A Hotel Recommender System using Context Based Clustering

The web is one of the largest textual data repositories in the world. There is voluminous data in the digital world. To search for online hotels based on specific requirements of the user is not a very easy job. Ratings and reviews available on different travel websites help to some extent but gives generalized recommendations. A recommender system (RS) which uses reviews is known as content-based and is preferred, to produce a recommendation. Proposed RS maps all requirements of a traveler to features of a hotel and produces person specific recommendation. Phrase-based Recommender System is proposed to reduce efforts and time as compared with a traditional generalized recommender system. The proposed approach makes use of hotel reviews downloaded from TripAdvisor site. The technique initiates with phrase-based feature extraction followed by iterative clustering and ends with feature mapping and exports more relevant recommendations. Betterment of a technique is proved in terms of relevance, accuracy, scalability, and consistency by comparing precision and entropy refinement and corpus size with existing technique.The web is one of the largest textual data repositories in the world. There is voluminous data in the digital world. To search for online hotels based on specific requirements of the user is not a very easy job. Ratings and reviews available on different travel websites help to some extent but gives generalized recommendations. A recommender system (RS) which uses reviews is known as content-based and is preferred, to produce a recommendation. Proposed RS maps all requirements of a traveler to features of a hotel and produces person specific recommendation. Phrase-based Recommender System is proposed to reduce efforts and time as compared with a traditional generalized recommender system. The proposed approach makes use of hotel reviews downloaded from TripAdvisor site. The technique initiates with phrase-based feature extraction followed by iterative clustering and ends with feature mapping and exports more relevant recommendations. Betterment of a technique is proved in terms of relevance, accuracy, scalability, and consistency by comparing precision and entropy refinement and corpus size with existing technique.

Superintendent Recruitment: Effects of School Councils, Job Status, Signing Bonus, and District Wealth

This study examined the effects of four variables on job ratings provided by applicants for simulated superintendent vacancies. The participants were superintendents ( n = 72) and superintendent-certified personnel ( n = 72) reacting to jobs described in simulated position announcements. The participants rated jobs in districts without school councils higher than jobs in districts with school councils. Superintendents rated jobs in districts without school councils higher than did superintendent-certified personnel. Superintendents rated jobs in high-wealth districts with signing bonuses higher than jobs in a high-wealth district with no signing bonus. Implications for recruitment practice and future research are discussed.

Public Assessments of Gubernatorial Performance

Scholarly attention to public evaluations of governors has focused almost exclusively on individual voting decisions. Such an approach has allowed scholars to identify the factors that lead voters to support and oppose incumbent governors. However, such analyses deal with assessments of governors solely at election time, potentially overlooking some factors that influence assessments of governors and overstating others. The authors develop a model of public approval of gubernatorial performance and test it on a cross-section of governors. Their results suggest that only in an election year does the public hold the governor responsible for having presided over tax increases. Similarly, only in an election period does a strong institutional power base result in higher approval ratings for governors. Outside of the campaign context, neither tax increases nor institutional power makes a dent in governors' job ratings.

Assessing the Validity of Job Ratings: An Empirical Study of False Reporting in Task Inventories

Despite the widespread use of task inventories in job analysis, little is known about the validity of the obtained task ratings. One approach for examining the validity of such ratings is the use of a “false reporting” index to identify invalid responding. The purpose of this field experiment was to examine the effects of the type of frequency rating scale and method of task inventory administration on the degree of false reporting in task inventory ratings. A total of 177 Correctional Officers from a state correctional system responded to a 68 item task inventory using frequency and importance rating scales. Five of the items in the task inventory were bogus tasks not performed by the target job and formed a false reporting index. In a 2 × 2 design, the type of frequency rating scale (Relative-Time-Spent vs. Actual-Time-Spent) and method of task inventory administration (anonymous vs. identified) were manipulated. Analysis of variance results showed a significantly greater degree of false reporting in Relative-Time-Spent ratings. No significant differences in false reporting were found for method of task inventory administration or scale × method interactions. Overall, 45% of respondents indicated that they performed tasks that were not part of the job, which raises concerns about whether job incumbents are capable of providing accurate and complete task rating data.

Social Stratification and Aspects of Personnel Management in the Chinese Communist Bureaucracy

One significant trend in the Chinese political system in recent years has been the growth of complex bureaucratic patterns of social stratification, even within the ranks of the Party cadres in Communist China. The Party has tried in many ways to resist these trends—for example, by promoting physical labour by cadres, sending personnel to work in rural areas and taking such drastic steps as abolishing ranks within the army but as the égalitarian heritage of active revolutionary struggle has tended to recede into the background, deep-rooted authoritarian and bureaucratic predispositions—especially the tendency to differentiate people on the basis of rank—have reasserted themselves. Consequently, virtually all cadres in Communist China today can be labelled and placed fairly accurately in the hierarchy of power and prestige on the basis of seniority in the Party, salary grade and job rank. Significantly, while formal salary and job ratings are very important, informal ratings based on length of service in the Party appear to be of equal importance, and in fact the former tend to be equated with the latter. The growth of these patterns of social stratification has been a major factor contributing to the steady bureaucratisation of the regime and the erosion of the élite's revolutionary character.