Search results

Social network sites have been widely adopted by politicians in the last election campaigns. To increase the effectiveness of these campaigns the potential electorate is to be identified, as targeted ads are much more effective than non-targeted ads. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to propose and implement a new methodology for automatic prediction of political orientation of users on social network sites by comparison to texts from the overtly political parties’ pages.

To this end, textual information on personal users’ pages is used as a source of statistical features. The authors apply automatic text categorization algorithms to distinguish between texts of users from different political wings. However, these algorithms require a set of manually labeled texts for training, which is typically unavailable in real life situations. To overcome this limitation the authors propose to use texts available on various political parties’ pages on a social network site to train the classifier. The political leaning of these texts is determined by the political affiliation of the corresponding parties. The classifier learned on such overtly political texts is then applied on the personal user pages to predict their political orientation. To assess the validity and effectiveness of the proposed methodology two corpora were constructed: personal Facebook pages of 450 Israeli citizens, and political parties Facebook pages of the nine prominent Israeli parties.

The authors found that when a political tendency classifier is trained and tested on data in the same corpus, accuracy is very high. More significantly, training on manifestly political texts (political party Facebook pages) yields classifiers which can be used to classify non-political personal Facebook pages with fair accuracy.

Previous studies have shown that targeted ads are more effective than non-targeted ads leading to substantial saving in the advertising budget. Therefore, the approach for automatic determining the political orientation of users on social network sites might be adopted for targeting political messages, especially during election campaigns.

This paper proposes and implements a new approach for automatic cross-corpora identification of political bias of user profiles on social network. This suggests that individuals’ political tendencies can be identified without recourse to any tagged personal data. In addition, the authors use learned classifiers to determine which self-identified centrists lean left or right and which voters are likely to switch allegiance in subsequent elections.

Agency Theory is normally used to explain the relationship between the managers of a corporation and its owners, or shareholders, and to legitimate the payment of share options, and other remuneration mechanisms, to those managers on the basis that this will align the interests of the managers of a corporation with those of its owners. The paper aims to argue that this outworn legitimation is not just based on a bankrupt theory but is actually deleterious to corporate performance, managerial behaviour and the relationship between managers, shareholders and other stakeholders.

The approach is to examine the behaviour of the managers of The Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies (“Shell”) as they have continued to reinterpret accounting regulations, reclassify oil reserves and re‐report past and probable/possible future performance of the company.

The argument is predicated in the assertion that in the relationship between owners and managers of such a corporation there are actually no principals and therefore there can be no agents. Furthermore, the rewards structure developed from the theory provides a motivation for managerial misrepresentation leading to a situation in which principles are defunct. The Social Contract between all stakeholders to a corporation has been reinvigorated as a basis for sustainable performance, with consequent implications for the behaviour of all parties to the contract.

The paper illustrates that evidence abounds showing that corporations do not have any sense of social responsibility and do not feel constrained by any kind of ethical code, no matter what their corporate literature states, but that there are an increasing number of stakeholders to organisations who are demanding accountability – and forcing corporations to respond accordingly.

Reliability and political bias of mass media has been a controversial topic in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to propose and implement a methodology for fully automatic evaluation of the political tendency of the written media on the web, which does not rely on subjective human judgments.

The underlying idea is to base the evaluation on fully automatic comparison of the texts of articles on different news websites to the overtly political texts with known political orientation. The authors also apply an alternative approach for evaluation of political tendency based on wisdom of the crowds.

The authors found that the learnt classifier can accurately distinguish between self-declared left and right news sites. Furthermore, news sites’ political tendencies can be identified by automatic classifier learnt from manifestly political texts without recourse to any manually tagged data. The authors also show a high correlation between readers’ perception (as a “wisdom of crowds” evaluation) of the bias and the classifier results for different news sites.

The results are quite promising and can put an end to the never ending dispute on the reliability and bias of the press.

This paper proposes and implements a new approach for fully automatic (independent of human opinion/assessment) identification of political bias of news sites by their texts.

During the year the Department have approved 30 appointments of Public Analysts in England.

Executives are challenged every day to make important decisions that affect the performance of their business enterprises and, as a result, the success of their own careers. Based on that scenario, one cannot expect that only the rational approach works like a panacea for all managerial problems. This paper aims to propose that the best solution tends to embrace a complementary or integrated decision‐making approach.

The paper seeks to demonstrate that the convergence between rational and non‐rational decision‐making processes can be optimized by integrating several religious tenets.

The paper finds strong evidence that a religion‐based framework might enrich the sensitive topic of decision‐making processes in organizations.

Overall, the paper strives to show that intuition and prayer are two faces of the same coin, and argues that both forms of decision processes (e.g. rational and non‐rational analysis) might coexist perfectly in an integrative frame.

The article proposes prayer as a transcendent coping mechanism whereby executives might refine their intuition flux. As a result, it depicts a conceptual framework encapsulating all those constructs.

Young women who entered the Dominican Sisters in the years before the Second Vatican Council3 lived in semi‐enclosure and took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. As women religious they engaged in a life of teaching and prayer that was underpinned by notions of sacrifice and self‐effacement. In order to understand the teaching experiences of these women it is necessary to first understand something about the history of Catholic education in New Zealand and the context in which the New Zealand Dominican Sisters lived and worked.

CHARLES DICKENS'S immense popularity when his novels first appeared in weekly and monthly parts, and his continuing popularity today is due, above all, to his skill in creating memorable characters whose fortunes the reader compulsively follows. His characters show their creator's remarkable powers of observation, particularly in small details, so that the reader constantly stops to think, ‘How true to life!’ or ‘How like old so‐and‐so!’ Many of them were based on real people—his father (Mr Micawber), his mother (Mrs Nickleby), himself (David Copperfield), but they are so transmuted that the originals did not recognize themselves. In Bleak House he had to modify his sketch of Harold Skimpole, who was too recognizably Leigh Hunt.