Leader Strategies to Reduce Sales Personnel Attrition

Because sales are the primary revenue generators for insurance companies, reducing attrition of sales agents is essential to organizational success. The purpose of this single descriptive case study was to explore strategies that 6 Nebraskan sales leaders within the insurance industry used to reduce attrition. Participants had experience in sales leadership and the attrition of sales personnel and were able to provide insight into the unique perspectives on attrition in the insurance industry. Participants met the following criteria: (a) manage an insurance sales office or organization or (b) held an insurance sales leadership position for at least 1 year and (c) are actively employed in the insurance industry. Data were collected from interviews with sales leaders, focus groups with sales representatives, and documentation from organizational websites for data triangulation. The expectancy theory framework guided the data analysis process. The data analysis process involved using thematic analysis which allowed coding data that related to the expectancy theory and research question. Data analysis also included the uncovering of repetitive themes and patterns and synthesizing results. Five themes emerged from data analysis: (a) leadership\u27s responsibility for motivating sales personnel, (b) organizational commitment to creating a culture of engagement, (c) the use of compensation and rewards as sales motivators, (d) the necessity for training and development, and (e) a need to improve the selection process for new candidates. Organizational leaders may apply findings in other, similar settings to strategize community growth initiatives encouraging young people entering the workforce to stimulate local economies. Other possible benefits include reduced customer issues and claims

Track The Planet: A Web-Scale Analysis Of How Online Behavioral Advertising Violates Social Norms

Various forms of media have long been supported by advertising as part of a broader social agreement in which the public gains access to monetarily free or subsidized content in exchange for paying attention to advertising. In print- and broadcast-oriented media distribution systems, advertisers relied on broad audience demographics of various publications and programs in order to target their offers to the appropriate groups of people. The shift to distributing media on the World Wide Web has vastly altered the underlying dynamic by which advertisements are targeted. Rather than rely on imprecise demographics, the online behavioral advertising (OBA) industry has developed a system by which individuals’ web browsing histories are covertly surveilled in order that their product preferences may be deduced from their online behavior. Due to a failure of regulation, Internet users have virtually no means to control such surveillance, and it contravenes a host of well-established social norms. This dissertation explores the ways in which the recent emergence of OBA has come into conflict with these societal norms. Rather than a mere process for targeting messages, OBA represents a profound shift in the underlying balance of power within society. This power balance is embedded in an information asymmetry which gives corporations and governments significantly more knowledge of, and power over, citizens than vice-versa. Companies do not provide the public with an accounting of their techniques or the scale at which they operate. In order to shed light on corporate behavior in the OBA sector, two new tools were developed for this dissertation: webXray and policyXray. webXray is the most powerful tool available for attributing the flow of user data on websites to the companies which receive and process it. policyXray is the first, and currently only, tool capable of auditing website privacy policies in order to evaluate disclosure of data transfers to specific parties. Both tools are highly resource efficient, allowing them to analyze millions of data flows and operate at a scale which is normally reserved for the companies collecting data. In short, these tools rectify the existing information asymmetry between the OBA industry and the public by leveraging the tools of mass surveillance for socially-beneficial ends. The research presented herein allows many specific existing social-normative concerns to be explored using empirical data in a way which was not previously possible. The impact of OBA on three main areas is investigated: regulatory norms, medical privacy norms, and norms related to the utility of the press. Through an examination of data flows on one million websites, and policies on 200,000 more, it is found in the area of regulatory norms that well-established Fair Information Practice Principles are severely undermined by the self-regulatory “notice and choice” paradigm. In the area of informational norms related to personal health, an analysis of data flows on 80,000 pages related to 2,000 medical conditions reveals that user health concerns are shared with a number of commercial parties, virtually no policies exist to restrict or regulate the practice, and users are at risk of embarrassment and discrimination. Finally, an analysis of 250,000 pages drawn from 5,000 U.S.-based media outlets demonstrates that core values of an independent and trustworthy press are undermined by commercial surveillance and centralized revenue systems. This surveillance may also transfer data to government entities, potentially resulting in chilling effects which compromise the ability of the press to serve as a check on power. The findings of this dissertation make it clear that current approaches to regulating OBA based on “notice and choice” have failed. The underlying “choice” of OBA is to sacrifice core social values in favor of increased profitability for primarily U.S.-based advertising firms. Therefore, new regulatory approaches based on mass surveillance of corporate, rather than user, behaviors must be pursued. Only by resolving the information asymmetry between the public, private corporations, and the state may social norms be respected in the online environment

The Electronic Silk Road: How the Web Binds the World in Commerce

On the ancient Silk Road, treasure-laden caravans made their arduous way through deserts and mountain passes, establishing trade between Asia and the civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean. Today’s electronic Silk Roads ferry information across continents, enabling individuals and corporations anywhere to provide or receive services without obtaining a visa. But the legal infrastructure for such trade is yet rudimentary and uncertain. If an event in cyberspace occurs at once everywhere and nowhere, what law applies? How can consumers be protected when engaging with companies across the world? In this accessible book, cyber-law expert Anupam Chander provides the first thorough discussion of the law that relates to global Internet commerce. Addressing up-to-the-minute examples, such as Google’s struggles with China, the Pirate Bay’s skirmishes with Hollywood, and the outsourcing of services to India, the author insightfully analyzes the difficulties of regulating Internet trade. Chander then lays out a framework for future policies, showing how countries can dismantle barriers while still protecting consumer interests

Privacy-preserving systems around security, trust and identity

Data has proved to be the most valuable asset in a modern world of rapidly advancing technologies. Companies are trying to maximise their profits by getting valuable insights from collected data about people’s trends and behaviour which often can be considered personal and sensitive. Additionally, sophisticated adversaries often target organisations aiming to exfiltrate sensitive data to sell it to third parties or ask for ransom. Hence, the privacy assurance of the individual data producers is a matter of great importance who rely on simply trusting that the services they use took all the necessary countermeasures to protect them.Distributed ledger technology and its variants can securely store data and preserve its privacy with novel characteristics. Additionally, the concept of self-sovereign identity, which gives the control back to the data subjects, is an expected future step once these approaches mature further. Last but not least, big data analysis typically occurs through machine learning techniques. However, the security of these techniques is often questioned since adversaries aim to exploit them for their benefit.The aspect of security, privacy and trust is highlighted throughout this thesis which investigates several emerging technologies that aim to protect and analyse sensitive data compared to already existing systems, tools and approaches in terms of security guarantees and performance efficiency.The contributions of this thesis derive to i) the presentation of a novel distributed ledger infrastructure tailored to the domain name system, ii) the adaptation of this infrastructure to a critical healthcare use case, iii) the development of a novel self-sovereign identity healthcare scenario in which a data scientist analyses sensitive data stored in the premises of three hospitals, through a privacy-preserving machine learning approach, and iv) the thorough investigation of adversarial attacks that aim to exploit machine learning intrusion detection systems by “tricking” them to misclassify carefully crafted inputs such as malware identified as benign.A significant finding is that the security and privacy of data are often neglected since they do not directly impact people’s lives. It is common for the protection and confidentiality of systems, even of critical nature, to be an afterthought, which is considered merely after malicious intents occur. Further, emerging sets of technologies, tools, and approaches built with fundamental security and privacy principles, such as the distributed ledger technology, should be favoured by existing systems that can adopt them without significant changes and compromises. Additionally, it has been presented that the decentralisation of machine learning algorithms through self-sovereign identity technologies that provide novel end-to-end encrypted channels is possible without sacrificing the valuable utility of the original machine learning algorithms.However, a matter of great importance is that alongside technological advancements, adversaries are becoming more sophisticated in this area and are trying to exploit the aforementioned machine learning approaches and other similar ones for their benefit through various tools and approaches. Adversarial attacks pose a real threat to any machine learning algorithm and artificial intelligence technique, and their detection is challenging and often problematic. Hence, any security professional operating in this domain should consider the impact of these attacks and the protection countermeasures to combat or minimise them

Actas da 10ª Conferência sobre Redes de Computadores

Universidade do MinhoCCTCCentro AlgoritmiCisco SystemsIEEE Portugal Sectio

State of the Art and Future Perspectives in Smart and Sustainable Urban Development

This book contributes to the conceptual and practical knowledge pools in order to improve the research and practice on smart and sustainable urban development by presenting an informed understanding of the subject to scholars, policymakers, and practitioners. This book presents contributions—in the form of research articles, literature reviews, case reports, and short communications—offering insights into the smart and sustainable urban development by conducting in-depth conceptual debates, detailed case study descriptions, thorough empirical investigations, systematic literature reviews, or forecasting analyses. This way, the book forms a repository of relevant information, material, and knowledge to support research, policymaking, practice, and the transferability of experiences to address urbanization and other planetary challenges

Who Governs the Internet? The Emerging Policies, Institutions, and Governance of Cyberspace

There remains a widespread perception among both the public and elements of academia that the Internet is ungovernable . However, this idea, as well as the notion that the Internet has become some type of cyber-libertarian utopia, is wholly inaccurate. Governments may certainly encounter tremendous difficulty in attempting to regulate the Internet, but numerous architectures of control have nevertheless become pervasive. So who, then, governs the Internet? Our contentions are that the Internet is, in fact, being governed; that it is being governed by specific and identifiable networks of policy actors; and that an argument can be made as to how it is being governed. This project will develop a new conceptual framework for analysis that deconstructs the Internet into four policy layers with the aim of formulating a new political architecture that accurately maps out and depicts authority on the Internet by identifying who has demonstrable policymaking authority that constrains or enables behavior with intentional effects. We will then assess this four-layer model and its resulting map of political architecture by performing a detailed case study of U.S. national cybersecurity policy, post-9/11. Ultimately, we will seek to determine the consequences of these political arrangements and governance policies

Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation

The 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES) was held on November 2-6, 2015 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA. There were 327 delegates from 22 countries. The program included 12 long papers, 15 short papers, 33 posters, 3 demos, 6 workshops, 3 tutorials and 5 panels, as well as several interactive sessions and a Digital Preservation Showcase