Description: The April/May 2013 edition of The Actuary magazine—the Society of Actuaries’ flagship publication.

Description: The February/March 2014 edition of The Actuary magazine—the Society of Actuaries’ flagship publication.

Description: The June/July 2014 edition of The Actuary magazine—the Society of Actuaries’ flagship publication.

Description: This article introduces IT DevOps to actuaries and how it is applicable to them to improve their modeling efforts and make them more efficient.

Description: The August/September 2015 edition of The Actuary magazine—the Society of Actuaries’ flagship publication.

Description: Traditionally the SOA formulates pedagogic excellence in terms of the Marzano Taxonomy. For example, the "analysis level" consisting of generalization, specification, classification, contrast, matching, and error identification, is considered superior to the "retrieval level" consisting of rote memorization such as recognition, recall, and using. In this presentation, we first show that pedagogic excellence can be equivalently, but more simply, formulated in terms of executive function and goal-setting. Here executive function refers to problems requiring multiple mental modalities - such as, formal, verbal, computational, and graphical - for their solution. Goal-setting refers to the skillful breakup of a complex problem into a sequence of subgoals each of which is clearly formulated, challenging, but achievable timely. Light examples from the literature illustrate these concepts. Five "challenging FM problems": reinvestment, refinancing, multiple rate/deposit problems, pricing deferred bonds using a term structure, and obscure loan problems, illustrate the following fundamental techniques of goal-setting and executive function: i) a fellowship approach to teaching preliminary exam material, ii) using subgoals to give difficult homework, iii) alternating between different mental modalities to achieve elegant brevity in solutions, iv) goal-setting reflecting familiar vs. new, and v) skillful definition of unit subgoals.

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.

Description: The following case study walks through the steps of a predictive modeling exercise to illustrate one way analytics can streamline the underwriting paradigm.

Description: July 2019 issue of Small Talk by the Smaller Insurance Company Section. Practical information for actuaries, trends that impact section, and section activities.

Description: The August/September 2014 edition of The Actuary magazine—the Society of Actuaries’ flagship publication.