Description: Actuaries, like other business professionals, communicate quantitative ideas graphically. Because the process of reading, or decoding, graphs is more complex than reading text, graphs are vulnerable to many sources of abuse. This is the abstract of a paper that will help creators design more effective graphs and will help viewers recognize misleading graphs. The paper summarizes guidelines for designing graphs that show important numerical information and gives examples of commonly encountered graphs that mislead and hide information. The complete paper appears in the April 1998 issue of the North American Actuarial Journal. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1998 Vol. 1.

Description: A flipped classroom moves the traditional lecture component of teaching outside of normal classroom time, so that lectures can be replaced with active learning activities during class time. In this talk, I first present a brief overview of flipped classrooms, with strategies for implementation and resources provided. Second, I will discuss the details of its application replacing two lectures in my third-year Life Contingencies course. Students’ responses to the technique are also provided in the form of data from anonymous post-activity surveys.

Description: This article highlights the importance of communicating concisely and effectively through email and other written forums, and when/when not to use written vs. other forms of communication.