland, Oregon, thousands of un-housed individuals are constantly persecuted and attacked by local police, rent-a-cops hired by the businesses, and by random thugs, for the crime of attempting to survive.  Especially during the weeks preceding the Portland Rose Festival, "the official festival of Portland," the police is busy driving camps out of the Tom McCall Waterfront Park, under the bridges and other prominent downtown locations, utilizing the city ordinance prohibiting camping on public right-of-way.

This year, local activist organizations Right 2 Survive, Dignity Village, and Sisters Of The Road, as well as representatives from Seattle's SHARE/WHEEL have set up an impressive camp-out gathering that is a cross between a protest, a block-party, and a mini-Rainbow Gathering, on the sidewalks of Southwest Fourth Avenue between Alder and Stark Streets.  This is done in response to the long-standing tradition (and now officially codified in the city ordinance 14A.55.010.C) that allows the parade spectators to camp overnight on public sidewalks starting on Thursday before the Grand Floral Parade on Saturday morning.

In solidarity and honour of this direct action, I have created an acrylic painting (aptly titled "Right to Survive") depicting the street camp and demonstration at the intersection of Fourth and Washington.  It is presently on display on the exterior wall of the former Greek Cucina site, on the southwest corner of the intersection.  It should be up until the parade, which is scheduled to start at 10 a.m. (allow 30 to 45 minutes before the first float arrives at the intersection, from the Portland Veterans' Memorial Coliseum via Grand Avenue and Burnside Bridge.

Related articles:

• http://streetroots.wordpress.com/2011/06/10/homeless-amass-along-the-rose-festival-parade-route-along-sw-4th-and-washington/
• http://streetroots.wordpress.com/2011/06/10/u-s-soldier-holds-a-sign-supporting-homeless-vets-at-downtown-protest/
• http://www.kgw.com/lifestyle/rose-festival/Grand-Floral-Parade-to-feature--94859494.html
• http://www.kgw.com/your-pics?cid=71576&c=y

Road Markings (2011) Mixed-Media (mandala)

Project Credits:

Participants


Cole Merkel 马凯龙
Darren Alexander         艾达仁
Ray 吴 雷
John Brown 罗 锦
Gary Davis 邓介历
Troy Ennis 恩德勒
Spence 石鹏史
Terris Herned         韩泰伦
Saul Cortez 高世武
Two Bears 雙 熊
Roger Fuch 方禄基
Benjamin Matthews        麦贲锦
Julia Munson 闵珠丽
Bergen Allee 李凤佳

Project Sponsor: Operation Nightwatch Portland
Event Sponsor: Lake Oswego United Church of Christ

Project lead and conceptions: Sarah-Andrea Morrigan  柳彩云

Phoenix

Photograph by Sarah Morrigan

Hello from scenic Molalla

Image via Wikipedia

I am typing this from the forest of Clackamas County, at the Camp Adams.

Constructing an artmaking ritual as social and spiritual practices (part 3)

Construction of a ceremonial artmaking as a social and spiritual practice
Sarah-Andrea Morrigan


Background for this project: In 2008, I began serving as the artist-in-residence for the annual Operation Nightwatch (Portland, OR) spiritual retreat in rural Clackamas County, Oregon.  The annual event, an invitation-only affair with a group of between 10 to 20 pre-screened participants, brings together various kinds of people for whom any similar event held elsewhere would be economically prohibitive.  Built upon the regular client base of Operation Nightwatch, this includes individuals in various stages of recovery, those living with non-mainstream mental diversity, and severe socio-economical challenges.  Since 2008, I had worked on the improvement of existing art-and-craft programming during the event by inspiring and providing infrastructure for creativity.  A well-stocked ad hoc open art studio is established each year through the duration of the event in the conspicuous common area to allow a free-flowing and open-ended artistic expressions and experimentation by participants.  I had also made conscious efforts at improving the artistic quality of the group project, as the product of the group project has traditionally been on permanent display and I felt that many of the previous years’ group projects appeared infantile and reflected low expectations placed by facilitators of participants, thus unduly underestimating their values as creative adults with a real life.


Challenges:
The past year’s project began incorporating the interactive social practice aspect of artmaking (making art as a conversation), but it did not produce a sense of community -- in fact, a certain person had vandalized the creations of other participants while no one else was watching!
In the effort at making it free-flowing and open-ended, the quality of the artwork suffered accordingly, and was far from complete when the retreat was about to be over.
This format came originally as a response to feedback that participants were being hurried endlessly from one activity to another and did not have mental space to take in the nature and the retreat’s themes.  How can we make a great art together, and have a great fun at it, and yet derive some serious spiritual meanings out of the activity, consistent with the overall theme of the spiritual retreat -- all without anyone feeling like they are treated like little children in a boring art-and-craft class being told by a teacher what to do?


Solutions:
While I am primarily a visual artist, art is more than visual and encompasses all modalities.  As a social art, each participant brings his or her own talents, personalities, and creative modalities to the mix.  Hence the project is no longer limited to visual art or specific methods, but rather incorporates a little bit of everything -- including performing art elements.
Taking the spiritual themes of the overall event as the point of departure, I had constructed the project to elicit creations of spiritual significances by participants.  This is accomplished through a ceremonial format.
The ceremony is constructed deliberately to be in keeping with the ecumenical nature of the organization with “no proselytizing policy” in place.  Instead of using the “lowest common denominator” (which usually involves a scaled down, minimalist Protestant Christian practice), however, I had taken the entire ceremony outside what may be familiar to the participants.  This is done for a number of reasons: (1) A retreat is a time outside the ordinary by design, and creating an environment that is outside the routines and the familiar is rather appropriate; (2) This way, I would not need to privilege a predominant (or any specific) faith tradition over the others -- in the rituals invocations are made to “Lushede” (from the La’adan language) to emphasize the all-inclusion in neutrality; (3) and thirdly, I hoped that this project will not only be multimodal and mixed-media, but also multicultural.  The ceremonies are generally constructed along the lines of shamanic rituals of the historic pan-Tungusic nations (eastern Siberia, Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea and Japan), with some input from the Chinese Buddhist and Daoist elements, as well as some parallels in the Native American rituals.
The all-encompassing ritual environment facilitates participation without making it feel like a compulsory “art class” or “craft activities” of the past.  Fully incorporated with the Exploration sessions of the retreat, participants can bring whatever the feelings into the ceremonial art while can also derive personalized meanings from the experience.  Likewise, the ritual elements create a special time and space within the event where certain intentions are held in common as a group.


The Art Project: Road Markings (2011, mixed-media, 18 inches x 18 inches) 

This year, in favour of enhancing the shared social elements of artmaking -- and in recognition that each person comes with a varied artistic skills and creative temperaments -- less emphasis is made on the visual media or development of skills.  The actual artmaking, heavily ritualized, is rather simple and easy for most people, involving a form of East Asian calligraphy (without needs for learning any language).


The panel is accented with a small canvas board painting representing the four cardinal directions according to the Chinese tradition: black turtle (xuanwu) of the north, blue dragon (qinglong) of the east, red phoenix (zhuque) of the south, and white tiger (baihu) of the west -- signifying that the the artwork represents the world in which we live. 


At the centre is a circular mandala made of paper leaves in various shades of green.  The leaves grow outward in a radial movement, representing the reaches of the world tree from the axis mundi that connects the heavens and the underworld with the earthly plane.


Upon the leaves are a spiral line, originating from the periphery extending inward into the centre of the circle.  During the ceremony, Chinese calligraphy brushes are passed around, and each participant may write words or ideas representing what they believe is the truths about who they are.  Outside the circle are straight lines, upon which what they believe is the falsehoods about who they are is written.  The spiral shape of the lines of personal truths also symbolizes a kind of pilgrimage, on which a person undertakes to take leave of the falsehood and into the ultimate truth, while discovering more and more about what is real and what reflects their own divine images.

Does anyone know whatever happened of her?

Once upon a time, God lived in and among us the Portlanders.

http://portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story_id=27234

In honour of a nation history has forgotten

Image via WikipediaManchuria was home to various Tungusic ethnic groups, whose languages were more in common with Mongolian, Japanese and Korean, and with them shared a long tradition of shamanism.  Like the Mongols, at one point the Manchus became powerful and took over China, ruling over the Han and other ethnic groups for centuries.

At the collapse of the Qing Dynasty and beginning of the Republic of China (Xinhai Revolution, of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen), the Manchu people founded a separate country under the leadership of His Imperial Majesty Aisin-Gioro Puyi and with support of Japan, who had an interest in securing the strategic natural resources and railroads away from invasions of the nascent Soviet Union, and to have a buffer zone for Japan against the Bolsheviks.  The newly reorganized Manchuria quickly became the most ethnically diverse nation in Asia, with Japanese migrant farmers, White Russians who fled the Soviet revolution, Koreans, Han Chinese, Chinese Muslims, living side-by-side with the ethnic Manchu people.

The economy and currency of Manchuria at the time was considered most sound and stable in the region, only next to those of Japan.

In 1945, the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria -- and shortly after the surrender of Japan to the Allied Forces, the Russians unilaterally handed Manchuria over to Mao Zedong's Communist Party.  Thus the nation was quickly forgotten except as a "fake (puppet) Manchukuo" that is occasionally mentioned in history books.  The cultures, spiritual heritage and language of the Manchus were all but destroyed.

There is however an effort to revive Manchuria.  Recently His Imperial Majesty Lee Chee Chuan, a direct descendant of the Tang imperial family who had been exiled to Malaysia, assumed his throne as the emperor of Manchuria (on May 28, 2011).

Speaking of cartography

Image via Wikipedia
Maps, just like history, are inherently biased and are outdated the moment they are printed.  We live in a dynamic world, with people with varying perspectives, and therefore a map does not convey an objective truth -- even if it might represent a widespread consensus.  The existence of international boundaries and its highly arbitrary and political nature is an epitome of this phenomenon.  We have the earth and its natural phenomena.  We then have a map of the world, neatly divided into various coloured zones.

Somewhere between the yellow sign (in Tsawwassen, BC) and the street sign (Roosevelt Way, Point Roberts, WA) is the U.S.-Canada border.

Look at the ditch on the right.  It is a border. (0 Avenue, Surrey, B.C., just a few metres east of the Smugglers' Inn, Blaine, Wash.)

The yellow concrete marks the end of Canada, while the USA welcomes neighbourhood walkers into the park with the sign "scoop your doggie poop." (On Peace Park Drive, Surrey, B.C., looking towards Peace Arch State Park, Blaine, Wash.)

On the ground level, such borders can defy the reality and may even be really silly, especially in case of the U.S. and Canada.