Friendly Agent

Do you know that starting an insurance agency is probably one of the best business ideas? Do you want to know . . . How some startups created billion-dollar-plus, insurance-based companies in the last 5-10 years? The secrets behind building a multimillion-dollar insurance agency? How to scale up an insurance agency profitably? How to cut through the noise in the market and differentiate your business? How to leverage technology to rise above (be seen and heard) the myriad of agencies around you and compete with both local and online agencies? How to build a team which carries your mindset to take care of clients and grow your business?If you are interested in learning about these topics, then you are at the right place. You can either spend years/thousands of dollars figuring things out for yourself or read this book and get wisdom from successful agents and thought leaders at top insurance agencies. I have interviewed Chris Paradiso, Mike Stomsoe, Mark Vitali, Ryan Hanley, Ryan Deeds, Kelly Donahue-Piro, Joe and Gina Clevenger, Nick Lamparelli, Tony Canas, C.J.Nolan, and dozens of other thought leaders and collated their wisdom in this book. This book will provide you a playbook which you can use to start, build, and scale up an insurance agency.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Multi-Agent-Based Simulation, MABS 2013, held in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA, in May 2013. The workshop was help in conjunction with Twelfth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2013. The 11 revised full papers included in this volume were carefully selected from 29 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on MABS for real-time and online data, formal approaches in MABS: design and validation, MABS in environmental modeling, simulating social phenomena.

This book offers a structured overview and a comprehensive guide to the emerging field of Autonomous Intelligent Cyber Defense Agents (AICA). The book discusses the current technical issues in autonomous cyber defense and offers information on practical design approaches. The material is presented in a way that is accessible to non-specialists, with tutorial information provided in the initial chapters and as needed throughout the book. The reader is provided with clear and comprehensive background and reference material for each aspect of AICA. Today’s cyber defense tools are mostly watchers. They are not active doers. They do little to plan and execute responses to attacks, and they don’t plan and execute recovery activities. Response and recovery – core elements of cyber resilience – are left to human cyber analysts, incident responders and system administrators. This is about to change. The authors advocate this vision, provide detailed guide to how such a vision can be realized in practice, and its current state of the art. This book also covers key topics relevant to the field, including functional requirements and alternative architectures of AICA, how it perceives and understands threats and the overall situation, how it plans and executes response and recovery, how it survives threats, and how human operators deploy and control AICA. Additionally, this book covers issues of testing, risk, and policy pertinent to AICA, and provides a roadmap towards future R&D in this field. This book targets researchers and advanced students in the field of cyber defense and resilience. Professionals working in this field as well as developers of practical products for cyber autonomy will also want to purchase this book.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Persuasive Technology, PERSUASIVE 2023, held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, April 19–21, 2023. The 24 full papers and 2 short papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 69 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: Persuasive Technologies in Virtual and Augmented Reality; Persuasive Strategies; Persuasive Design and Applications; Methods for Tailoring and Personalisation; Artificial Persuasive Agents; Gamification; and Personal Factors in Persuasion.

The 5th Experimental Chaos Conference was a gathering of scientists and engineers who work on real-world systems that behave in a nonlinear and, often, chaotic fashion. The proceedings present discoveries of chaotic behavior, explanation of nonlinear phenomena in the laboratory, and applications of nonlinear and chaotic effects to devices and techniques for improving performance and surmounting technical obstacles. Experimental work is presented on chaos in semiconductor superlattices, spatiotemporal chaos in magnetic materials, instabilities in magnetic fluids, bifurcations of hexagonal patterns in lasers, and discrete rotating waves. New phenomena are exhibited on amplitude death in coupled oscillators, vortex crystals, wakes in soap films, chaotic dynamics of ocean waves, and microscopic chaos. Applications of chaotic dynamics are offered in the areas of chaotic pulse trains in digital communications, detection of changes in EEGs, detection of unstable periodic orbits in noisy data, cellular automata and warfare, detection of n: m phase synchronization, methods in acoustic chaos, chaos in the machine tool-cutting process, and a nonlinear airfoil. The broad range of topics and fields touches on a wide variety of systems whose behavior is now better understood and applied through the use of chaotic dynamics

Prime time: those precious few hours every night when the three major television networks garner millions of dollars while tens of millions of Americans tune in. Inside Prime Time is a classic study of the workings of the Hollywood television industry, newly available with an updated introduction. Inside Prime Time takes us behind the scenes to reveal how prime-time shows get on the air, stay on the air, and are shaped by the political and cultural climate of their times. It provides an ethnography of the world of American commercial television, an analysis of that world's unwritten rules, and the most extensive study of the industry ever made.

The author investigates proofs of correctness of realistic security protocols in a formal, intuitive setting. The protocols examined include Kerberos versions, smartcard protocols, non-repudiation protocols, and certified email protocols. The method of analysis turns out to be both powerful and flexible. This research advances significant extensions to the method of analysis, while the findings on the protocols analysed are novel and illuminating.