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.

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