Description: A good primer on how clinical studies should be conducted and how statistics are used and misused to influence us.

Description: Description of the vast variety of predictive analytics topics covered by the Forecasting & Futurism section and introduction to the July 2015 issue of the newsletter.

Description: This article is a review of the book by Joshua Foer. It covers the history of memory techniques, the way a human brain organizes memory, and various problems and successes in memory recall. The author starts by interviewing memory savants, and learns from them that the ability to perform seemingly impossible memory tricks is simply a matter of studying and practicing proven techniques used for millennia. This review suggests that actuaries can benefit greatly from some of these techniques despite the availability of electronic hand-held devices to recall facts because the person who does not need to rely upon such devices can have a huge perceptual advantage in executive presentations.

Description: The author recounts his experience as a keynote speaker at the Actuarial Research Conference and provides advice to young actuaries to present complex subjects in an understandable manner.

Description: Panelist discuss issues relating to new medical technologies and how these are going to affect the practice of medicine, the delivery of care, the costs of care, the insuring of care, claims handling, utilization, and cost management. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 25, No. 2.

Description: Chart 4 for Session 1030F: Impact of Technology on Health-Care Delivery Systems

Description: This session 84I of the 2001 SAO Annual Meeting in New Orleans is about how many insurers are migrating toward Web-based interactive underwriting systems in order to economize and streamline the underwriting process. This requires some radically different techniques well beyond the time-honored traditional approaches. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol 27, No. 3

Description: In An Introduction to Incremental Learning, by Qiang Wu and I describe how machine learning is a natural enhancement to predictive analytics through its many useful tools to derive meaning from a lot of otherwise unusable data such as handwriting. Again, there are formulas involved; but we have tried to keep them understandable to the actuary who isn’t already familiar with stochastic gradient descent, perceptrons, and principal component analysis. Incremental learning can help you refine the estimations you derive from more traditional actuarial methods.

Description: Second article in a series on effective writing: focuses on writing for Chinese readers if English; and on writing for English readers if Chinese.

Description: The editor of the newsletter provides a running list of articles included in the issue highlighting such topics as the applicability genetic algorithms, the power of group dynamics, judgmental forecasting, improvement in mortality and complexity science.