Description: An interview with Prof. Johnny Li of University of Waterloo, which touches upon the subjects of longevity, mortality projections, international collaboration and the Living to 100 Symposium. Longevity is a topic in which scientific research and collaboration successfully spans many countries, which is desirable because the implications of ever increasing life spans is of global importance.

Description: Following up on recent articles on claim reserves and retrospective testing, this article examines some data quality and methodology issues related to calculating LTCI claim reserves.

Description: An economic value model is used by the National Hockey League NHL to allocate salary budgets between players using a method based principally on salary comparison between players with similar statistics.

Description: The United States Geological Surv ey USGS released the latest version of its National Seismic Hazard Maps NSHM in April 2008. The maps, which were last updated in 2002, define the latest scientific view of earthquake hazard at varying probability levels across the United States.

Description: Article about entries to the Speculative Fiction Contest and the winning entry for the Speculative Fiction and Futurism section prize.

Description: This paper shows how the results of copula based capital aggregation models can always be locally approximated by relatively simple formulas. The paper defines the concepts of diversification factor and tail correlation matrix and describes methods for estimating these quantities from simulated data. We show how these ideas can be put into practice as both computational shortcuts and presentation tools.

Description: In the copula literature there are many bivariate distribution families but very few higher dimensional ones. Moreover, most of these are difficult to work with. Some of the bivariate families can be extended to more dimensions but in general the construction of distribution functions with more than two variables is a difficult problem. This paper introduces a construction method that is straightforward to implement and can produce multivariate distribution functions of any dimension.

Description: A recent study sheds light on the measurement and implications of the relationship between increased morbidity and declining disability. The results were not consistent across all populations. This study of the compression of morbidity is part of a wider project called the M-project, led by the four authors, which aims to explore the demographic factors leading to an increase in the adult longevity, investigate the phenomenon called the compression of mortality and develop a new methodological approach to longevity analysis with focus on the modal age at death M.

Description: This paper offers a decision making procedure for solving complex problems step by step. It presents the decision analysis process for both public and private decision making, using different decision criteria, different types of information, and information of varying quality.

Description: The purpose of this paper is to help practitioners and regulators more accurately quantify the potential impact of market risk on insurance products with equity-linked guarantees. To this end, this paper examines time series model selection and assessment based on residuals, with a focus on regime switching models. Also it discusses the difficulties in defining residuals for such processes and propose several possible alternatives. We determine that a stochastic approach to defining the residuals is the only way to generate residuals that are normally distributed under the model hypothesis.