I consider it a huge honor to chair the Technology Section. Not only is it an opportunity to give back to a professional organization that's given me so much, I get to work with a cast of other volunteers who, like me, are passionate about using technology to improve the profession...

Getting our hands around a vast expansion of operating data and communicating it meaningfully is a core skill of actuaries operating in the 2012 risk management era. To that end, each of our authors this month has made a worthy contribution to managing and communicating data...

For the last 30 years the insurance industry has been bombarded with new and increasingly diverse regulations, all designed to ensure that insurers and reinsurers are financially stable and act responsibly...

Data is the lifeblood of the health care business, giving insight to an organization's current status and thus helping actuaries and other analysts make informed decisions and projections on a daily basis. Because of the complexity and size of health care data, working with it can be frustrating and challenging as each new data set has unique issues and problems. In addition, health care data is a rapidly evolving and difficult-to-understand breed of business data...

It was a pleasure to participate in our "Apps for Actuaries" discussion at the SOA meeting. It was the first time I got to speak with Eddie Smith, which was an honor. Of course, spending time talking about actuarial apps with my son Ben was priceless. There were some apps that we discussed as a team but I hadn't tested out yet, so I thought I would give a few of these apps a test drive from another independent source...

As the proud owner of several large VBA macros, I have spent a considerable amount of time looking for ways to make macros run faster. This article lists my top rules for speeding up VBA...

The ability to take continuous data and convert into categories is very useful in actuarial work. This article provides an R function for the calculation of the credibility of mortality claims, and then separates that credibility into different categories using the R cut function...

I recently had the opportunity to use an SQL cursor for a project and realized how powerful and useful it is...

  If Benjamin Franklin were alive today, it's a safe bet he would buy a Tablet PC. Will you? Recent sales figures make clear that a multitude of you will...  

Your help and participation are needed: Articles, book reviews and other information on technology useful to actuaries are needed!...