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: We look in this article at the challenges which life insurance companies operating in a low interest environment have to face.

Description: This article is a review of Peter F. Drucker’s 1980 book ‘Managing in Turbulent Times.’ The reviewer notes that this is a troubling book ‘to anyone familiar with the unsettled outlook for our economic, political, and social environment,’ because of Mr. Drucker’s credibility as a management analyst, and because ‘the turbulent times that he identifies call for changes in management attitudes and practices that are difficult to make.’

Description: This article describes the allocation of FATCA withholding risk in cross-border reinsurance arrangements and discusses practical considerations in regards to the drafting of those agreements.

Description: The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You by Faisal Siddiqi from The Stepping Stone Newsletter, April 2004, Issue No. 14.

Description: his article contains a summary of some of the presentations given at the 2015 SOA Annual Meeting & Exhibit, held October 11–14, in Austin.

Description: In this paper, Honorable Mention Essay for the Society of Actuaries' Entrepreneurial Actuaries Section 2010 Papers Competition, the author examines the rapidly increasing costs of maintaining the U.S. prison system and the fiscal pressures the federal and state governments are faced with, and proposes a plan for an early prisoner release program “with a rigorous, merit-based approach that can be expected to demonstrate favorable outcomes for the general public and the released prisoner.” This plan involves “an optimized process for evaluating the perils associated with freeing candidates eligible for early release - an individualized assessment and quantification of those risks…” The article goes on to describe the costs, benefits, risks, and critical success factors. The report includes two appendices.

Description: At the November meeting of the IASB’s SAC, I raised strong support for the concept of a priority project to accelerate the development of a new conceptual framework for the IASB with emphasis on the role of reliability, the definition of liability, the meaning of probable, the effects of contingencies i.e. contingent probabilities, the unit of account and accounting for contractual rights and obligations. Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from a longer address to the International Accounting Standards Board on guiding principles.