Description: Update on the SOA International experience study. The SOA has developed a new “tool” using Microsoft Access/Excel for international actuaries to conduct mortality and persistency studies in conjunction with the SOA’s international experience study initiative.

Description: This article explains the importance of centralizing modeling departments. It goes further and explains the importance of making all aspects of modeling reusable. It explains the consequences of decentralization.

Description: This article provides a pre-release summary of Microsoft Windows Vista personal computer operating system.

Description: As any international traveler who has tried to plug in an electronic device knows, the human race is great at devising many different ways to accomplish the same task. Predictive modeling is no different. Data scientists can choose from a wide variety of languages to prepare data, fit models, and verify results. The Rosetta Stone, which showed writing composed in three languages side by side, was instrumental in translating unfamiliar Egyptian hieroglyphics into the more common Greek language. This presentation follows a similar approach by showing the same predictive model implemented in the following languages: R, Python, Spark, MatLab, and SAS. Participants will compare and contrast each of these languages and, by doing so, build a greater understanding of those languages less familiar to them.

Description: The complex world of life insurance, historically the domain of those gifted in integral calculus and probabilistic and present value mathematics, is explored using Excel spreadsheets and the Solver macro. The cash flow approach to learning life insurance examines how the cash flows through an insurance company without using higher math.

Description: This article shares our experience of using the cloud to do large-scale parallel processing and discusses some background regarding the cloud.

Description: This article is about Content Management Systems and other software to help build a web site for a small business.

Description: The editor introduces a new newsletter format and asks for ideas for articles.

Description: Welcome to the third edition of Cool Tech. This is where the author points out cool things on the Web.