Description: This article discusses challenges that short-term predictions have on actuaries' reputations, both as individuals and as a profession, and discusses strategies to improve our professionalism and better manage this risk.

Description: Writing tips for actuaries – skipping the usual guidelines you get in most books on writing. They represent a half century of personal successes and failures.

Description: Issue introduction and theme of how to improve our technical skills and soft skills to better cope with a rapidly changing world.

Description: Humor in the workplace can improve productivity. This article describes a typical office relationship problem and how humor helped disparate teams work together.

Description: On October 30, 2015, the SOA Assumption Development and Governance Group, an informal discussion group consisting of nearly 200 interested actuaries with topics pertaining to actuarial assumption development and governance, organized an industry discussion call on end-to-end assumption documentation practices. The purpose of this call was to generate a large list of ideas for best-practice assumption documentation. More than thirty companies were represented in the call, including direct insurers, reinsurers and consulting firms. This article is the work product of the discussion written by Laurie Li and Alex Zaidlin.

Description: A critique of the SOA's co-sponsoring of the Manhart Brief which addressed sex discrimination in pension rates. The critique argues that the brief fails to satisfy standards of academic rigor reflected in other SOA publications.

Description: A critique of the SOA's co-sponsoring of the Manhart Brief which addressed sex discrimination in pension rates. This critique argues that the brief violates the SOA constitution by expressing not just facts, but opinions, without following specified procedures for doing so.

Description: Brief description of articles contained in the newsletter.

Description: Book review on Standards for Discussion and Presentation of Errors in Survey and Census Data by the American Statistical Association, Washington, D.C., 1975. The material will be of interest to actuaries and of help in preparing their own study reports. The guidelines discuss some relatively simple means of presenting error estimates for published data.