Description: This article, an Honorable Mention Essay for the Society of Actuaries' Entrepreneurial Actuaries Section 2010 Papers Competition, is a discussion of the various issues relating to measurement of data in healthcare. The author presents “a light hearted & tongue-in-cheek take on how healthcare is typically measured, and an entrepreneurial vision for a better world.” Noting that typically data is summarized in deterministic models that produce point estimates for analysis and decision making, the author’s vision presented in the paper “is that of a central repository of actuarially modeled distributions that can either be used as benchmarks or adapted to an organization's experience.”

Description: John Naisbitt, in Megatrends, defined a megatrend as a general shift in thinking or approach affecting countries, industries and organizations. This article challenges actuaries to consider off-the-charts factors within their risk maps and consider their potential impact.

Description: This paper reviews state and federal regulation of investment advisers as it applies to personal actuaries and advocates action steps.

Description: The University of Wisconsin–Madison used its Centers of Actuarial Excellence grant to develop technology enhanced learning (TEL) tools that would be distributed publicly to supplement the actuarial education classroom experience.

Description: Many top-performing businesses aren’t just risk aware, but rather risk intelligent. Such a posture helps prepare companies for a major event and can demonstrate to a regulator or auditor that an appropriately strong control framework is in place. Better still, companies gain real strategic value from a “risk adjusted” understanding not only of their threats and vulnerabilities, but also the upside opportunities associated with various risks. It starts with having both qualitative and quantitative information to identify, assess and manage risks. Strategic risk management, at its core, is about creating value by increasing transparency and accountability, and quality of information. More than a mere compliance exercise, effective risk management enables more informed strategic decision making, increased accountability and transparency, a greater likelihood of organizational success, and – ultimately – competitive advantage, as borne out by many studies that correlate risk management and financial results.

Description: How insurers can build trust with the customers, particularly in the context of micro-insurance.

Description: Through a public relations effort launched first by the Canadian Institute of Actuaries [CIA] and then the SOA, two actuaries representing the profession capitalized on their abilities to analyze future contingent events in the 1998 baseball season’s home run race. This article describes the efforts of Mel Norton, FCIA and John Dewan, FSA to predict who would break Roger Maris’ 1961 record of 61 home runs in one season.

Description: This article explains how to create more maintainable models using abstractions by relating it to option, machine learning and machine intelligence models.

Description: Issue 38 of Actuary of the Future newsletter, November 2015

Description: The Society of Actuaries' managing director of actuarial research provided an overview of research activities including the funding behind research projects and the staff/volunteers involved with research.